By Alec Meer on August 1st, 2011.
Oh, ‘voxel destruction’ are two words that so truly belong together, like cheese and chips, apple and pie, seagull and evil. Indie alterna-flight sim (also with tanks) A New Zero has updated its voxel-based engine to include structural physics – meaning that when you bring the rain onto a building, it’s going to crumble spectacularly into a shower of distressed voxels. As you may see below.
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By Alec Meer on July 18th, 2011.
Cryptic Sea – they of the remarkable lo-fi flight sim A New Zero – have been in touch about their new game, Hockey? It’s immediately an attention-grabber both because it applies A New Zero’s back-to-raw-basics-then-outwards-again control philosophy/design to ice hockey, and because it takes the very rare step of giving a sports game a first-person perspective.
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By Alec Meer on January 15th, 2009.
Your cost-free indie curio of the day is a bravura work-in-progress from Alex Austin, the other half of the Gish team. Unlike the surreal ‘toonery of his and Edmumd McMillen’s joint projects, A New Zero is very much straight down the line. A simulation, almost. Austin cites the likes of TIE Fighter and Mechwarrior as inspirations, and they’re certainly there in the combat mechanics. As for the game as a whole, it’s got a definite scent of Battlefield and a dash of Battlezone to it. While there’s bot play in there if you’re scared of strangers, really it’s a team-based multiplayer game: two squads of planes, boats and bigger boats trying to wipe out each other and each other’s base.
Impressively, it’s all the work of Mister Austin on his lonesome. Doubly impressively, it’s only 432k big. Just one 10,000th the size of Left 4 Dead, as Austin points out – hell, it’s less than a 30th of a Peggle.
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