Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hello! I’m supposed to be away today (don’t envy me – I was doing my tax return, weeping, screaming, not having any fun), but I just wanted to stop in and share this level walkthrough of Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine with you. Even now, some sixteen years on from its original announcement, Andy Schatz and Pocketwatch Games’ long in the making, IGF winning co-op heist is one of the games I’m most looking forward to right now. Here’s a little taste of why I think that, as well as a bit of hot monkey action and some top mad piano noodling.
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Monaco! There’s a game I’m very excited about. Hopefully we’ll have a ton to say about it very soon. Meantime, creator Andy Schatz is working on enfleshening his co-op, semi-free-form heist game, and one thing he’s decided upon is making sure any hacking language and terminology used in it (i.e. when a character is hacking an in-game computer) is relatively convincing. That’s where you come in.
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The happiest person I’ve met at GDC so far has been last year’s IGF winner, Andy Schatz, the creator of 4-player heist game, Monaco. Why so happy? Well, the Indie Fund – an investment group set up by the World Of Goo creators 2D Boy and others – is funding his game, allowing him to hire a level designer and to focus on getting the game just right. “It’s coming together so fast that we might go beyond the twenty levels of the story mode,” Schatz told me. “We could end up having a bunch more multiplayer maps.” And, having played some of that both with the rest of RPS, and yesterday with Schatz, I can confirm that this is Good News. The game will also ship with online multiplayer and an editor – an editor whose maps are miraculously encoded into the side-on loading screen images of the game. Magic.

Andy “Monaco” Schatz’s cat is being slowly broiled alive. It crawled behind the oven, which was in the process of cooking Macaroni & Cheese. It’s only later that Andy’s Delightful Wife is alerted by the frantic yelping of a distressed pussycat. We’re about to play SpyParty at my hotel room when the alert comes through, leading to a frantic cross-San Diego dash to try and rescue the pipping-hot cat from its furnace-crammed state. The Andy is trying to get his landlord on the phone, to see if there’s any reason why they can’t just pull the oven around. He’s failed. Meanwhile, Spy-Party-dev Chris Hecker is insisting that it’ll be fine, and we should just act immediately heft the cooker to release it. Let’s do this thing! We do this thing, and the cat runs free.

I’m not sure this is a metaphor about Chris’s position in the industry or SpyParty or how he’s a man capable of making hard decisions swiftly, but it was too good not to share. And I wanted something to separate this initial report of SpyParty from all the other pieces online, because I’m basically going to echo what they all said. This is looking like something genuinely startling.
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Part of you wants to be upset with Pocketwatch Games. Why haven’t they given us 2009′s Unknown Pleasure Venture Dinosauria yet? That part is soon quashed when you see what Andy Schatz is working on. Monaco is a four-player co-op stealth game that’s been shortlisted for both the Design and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Minimalist graphics. Exciting theme. Stealth. This one has RPS written all over it. Our interview with Andy, and footage of Monaco follows…
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Pocketwatch have been cultivating their seeds in their increasingly distinct stretch of soil for a while now. Wildlife Tycoon was a IGF finalist. Venture Arctic, its semi-sequel, while winning Gametunnel’s Sim of the year was somewhat overlooked, becoming most noticeable when it went free for a week around Christmas. But the third game of ecology strikes us as something which has a chance of finding an even wider audience. It’s called Venture Dinosauria and is an ecological management game set during the very last days of dinosaurs’ rule…
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