Rock, Paper, Shotgun

For as long as there is an internet, fresh footage of A New Zero will sporadically arise and cause people with an interest in procedural animation, physics and good old-fashioned vehicle combat to coo excitedly and then wonder if it’ll ever be finished. Cryptic Sea are doing all kinds of things with their tiny game parcels, all much smaller than a Peggle, and Sub Rosa was the most recent to cause an outburst of gleeful multiplayer shenanigans. Work in A New Zero seems to be concentrating on man-shooting rather than vehicular violence, and the latest work in progress video shows how men go to war when they have no canned animations at all.

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A bunch of us are playing Sub Rosa, which was one of the 7-Day FPS games, right now. It’s about agents pursuing cars across a city, and attempting to intercept couriers as they race about. You can download the demo here for Linux, Mac, and PC. There’s only one dedicated server up, but it looks like starting a new one is pretty straightforward if anyone wants to do that. No one seems to know how to play. So that’s interesting. I think you have to get the package and take it to the building marked with a ring of your team’s colour. That seems to be it. Hmm.

Video below.
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Every year around this time Google calendar reminds me that A New Zero, Cryptic Sea’s abstract, multiplayer military vehicle sim, exists. It’s so lo-fi that I keep forgetting it’s still in development, and expanding at a very slow but steady rate: I tend to forget games that are under a Peggle in size, even if they’re capable of procedurally generating massive landscapes and battles. My yearly check-in has dug up a few new videos, showing off the work-in-progress infantry additions that will end up powering Hidden & Dangerous style missions co-op missions. Cor.
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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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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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Okay. It’s lunch-hour in the UK. I want to play The Balls, and need you chap’s help. Basically, it’s a scrum-game by Cryptic Sea – which is the genre title I’ve plucked out of my head for things like Transformice. Played on a server with up to 100 other balls (or 4 people on one machine), you play a tiny eponymous ball racing across real-world environments at a micro-scale. You either race, or smash stuff up or eliminate one another. In other words, Transformice meets Micromachines, with a sinister 50s horror theme. You can get it from here – it’s currently in a brand new 0.57 version – and there’s a server running in the US. There’s dedicated server software stuff if anyone wants to set up their own. Anyway – some video of the previous, not as fancy looking, version follows. Download and join me. I want to experience the sort of 100 balls of jiggling chaos I haven’t seen since the last Future Christmas party I went to.
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Now, I was considering posting about this when it was released as part of the Experimental Gameplay project. I didn’t. Then creator Alex Austin mailed us, and I’ve decided to. Is it because it’s a 100-person online (with up to 4 people on a PC) melee slaughterfest with a crest-designer? Partially. But mainly because the site’s story section says, in terms of motivation for the bloodbath, “The other team killed your wife.” Oh no! Our wives. You can get C: Medieval from here and then go play. There’s a server up right now, but it’s empty. I figure RPS can bum-rush it and try it out. I don’t know what bum-rush means. I got it from the Public Enemy album. Man! Footage follows…
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It is highly unlikely we’ll ever get bored of posting new footage of Cryptic Sea‘s upcoming Hitlers Must Die, part of their No Quarter indie-retro-sadism-mashup compilation. For one, it means we get to say “Hitlers Must Die!” again and again. For two, it looks like this…
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It’s good to start the week with something strange. How fortunate, then, that we have Somnia. This peculiar little 3D puzzle game contains one of those little moments of realisation – “Oh, that’s how it works” – which makes you smile, because it’s different, and so clever. If you don’t want that to be spoiled you should follow the link and play the game. Otherwise click onwards for more thoughts.
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Yay! This first surfaced over on Tigsource and is clearly splendid, and on more than the much-discussed Good-Name=RPS Coverage grounds. We’ve talked about No Quarter as part of our Unknown Pleasures 2009, the Edmund McMillen/Alex Austin Cryptic Sea project of six games. This was what they were called GUN then. Now it’s called Hitlers Must Die! This is what we call progress. For surely, if the RPS readers can agree on anything, it’s on the idea that if presented with many Hitlers, offing the lot of them would be the thing to do. The above screen’s from the Hitler Must Die intro rather than the Beta footage. Its physics-heavy Hitler-annihilating action is found nestling below…
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