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 Kieron Gillen on August 17th, 2010.
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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By Kieron Gillen on February 10th, 2010.
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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By Alec Meer on August 18th, 2009.
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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By Jim Rossignol on June 15th, 2009.
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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By Kieron Gillen on May 19th, 2009.
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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