Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Ohhhh. That’s really clever,” were the words uttered by my mouth as I realised The Fourth Wall‘s conceit. And then I realised I was going to have to try to explain it with words.

It’s a 2D sometimes-side-scrolling platformer from DigiPen student group Pig Trigger, in which you can control the character and the scrolling of the screen. So, run left or right and the screen scrolls with you. However, hold down Ctrl and it becomes static, and running from one edge has you appear on the other side. So you might drop down a hole and appear from the corresponding point on the top edge, or run from the left and appear on the right – it’s a notion familiar to anyone who’s played enough 80s/90s platform games. But here you’re in control of where the screen stops and starts, and it’s manipulating this which allows you to progress.

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If you’ve somehow managed to get out of being obligated to buy gifts today then you might be able to spend some of the time we saved by shopping on the internet playing Deity, a free game from an intrepid band of Digipen students. It’s free! In it you play some kind of magical assassin dude, as you can see in the trailer below. The team say the mechanics of the game are inspired by Diablo and Arkham Asylum, and the acrobatics in the trailer seem to confirm that can of Batmanly dynamism in taking down your enemies. Seriously go take a look at this one!
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I really don’t think I’m exaggerating. In the same way that Narbacular Drop made you sit back and go, “Woah!”, so too does Void. It’s certainly not the first time manipulating time bubbles in the world has been done, but it’s certainly the best I’ve ever seen it, and it’s the first time it’s just felt right.

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Oh FFS. Despite the game’s own site saying it was announced yesterday, Jim somehow knew about this in August.

I don’t know about you, but I like shiny colours. The way they’re all shiny. And all colourful. And when they move! My goodness me, it’s all I can do to stare vacantly as the saliva wettens my bottom lip. So it is that I instantly decided I liked Nitronic Rush, a new game emerging from the electronic folds of DigiPen. It’s described as “an experimental survival driving game”, citing the 1990s (in which there is no apostrophe, planet Earth) as its inspiration. But my oh my, the 1990s never offered shining colours like these.

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The autumnal quasi-summer has abandoned me and more than ever I am in need of indoor entertainment, preferably without spending a single penny as I’ve squandered all my money on garish Bermuda shorts. Enter Nous, a free game which claims to be a computer program seeking its purpose and identity. In order to learn it offers to teach the player, a quid pro quo in which both discover something about themselves. I should stress, that’s what the program does, not the game itself. It’s a top-down shoot ‘em up with a weirdly compelling narrative and there isn’t a fourth wall in sight.

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PAX Prime, the increasingly gargantuan expo set up by the chaps at Penny Arcade, is almost upon us. One of the most enjoyable parts of the whole shindig is the selection of the PAX 10, a group of indie games selected to enjoy the exposure that such a large platform can bring. Super Meat Boy and Bastion were both picked last year; not bad company to be in. This year there are some familiar titles and one that’s entirely new to me. From DigiPen, A Flipping Good Time is a platformer with a gravity switch mechanic you may have seen before, but do not be deterred. This is fun times. And it won’t cost you a penny.

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Indie developer Jake Spencer got in touch with us regarding his DigiPen project, Be Good. A claymation adventure game that explores a person’s life in a series of vignettes. Which isn’t a sentence you type too often, making this something interesting.

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Students at DigiPen Institute of Technology have been pimping their game, Nitronic Rush, which is a videogame name if ever I heard one. ["NITRONIC RUSH!" - Voiceover Man.] Anyway, there’s a video below, and it depicts what said students are calling “a survival driving game”, which I think means you need to avoid getting chopped up by lasers or running into walls at a speed that is too fast. Anyway, take a look below for neon racing cars and some kind of rotating HAL tower thing. It not only has a videogame name, but it looks like a videogame too. (That’s double points.)
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Digipen – which is a pen into which students are herded and then forced to make digital entertainment for their sinister cowled overlords – produces some excellent games. 8-bittest among these is the superb Dig-N-Rig, in which you control a mining robot who can dig and then hoover up the minerals he has discovered. A familiar motif, but the rig part is more interesting: you have to construct a series of horizontal and vertical conveyors to send your mineral loot back up your factory-HQ on the surface. Mining therefore becomes self-perpetuating, as you have to pay for bits and pieces to expand the rig, and to upgrade your robot with things like better wifi, so he can dig deeper and further from his base.

Dig-N-Rig is, as games about digging and mining tend to be, rather compulsive. But combine the building, the surprising complexity, and the glorious 8-bit 2D execution, and you have something that is going to eat time like some kind of desktop-based black hole. I blame Indiegames for digging this one up, now you can too.

Having spotted this over on the almighty TIGSource I thought “looks interesting.” Having played it, I can now upgrade that to “is awesome.” Igneous is a kind of rock, which is interesting because Igenous rocks. Sorry. It’s actually a kind of Wipeout-with-a-jumping-head-meets-Sonic 3D. Something like that. It’s not easy, and you will plunge into magma. Oh, just go and play it, because everyone should. This fiery fruit of the Digipen Institute is 115mb, and can be obtained here.

The_B flagged up this IGF entry immediately, and you can see why. Attack of the 50ft Robot! from Digipen is the sort of thing which just begs for posting. It’s a retro-50s B-movie Rampage-esque homage with lots of physics malarkies. Its most obviously striking element is the Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow-esque black-and-white footage, shot through with the vivid-laser reds. The secondary striking element is the ability to throw your own head as a striking element. A little twitchy – it crashed a couple of times when I played it – but it’s splendidly silly stuff. You can download from here (EDIT: NEW LINK WITH NEW BUILD) and see footage below…
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