Tag Archive

Push, That’s It, Come On, PUSH!

Written by John Walker on June 30, 2009.

Thanks to the fine folks at Bonus Level – the create-your-own Flash gaming site – we’ve word of another absorbing puzzler to distract you from the mundanity of your life. It’s called Push, the work of one Ian Snyder, and it’s a completely new (until someone tells me I’m wrong and references something from 1984 on the Amstrex CX44) approach to platforming.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Star Soccer 4.07: Can You Click It?

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 29, 2009.

Sometimes I’ve amazed what we haven’t written about. A recent update to 4.07 reminded me that we’ve never even given the slightest plug to New Star Soccer 4, unarguably the most critically acclaimed Indie football game existent. The updates include a general boost to AI – both players and goalkeepers – but it’s really notable for just being its own take on the genre. You play a single player, following him through his career. I admit, I haven’t had a chance to really delve it into much, but the worth of being independent is clear when there’s obvious options to do illegal drugs to boost your performance at the risk if you’re found out. Plus, going gambling, drinking and getting a girlfriend. In other words, all the stuff which you’ll never see in a game with an official licence. You can get the demo here or watch some footage beneath the cut…
Read the rest of this entry »

Earth, Wind & Firepower: Kingdom Elemental Demo

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 24, 2009.

Chronic Logic dropped me a line, mentioning they’d just released a major update for their strategy game, Kingdom Elemental: Tactics, improving the interface, revamping skirmish, new challenge levels, user-created stuff and lots of exciting sounding improvements. Or rather, they would be, if we knew anything about the game, but we’ve never played it. There’s only two ways to solve that. One: find a player, excise their brain with scalpels and merge it with your own with brain-glue. Two: play the demo. I went with the latter. It’s basically a real-time-with-pause skirmish game, with a tiny touch of tower-defence in its design. Oh, I’ll explain it a bit better below…
Read the rest of this entry »

French Revolution: Enter the Story: Les Miserables

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 22, 2009.

This caught my eye over on TigSource, for a load of reasons. It’s an adventure game (kinda) version of Les Miserables. You buy the game for 15 dollars, and you get the next two games in the series free (Which are based on the Divine Comedy and Roman poet Lucretius’ “The Nature of things. Apparently). Even more-so, the profits are being put towards his research into popularising Georgist ideas of Land-rent. Oh – and he’s got plans for the next five years. Ideas aren’t in short supply.

Clearly, I had to give a demo a shot…
Read the rest of this entry »

It Lives: Indie MMO Golemizer

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 17, 2009.

We get a lot of mails about indie games. How do we pick which ones to write about? Random chance. Random chance plus including a sentence like “Golemizer is a free MMORPG where players are set in the role of mad scientists creating strange creatures in a steampunk universe” in your mail. Even if it isn’t true, we’re going to look at your game. As practitioners of mad word-science, RPS generally consider ourselves exactly like that anyway, so it’s RPS the game in all but names. Including being 2D and not aesthetically pleasing. But fuck it! Full user crafting? Full User-quest generation? There’s a lot of things here to see. You’ll find a video explaining the game plus some more thoughts from my few minutes with it below…
Read the rest of this entry »

Simply Splendid: Minecraft Multiplayer

Written by Jim Rossignol on June 13, 2009.

Games which have other, real human beings in are often bettered simply by have a human intelligence at work in them. That’s never been more true than in the indie-multiplayer building toy/game thing, Minecraft. The randomly generated levels of the single player system are interesting, and an useful way to figure out how you can build with nine types of blocks, or delete them. But it’s only when you go onto the multiplayer servers, and see the astonishing pixel-art landscapes that people have created, that you realise what a brilliant piece of software this is. Somehow, by being limited to just nine blocks, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. The beauty of simplification, or something. Anyway, enough babbling from me, go sign up, explore, build. It’s awesome. That image above is from the Great Pyramid server (which seems to have public editing disabled?), but there’s a whole load of amazing projects. I quite like the floating islands servers for their amazing vistas.

Hexyback: Conquest! Medieval Realms Demo

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 11, 2009.

The Hexmaster Tim Stone has already written that Illustrious have released Conquest! Medieval Realms. But he complained there isn’t a demo! But in the time between then and now, that’s changed in one, very important way. That there’s a demo. There’s totally a demo. And you can get it from here. It’s a considerably cut down version of the full game, containing two missions instead of the kertrillions of randomly generated ones, multiple campaigns, map editor and all that good strategy malarkey. On a score of “genre” it rates “turn based strategy”. I had a little play of the demo…
Read the rest of this entry »

You Might As Well Jump: Takishawa Is Dead

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 10, 2009.

Jim saw this over on the ever-good Indie Games blog and prodded me in its direction. It’s called Takishawa is Dead and is a short, if punishing, indie platformer with a kind of Psychonauts meets 3D Ant Attack feel to it – the latter mainly due to the manually-rotating camera and bits of how the 3D tech look. I turned from it pretty quickly – its very much in the school of platforming that digs falling to your death repeatedly – but it provided a stylish gaming wake up to the day. You can follow its development here, or download its 3Mb file here. Teeny! Teeny! Oh – and video below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Phasers To Stun: Ancient Galaxy

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 9, 2009.

Being away means that I’m enormously behind on the indie game situation. There’s about half a dozen open tabs plus e-mails marked as IMPORTANT for me to investigate. I’ll be catching up as well as I can, but the first thing I took a look at was Ancient Galaxy. And it’s… interesting. My mental note-pad is covered with scrawlings like “Outcast”, “Early Tomb Raider”, “Quasi-Star Trek”, “System Shock” and lots of other similarly intriguing things. It’s basically an oddly late-90s feeling action/adventure – in that it swaps elegance for piling on ideas and mechanisms. It’s a very PC action/adventure, in other words. The shareware version can be got here, and there’s some more thoughts from my quick play beneath the cut…
Read the rest of this entry »

Are You Listening Carefully? The Path Demo Out

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 6, 2009.

Not sure how we missed this. The ever-controversial and much previously discussed The Path have finally released a demo of the game. In fact, it’s more than a demo – iit’s actually a prologue to the game proper, especially created to give a sample of the atmosphere. In other words, almost certainly worth downloading for fans of the the full game as well as those intrigued by all the net-chat.

Next Page »