Posts Tagged ‘kickstarter katchup’
World of Magic, Sea of Stars
By Adam Smith on April 28th, 2013.
Jagged Alliance: Flashback arrives in the Katchup this week. I’ve expected (and hoped for) a Jagged Alliance crowdfunding attempt for some time now. As soon as it became obvious that Kickstarter was a place where old franchises could revive themselves, every week that the mercenaries didn’t appear was slightly more unsettling than the last. Would I rather have a direct sequel without a crowdfunding campaign? Perhaps. The transparency that Full Control promise, listening and learning as they go, is appealing and it’s hard to imagine fans of the series pledging for a sequel, like Back in Action, without the core of the original games’ features in place. Elsewhere, Worlds of Magic and Infinite Space: Sea of Stars are two major successes.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
Happiest mask and ukulele
By Adam Smith on April 21st, 2013.
Two $100,000 winners this week and a few other projects close to the finish line. While I was compiling the column this week, I realised I was keeping track of the number of projects that apparently ‘contained roguelike elements’. It’s about 90%, although to be fair I stopped keeping track almost as soon as I’d started so that figure is entirely made up. Perhaps my memory fails me, but I don’t recall the term being anything like as popular 12 months ago. Of course, some would argue that the meaning has been lost and that anything with procedural generation or a modicum of difficulty is now wearing the roguelike hat, but that in itself surely tells us something. Games want to be like rogue, which is far more agreeable than the days when every other one wanted to be like a soldier or a space marine.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
The Win Bin
By Adam Smith on April 14th, 2013.
Last weekend took on a life of its own, which is the sort of thing weekends should probably do more often, and I was stranded away from my trusty keyboard and therefore unable to type words about games that might exist at some point in the future. This was a sad thing. Fortunately, missing a week means that there are more winners than ever before and the bumper crop contains two games that I’ve played and enjoyed, at least three that I look forward to playing when they are released and a project that makes me realise how much I want to play with an Oculus Rift.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
Happy Chocolate Eggsmas
By Adam Smith on April 1st, 2013.
I haven’t eaten a single chocolate egg in the last twenty four hours, which would normally be an acceptable dietary state, but with this being the extended weekend of confeggtionary rabbit worship, I’m a little bit upset that nobody bought me a big Smarties egg. There’s nothing like a tube of Smarties to make me feel like a kid again. Some crispy chocolate buttons, a few episodes of Button Moon and a glass of Tizer. Right, that’s my annual product placement commitment out of the way and hopefully I’ll be receiving a batch of shop-soiled Smarties eggs any day now. On with the Katchup.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
An Ice Kream Sunday
By Adam Smith on March 24th, 2013.
A few winners, a few losers and a heap of new entries. It’s a busy week and there are quite a few projects that people have contacted me about that aren’t included, even though I’m interested in them. I’ll do some individual posts on those over the next couple of days but, for now, feast your eyes on the contents of the Katchup at the breadth of gaming delights that it contains. Then feel a bit morose that Rogue System probably isn’t going to be on your computer for a long time.
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Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
Putting the 'ding' back into crowdfunding
By Adam Smith on March 18th, 2013.
The Katchup contains a delicious new entry this week that goes by the name, ‘The Adventures of Dash’. It stars a narcoleptic boy. Then there’s Back to Bed, a success story that contains a sleepwalking chap. Yet here I am, an insomniac man, writing on the internet at one o’clock in the morning. If computer games can teach people to fire guns and drive cars then why can they not teach me to sleep? But, hey, there are loads of successful projects again this week so that’s good. I’m going to eat a block of cheese and hope for terrible but inspirational nightmares.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
By Adam Smith on March 10th, 2013.
The winners’ podium is crowded this week, and by those that have been funded rather than the crowds wot have funded them. Hopefully, when the games are actually released, we’ll all be winners though. There are so many success stories this week that I didn’t even make room for the most ridiculous victory of all time. The spiritual successor to Torment took a mere seven hours to reach its total. Lord British, with over half a million in a few days, dreams of success like that.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
Like Klockwork
By Adam Smith on March 3rd, 2013.
There haven’t been any ‘losers’ in the Katchup for a while, partly because projects that are moving very slowly tend to be removed before they run out of time, and partly because there haven’t been quite as many small projects to cover. The list of ‘players’ is increasing rapidly though and even though the first comment will undoubtedly be from somebody reminded me of a game that I’ve missed, there are plenty of things to see. However, the influx of new entrants is balanced somewhat by this week’s losers. One is a small, surreal project, the other is a grander and more direct proposition. The creators of both have vowed to continue their work in some form.
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feature, kickstarter katchup.
Kurb Your Enthusiasm
By Adam Smith on February 24th, 2013.
Only one victor this week and several projects either on the brink of the precipice of funding failure, or in a prolonged mid-term slump. It’s enough to make a man pre-emptively proclaim the Kickstarter craze dead and buried, but if that same man then casts an eye over the promising new projects and remembers successes and shortfalls of the past, he may well decide to cancel the obituaries, at least for now, and simply play some prototypes instead. There are plenty of projects with playable demos, at varying stages of completion, and the new entries include another old-school adventure, an educational game of vikings and robots, and a game inspired by FTL, one of the first games ever to receive a Kickstart. We have come full circle.
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Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
Katch As Katch Kan
By Adam Smith on February 17th, 2013.
Two contrasting success stories this week. Dreamfall Chapters didn’t need a full week to reach its target and come the morning, the first stretch goal will almost certainly have been reached, adding Mac and Linux support. Unwritten needed almost every second to reach its goal but did cross the finishing line with a tremendous amount of support in its final days. There are several new entries this week, including the astonishingly compelling Enemy, which generates worlds and stories drawn from the history of gaming, incorporating turn-based combat inspired by X-COM. Sometimes I think my dreams coalesce on the internet and become real.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
Kick It With A Tribe Called Quest
By Adam Smith on February 10th, 2013.
In terms of anticipation and dollars pledged, this has been the week of Dreamfall Chapters but you already knew about that one, right? The Katchup concerns itself with all Kreatures, great and small, and there are plenty of newcomers this week, including Tom Hall’s keen platforming tools, Projects Awakened and Cornerstone, the mad and possibly brilliant Ritual Dementia and gorgeous light-speed drifter, Race The Sun. Some projects are teetering on the brink of failure but, as we have seen with the adventure game in the past, any news reports of Kickstarter’s death are entirely premature.
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feature, Kickstarter, kickstarter katchup.
