Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Being a good thief requires patience. Co-op heist darling Monaco, for instance, has been on the radar for ages (we first posted about it back before thievery was even invented, in the primordial mists of 2010), so it’s methodically slipped in and out of hiding to avoid detection and subsequent ejection. Or, you know, it’s a hyper-ambitious independent videogame, and hammering its many moving parts into working order was akin to coordinating a hitch-free heist of the world’s foremost exceedingly loud clown shoe, whoopee cushion, and  landmine museum. Regardless, its release is now finally, mercifully right around the corner.

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Monaco is one of the best co-op games I can remember, and it’s also one of the best heist games I can think of. It also won the IGF, which means that you have plenty of reason to be interested in pre-order of Monaco. Yes, tempting isn’t it? Very tempting… Perhaps you’d also like to see the game being played in brilliant fashion in a gameplay video? That’s below, just to sweeten the pudding. Mmm!

Final release of the game will be around March, although Mr Schatz says he hasn’t quite nailed down a date.
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UPDATE: Andy has chose the winners. Check your email later tonight to see if you won. Winners list is here.

IGF winning heist game Monaco – which I can report is fairly brilliant – is having a closed beta. Yes, very closed, only a select few people are invited. And some of those people are you. Well, if you can be clever, anyway. Developer Andy Schatz is reading, and he’s going to pick ten commenters from this thread to receive access to the beta. The keys will be sent to your RPS-registered email address by me, so if you can’t check that for whatever reason, you might want to provide another. For your comment, please reason why you should get a key in verse. Haiku and limericks would be preferred.

Oldish Monaco footage below, too.
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Hello! I’m supposed to be away today (don’t envy me – I was doing my tax return, weeping, screaming, not having any fun), but I just wanted to stop in and share this level walkthrough of Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine with you. Even now, some sixteen years on from its original announcement, Andy Schatz and Pocketwatch Games’ long in the making, IGF winning co-op heist is one of the games I’m most looking forward to right now. Here’s a little taste of why I think that, as well as a bit of hot monkey action and some top mad piano noodling.
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Monaco, which is the indie heist game you will be going crazy for in 2012, has a video out! It shows the online multiplayer in action: you are going to be able to play peer-to-peer co-op with teams of burglars doing their business across the exquisitely-crafted lo-fi levels. Oh, you are going to enjoy this game.
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The happiest person I’ve met at GDC so far has been last year’s IGF winner, Andy Schatz, the creator of 4-player heist game, Monaco. Why so happy? Well, the Indie Fund – an investment group set up by the World Of Goo creators 2D Boy and others – is funding his game, allowing him to hire a level designer and to focus on getting the game just right. “It’s coming together so fast that we might go beyond the twenty levels of the story mode,” Schatz told me. “We could end up having a bunch more multiplayer maps.” And, having played some of that both with the rest of RPS, and yesterday with Schatz, I can confirm that this is Good News. The game will also ship with online multiplayer and an editor – an editor whose maps are miraculously encoded into the side-on loading screen images of the game. Magic.

There are certain games which, when their names are uttered three times into a mirror, cause Peter Molyneux to appear. Following serious testing, we can confirm that Monaco is not one of them. And that’s not all we know about Monaco, the game by Pocketwatch Games, aka Andy Schatz. We – all five – gentleman thieves of RPS recently played the IGF-winning four-player steal ‘em up (John and I had to sit out by turns) in an special group contrivance. It was a fun time, a giddy time, like the south of France on a balmy night. Monaco!

This was the recent PAX build of the still as-yet-unreleased game, with four entire levels, and – for some reason – there’s actually a video of us tackling one of them posted below. I’ve also penned some thoughts about the experience, which I previously looted from my brain, and those of my fellow conspirators.

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Part of you wants to be upset with Pocketwatch Games. Why haven’t they given us 2009′s Unknown Pleasure Venture Dinosauria yet? That part is soon quashed when you see what Andy Schatz is working on. Monaco is a four-player co-op stealth game that’s been shortlisted for both the Design and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Minimalist graphics. Exciting theme. Stealth. This one has RPS written all over it. Our interview with Andy, and footage of Monaco follows…
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Pocketwatch have been cultivating their seeds in their increasingly distinct stretch of soil for a while now. Wildlife Tycoon was a IGF finalist. Venture Arctic, its semi-sequel, while winning Gametunnel’s Sim of the year was somewhat overlooked, becoming most noticeable when it went free for a week around Christmas. But the third game of ecology strikes us as something which has a chance of finding an even wider audience. It’s called Venture Dinosauria and is an ecological management game set during the very last days of dinosaurs’ rule…
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