The Swindle is dead, long live The Swindle. This Steampunk heist game was what Size Five Games planned on doing in lieu of another Ben & Dan / Time Gentlemen, Please point and click adventure, but lead dev Dan Marshall wound up quasi-cancelling it when he couldn’t find the fun, to borrow a line from Blizzard. Given that he’d also axed third Ben & Dan game Revenge of the Balloon-headed Mexican, he was in danger of developing A Reputation.

Instead, perhaps his reputation will be as the Uncanceller, for The Swindle is resurrected and rebooted as a quicker, simpler, gadgety action-stealth game, with its new form borrowing a few pages out of Spelunky’s high-speed procedural generation book.
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What a strange time for game selling we live in. Not ten years ago the idea of doing basically anything other than heading down to your local Woolworths and picking up an honest-to-goodness box was madness. Now, not only would there have to be a special case for a game to come in any sort of packaging but you can do anything from pay for a game before it’s made to never pay for it at all. And here’s yet another method: distributing copies of multiplayer indie platformer blast-em-up Gun Monkeys to those who spend a long time waiting to find a game. In a blog post yesterday, Size Five Games man Dan Marshall outlined the plan as a way to drum up interest in the game and ensure current players get the experience they paid for. Full statement below.

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Are you Slightly Old? And British? And of broadly good humour? Then you will doubtless be at least passingly familiar with the work of The Actor Kevin Eldon, quiet mainstay of some of this nation’s greatest televisual comedy. As well as Brass Eye, Alan Partridge, Nighty Night, The IT Crowd and more, he can now add Size Five Games’ Gun Monkeys to his CV. Witness a sad lack of weak lemon drink references, but a positive bounty of warm, chummy tones, below.
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