Posts Tagged ‘Size Five Games’

RPS Feature Foot-to-ball: The Game

Behold The Kickmen can’t escape the problems of football games

Still basically a football game.

Behold The Kickmen [official site] is an almost-football sportsball game: there’s a ball and two teams trying to get it in each other’s goal via tackling, sprinting, passing and kicking. It’s only almost-football though because it has been designed by someone with a wilfull ignorance of football’s details, and who dislikes the sport but did enjoy playing classic football Amiga game Sensible Soccer. Footballers become “kickmen”, your opponent’s team is made up of “enemies”, you “do” a goal rather score one, and the pitch is circular and surrounded by walls.

It mines its own ignorance with comic intent, but I was curious whether it could move beyond the developer’s Twitter bants and stand up as an arcade sports game in its own right. Read the rest of this entry »

Very realistic football game Behold the Kickmen dribbles onto Steam in authentic and accurate way

The sign is right

Behold the Kickmen [official site], the arcade game about football, known in some parts of the world as British Football, has been released this day. It’s by Dan Marshall and Size Five Games, makers of The Swindle. Dan started working on the ball-kicker as part of a game jam but was whisked away by the locker room drama of it all until he finally ended up with an actual game, instead of a simple joke about the famously unknowable and incommunicable sport.
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Foolish football: Behold The Kickmen coming Thursday

If football is the biggest sport in England, pretending that you don’t know anything about football comes a close second. Dan Marshall, the creator of The Swindle and the bad half of Ben & Dan, is a fan of the second. His Behold the Kickmen [official site] is an arcade kick ’em up which gets football gloriously wrong, and it’s launching this Thursday. It’ll run you about three quid. Read the rest of this entry »

Behold The Kickmen adds ‘Speedball’ mode

It’s not officially called Speedball mode because that might cause upsets down the line, but Dan Marshall’s Behold the Kickmen [official site] now has a menu switch that turns it from a highly accurate football simulation into a highly accurate grim futuresport simulation. I say “highly accurate” with tongue in cheek as Kickmen is the project of Dan Marshall (he of Ben There Dan That and The Swindle), a man who does not understand or care for football. What began as a joke is now close to release and to my fooball-lovin’ eyes, it actually looks like an extremely entertaining arcade game.

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The Swindle Potential Follow-Up Shows Sci-Fi Style

The Swindle’s [official site] cyberpunk/steampunk aesthetic was unique, but the sci-fi concept art posted on Size Five Games’ blog seems like it would adapt even more readily to its stealthy computer hacking gameplay. The developer is considering a follow-up game and has brought in an artist to chuck a few ideas together. The resulting artwork by Gareth Davies has a gritty 70’s/80’s sci-fi look highlighted by pastels and reminds me of Chris Foss’ work for Jodorowsky’s Dune. Read the rest of this entry »

Silly Football In The Swindle Dev’s Behold The Kickmen

Here’s a curious thought experiment: what if football were played by human beings rather than sentient cars? How would they turbo boost? How would they even kick the ball? Dan Marshall – him what made The Swindle and is the mean half of Ben & Dan – has some ideas. He’s making Behold the Kickmen, a game where football is played on a round pitch by kickmen with the power to charge up and hyper-curve shots. Have a look at this imaginative vision of an alternate reality:

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RPS Feature Dwindling Returns

Wot I Think: The Swindle

Steampunk London-town heist caper The Swindle [official site] should feel comfortable in the shadows. It’s a sneak ’em up, with gadgets, set in self-contained randomised levels full of robotic guards, fatal falls and explosive traps. There are also clanking great computers that a skilled hacker can siphon cash out of and piles of cash. All of these elements are scattered willy-nilly around the interiors of the various slums, factories and warehouses you’ll guide your endless supply of miscreants through. Here’s wot I think.

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Sneaky Sneaky: The Swindle Breaking Into July

After four years, one cancellation, and one uncancellation, The Swindle [official site] is faring better than the third Ben & Dan game. What’s going on with that, HEY DAN? Anyway, it seems The Swindle will see the light of day, as Size Five Games have announced a release date: July 28th.

The Swindle’s a 2D steampunk sneak-o-stealing game about pulling heists in procedurally-generated levels, dodging guards and security to hack systems and swipe loot. Come watch creator Dan Marshall be – ha ha – totally rubbish at his own game, the big fool.

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Been There, Doing That Again: Size Five Unkill The Swindle

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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RPS Feature Channel Hopping

Down The Tube: A Developer’s Guide To Television

You may have heard about last weekend’s extraordinarily disastrous attempt to film and broadcast a Pepsi-sponsored game jam, called GAME_JAM. At enormous expense (rumours fly of around $400,000), a group of in-indies – the likes of Zoe Quinn, Davey Wreden, and Robin Arnott – and YouTubers were supposed to be taking part in a reality-show-cum-game-jam for four days, to be professionally filmed, edited and broadcast on YouTube. The event didn’t make it through the first day before a number of the developers walked off set and refused to return, and everyone involved was upset and pissed off. It didn’t make it to day two. For a comprehensive account of what happened, you ought to read Jared Rosen’s article on Indie Statik, but the short version is: one of the people in charge was a sexist arsehole, the sponsorship was so ludicrous they weren’t allowed to drink anything other than Mountain Dew (not even water), and the atmosphere was miserable beyond anything conducive to making games. It was a massive, hugely expensive, disaster.

In response, we and asked Size Five Games‘ Dan Marshall to use his experience working in television production to write a guide for developers when it comes to TV. What to look out for, the tricks of the trade, and why it’s probably best avoided altogether. We should stress, this is a general guide, and not directly related to those peculiar events in LA.

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The Sim(ian)s, Free: Gun Monkeys Free Weekend

It’s no Monkey Tennis but Size Five’s Gun Monkeys has found its fans. It’s a procedurally generated, physics-based 1 vs 1 deathmatch game and, being a multiplayer sort of thing, it is hungry for new players. To entice fresh monkey-handlers, Size Five are allowing people to play for free this weekend, on Steam, and reducing the price of the game by 50% during that time. That makes the price £1.99 and that’s for two copies of the game so you can pass one along to a friend. And then kill their monkeys. I haven’t played it yet but I may jump in this weekend. Video below.

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Dwindling: Size Five Put The Swindle On Hold

We’ve written so much about The Swindle that sometimes I forget that it’s not out yet and that I still somehow know very little about it. Stealth, cyberpunk, crime, infiltration. Good things. It’s in the same mould as Gunpoint and perhaps distantly related to Subversion. News from Size Five suggests that there may be a deeper connection to Introversion’s ill-fated infiltrator. Development is proving problematic, although not necessarily for the same reasons:

It’s a great game, but it’s a fucking complicated beast, and I’m simply not sure I can afford to make it the game it deserves to be right now…Nope, after a lot of metaphorical wrestling, it simply can’t be the game I’m going to make next.

Boo.

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The Big Gamble: Gun Monkeys Distributes Keys

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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Meet The Actor: Gun Monkeys Gets Kevin

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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Monkey See, Monkey Post: Gun Monkeys Out Now

Oh, he just had to release this just as the RPS Hivemind was about to slump into its weekend-long coma, didn’t he? The punishment for that is a shorter post free from our usual witticisms. Actually, no, I’m going to twist the knife and say ‘bum monkeys more like’.

I don’t know if Gun Monkeys is fun or bum in fact, as I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play it – it was at Rezzed, but I was dashing about like a monkey with its bum on fire so I didn’t get the chance. The people who did seemed to be having a good time however, but maybe that’s just because they enjoying harming monkeys. Anyway, this “procedurally–Generated, physics-based, online deathmatch platform game”, starring murderous simians and the voice of the actor Kevin Eldon, comes from the studio behind Time Gentlemen, Please, Privates and the upcoming The Swindle, so it bears investigation, I’d say.
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Steamy Simians: Gun Monkeys Steam-Bound

As Alec discovered during a conversation with Size Five’s Dan Marshall, Gun Monkeys is a smaller project, punctuating the long development process required for The Swindle. It’s also a simian-stuffed iteration of Gibbage and, in Dan Marshall’s own words, “a game about wall-jumping and double-jumping, scuttling around the arena shooting each other”. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy, you may be pleased to hear that the game is coming to Steam, with a provisional release date of June 28th. There is a trailer below for those who wish to spend their morning watching monkey killing one another.

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RPS Feature "You're basically running a corrupt version of nPower"

Size Five Games Talk Gun Monkeys, The Swindle, Kittens

Gun Monkeys is a surprise new multiplayer 2D shooter from Size Five Games, creator of Time Gentlemen, Please, Privates and the upcoming The Swindle. It has monkeys in it. Is has guns in it. It has Gun Monkeys in it. It’s out this Summer, before The Swindle, which will be out when it’s ready. It stars monkeys with guns, sent to the future to swipe energy for corrupt power companies, and fighting each other in procedurally-generated levels. I spoke to Size Five’s Dan Marshall to find out more, what other animals he could use, why he took a break from The Swindle and something something Timesplitters. In case you’re allergic to reading, the game’s first trailer is also below.
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RPS Feature "trendy hippy indie stuff"

Size Five On Stealth, Story & Swearing In The Swindle

A few days back, Time Gentlemen, Please and Privates dev, Dan Marshall of Size Five Games, revealed just why his ‘xciting upcoming cyberpunk crime caper The Swindle had gone eerily quiet for a few months. Fearful that the XNA language he’d been working with might not be supported by Windows 8, he started from scratch in Unity. In this second half of our chat, we cover the game itself – how important stealth and gags are to it, its ‘retrospective’ approach to storytelling and why it’s more Grim Fandango than Day of the Tentacle. Also Dishonored, because Dishonored. Also Hitler, because Hitler.
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RPS Feature Or 'why Windows 8 meant starting over from scratch'

Whatever Happened To The Swindle?

The Swindle was the much-anticipated next game from Time Gentlemen, Please and Privates dev Size Five Games. Then things went quiet. Very, very quiet. But why? Wha’happened? Will we ever get to play this cyberpunk crime caper? Here, Size Five’s Dan Marshall reveals for the first time why the game went dark – a sad tale of Windows 8-based potential doom, leading to a Summer of fear and the difficult decision to start the game over from scratch. But, thank heavens, it’s a sad tale with a happy ending. Also, you can get your first glimpse at the game’s totes snazzy new look in its brand new engine in the top three (pre-alpha) screenshots in this post.
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BAFTA Publicly Praises Size Five’s Privates

"Thank you for honouring my game about diseased genitals"

If your only exposure to Size Five’s size five Privates is through this esteemed periodical, you may believe that it is little more more than a flimsy excuse for us to make jokes about willies. Not true. Last night, at the British Academy Children’s Awards, Privates won in the ‘Learning – Secondary’ category. This involved beating off competition from the likes of erstwhile Naked Chef and Turkey Twizzler basher Jamie Oliver. You can see footage of Dan Marshall’s acceptance speech and a brief interview by selecting the category on the right here.

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