Oh god, we’ve done it now haven’t we? The erstwhile Mr Andy Noble and myself have just bunged out our first 360 game onto the XBLIG service. It’s a remake of my own Squid Yes, Not So Octopus and it’s a bargaintastic 80 points (about $1, we can’t give it out for free on there, obv, so it’s the closest we could get).

I sorta ummed and arr’d about posting this up here but then I remembered that every spare penny I get goes towards keeping this place afloat so sod it.

For those who’ve not played the PC original or its sequel, well, there’s a story behind its creation. You can read that here on Rodent. If you want to grab the demo, or y’know, punt out for the full version on the 360 you can do by clicking this link and downloading it straight to your 360.

So yeah, hope you enjoy it and I’d love you for life if you could give us a rating. Resuming normal service in 3,2,1…

Another Miner, he’s not manic but the game is…

Danjo has dug up the classic Miner 2049er for inspiration to create a gorgeous looking 20 level platformer. If those miner’s helmet pixels don’t excite you then you’re dead inside. The game plays as well as it looks, so why are you still reading this? Get it from here and then tell him how good it is in the forum thread.

November is upon us and there were some excellent responses to our call to finish something.

First up we have Spraydough  a RR sourdough ["It means 'early settler'" - Ed] back behind a keyboard and bringing us one of those frustrating “I’ll just get by this level” puzzlers. Check out Gatecrasher.

Another cerebral challenge comes from another RR regular Ian. With a casual mention of starting something and then posting finished versions for the PC, GP2X F200 and Wiz the next day, he makes us mortals feel inadequate. Check out Drench.

Jayenkai didn’t actually enter since the requirement to finish something and not somethings was too constraining. Instead he continued on his Game A Week quest and produced four games! Checkout Blockman Gets DS, Munky’s Block, Yip and Guesstimates.

What annoys me most about Jayenkai doing four games in the month is that it totally screws up my formatting of this page. Which, while dreadful to begin with, I now need to pad out with this rant just to try and get it back to being awful.

From four games, to half a game. Mr Toucan finally stops writing abstract templated interfaces ["But still writes about himself in the third person" - Ed] and gives you?, us?, them? DDBJ.

As posted previously there were two additions to the plethora of Manic Miner remakes. These two certainly raise the standard; Manic Miner the Lost Levels DS is this year’s must have Christmas present for your DS.

But just in case your poor mobile phone gets jealous Scottige wraps up Mr Smiths original classic a delivers a top notch remake. Check out Manic Miner Mobile.

Lobo must have several clones since as well as doing graphics for MMLL and Betpet’s WIP Auf Wiedersehen Monty, and lots of other stuff, he also put out the first six levels of the rather spiffy looking platformer Horace In Geistburg.

The first appearance of Mr. Bacon to RR brings a remake of a Spectrum shooter by a company called The Edge Software ["Never heard of them. Do they still make games?" - Ed]. Check out Starbike.

With the October crunch deadline over I’m looking forward to trying Mike Macdee’s latest exploration into the top-down-action genre with Inframan.

Another RR regular back behind the keyboard is The Caffeine Kid and a glorious return it is to. With the original author’s blessing, TCK has remade the superb Cruising On Broadway in true style with updated graphics and sound. I fully recommend paypal’ing a few quid his way to get your name on the online scoreboard just to beat Bob. Check out COBEX – Cruising On Broadway Extra.

Finally Sparkes not only got Virus Wars out thus securing his iPhone game dev course place, but also completed delivery of a new playtester and future RR member. Congratulations!

[cross posting and extending this from my personal blog because y'know, it was a fun day or two and at Leeds it was great to meet up with a large proportion of the RR folks who all turned out to be absolutely wonderful in the extreme, couple that with some great games and well, it's a winner all round]

There’s a lot to be said for curated events over “we’re showing some stuff that got entered into a competition” and over and above all else, this is why given the choice between Indiecade, The IGF or any of the other miscellaneous events abound I’d choose The Indie Games Arcade at the Eurogamer Expo over the lot of them. It’s not just because I’ve had my work on show there twice (for which I’m incredibly grateful and chuffed to buggery) but because it feels more representative of the rich diversity that comes from Indies.

This years selection, especially, was stellar and a hearty thanks and congratulations to David, Pixel Lab, Sheridans and Eurogamer for putting the show on because y’know, there’s nowhere else I can think of that shows off the stuff that wot we all do and is so accepting of different.

Sure, it may be (in the case of London, not so much Leeds) slightly tucked off the main drag past the grooming booths (Sega had sweets to lure children in, I swear) but thankfully, for the duration of my visit there I rarely caught a point where there wasn’t some folks playing the games. That’s a testament to both the choice and the developers, all of which made games that people would want to play.

In Leeds on Tuesday, which admittedly I was there for far more sociable reasons, watching two guys refuse to budge from Anna Anthropy’s Starcade until they’d played every single game repeatedly was the highlight. I placed Mrs Bob down in front of it on Friday at London and got the same results. That’s a bit special.

RR stalked the corridors of Savile’s Hall. All present and correct came the boys from Ovine, Minion, PlayerOne, TamToucan, TCK, Andy Noble, HappyMonster, Pags and myself. We won’t talk about the confused look on my face at seeing a giant Jim’ll Fix It logo hanging from the ceiling whilst folks slowly explained the Savile part of the halls name to me. Sometimes my own idiocy gets the better of me folks and this was certainly one of those times.

Both myself and the esteemed Tam Toucan punched the shit out of each other in Cletus Clay laughing our way through it in Leeds, Tam swore heartily at Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVV, Joe Danger amazed the lot of us. I got collared by a chap in a Eurogamer T-shirt for a brief session on Increpare’s Happening Game. I’m still shit at Tumbledrop. Squid Harder, Fig8 and Ergon Logos look amazing on a big screen. And this is the thing I can’t possibly stress enough – they were a bunch of really playable games that you couldn’t get from a random set of rules or criteria and I dunno, it just feels more right. And that’s ace.

Post the show a couple of us nipped off to the pub and had a bloody good laugh until it was time for everyone to part. It wasn’t until the pub that I noticed Tam’s T-shirt with “SYNSO IS SCHLOOSHENDOOSH” on it, a joke that likely two other people outside of RR would ever get but a worthy one all the same. We drank, we talked RR things and managed to argue the merits of Stock, Aitkin and Waterman too. In case anyone is wondering, yes, I was the one arguing for them.

A top day out and if you get the opportunity to pop along and meet the RR chaps, I couldn’t recommend it more. They’re all lovely.

Outside of the RR meet-age, somehow no-one else managed to spot me on both occasions. Clearly, until the Show And Yell, my anonymity was strong. That’s probably a bit out the window after my talk, even if it’s just people muttering about that lunatic under their breath. More on that in a bit though.

It was great to see more developers taking their places this year, Joe Danger, Eufloria, Cletus Clay and others all had folks on hand to show the games off. Due to my bizarre affliction where I appear to be a shadow passing through, it wasn’t until the Show & Yell afterwards that I got to greet anyone properly. Disturbingly, aside from Ben of Zombie Cow I managed to avoid everyone whilst sitting in the same room as them. Quite remarkable even by my standards. Perhaps I am just a myth…

And yeah, the Show & Yell went well. Probably better for the technical hitches that killed the plasma screen off. Interesting talks from most people involved and I got to slap Michael Rose on the head, chat to Alex Amsel and Robert Swan briefly, wave at Terry who I wish I’d known was there earlier and meet up with Barrie Ellis and his good wife for a chat for the first time.

Which was handy considering that what I wanted to do above all else was give the guy a shout out for the tireless and brilliant work he does. Which I did. Whilst standing on a chair berating a room full of developers for not including accessibility features in their games. A much deserved round of applause for the man and I hope I didn’t embarrass him *too* much. The rest of the tale of the Show & Yell is probably best left to someone else’s perspective, it was all a bit of a blur for me given I’d been up since 4am with only a few hours sleep and seemed to exist in a semi-comatose state. I’m sure after a lot of the “here’s my game, here’s what I’m doing” having a bearded nut job standing on a chair telling people off must have been quite surreal.

I did have to stifle a snigger at the tumbleweed when I mentioned I wrote War Twat because I fucking hated Everyday Shooter, mind.

All told, good stuff. Mega thanks to David for the opportunity to swear at people in public about something I feel passionately about and thanks to a very drunken Dan Marshall for making my final memory of leaving the place one of laughter and smiles and to D3v from the forums for being him as ever.

You can view the photos from Day 1 at London here.

More online shenanigans abound today. This time in the shape of an online version of the Amiga puzzleyfest, Clockwiser. It’s donedorised by the original authors and comes with a downloadable version too for those who prefer their block turning antics to be done internetless.

Play it here.

Ahh, long overdue methinketh. All the competition entries are now available once more to download. They’re all in bumper mega sized one click download things so y’know, if you do leech the lot or something a donation would be greatly appreciated towards our bandwidth.

Thanks to the fine work of forumite and guest poster Mr Tam Toucan, you can also find nice easy links to the “from the vault” posts until I get round to making something more useful from them.

Ah man, just go and get it. It’s awesomeness incarnate.

Oh god, just when you thought you really were done playing with the Willy, there’s more! I officially declare today “National Play With A Willy Day”.

Jet Set Willy in Java by DarnKitty. It’s here.

Completing our (unintentional) trilogy of Willy. Manic Miner Mobile is complete and due to drop today. It’s Willymania!

Keep an eye on the forums for a release later today.

Haha, did I say we’d finished with Willy for the day? It would seem not! Manic Miner also available in Silverlight.

Go here to play it (requires Silverlight, obviously)