Offworld

Touch Noir: Tribal Games & Mighty Boosh release The Mighty Decider for iPhone

2010-02-05T20:52:17Z

Though Xeni and I still have yet to hold our crimp-off for local number one fan status, it's safe to say that pretty much everyone around these parts is a fan of cult TV/radio/theater supergroup The Mighty Boosh (who you've previously seen on Boing Boing Video here and here and here).

You can imagine, then, my pleasant surprise to learn that the just-launched iPhone debut of SF indie devs Tribal Games is this: The Mighty Decider, an app created in partnership with the Booshes themselves.

Though the App Store has no general lack of magic-8-ball-alikes, The Mighty Decider is quite clearly the only of its kind that lets you (as pictured above): coin flip with Boosh universe urban legend The Crack Fox, have your fortune told by freelance shaman Naboo the Enigma, spin a bottle of Bob Fossil's heady love potion, and, of course, seek advice from the cheerfully obtuse Moon.

The Boosh's own Noel 'Vince Noir' Fielding created much of the artwork you see in the App, and all the cast provided their own voice work, including an all-too-familiar app-starting red curtain introduction, making it basically an essential digital bit of collectible Boosh fandom.

The Mighty Decider is available in the App Store now [iTunes link], and is currently on sale for its introductory weekend.

Previously:

Get this game: Zoe Mode's charitable music-puzzler Chime

2010-02-04T13:59:27Z

It's been a long road for charity-focused games publisher OneBigGame: when I first talked to founder Martin de Ronde in 2007, its goal was to raise funds by soliciting mini-game designs by some of the industry's top developers, and find a studio to bring them all to life in one retail kit, a playable form of fundraising form of 80's supergroup org Band Aid.

Flash forward three years -- a lightyear away from the landscape then, with the rise of dedicated digital-download portals across every gaming platform -- and priorities have changed, for the better, with Broken Sword designer Charles Cecil, Parappa creator Masaya Matsuura (and a stellar handful of unannounced devs) now on board to create their own fully formed games for a variety of devices, with proceeds going to benefit charities like Save the Children and Starlight.

The bar for those designers has already been set incredibly high, though, as UK studio Zoë Mode lets loose the first game under the OneBigGame label with music puzzler Chime, just released via Xbox Live Arcade.

Genre aficionados will recognize the precedent here, and Zoë Mode wears its influences proudly on its sleeve: take the sweeping 'beatline' of Q Entertainment's PSP-launching Lumines and swap out the falling blocks for an open, free-form arrangement more akin to cult board game Blokus.

Fitting together the pieces into 3x3 or higher solid 'quads' clears them off the board, with chains and multipliers that reward you for creating multiple concurrent quads, or for rapidly expanding the quad before its own meter runs out (which it does more quickly on the more difficult levels) and it's cleared off the board. More importantly, the game rewards covering each square of the board's grid before your timer runs through.

And how it does that is directly related to the real star here: its musical integration, and the artist list Zoë Mode managed to bring together, a diverse and A-list team including Moby, Orbital's Paul Hartnoll, and no less than composer Philip Glass.

Each submitted master versions of their songs, giving the developer the opportunity to tightly integrate the song with your gameplay: each placed block, well, chimes, as the beatline sweeps across it (in almost a faux Tenori-On fashion) with minute bits of the song, a base on top of which each formed quad rewards you with its own samples, and the amount of the board you've covered brings background ambiance to a bold crescendo.

It's that even tighter and more direct interplay between the brick laying and the music that sets it far apart even from its Lumines inspiration: it's as truly hypnotic and zone-inducing (particularly, and not surprisingly, on Glass's level) as puzzlers come, and a fantastic start to what is hopefully OneBigGame's long-running campaign for a greater good.

Chime has been added to Boing Boing's ongoing list of Games To Get, covering the best in independent and retail games.

Scratch to win: the Bell Brothers' turntablist-puzzle game Record Tripping

2010-02-03T20:36:09Z

Probably the easiest pick for web game of the week I'll make in some time, Record Tripping, the latest from Flash duo the Bell Brothers, probably couldn't survive easily on any of its individual parts, but adds up to a fantastic circular whole.

Using your mouse's scroll-wheel (or, more fittingly, if more uncontrollably, two fingers on your MacBook trackpad), Tripping requires you to solve a series of vaguely Through-The-Looking-Glass-inspired puzzles, all plays on rotational mechanics: unlocking safes, spinning windmills to blow seeds into pots, or manipulating time itself to help White Rabbits make their train.

Which again, fair enough on its own, but it layers on top of that a turntabilist scratch effect with backing music by Gorillaz, Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, and Spoon and Peter-Pan-record narration of Alice's adventures in Wonderland.

The design's slightly at odds with itself -- all the challenges are time based, which means more often than not you're causing a groove-skipping cacophony rather than working your way through to the beat, but it's still the cleverest use of the mouse wheel (an otherwise altogether overlooked part of the computer interface kit) I think I've ever seen.

When you're done with that, there's also the Brothers' beat-matching Gorillaz spinoff game, and a decent enough similar bongo-along featuring Weezer (heavily inspired by Namco's Taiko: Drum Master) awaiting your perusal.

Record Tripping [via Capy's Kris Piotrowski and .Tiff]

Not a waste of time: Ste Curran's keynote for the 2010 Global Game Jam

2010-01-30T20:17:16Z

We're already just past 24 hours into the 2010 Global Game Jam -- a worldwide weekend where students and developers both indie and professional meet for a high intensity and high concept sprint to develop something new in a desperately short amount of time.

Following last year's top 7 Tyra-Banks-channeling (?!) tips for the jammers given by World of Goo creator and Experimental Gameplay Project co-founder Kyle Gabler, this year's keynote has just been uploaded for public consumption by former Edge magazine editor-at-large and current Zoë Mode creative director Ste Curran.

Curran -- whose debut music-puzzle game Chime is due for release as part of the charity-partnered One Big Game later this week (and more on that then) -- is also co-host of essential games radio show One Life Left, and here takes Jammers on a personal, Vonnegut-referencing journey regarding wastes of time: as in, are games, and how can developers ensure, above all, that they aren't.

Once you're finished with (and are properly inspired by) the video, follow the ongoing efforts of all the individual Jams across the world by visiting the Global Game Jam site and clicking on each team's live stream (if you can tear yourself away from the default puppy cam) and project updates.

Continued best of luck to all the Jammers this weekend!

Global Game Jam 2010, One Life Left

Introducing our 'Games To Get' Page

2010-01-29T13:59:53Z

Over the past few months, I've made more than a handful of scattered game recommendations, whether in the form of yearly wrap-up lists of indie/iPhone and console/handheld games, sketchbook/concept art gallery posts, or more simple compiled reminders of the best releases of the week.

And for just as long, there wasn't an easy way to keep all those games straight, especially if you'd just managed to get your hands on an iPhone or PS3 or DS for the first time. And so now, we present, the official Games To Get page.

For now, then, it's a compiled list of 2009's top games across all platforms (along with a few extras), with quick descriptions and links to each game's original mention, and a download link that'll take you to the App Store, Amazon, or simply to the freeware/indie download page.

In the future, every recommendation will also come with an update to the list, keeping it a dynamic and growing guide to the best the indies and industry proper have to offer, and also, if nothing else, proof positive (as became clear when the page was finished) that there's still, thankfully, a healthy cross-section of developers that believe games can be more than muddied washes of brown and gunmetal grey.

Boing Boing: Games To Get

What do Indie Gaming's All-Stars think of Apple's iPad?

2010-01-28T13:59:03Z

Before Steve Jobs had even brought yesterday's iPad-announcing keynote to a close, I called together a quorum of indie gaming's Justice League -- a handful of the best and brightest developers pushing the medium forward across every new device -- to ask: what's the iPad going to mean for the future?

Between those that've already staked out a strong presence on the iPhone and iPod Touch (Canabalt's Adam Saltsman, Eliss's Steph Thirion, Rolando's Simon Oliver, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor's David Kalina and Critter Crunch's Nathan Vella), those that've seen their PC hits brought to the device (Fantastic Contraption's Colin Northway), those that haven't landed there yet but will soon (Fez's Phil Fish and Henry Hatsworth's Kyle Gray), and those that I selfishly hope eventually might (World of Goo's Kyle Gabler), opinions were cautious, but on the whole optimistic.

While it's clear that the past two years of training on the iPhone have taught us that there is indeed a viable future in multi-touch and accelerometer-based gaming, and that the App Store can provide developers with an enthusiastic and sustainable audience, its position as a third-pillar between the phone and the laptop is entirely unproven, leaving many developers in a holding pattern before diving nose-first into an unquantifiable market.

But despite this, with the problems it solves (like: the issue of the Big Fat Thumbs) and the opportunities it opens (its screen is now not necessarily only for a single person), you can already hear the sound of hundreds of collective gears turning to chart gaming's future course.

So below, the thoughts of all the above developers, with -- as a bonus where applicable -- off-device screenshots that blow up to their iPad-native 2x resolution when clicked, for a preview of what the device's scaling simulator will look like when it lands in March.

Adam Saltsman, co-founder, Semi Secret (Canabalt, Wurdle), creator of Flixel:

I have been forcefully ignoring all the buzz until today, but I have to say I'm a little giddy right now. Pixel doubling means Canabalt is ready to ship right now, and I did all the assets for Wurdle (and our new unannounced game) at 2x resolution, so we can actually very easily ship 'HD' versions of those alongside our iPhone res stuff.
They haven't shown much in this regard, but this device is pretty much begging to be subjugated for all sorts of insane multitouch music composition purposes, and there's also the possibility here to do something pretty special, which is finally getting to do what board games do - a big shared playspace that you interact with in an intuitive way. This would be a pretty big deal in getting people into games that might otherwise be intimidating from a dual-sticks perspective.

We're also making a big tech announcement that will be super extra awesome, very soon I hope!

Colin Northway, creator of Fantastic Contraption:

Two things strike me as interesting about this:
1) is there going to be another gold rush?

And the more interesting:

2) What kind of games are going to work really well on the iPad?

The first question is really just about answering if we can afford to explore the second.

The iPhone's interface has proved itself capable of supporting some great game experiences that wouldn't work nearly as well with a mouse. You could play Flight Control perfectly fine with a mouse but you wouldn't draw the same sweeping natural lines.

At the same time there is a brutal lack of screen real estate which means some game ideas just can't exist on the iPhone or feel shoe-horned onto the iPhone (like Fantastic Contraption). So this is kind of the best of both worlds. We get the wonderful tactile interface but people don't have to squint to see what's going on or wish they had see-through fingers.

There will be some people with game ideas that didn't quite work on the iPhone who will be dusting them off and examining them under this new light. I am definitely one of those people.

Kyle Gray, creator of Henry Hatsworth, Experimental Gameplay Project co-founder:

The Apple Hype Machine never fails to impress. I was in the middle of a meeting when this thing was announced and my inbox practically exploded with talk about the iPad in the interim (mostly from you lot, but some from friends pitching ideas as well).
Most surprisingly was my wife falling in the "do want" category. It's a real testament to Apple's prowess that it can have such a strong pull on someone who's more into purses than processors.

That being said, a buddy and I have been working on an iPhone game in our spare time, so this is pretty damned exciting news.

Now to just make something for it without getting pulled in by its siren's song...

Phil Fish, co-founder, Polytron (Fez and the iPhone's upcoming Power Pill [above]):

It isn't the huge leap forward in terms of multi-touch interface i was hoping for, but it's certainly still a big step forward. It isn't the multi-touch terminal to my MacBook I think it should be. Lack of camera is a missed opportunity for augmented reality overlays that the 1ghz processor would handle a lot better than even a 3GS.
I guess it's up to the developers to make good use of it now.

But I'm still incredibly giddy. "Just a bigger iPhone" is already a huge step forward in terms of multi-touch usability. I don't understand what people are complaining about. A bigger screen here means a lot more than just a bigger screen. It implies so much more.

Backwards compatibility with iPhone apps is good, but is just that. The real meat is going to be in iPad exclusives, designed for the huge real estate.

Simon Oliver, founder, Hand Circus (Rolando and the upcoming Okabu):

The larger real-estate is going to be great, in terms of being able to interact with it without your fingers smothering the screen, and being able to add more functionality without tons of clutter. I think it definitely opens up the iPhone/iPod/iPad range to quite a few genres that a lot of people might have considered verboten previously - you know those games on the iPhone where the screen is covered in UI clutter. Simulation and construction games, MMORPGs (I'm sure Blizzard was watching the keynote with avid interest), and as Adam was saying, this is gonna be awesome for fun music/painting/animation creation tools and games. With that big touchscreen you've got a perfect canvas for creative play. I hope an iPad lands in Toshio Iwai's lap!
I'd love to do a Rolando title with a more "zoomed-out" perspective - i.e. same size characters but you can see 4x the playspace - would definitely be fun to explore what the bigger screen could afford in terms of more elaborate puzzles, more characters and fun multitouch interactions.

David Kalina, co-owner, Tiger Style (Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor):

While the iPad seems like a pretty incredible piece of hardware, I can't help but wonder if there will actually be a viable marketplace for an independent game developer. The iPhone revolutionized the way people thought about cell phones, whereas the iPad seeks to occupy some hole between the laptop and the phone that may or may not actually exist. Of course, the market has a way of working these things out.
As a developer of touch interfaces, more screen real estate really does make a difference beyond allowing us to draw more pixels on the screen. It means that we should be able to communicate to players more clearly when fingers are present, as well as allowing multiple touches to take place without obscuring all of the game content.

Hopefully, this will encourage developers to explore more native interfaces for their games, rather than settling for the awkward and uninspired 'virtual gamepad'. But also, it gives developers the potential to explore interesting new designs for single-device multiplayer. As a designer, this is the aspect of the iPad that I find most intriguing.

Steph Thirion, creator of Eliss:

I just spent the past two hours reading announcements and tech specs and iPad programming guides, so my head is a bit fuzzy, and it's a bit early to come to conclusions. I still have a lot of important questions, but here are some early thoughts and feelings.
Like my girlfriend was just saying, this could be 'the Wii of general computing': accessible to everyone. This is the first device (at an accessible price) that makes web browsing like reading a newspaper: a casual, pleasurable thing, not done on a professional workstation. And for the not so common tasks (like Adam said, music making, etc.), a multitouch screen of this size for $500 is absolutely mad (JazzMutant are officially fucked).

As far as gaming, I think David has a very good point (why go for expensive development for a smaller market), but on the other hand, if the first point holds true, and a couple of these devices start to pop up in every household, then we have a market. What we could potentially see then is the border disappearing between general computing devices and gaming devices!

Any way this evolves, this device opens up a world of possibilities for new interfaces. Even if we don't get rich off of it, we'll still be able to build the coolest shit on it.

But even then, we still need to hold one of these devices. Are they truly responsive? If I'm correct, this is the first time Apple has made their own processor. How many touch points does the multitouch handle? Is multitouch as precise as the iPhone? Following on Apple's history, this device will rock, but that doesn't change the fact that we haven't yet seen it fly.

Finally, is it true that all apps in the AppStore can be run on the tablet, without modifications, without a green light from the developer? I haven't tested Eliss on the iPad, yet Apple has basically announced that it's coming out for this new device I had only heard rumors about. If this is true I find this a bit surprising. We should have the right to decide if we want to allow our apps to be run and stretched on a different device than they were designed for.

Nathan Vella, president, Capy Games (Critter Crunch and the upcoming collaborative Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP):

When it comes down to it, I am really excited to see what people make for the platform. Some of my favorite games of 2009 were iPhone games, and despite the fact that there's an astronomical amount of shit on the App Store, the gems (pretty much exclusively made by indies) really validate it. I sincerely hope the same thing happens with the iPad.
Sure, we'll get our Need for Speeds and our Monkey Balls, but it's the games from Steph Thirion, Hand Circus, Mr. Saltsman/Semi-Secret, Mobigame and the other super-awesome indies that will pull me into the platform as a gaming device. While functionality-wise it doesn't offer an earth-shattering step forward from the iPhone, I think there's a lot of possibilities for insanely creative people to make something special for the iPad.

On the "specs" side, since Capy (and Capy in collaboration with Superbrothers) makes iPhone games with pixel art, I am really interested to see how the device handles its up-scaling. We've always thought of iPhone as a great place to continue our love of pixels, so I am terrified at the thought of muddy anti-aliased pixel art (much akin to what happens when you zoom in Firefox 3+). Here's hoping that they implement it in a way that easily and effectively maintains nice clean pretty pixels. We have our collective fingers crossed.

Capy is working on a WiiWare game called Heartbeat, and we've been toying with the idea of eventually bringing it to iPhone, since games built specifically for the Wii interface have a real good shot at translating well into touch controls. Now that there's another addition to the iPhone "family" - specifically one with a big-ass higher-res screen - it certainly makes that possibility more interesting. The combination of WiiWare and iPad/iPhone might be a powerful thing to consider for future development, especially for small studios making interesting stuff on WiiWare.

I know for sure we'll have a huge push internally to put our Capy/Superbrothers/Jim Guthrie collab Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP on the iPad. Superbrothers would probably sacrifice a limb to get the game on that screen, and rightfully so. It would look mighty pretty at that resolution.

Kyle Gabler, co-founder, 2DBoy (World of Goo):

What? What's an IPAD? Can I install Windows XP on it?
I totally don't follow Apple news at all, but I'm suddenly hungry for Stone Soup!

I am an old man,
Kyle

Gnop: Avoid Hitting Paddle For High Score

2010-01-25T20:36:06Z

Gnop might be the most austere game you play all week, though not necessarily the simplest: Bit Battalion have (as you'll follow from the title) turned Pong on its head by giving you control of the ball, rather than the paddle, and wrapped it in light poetic metaphor.

The most surprising thing about it, though? That it took 38 years for someone to pull off such an obvious role reversal.

Gnop [Bit Battalion]

Consollection: videogame systems from history

2010-01-25T18:21:17Z

Consollection is an elegantly-presented page about more than 100 different videogame systems from history in the collection of a gent named Phil Penninger. The site is tied to a German book by the same name, designed by Patrick Molnar Design. (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)

The Boing Boing Guide to the 2010 Indie Games Student Showcase

2010-01-22T13:55:32Z

Though the announcement this week of the Student Showcase winners in this years Independent Games Festival might seem necessarily secondary to the main festival's competition, it's important to remember that some of gaming's recent best has been plucked directly from its former finalists.

Most notably, Valve's much-beloved Portal was borne from 2006 student entry Narbacular Drop, the same year that Cloud would propel thatgamecompany forward to create their PlayStation 3 art-games flOw and Flower.

2007's And Yet It Moves is currently one of the upcoming lynchpins of indie representation on Nintendo's downloadable service WiiWare, and de Blob would later be revamped as a cult success for publisher THQ, while 2008's The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom is just weeks away from an Xbox Live Arcade release from BioShock publisher 2K, and 2009's The Unfinished Swan still remains one of the most anticipated games to come from the festival.

The point being: while the main IGF entrants are still the best temperature gauge for what the indie scene is up to, the student entrants are no less important a guidepost to the teams that will be moving it forward in the years to come.

And so, as with Boing Boing's guide to the main IGF finalists, below is a breakdown of the ten student showcase finalists -- with links to downloads for nearly all the games to play yourself -- which this year brought a refreshing amount of genuinely compelling and moving experiences:

Boryokudan Rue • PC • UCLA • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

Following very confidently in the point and click tradition of dramatic adventure classics like Beneath a Steel Sky, the unfortunately titled Boryokudan Rue is a year 22xx cyber-noir thriller that manages to even get the occasional drop on Hideo Kojima's Snatcher for nailing Blade Runner's broken grey future. Fantastically atmospheric with its limited pixels and challenging without losing accessibility, it does a stellar job of keeping the point and click tradition alive.

Continuity • web • Chalmers University of Technology / University of Gothenburg • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Continuity should look familiar to regular readers: it was previously featured as the web hit of the week in early December, for its smart and simple platforming action split into and laid across a deck of cards that you rearrange like a classic slide-puzzle, and a wickedly bombastic synthed-out score counterpointed with the card-shuffle's light ambiance.

Devil's Tuning Fork • PC • DePaul • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Devil's Tuning Fork isn't a half step away in concept from last year's student showcase finalist The Unfinished Swan, for taking standard first-person platforming fare and turning it into an exercise in feeling your way through a discomforting void.

In Fork's case, though, that void is even more frightening by design: its midnight blackness can only be navigated by echolocation -- or how we might visually translate the sensation of actual echolocators -- and the stuffed-toy objects it's your goal to collect are each crying out in childrens' voices about monsters and pain, adding to the overall sense of primal scared-of-the-dark dread.

Dreamside Maroon • PC • DigiPen • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Easily the best surprise of this year's showcase, Dreamside Maroon is 2010's version of the first time you played a thatgamecompany game: it's visually arresting, effortlessly stylized and quietly evocative in a way that's still too rare in gaming today.

Your Dreamside goal is to grow a single vine to the moon, with no real enemies or challenges standing in your way, but the game truly opens up in a smell-the-roses sense as you realize that the gorgeous painterly floating islands you're surrounded by have lanterns that can be lit, each of which unlocks a small poetic verse and attracts groups of fireflies to collect and bring along in your journey upward.

Utterly unmissable, if you can only bring yourself download one game from this list, make it this one.

Igneous • PC • DigiPen • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

DigiPen's other strong showing this year outside Dreamside Maroon is Igneous, which is gaming's equivalent to Indy Jones's trademark boulder-chase scene, stretched out across a series of increasingly harrowing levels.

Playing the part of a miniature rolling totem, all the game asks you to do is go -- and fast -- escaping from a wall of lava constantly nipping at you from behind, jumping over rivers of magma and ground that's continually falling out from beneath you: a game happily unforgiving and consistently nervewracking.

Paper Cakes • PC/Mac • Utrecht School of the Arts & USC • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Created as part of a student design challenge for Wacom's ongoing efforts to bring fun to their pen/tablet interface (but still just as fully playable with only a standard mouse), Paper Cakes is an adorably ingenious point-a-to-point-b puzzler about leading your sketch-drawing player to cake.

To do so, as the other half of the title would suggest, you guide by drawing paths and -- here's where the clever comes in -- by origami-folding the paper the character lives on to its flip side, which can cover up obstacles, join floors, and open new routes to cross otherwise inaccessible routes. The character's post-cake-binge "itis" snooze is probably the cutest thing you'll see in the Indie Games Fest this year.

Puddle • PC • ENJMIN, France • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Between the main IGF's entry Vessel, Q-games' recently released PixelJunk Shooter and Puddle, it seems as though fluid dynamics modeling is becoming this year's "it girl" mechanic. Played out with only your joystick's shoulder buttons to tilt levels left and right, Puddle sees you guiding an amount of liquid through devilishly difficult laboratory levels, with bunsen burner flames and pitfall cracks draining your allotment along the way.

Puzzle Bloom • PC • DADIU, Denmark • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Somewhere on par, thematically, to the Oddworld series and Flower, Puzzle Bloom brings an environmental and anti-industrial message to puzzle mechanics that see you hopping from character to worker-drone character, taking control of their bodies to work through switch-gates and hit checkpoints that cause factory control rooms to bloom with greenery. Created in Unity, it's a good showcase (alongside the work of Flashbang and Infinite Ammo) of where 3D web gaming is headed.

Spectre • PC/Mac • USC Interactive Media • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

One of this year's most narratively ambitious games, Spectre attempts nothing less than telling the story of one human's life from start to finish, spread out metaphorically through various 2D platforming challenges.

Each playthrough lets you select nine memories -- and your goal is to avoid the darker bits of main character Joseph's past and concentrate on the glowing brighter ones -- with over fifty end-game themes and a uniting theme that's there for you to uncover via repeat play.

Ulitsa Dimitrova • PC • Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Finally, Ulitsa Dimitrova might be the most surprisingly affecting game entered this year that uses the least amount of mechanical ingenuity to make its point. Watching the guided-tour video above will give you basically the entirety of what it attempts to do, but it might be better told through your own discovery.

Cheerfully drawn in broad, broad and utterly bleak ballpoint pen strokes, it's a character portrait of homeless Slavic seven-year-old Pjotre, capturing a slice of life that consists of little more than nicking Mercedes hood ornaments and stealing huffable glue and cheap liquor, all to trade away to support his chainsmoking habit.

There's no winning, the city loops endlessly in classic Hanna Barbera style and echoes the nihilistic pointlessness of Pjotre's life -- all you can do is keep moving and repeating each empty day, because stopping means freezing to death in the St. Petersburg streets.

What's Microsoft doing for Indie Games?

2010-01-21T17:59:48Z

It's been a year and a quarter since Microsoft first launched their initiative to "democratize gaming", and nine months since they co-opted the "Indie Game" brand for that initiative, and the report card on those efforts is looking a bit bleak.

So off the radar are those efforts that it might surprise the majority of Xbox 360 owners that tucked away a few navigational clicks away in their dashboard is a growing library of some 700-odd bedroom-coded creations, more than a few of which are well worth playing.

On the surface, the problems with their Indie Gaming efforts aren't at all that different than those we've seen plague every other nominally "open" platforms like the App Store: a deluge of low-quality noise (including, most famously, not one, not two, not three, not four, but no less than five "massage" apps that turn your controller into a low-rent variable-speed vibrator) which instantly drowns out the signal of honest efforts that otherwise might flourish.

The symptoms are, of course, sales so low that the platform hasn't proven itself to be viable for any serious full-time indie developer that isn't looking for more than quick bursts of brand building, or hobbyist coders seeking the thrill of seeing something they've made hit the living room. Up to date sales figures are hard to come by other than on case by case blog posts, but a Gamasutra poll six months in showed that 27 games released on the surface had only grossed a collective $69,000 -- ranging from the top earning $5995 to a paltry $84 at the low end.

So what can be done? The main offender is a lack of publicity and marketing, something Microsoft had promised as the service was launching -- that games would receive 'front and center' first party attention for a higher cut of revenue -- a promise that hasn't been made good on since Ska Software dev James Silva shared the 2008 GDC keynote stage as the company first announced its indie intentions (and an onus that's obviously shared with developers themselves, too few of whom unfortunately have mastered the technique).

And Microsoft's partnering with games mega-site IGN to bring some semblance of editorial oversight and attention to the cream of the Indie Games crop has proven less than useful, with no transparency, explicit on-console expounding, or, apparently, logic to their shifting lineup of top picks. You're just as likely to find Dont B Nervous Talking 2 Girls [sic] or Cassie's Corner (above) -- honestly quite discomforting barebones 'games' that traffic more in disaffected adolescent loneliness than they do in interactive entertainment -- in IGN's lineup than you are to find a spotlight on under-sung up-and-coming talent.

That's doubly distressing when IGN themselves have declared the service 'a failed venture', though they presumably aren't making plans to pass the torch to highly-motivated/low-trafficked sites like XNAPlay or any other number of dedicated indie-focused outlets (hey Microsoft, call me!).

The more harmful, if unintentionally so, problem is one of pricing, with the company only allowing developers to choose one of three pricepoints, first launching at a competitive 200, 400, or 800 Microsoft Point levels (roughly equating to $2.50, $5, or $10) before dropping those points to 80, 240, or 400 (roughly $1, $3, and $5) on their brand-switch from "Community" to "Indie" games. While this might not seem a move out of step with the App Store's race to the bottom economics, because the promise of XNA development (the software kit used to develop Xbox 360 indie efforts) was delivering cross-platform ease between both the console and PC, this has damned XNA developers to choosing those same price-points no matter where they decided to sell: it's hard to convince consumers that a PC version is worth even a dollar more than what they're allowed to ask for the console version.

Despite all this, it's not impossible to find indie devs that don't harbor all out pessimism for the platform, and with fair enough reasons: as the aforementioned Ska Software's Silva points out, piracy, payment processing, and hardware support issues are essentially non-existent with the service, and Parisian indie studio Arkedo has gone on record as well with high praise for the ease with which anyone can get their game onto consoles worldwide (no dev kits, no concept or studio approval, no lot checks, community code sharing), though they in the same breath admit that the platform is "at a crossroads."

But without intervention on someone's part -- whether Microsoft decides to take some responsibility for sustaining the community by (as Fantastic Contraption creator Colin Northway so aptly put it) "spraying the money hose" on those trying to bring quality work to the service, as Apple (opaquely) does with iTunes-front-page App Store highlights, or an editorial body prominently emerging that's dedicated to raising the bar, the platform will maintain its downward spiral where the top performers are the creepiest (see above!) or most left-field curiosities, the loudest shouters stifling the humble few trying to help establish, maintain, and make viable a platform that could have been a fantastic opportunity to reach an open and enthusiastic mainstream audience.

In an attempt to do some candle-lighting rather than simple darkness-cursing, then, here's three of the best recent efforts made, which sit quite comfortably alongside games like Xbox Community Game pioneering shooter Weapon of Choice, Downtown Smash Dodgeball [by the same team behind the NES 8-bit cult classic Dodgeball], and enthusiastic multiplayer effort Hieronymus Bash.

Tobe's Vertical Adventure

Rayteoactive's debut holds a lot of obvious retro/cute charm, but beneath its cheek-pinchingly adorable exterior is a game that's lifted some of the best ideas from Nintendo's early Game Boy Advance platformer Wario Land 4, where your leisurely stroll to its bottom becomes a desperate race back to the surface.

Leave Home

Hermit Games' just-released shooter might also be, at a glance, indistinguishable from any number of other geometric/abstract dual-stick shooters that Geometry Wars hath wrought, but its ace up the sleeve is a dynamic system which adapts to your current level of play and keeps each time-limited session consistently surprising, a far cry from the horizontal shooter norm which asks players to adapt to a strict second-by-second bullet dodging choreography.

Arkedo Series

Best (but not nearly well enough) known for their hyper-stylized DS efforts Nervous Brickdown and the fireworks-flinging-shooter Big Bang Mini, Arkedo have taken a break from the retail racket to drop a steady stream of their retro-future polish on the Indie Games service, starting with 8-bit platformer Jump, tile-pushing puzzler Swap, and, above, their neon-lit LED microgame Pixel, which combines both simple platforming with quick-time maze navigating, all of which have served as the biggest burst of fresh air to hit the service since it first began.

Get this: Namco's Muscle March breaks through to U.S. WiiWare

2010-01-18T18:21:22Z

Muscle March • WiiWare • Namco • www

It was one of 2009's top game memes when video first emerged of its Japanese release, and now it's finally arrived: in a momentous occasion few thought we'd ever see (and even fewer genuinely hoped we would) -- Namco has just released Muscle March for download on U.S. Wiis.

So how'd it turn out? Not surprisingly, pretty much exactly as you'd imagine from that video above. Strip away all the well-oiled bodywork and its a remarkably slim game of think-fast reaction time, a holdover from its arcade roots.

The plot, so to speak, is simply to chase down the thief that's stolen your protein powder, be he a rogue football linebacker, alien Grey, or clownish/fey Nobunaga, striking whichever pose they choose to fit cleanly through the slapstick man-sized hole they leave in each subsequent wall.

It's an easier task at the caboose end of the muscled train, giving you plenty of time to anticipate each movement, but as each teammate drops out and leaves you alone to your task, the pace quickens to split second decisions, made even more difficult by last-minute feints.

Again indicative of its arcade origins, each game rarely lasts longer than a hot minute or two, and Namco has made no effort to provide depth beyond that: it simply strives to be the best scantily-clad-bodybuilder-breaking-through-walls game ever made, a glorious goal it's impossible to say it hasn't achieved.

Too elementary, dear Watson!

2010-01-14T19:30:06Z

Just tried the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries iPhone game. This video explains it: ask questions, inspect evidence, then figure stuff out. An interesting idea, but the execution is so simplistic that interrogation is just an interactive story, clue-searching a mindless mini-game, and solutions easily brute-forced. It's polished and mildly entertaining--and just a dollar--but it only held my attention for a few minutes. [iTunes Link]

Nintendo as a gothic manuscript page

2010-01-14T13:20:34Z

Got Medieval presents the opening crawl of the Legend of Zelda as a gothic manuscript page.

Avatar for Atari 2600

2010-01-13T16:14:54Z

Illustration: Penney Design.

Get this: Flipping out with Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV

2010-01-13T13:59:09Z

VVVVVV • PC/Mac (Linux forthcoming) • distractionware • www

According to early Internet opinionating, VVVVVV -- the essentially unpronounceable commercial debut of Don't Look Back creator Terry Cavanagh is either a groundbreaking platformer that has already instantly redefined indie gaming in a way that we haven't seen since Jon Blow's Braid, or "a bland exercise in confusion and frustration".

The truth, as usual, is somewhere quite comfortably and happily in between. Designed around giving the player only one switch (beyond left and right movement) to interact with its world -- a switch which flips the gravity of its interstellar station -- VVVVVV isn't hiding any particular mechanical tricks up its sleeve.

It doesn't boldly dare to upend time itself or bend inter-dimensional space or throw plot twists asking you rethink everything you thought you knew about free will. What it does instead is simply craft an enormously cohesive experience around -- and allow a fantastic sense of exploration through -- that one simple interaction.

VVVVVV doesn't draw its charm or its power from its indefinably retro visuals (neither really C64-ish or Spectrum-esque, though clearly inspired by the latter's foundational UK single-screen platformers like Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy), or its even harder to pin down chiptune score (though Magnus 'Souleye' Pålsson's work there is easily worth calling out on its own).

Instead it's remarkable for the way it can consistently provide a compelling experience from screen to screen relying only on that gravity flip, and particularly for how intricately Cavanagh has constructed its twisted caverns and adjoining rooms. It's not until you see your goal sectioned off by what originally appears to be an insurmountable wall only to wind yourself seemingly aimlessly through its rat-maze network and find yourself precisely where you wanted to be that you appreciate just how finely designed the game is.

But even if that might seem to imply a cakewalk tour through its world, VVVVVV is surely anything but: the final death toll for an average run can easily stretch into the thousands, particular rooms in the multiple hundreds, but Cavanagh has made death a learning experience rather than a punishment with liberal checkpoints and zero-time restart.

Certain challenges in the game are so difficult that they become more tests of rote reaction time muscle memory against its one-hit spiky deaths (so omnipresent that they loom even in the game's very title), and it's to Cavanagh's credit that he's made burning through 177 subsequent deaths in a matter of minutes feel like a rewarding puzzle over a maddening flaw.

And so in the end that's "all" VVVVVV is -- not a redefinition but rather a confident and novel refinement of simple platform play, a game delightfully self-referencing and -aware, and a fantastic start to the new year of indie gaming.

Play a demo of the game online at Kongregate, and purchase the full version direct from Cavanagh's distractionware site.

Get this: Capcom's criminal-trial adventure Phoenix Wright hits WiiWare

2010-01-12T13:59:06Z

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney • WiiWare • Capcom • www

The 2005 DS debut of Capcom's Phoenix Wright franchise was a minor gaming landmark in finally introducing the West to the 'visual novel'. And while it may not have necessarily opened the door as widely for other adventures of its type, it quickly lifted the franchise to cult hit status, with two direct sequels and two more spin-offs.

What it lacks in action oriented play -- as the genre name suggests, you spend the majority of your time simply watching its text-heavy courtroom drama unfold, only interjecting (or, you know, objecting) to point out flaws in witness testimony -- it makes up for where it counts the most: with its intricately constructed murder mystery scenarios, and a surprising amount of comic timing eked out of two-frame animations and a genuinely at-times-hilarious script.

The new downloadable WiiWare port of the game might be a no-frills affair (it appears to be running in what is presumably an official DS emulator), but it's a perfect introduction for anyone that missed out on the handheld debut -- and one of January's most unmissable game releases.

Game-themed cupcake quiz

2010-01-07T01:04:44Z

Wil Wheaton points out this severely awesome game-themed cupcake quiz. How many can you get right?

The Boing Boing Guide to the 2010 Indie Games Festival

2010-01-06T14:00:04Z

Still the best temperature gauge of What The Indie Game Development Scene Is Up To This Year, this year's Independent Games Festival brought in yet another record number of entries (306 to last year's 226), and its just-released finalist selection has brought another round of some of the most innovative and finely crafted games due for release in months.

The grand prize finalists this year see a diverse collection of stunt-jumping daredevils, competitively coordinating catburglars, sadistically savory sacks of meat, post-traumatic surreal memory exploration, and militaristic poultry, and its Nuovo finalists -- awarded for boundary-pushing shortform and abstract works -- bring together Atari 2600 haiku, sedan-slamming bears, dark interactive poetry, all-out sensory/perception warping, and a play between light and darkness itself.

And so below, ahead of the final winner announcements during March's Game Developers Conference, a complete illustrated guide to all twenty of 2010's IGF finalists across all its categories, with a precis of each, links for more information, and, where available, a link to play all finalists that have already released their games.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity • PC • Dejobaan Games, LLC • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Design
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Dejobaan's latest game might have the most unwieldy name of all the IGF entries, but it's also probably the most literally descriptive: its base-jumping core isn't about flying so much as free-falling, with bonuses for stylishly skirting its floating cities on the way down and tossing flourishes or fingers toward your fans while you get there.

A Slow Year • Atari 2600, PC, Mac • Ian Bogost • www
Nominated for: Nuovo Award
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

The sharpest among you will remember that A Slow Year isn't the first 'zen'-like experience professor, researcher, and occasional Colbert guest Ian Bogost has designed for the Atari 2600: that honor goes to his Guru Meditation, a stillness simulator created for the retro-tech Wii Balance Board-ish "Joyboard" later ported to the iPhone, in which players win by sitting motionless for as long as possible.

A Slow Year takes that zen inspiration a step further with four interactive haiku -- games about maximizing your quiet sunrise pleasure before your morning coffee gets cold, guessing the time/distance between a lightning strike and its accompanying peal of thunder, or closing your eyes and anticipating where a floating stick will be when you re-open them -- that, on completion, will be sold as a new 2600 cartridge, along with a book of poetry.

Closure • PC, Mac • Closure Team • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Audio, Nuovo Award, Technical Excellence
Can I Play It Right Now? In its early Flash form, yes!

If you've played Tyler Glaiel and company's original Flash prototype of Closure you've only scratches its surface, as the team rebuilds the game from the ground up as a PC, Mac and quite likely a console experience.

If you haven't, start there now: Closure is the very definition of Gestalt-gaming, where what you can't see is quite literally not there -- if the floor is not lit, there is no floor, and the borders of cast light can be jumped on like platforms -- and in its new form is twice as terrifying as you wend your way through its horrible nightmarish blackness.

Cogs • PC, iPhone • Lazy 8 Studios • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Design
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Cogs wears its design on its sleeve: it is little more than a brass and woodwork steampunk tile-swapping game, but what's surprising is how much variety and startlingly clever puzzle design they've been able to twist out of that simple premise, as your playfield expands into further dimensions and shapes.

With an iPhone port due before the end of January and its PC version already available (alongside user-created puzzle swapping), you'll likely be hearing much more about Lazy 8's game soon.

Enviro-Bear 2000 • PC, iPhone • Justin Smith • www
Nominated for: Nuovo Award
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes! And on your iPhone, too!

Enviro-Bear's one of those jokes that never seems to get old, and takes on its own life once it's told. Built as a one-off competition entry based on 'cockpit' games, Justin Smith's managed to notch up its knee-slap premise -- bears can't drive cars! -- by utilizing a real-ish physics model that makes its ever-increasing cockpit chaos that much more manic.

There is, quite simply, no better simulator of high pressure, unskilled driving (bar maybe attempting Grand Theft Auto IV's drunk driving while actually drunk yourself), especially when each consecutive collision brings a heavy rain of branches, bees and rabid badgers that all have to be dealt with via your one non-steering hand.

Heroes of Newerth • PC, Mac, Linux • S2 Games • www
Nominated for: Technical Excellence
Can I Play It Right Now? Currently only in closed beta.

Heroes of Newerth might be somewhat of an odd-man-out on this list, with a sizable and long-standing team behind it (the same as behind strategy/shooter/RPG series Savage) and one of the most traditional designs in the competition, a 'Defense of the Ancients'-alike inspired by the original Warcraft mod.

But judged on technical merits, it's hard to argue that S2's engine (and overlaid art direction) isn't half a step away from some of Blizzard's own tech that would eventually inspire the studio.

Joe Danger • TBA • Hello Games • www
Nominated for: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

I've only just recently mentioned Hello Games (a team of ex-Criterion and -Kuju devs gone indie) and their sudden burst appearance onto the scene, and now their debut toy-like stunt racer Joe Danger has done a high-jump trick that's landed it as one of the year's top grand prize finalists.

Just as LittleBigPlanet is able to re-interpret nostalgia through gorgeously rendered modern tech, Joe Danger is the Excitebike we saw in our minds as we wound our way through its 8-bit paths, only now made 'flesh' and with a hyper-driven focus on physics-enhanced stylized stunts, and a world you can feel Hello's love poured into in every smiley-face mesa jutting into its deep blue sky.

Limbo • TBA • PLAYDEAD • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Visual Art, Technical Excellence
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

Limbo is one of IGF 2010's biggest surprises, both for having fallen completely off the map for over three years (it was originally featured here on BB in early October, 2006), and for re-emerging with one of this year's best-realized atmospheric treats.

Despite the time between there and here, it still offers pretty much exactly what you wanted it to from that first video teaser above: a warmly and softly lit monochromatic world that stands in surprisingly harsh opposition to the cold realities that await your young adventurer within (that bit with the terrifying tree-monster in the video? That doesn't end so well on your first encounter), and a series of delightfully modeled physics-based challenges that give that world real weight.

Miegakure • PC • Marc ten Bosch • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Design
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

It's hard to count how many minds Marc ten Bosch has blown thus far since he first revealed Miegakure at the 2009 Game Developer Conference, and it's incredibly disappointing that this is one of the few of the list that still hasn't had an official (or any, so far as I can tell) video release.

Because I can't really explain to you how Miegakure works, and that's why it might be the most frightening game in the IGF this year. I've spent a good amount of time wandering through its zen-like cube-gardens, I've made peace with its placeholder characters lifted cutely from Mother 3, but every time I press the 'B' button, the game instantly reminds me that it's infinitely smarter than I am and that it's hopeless to try and out-think it.

Because Miegakure, so claims ten Bosch, is the world's first fourth-dimension game, and I think it's quite rational that my mind hasn't been properly mapped to deal with that extra one on top. Can it be as commercially viable as Jon Blow's Braid, which taught us to map out and manipulate time as well as space, when Miegakure's extra space is an invisible dimension linking parallel worlds? Where a fourth-dimensional object is capable of casting a three dimensional shadow? This all deserves much more investigation, but it should be clear why the game ended up on the list.

Monaco • TBA • Pocketwatch Games • www
Nominated for: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Design
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

One of the most effortlessly clever games in the running this year, Monaco's a tough game to get across in images or video, but makes perfect sense once you're in the game itself. In essence, it's a classic 'heist' game of sneaking through shadows, lifting valuables, and disabling security systems -- not so far, really, from your average game of Thief -- but all displayed from a pure 2D top-down view that not only gives you a better view of your surroundings, but obscures those surroundings through a tile-based line-of-sight mechanic.

That means, unless you've tapped into an area's security systems, that you have even less of an idea where guards are roaming than you did in Metal Gear, unless you've got a line-of-sight through an exterior window.

More importantly, though, Monaco's best as a multiplayer game, with balanced strengths for each of four different catburglars: one's got the chloroform to knock out the guards, one's the electronics expert, the other's the lockpick, and they all work together to cleanly ransack each of the areas. Monaco feels like a classic tabletop game with arcane rules put perfectly to real-time in a complex but instantly legible way.

Owlboy • Xbox 360, PC • D-Pad Studio • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Visual Art
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

Long in stop-start development for Xbox Live's Indie Games Channel and PC, Owlboy is the best late-generation Genesis game we never got, with some of the most gorgeous pixel-work that's cropped up in the past several years. For as nostalgic as its 16-bit-era 2D gameplay is, as well, it's play flipped 90 degrees: a platformer -- as you'd want from a game of young birds -- gone almost entirely vertical through a world of floating clockwork islands. The hope here is that IGF recognition will help revitalize the team to make that final push to get the game into our hands.

Rocketbirds: Revolution! • Web, PC, Mac • Ratloop Asia • www
Nominated for: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

One of the very first IGF entrants to catch my eye back in November, Ratloop's all-Flash/all-chicken take on rotoscoped classics like Flashback and Out Of This World/Another World is both as gorgeous and darkly and comically militaristic as it appears above, and another fantastic example of updating classic design in freshly modern clothing.

Shank • TBA • Klei Entertainment • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Visual Art
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

Unfortunately one of the only finalists that required hardware that put it out of my grasp, Shank's visual art nomination is self explanatory from simply watching any given video like the one above.

Indie dev Klei has always had a handle on broadcast-quality animation (see: their early Xbox Live Arcade puzzler Eets, or their still-unpublished arena battler Sugar Rush, but Shank raises the bar considerably with a game that's as gorgeously rendered as it is unapologetically brutal.

Shatter • PlayStation 3 • Sidhe • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Audio
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

You might remember the name Sidhe from their work on early PSP and later Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 ports of the excellent puzzle-racer GripShift, and Shatter continues their fine line of updated classic play with the shooter/Breakout/Arkanoid mashup Shatter. Of particular note here, as the IGF judges have recognized, is its original score by New Zealand synth/ambient artist Jeramiah 'Module' Ross, all of which you can sample (and name-your-cost download) via Sidhe's bandcamp page.

Star Guard • PC, Mac • Vacuum Flowers • www
Nominated for: Excellence in Design
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

The most obviously retro-inspired game of the finalist lot, Star Guard's sparse and stark pixel-work is anything but a crutch to coat warm nostalgia over reedy mechanics. Quite the opposite, in fact: Loren 'Vacuum Flowers' Schmidt's tautly designed game is a reboot to a time when speed- and perfect-runs were the norm, something it reinforces and rewards at every level-complete. It might be kind enough to allow beginners to power their way through to the end, but it never stops reminding you that you could've played that section much better than you just did.

Super Meat Boy • PC, Wii • Team Meat • www
Nominated for: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Audio
Can I Play It Right Now? Only in its early Flash form.

Team Meat's upcoming all-singing/all-dancing/all-indie-all-star WiiWare and PC revamp of their Flash original should be a familiar face to regular readers, and its pleasantly familiar but wickedly strict platforming was able to quickly push it to the top of the IGF grand prize heap, proving that you don't necessarily need to do something entirely new, if you can do your take on classic play this well.

The same goes for the game's soundtrack as well, as Danny 'dbSoundworks' Baranowsky drops another round of tracks as instantly memorable as his Canabalt score, running the sick visceral squish of the Meat Boy's slippery steps himself.

Today I Die • Web • Daniel Benmergui • www
Nominated for: Nuovo Award
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Daniel Benmergui has set himself apart from the start in exploring the root language and storytelling ability interactivity with his early experiments Storyteller and I Wish I Were The Moon, so its probably little surprise that his followup Today I Die would be even more explicitly about language itself.

A dark poem that branches and progresses as you play with the very words that tell the story, there's no one else doing what Benmergui did with Today, at least not in this focused and powerful a way.

Trauma • Web • Krystian Majewski • www
Nominated for: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

The biggest left-field surprise of this year's IGF, few had heard of Krystian Majewski's point and click adventure going into the festival, and yet it sits next to Closure and Rocketbirds in picking up the highest number of nominations, including the grand prize itself.

And that's not by accident: Trauma is a strange and affecting adventure by nature of its subject matter -- as you explore the surreal and scattered memories of a hospitalized girl, post-trauma -- and the way you interact with her world.

Like Microsoft's Photosynth tech, Trauma's environments are pieced together with real-world photographs that reveal their subjects from different angles and allow you to push yourself deeper into them, in a way that essentially only Sherlock Holmes web-game 221b has explored before, and will hopefully inspire many more to do so now.

Tuning • PC • Cactus • www
Nominated for: Nuovo Award
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

Jonatan 'Cactus' Söderström's Tuning, as I recently mentioned here, has been causing a consistent stir from its reveal at my Austin GDC session through to its Indiecade award a month later to now, where its mindfuck-platforming has won it a nomination for the IGF's Nuovo Award.

Probably the most curiously accessible of all of Cactus's games -- curious because it's also probably the most aggressively cruel to the senses -- Tuning's jump-a-ball-from-point-A-to-point-B premise would be desperately underwhelming if he didn't bathe your brain in psychoactives the entire time.

Vessel • TBA • Strange Loop • www
Nominated for: Technical Excellence
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

And then along came Vessel, the game that would try to wrestle the fluid-dynamics crown away from the recently released PlayStation 3 PixelJunk Shooter by basing the entirety of its platforming and puzzling around its liquid physics.

Apart from simply sloshing and jostling your fluids to operate machinery and move you from one room to another, the game's cutest trick is in raising -- and learning to control and cope with -- liquid golems, who help you reach otherwise inaccessible parts of each level.

Penny Arcade TV

2010-01-04T16:28:55Z

Penny Arcade has a video channel. Watching the lads is interesting, especially the mini-documentary, a super intro to their play-work.

Ten for 2010: the 10 most-anticipated games coming in the new year

2009-12-28T15:00:22Z

For all the things the indies are able to do best -- experiment wildly and allow themselves the infinite creative freedom that otherwise gives stockholders the chilled sweats -- one of their greatest assets is the element of surprise.

Unlike the managed valleys and troughs of the four-year-dev-time hype-cycles, fantastic and wholly unexpected indie games pop up weekly and continually knock us flat on our backs. And so, choosing a list of the games we look forward to the most in 2010 is somewhat a fool's errand, as you honestly never know when another Canabalt is going to land from nowhere in a blinding flash.

But still, there are enough higher-ambition titles -- especially for indies making their bigger-budget forays onto consoles -- that deserve more attention to make this round-up necessary, so find below ten of the games (of a much larger field about which we know even less: I'm looking at you Bit.Trip: Runner) that you'll likely be hearing much more about in the months ahead, as their gestation periods finally end.

DeathSpank [Hothead, PC/PS3/Xbox 360]

Hopes are high for Penny Arcade Adventures dev Hothead's upcoming DeathSpank to be the Brutal Legend of 2010, not for its mechanical or thematic similarities, but rather its pedigree.

The game marks the return of original grump Ron Gilbert, creator of LucasArts classics Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, leading this loot-packing Diablo-esque action/RPG crossed with, well, genuine humor, still one of the things games desperately need more of.

Fez [Polytron, Xbox Live Arcade]

The excitement for Fez isn't just based on its inimitable style or perspective-shifting basics, though both obviously help: in helping to debut the game at Austin GDC I got a much longer look at the progress it's made since its Independent Games Festival debut and couldn't be more excited for the direction it's headed and the aspects yet to be revealed.

Though similarities to Super Paper Mario's dimensional shifts are still being drawn elsewhere, Fez does far more with its z-axis than anyone before has dared, making progress through its world directly reliant on cutting a path through each of its four sides.

Joe Danger [Hello Games, platform TBD]

UK upstart Hello Games came out of nowhere in 2009 -- well, not nowhere, their Voltron-like team is formed of former Kuju and Criterion leads on games like Burnout 3, Black, Geometry Wars Galaxies and Sega Superstars Tennis -- and their indie debut game Joe Danger rose meteorically to many top most wanted lists, especially after its debut at Eurogamer's 2009 Expo (from which the video above was leaked).

Forget the recent World Rally WiiWare remake: Joe Danger is the 21st century Excitebike we didn't know we wanted, with a gorgeous toy-like blue-sky aesthetic and a firm handle on stunt- and trick-jumping that rivals even Trials HD for expert handling.

NightSky [Nicalis, WiiWare]

Apparently lost in deep-sleep stasis somewhere in a cryo chamber hidden deep within Nintendo, NightSky should have been one of 2009's best, but -- with any luck -- will move on to top 2010 lists.

As good a bedtime-story game as we'll probably ever get, NightSky comes from Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren -- the same Knytt creator that only weeks ago surprised debuted best-of-2009 champ Saira.

With a firm focus on more physics-based platforming and an entirely original approach to What Game Music Can Be -- the lullabies here provided by Chris Schlarb (part of Sufjan Stevens' indie music collective Asthmatic Kitty) -- NightSky's set to be an instant WiiWare classic, if it could only let itself actually emerge.

Quarrel [Denki, Xbox Live Arcade]

It'll be hard to tell from simply the screenshot above what to expect from Quarrel, and even if I then go on to explain that it's at heart a competitive word game, you might be forgiven for giving it the same pass as you rightly did a number of the lower-shelf family games that were released to no fanfare on Xbox Live Arcade this year.

But this one -- be assured! -- is different. Not just because of the team behind it -- though Denki head Gary Penn has more than proved himself over the years with design credits on the original Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown -- but for the game's more strategic underpinnings, where the actual competitive word battles are simply its substitute for combat in a larger land-grab conquest (which you see above: think DiceWars). Fast-paced, instantly approachable, and considerably and considerately iterated on for the better part of a year, Quarrel is already set to be a game worth yelling about.

Diamond Trust [Jason Rohrer, DS]

It was the least likely design doc surprise of 2009, as Jason Rohrer -- solo dev behind reigning art-game-champ Passage and the Esquire-curated (?!) game Between -- announced he was partnering with casual publisher Majesco to create a DS game based on "diamond trading in Angola on the eve of the passage of the Kimberly Process."

We've only seen the recently released scraps of screenshots (well, and a chick-pea and penny based prototype), but the blood diamond trade is nothing if not a, well, diamond mine of strategic, socio-political, and potential emotional depth, and there are few people other than Rohrer that I'd trust to smartly interpret that in interactive form.

Scott Pilgrim [Ubisoft, platform TBD]

Here's the wildcard of the bunch: we don't really know what Ubisoft's got up its sleeve for the game based on Canadian comic artist Bryan Lee O'Malley's cult hit comic book series, but what we do know is that there is nothing in Scott Pilgrim's already deeply videogame-influenced world that shouldn't perfectly translate into one itself.

Deep-Throat rumblings about some of the cherry-picked team behind the game have bolstered some extra high hopes that this won't just be a quick cash-in tie-in with Edgar Wright's film adaptation (itself my most anticipated movie of 2010), but with nothing publicly said about the game other than their intention to create it and continual consultation with O'Malley himself, there's nothing much to do in the meantime but scrunch your eyes up tight and hope.

Spelunky [Mossmouth, Xbox Live Arcade]

You say: "God, Spelunky again?" I say: absolutely. Even though we've already spent all of 2009 plumbing its procedurally generated depths -- over, and over, and over, and over -- on PC, the forthcoming console port of Derek Yu's retro-platformer is worth watching for all the ways in which it won't be a port.

Yu's already recently explained that at least graphically, the Xbox 360 version will be a much different beast, relying on a more painterly approach akin to his work on Aquaria, and in general seems to be hinting that it holds other experimental surprises that will separate it from the freeware version it was branched from. To say nothing of the simple fact that now it's Spelunky in our living rooms! Over, and over, and over, and over.

Super Meat Boy [Team Meat, WiiWare]

There's nothing necessarily experimental about Team Meat's super-charged console port of their free Flash original Meat Boy: it's just old-school white-knuckle challenge-based platforming done gloriously right.

The Meat boys are determined not to make any concessions to the white-livered weaker players among us: having run through its first world, I can assure you that there's essentially no such thing as a safe landing in any of Meat Boy's levels until you've reached the end.

It'll be the visceral thrill that separates -- I don't know, the prime cuts from the grist -- and also, unrelatedly, will likely be the most indie-all-star jam packed game of the year, with cameo appearances already assured from Braid star Tim, Bit.Trip protagonist Commander Video, and The Behemoth's original Alien Hominid.

Zangeki no Reginleiv [Sandlot, Wii]

This list was almost entirely conceived to give proper due to this game, which might be completely unfair as it still hasn't been confirmed for a Western release. On the surface it might appear to be any other word-jumble from the subset of Japanese gaming that only two small handfuls of obsessive sub-culture fans in the West can appreciate, but again, let me assure you this is different.

I know this, having seen only as much as the trailer above, because I know developer Sandlot: or rather, I know they are the team behind the jaw-droppingly brilliant and desperately under-appreciated Earth Defense Force games (only one of which has made it to the States as the Xbox 360's Earth Defense Force 2017 -- you can find it for about $10 now and you need to purchase it immediately. Europe was luckier to have received its even more necessary PlayStation 2 prequels).

Originally devised as cheap budget thrills, the EDF series is a fantastically simple setup: choose two guns, shoot at about thirty billion cut-and-paste stock-3D-model giant ants and spiders that all swarm at you at once. But it works, better than you'd ever dream, the true gamer's game.

And then comes Reginleiv, which takes that same formula and substitutes in Norse mythology for all the future-alien-invasion b-movie tropes, hands you swords to Wii-mote slash on top of the firearm stock (here represent, of course, by "magic"), but leaves in all of the overwhelming and beelining enemy forces and, best, the towering demigods (which you can get a better taste of via this too-short earlier video teaser).

Nintendo obviously has higher hopes for this one than all of the budget publishers before have had for their previous works -- they're publishing it themselves in Japan -- and with more ambitious co-op play, this will be the year's biggest tragedy if we don't see it make its way West-ward.