We’ve all been there: you’re alone, walking down a dark passage, firmly gripping an axe in your hands. You can hear your heart pounding in your ears because you’re surrounded by complete silence…except for the mysterious sounds coming from behind the door at the end of the passage. As you […]
Monthly Archives: July 2009
There’s a biweekly column on GameSetWatch called Homer in Silicon — this little dose of gamely journalism usually explores stuff like narrative and storytelling in games. Looking at the latest offering, it has an eye-catching reference to the previously-reviewed Judith as well as an action-platformer called Don’t Look Back by […]
Narrative: Challenge and Complicity
Have you got a knack for making cool mobile stuff? It’s big locally, y’know, where every guy and his gardener has a cellphone. Nokia knows this, and has sponsored $125 000 to make it happen. They’ve challenged entrepreneurial devs to create a South African flavoured cellphone application (not limited to […]
Calling all innovators
I know that we already mentioned this competition a while back, but I think it bears another post now that it has actually started. After all, one has a tendency to mentally file these things away and forget about them if they haven’t yet come to pass. And it would […]
PGD Annual competition
Are you sick of hearing the now clichéd ‘Adventures games are dead’ whenever fond memories of LucasArts and Sierra classics are shared? Even worse, are you sick of saying it? Because, like all overused maxims, this one also has that shred of truth that led to its conception, but it […]
Ben There, Dan That!
Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been compiling daily ‘What Made Me’ features for the past week or so, detailing games the authors feel most influenced them. Initially including only the 4 RPS members’ thoughts, the feature series has extended to cover other big industry names. This, most recently, has included 2K […]
What made Levine
So, what have I been playing recently? Well, aside from loads and loads of Guitar Hero Aerosmith (judge me not!), this weekend saw me messing around with a brilliant little metagaming effort called Upgrade Complete. As the title implies, this game completely rips off the idea of using upgrades, money […]
Play: Upgrade Complete
I always keep a beady eye on Lost Garden. It doesn’t update all that often, unfortunately, but when it does, it’s always something worth reading. The latest update is no exception. DanC goes into fairly significant detail on why Flash may actually be the best platform to use to develop […]
Flash is the future …
Not every origin story involves radioactive spiders, murdered parents or babies sent from planets with silly names. Sometimes a single idea, an offhand conversation or an innocent post on a forum can find a life of its own. Let’s throw a party. Let’s start a band. Let’s make a game. […]
The Forum that Could
As advertised in GameSetWatch (and, let’s face it, just about any other publication under the Think Services umbrella), the 2010 Independent Games Festival is now open to game submissions: so if you’ve got something cool knocking around, you have until 1 November to polish it up and make it presentable […]
IGF submissions open
Have you heard of Experimental Gameplay? Well, you have now. Recently, it’s been a bit on the “not operational” side, but a quick trawl through the IndieGames blog has revealed that it’s up again and ready for some more action. I love the idea behind Experimental Games, and I love […]
Experimental Gameplay is back!
Blazing in at the IGF and leaving a clay-ridden trail of aliens, shotguns and grumpy farmers, Cletus Clay is shaping up to be one of the most interesting indie offerings around, not least because it uses a game world built entirely of plasticine models.
Playing with Clay
Okay, so I hate to treat the news like some sort of Classifieds section, but if there is one driving force that motivates me to cover something, it’s laziness. And when I have a neatly presented job description like this to copy and paste, you can bet I’ll be on […]
I-Imagine hiring iPhone devs
So I played this one back when we did our roundup of IGF finalists way back when. Well, the intriguing game has now joined the indie catalogues over at Steam, where it seems everything decent ends up. (LucasArts games, yay!) Anyway, if you were hesitant at picking up the game […]
Brainpipe out on Steam now!
With the recent surfacing of the Game Maker 8 open beta, I felt duty-bound to download the tool and give it a whirl to see what’s improved over previous versions. It turns out that there’re quite a lot of tweaks in the new release: some of them are purely aesthetic, […]