I mentioned this a few days ago, when it was first announced, but had yet to personally give it a run through. Having now finally jumped through a few hoops to get it installed^*, I've now given it a good look and stand by my original judgement that it appeared to be little more than an interactive tutorial, and that its classification as a game is tenuous at best.

In fact, it's probably a bit odd that I've dedicated another post to this at all, but given that I regularly use the entire Office suite, it is fair to note that it serves as an elegant way to accustom people with all the functions of the software and its nebulous new Ribbon interface. Everything down to the satisfying 'ding' sound as it counts up how many points you've earned, and rewarding you for not only learning a new technique but then again for remembering to use it again at a later stage. It's a kind of positive reinforcement cycle that is nabbed straight out of traditional game design for use in an unconventional manner. So, basically, it is everything is says on the box.

So, Ribbon Hero isn't strictly a game. It might not even teach you a single damn thing either. But it's an interesting experiment in applying game design concepts in an unorthodox manner, and there might be something for even traditional game designers to learn by looking at its implementation.

- Chippit

^* Not only did it require .NET 3.5 SP1, but had an additional runtime dependency that had to be downloaded separately. For future note, Labs guys, please disclose all this stuff in advance. When I download an installer, I really just want that to be everything I need to download. In fact, that goes for everyone. Thank you.

^** This post worth 18 points!

Okay, so today I'm going to be lazy (I'll accept the explanation that I did this to save all our readers time too) and lob a whole bunch of stuff in this post. Not because all of this isn't particularly important, but just because I either somehow missed it or it all appeared magically over this last weekend. Anyway, here goes:

• Remember that super awesome pre-order deal I mentioned a little while back? Well, the Wolfire guys wrote up a post-mortem about the deal over here, and give everyone a good idea of how well it went. In fact, it went so well that beards were, in fact, dyed pink.
  
• In related news, Natural Selection 2 (one half of the super awesome pre-order deal I mentioned a little white back) snagged itself ModDB's prestigious Indie Game of the Year award, edging out Wolfire's own Overgrowth. Following that, they released a super awesome looking new pre-alpha trailer, showing off their pretties and simultaneously offering an interesting physiology lesson: aliens see out of their mouth. Apt, really.
  
• The IGF's released its next batch of competition winners under the mobile games category.
  
• Finally, and most importantly, some news from the home-front. I'm posting this because Nandrew's both too modest and too busy making awesome things to post it himself: see this forum thread? You can find an early version of a game there. Go and download it right now, because you'll certainly be seeing and hearing a lot about this one in the near future. And I told you right now.

- Chippit

After excessive coffee and pizza consumption, the Global Game Jam has finally come to an end. Developers dragged themselves home after a (mostly) sleepless weekend spent (almost) successfully tripling last year's game tally. The theme was "deception", and it was worth 931 games, 10 of them from sunny SA.

Notable among that list are Press Tilda, made in Unity by a Game.Dev forum member, and YouDunnit, crafted by a group comprising wholly of Game.Dev and Dev.Mag crew. In fact, I would've waited for Nandrew to make this post himself, but he's apparently still catching up on 2 days of sleep.

And while you wait for those to download, have a look at the inspiring keynote video for this year's event:

- Chippit

When bandwidth permits it, I like strolling through threads like this to pick up on all the teensy little games that people make at events like the UK TIGJam. After seeing the announcement on IndieGames and checking on one or two of their recommendations, I decided to browse through some of the other games and was startled to find just how many of them relied on the flixel framework to get the job done in a just few hours.

Flixel has been on my mind a lot recently, and I've also used it to make one or two Flash game prototypes in a startlingly short time period: it's very easy to learn if you're already acquainted with ActionScript in some form, and seeing all of the TIGJam entries that it has produced fills my heart with joy and bunnies. In fact, I'm off to get said bunnies surgically removed right now, since they're starting to screw up my blood circulation.

If you're looking for just a few games to try out, IndieGames recommends I'm Not A Bad Person Really, I Just Have Low Self-Esteem and This Is How Bees Work. I recommend Solar Defense because it has bloom effects. Wheee!

-Nandrew

Right, so as I'm typing up this post, making good use of all of Word's fancy productivity features, Ribbon Hero's running in the background, scoring my performance. Or, rather, it would be if I had realised that an additional .NET 3.5 SP1 download was required to get it running, the requirement of which was, unfortunately, undisclosed.

However, the theory goes like this: Office 2007 (with its nice new controversial Ribbon) means many people have to relearn everything all over again. The blokes over at Office Labs figured that if something can be learned, and that leaning can be measured and rewarded, a game can be made out of it. So Ribbon Hero tries to do this for the three big names in Office 2007 and 2010.

How well does all this work? Well, the trailer videos seem to show what is simply a competitive tutorial, but I'm going to withhold judgement until such a time as I'm able to test it out. I'm only giving it this much chance because Daniel Cook was involved anyway. I have faith in his game design skill, even if whether or not this is a game is disputable. I shall post my thoughts then.

- Chippit