Since SavyGamer is a one (and several bits) man show, whenever I am out of action things get pretty quiet pretty quickly. I think it would be nice to have more people contributing things.

I can’t offer you any money, but I will be able to offer you some games for review purposes. I’m looking for people who can write interesting articles about video games. Be it reviews, editorial, rants, poetry, or whatever. Surprise me, be creative.

If you are interested, email me here with the subject “I want to write some words for SavyGamer”. Include in the email:
1. Who the hell you are.
2. Why the hell you want to write words about video games.
3. What areas of gaming are your speciality.
4. An original article about video games, of your own creation. This is a blank slate. Show me what you can come up with. No word length, but don’t write anything more than 1,000 unless you are convinced it needs to be that long. If you can make me laugh, make me think, or change my opinion on something then you will probably be successful. This should be something specifically written for this application, and if you’re successful will be your first thing published on SavyGamer.
5. If you have ever written for another site/publication then please also include some samples. I won’t hold it against you if you haven’t though.
6. How much you think you would want/be able to write. I’m just looking for a vague idea of what kind of commitment you’re thinking of, I won’t hold you to it.
7. Anything else that is interesting.

I’ll try to respond to all emails, but I have no idea how many people will be interested, so if I get super inundated I might not.

XxX
Lewie

Develop Interview: Sean Murray

We snuck into the bar on Tuesday after his presentation at Evolve, which is transcribed here.

He talks about the Joe Danger demo and patch that are on the way, Hello Games expansion plans (Jobs page here) and their ambitions for their next game.

Hello Games went on to win the Best New Studio and Micro Studio awards at the Develop awards. Well done lads, wish you all the best in the future.

Each of the speakers had a wealth of interesting things to say, and all gave a different perspective on the topic of discussion.

Sean talked a lot about why being self published is so important for them, and their plans post Joe Danger. Mark discussed how Introversion nurture their community, and how selling direct is a big part of Introversion’s DNA. Robin told Beatnik’s origin story, and the challenges for an indie releasing a multiplayer centric game. Cliffski explained that games are amazing value because he paid £75 for some jeans.

Whilst discussing the topic of web advertising, which only Cliffski does, someone in the front row interrupted the discussion to tell him that he was wasting his time, because having just one person working on advertising a game is pointless when big publishers have much much more than that. He told them that if they wanted to be successful that they had to expand and hire some marketing staff. It turned out that it was Mark Rein Founder/VP of Epic Games, aka the bloke that had been rude to me in the bar at 2am the night before. Everyone on the panel was completely taken aback. Throughout the conference there was often banter between speakers and the audience, but always initiated by the speakers. This was just impolite and unprofessional.

After the panel, Mark was eager to show off his ipad/android tablet Unreal engine tech demo. It is a boring as fuck looking first person shooter thingy, that looks like it controls horribly. Almost as if it is entirely unsuitable for the platform it is on. He also said that he predicts it is not long before indies are going to get entirely pushed out of the ios app store, because big publishers with (the most important thing in the world) large marketing departments are getting their act together on the platform.

Cliffski very obviously loves being an indie. He loves being in complete charge of his games. From the first line of code to the font used in the logo, he decides everything. He is making exactly the game he wants to make. He does not have a boss, he offers industry leading customer service, he is well respected by his peers and his customers, he is critically and commercially successful, and he owns a kick ass pair of jeans.

Mark Rein, I ask you this: What might you have achieved with Epic if you hadn’t sold out quite so much? What wonderful creative and intelligent works could you have made if the dollar bills and ambition for a very narrow definition of success weren’t making all the decisions. You’ve obviously got a lot of money at Epic Games, but don’t for a second think you are better than the little guys. These guys, the ones you turned up just so you could look down upon, are at the creative forefront of the video games industry. These Micro Studio’s, and the hundreds like them across the globe are highly responsive to changing market conditions in ways that a company like your’s can never be.

In the two years that the iphone has been out, you’ve still not released a single game for it. Why not? How come all those people wasting their time without marketing departments have sold lots of games on the iphone before you’ve sold any?

You’ve made lots of games about a guy with a gun that uses the gun to shoot the baddies. Well done.

<3

I’ll be adding much more stuff gradually too. At the minute there is a few 360/PS3 games, an N64, and a bunch of Mega Drive games.

That’s what Sony does, it’s their DNA. They did it with the Compact Disc with the Playstation, DVD with the PS2, HD and just about managed Blu Ray with the PS3.

A tiny number of people will benefit from the 3DTV stuff. There will always be early adopters, and this is no exception, but I certainly don’t think 3DTV will be as popular as fast as Sony seem to want it to be.

The problem here is that they haven’t even finished servicing the technology they sold on the back of their games division before moving on to the next one. I can count the number of 1080p capable PS3 games that I own on one hand. They took a lot of money from their customers in return for HDTVs, but their console barely manages to use them to their full extent. Yet they have the cheek to tell you that you should buy a new 3DTV now, and a pair of their, proprietary, googles to experience the best experience of their gaming experience.

I bet they are terrified of the 3DS.

I say 3D is bollocks, for the time being at least. I think Sony are impatient, and they should wait until they can put out a console that is powerful enough to support 3D and 1080p resolutions without hampering game performance, because the PS3 certainly isn’t.

In related news, issue 216 of PC Gamer is out on Thursday, subscribers should already have it. Some of my words have found their way into it. I wrote an article called “Gaming on a budget”, so I’ve not strayed far from my area of expertise. It has WOW: Cataclysm on the cover, and can be ordered online here (on Thursday), or found in petrol stations, super markets and corner shops across the land.

Load up Steam and buy yourself Mirror’s Edge.

Set about playing all the games that you have bought for cheap.

You can follow my festival antics on twitter.

I’m not quite sure how to respond to this. I’m reluctant to stop linking to their deals, particularly when they do have genuine discounts. I think I will just keep an extra close eye on them, and add a disclaimer to any posts for them that uses coupons.

I’m going away tomorrow (more on that later), but I’ll try to speak to trading standards to see what they have to say about it when I get back.

As an affiliate of lots of retailers, I get frequent emails from them telling me about their amazing offers. Sometimes they aren’t particularly good, sometimes they are, and I have to sort through them to find the best deals.

I got an email from The Hut telling me this:

Come celebrate your bank holiday weekend with www.thehut.com/home as we have gone voucher code crazy! These codes are available on EVERYTHING so don’t miss out this weekend! Massive savings and commissions are to be made!

So then I spent ages sorting through the games that they sell, and finding which ones were already a good price, so that they could be made even better by using the coupons. My policy with SavyGamer is that I never ever want to link to somewhere that isn’t the cheapest place to get a game from.

I found a bunch of great deals on games that they were already selling for cheap. Posted them up on SavyGamer along with the instructions of how to use the coupons. These offers were available for a short amount of time when I first posted them. Then, because they are dishonest, The Hut increased the prices of most of the games that were actually good deals when using those coupons. Here’s what they did:
Halo: Reach, Xbox 360 – was £37.93, £35.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Halo: Reach [Limited Edition], Xbox 360 – was £55.93, £51.93 with coupon. Increased to £59.93, £55.93 with coupon.
Brink, PC – was £24.93, £22.93 with coupon. Increased to £26.93, £24.93 with coupon.
Nier, Xbox 360 – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Wii – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £23.93, £21.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Xbox 360 – was £23.93, £21.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, PS3 – was £23.93, £21.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, PC – was £14.93, was £13.93. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Batman: Arkham Asylum [GOTY], Xbox 360 – was £16.93, £15.93 with coupon. Increased to £17.93, £16.93 with coupon.
Napoleon: Total War [Imperial Edition], PC – was £12.93, £11.93 with coupon. Increased to £17.93, £16.93 with coupon.
Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, DS – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £24.93, £22.93 with coupon.
GTA: Episodes From Liberty City, Xbox 360 – was £13.93, £12.93 with coupon. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Forza Motorsport 3, Xbox 360 – was £12.93, £11.93 with coupon. Increased to £14.93, £13.93 with coupon.

As you can see, for the most part their prices were far better before the ‘discount’ coupon was made available. If I were cynical, which I definitely am, I’d say that this was a deliberate deception to increase traffic to their site without actually offering any discount at all. Some of these are preorders, so it’s hardly like they would have been issues with them running out of stock forcing them to increase the price.

I’m going to speak to them on Monday and see what they have to say for themselves. But from now on I am definitely going to keep an eye on how they fiddle with their prices whenever they do have discount coupons.

Looking pretty great, no?

I caught up with Edmund and Tommy from Team Meat to check up on how the game’s going. This is what ensued:
Team Meat on Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is coming to PC, Mac, XBLA and Wiiware this summer. Follow the game’s development on the Team Meat blog here.

After getting caught having pirate code in the Steam release of Max Payne 2, it looks like they didn’t want to get caught with their pants down twice, and have tried to stealthily update some of their other games.

The problem is, they are breaking them in the process. Users on the Steam forums have reported issues like “no in-game sound” in GTA3 and “Vice City does not load at all“.

If you have these games, or any other Rockstar games on Steam, I suggest you turn off autoupdating:
1. Go to your games library.
2. Right click, then properties.
3. Updates tab, then select “Do not automatically update this game”.
4. Hit close.

This game has not been submitted to our pre-publication peer review process, and it has not been approved for distribution on Xbox Live Indie Games. We have guidelines in place that closely track requirements of content ratings boards worldwide and, among other things, prohibit the publication of strong sexual content. While we haven’t seen this game, we can confirm that if it is consistent with the description we have seen on the Internet, this game would not pass peer review and would not be permitted to be distributed on Xbox Live.

I spoke to Dan from Zombie Cow to see what he had to say for himself.

What exactly are you trying to do with privates? Are you just perverts?
Not particularly, no. Channel 4 wanted a game about sex education, so that’s what we made. It’s a little anarchic and unusual, but it’s all very abstract and cellular. The idea is to make a fun-and-funny little game that’ll drip-feed you a few things about safe sex while you’re there.

A Microsoft representative who has not seen the final game yet has speculated that privates won’t be allowed on Xbox live, does that come as a surprise?
Not massively, no. We always knew the Xbox version would be touch-and-go, you never know how people are going to react when it’s in review. Privates pokes the boundaries of the guidelines, but I’m pretty sure we fall on the right side of it – when you add in the valuable educational aspect I hope most people will err on the side of passing it.

Would you consider releasing an edited version of the game to comply with MS’s guidelines if that was the only way to get it on the Xbox?
We were discussing last night the idea of doing a badly-dubbed aeroplane movie cut, with all the risqué bits voiced over by different actors. I’d love that, it’d be brilliant. We’ll see. The core themes and messages would be the same no matter how we dressed it up, so probably not. But it’d be fun.

It seems a little strange to me that games like GTA4 and Fallout 3 are considered fine for the Xbox, but not an educational game like privates. What do you think this says about Microsoft’s outlook on sexual content?
As far as I’m concerned it’s their console, they’re completely entitled to do whatever they like with it. They’ve obviously got to be pretty careful about what goes up there, and they’re absolutely right to be cautious about Privates. It’s still very early days. I’m sure once everyone actually plays it, they’ll realise what a force for good the game is, and realise it’s in no way graphic.
The argument that sexual themes are intrinsically less harmful than fake violence feels a little flawed to me- life isn’t as black-and-white as all that.

Some idiots on the internet have already described Privates as pornography, what do you think to that?
It’s exponentially less ‘pornographic’ than the biology textbook I was given at age 11, put it that way.

Keep track of the game here, and Zombie Cow are on Twitter here. It’s still going to be coming to PC, but we’ll have to wait and see if it is made available for the Xbox.

Part of why trade-ins work in the real world is that there is free market economies going on. If I buy a game from HMV, and then want to trade it in at Gamestation, I am free to do so (so long as Gamestation stay in business that is).

Green Man Gaming is broken because in their fictitious economy you cannot trade in games bought elsewhere, you can only trade in their games back to them, and you don’t get money back, you get credit. Whether that credit is any good to you is largely determined by how much money you want to spend there. I’d be pretty annoyed if I had a shedload of money invested in Green Man Gaming and then they stopped having decent special offers, whilst I look at the other DD outlets with their frequent excellent promotions. Unless they promise to have a library as broad as the other outlets, and match them on price, there will be situations where you are worse off having chosen to give Green Man Gaming your money. There’s also no information available about how they calculate trade in values. Is it going to be 90% of sale price? 50% 2%?

Still, there is no reason not to capitalise on their crazy low introductory offers. A bunch of games for 1p.

Uplink
Darwinia
NecroVisioN: Lost Company
World of Goo
High School Dreams

However, this is a pretty great example of how it won’t work in the long run. In a few months time, what is the trade in price of these games going to be? The sale price will be back up to RRP, so surely I should get a trade-in price that reflects that?

It is pretty insulting to ask people to invest into a system when they can’t even fully explain it to customers. Hit “support” button, and you’ll simply be told “No topics found”.

I’d avoid it to be honest, but I will keep an eye on it for good offers too.

I certainly wouldn’t still be doing it today if it wasn’t for you lot. Thanks to all of you for support.

As a special reward, listen to our third Birthday Podcast Special (it’s just a normal podcast, but birthdayier) to be in with a chance of winning Red Dead Redemption on your console of choice. It’ll be up at some point today.

I’ve had a few people express an interest in making donations to SavyGamer, as a thank you for the hard work I put in. I’ll be frank, SavyGamer isn’t going to disappear if no one makes any donations, I make more than enough from running the site to pay for hosting and make a profit at the end of each month. If you’d like to buy me a pint, but aren’t near enough to go to the pub with me here is a paypal donation button.

If you want to help me out in a different way, spreading SavyGamer to anyone you think might find it useful is a big help to me. I don’t really do much marketing, and word of mouth is probably the best way for the number of people using this site to grow.

Extra special thanks to:
Will, for always being near a computer when I am not, always agreeing with me when I am right and disagreeing with me in the right way when I am wrong.
Everyone who has ever contributed any articles to SavyGamer, particularly Rob who will no doubt soon be snapped up by a publication that will offer him money for his nice words.
Alec, Jim, John and Kieron, for letting me put my words on their web site every week.
All the nice PR people who have given me free games.
All the lovely developers who have talked to me as if I was a proper journalist.
All the retailers that have some semblance of competition, and sometimes have good deals.
Anyone who has ever linked to, RT’d or read anything on SavyGamer.

Hugs, kisses and hi5s all round.
Lewie

It’s like Goozex would be, if they actually operated in our economy and not in some imaginary points economy that they can’t balance properly. Or maybe CEX if they ran a competent business.

You can buy and sell games in a similar way to Amazon Marketplace, and they have a lot of good introductory offers at the minute.

Using this sign up link, you get a free £5 spend (as will I). They are also giving a £10 voucher to anyone that sells 10 items or more before the end of July.

I’m probably going to buy something on it tonight. Let me know what you guys think of it too – it might be worth keeping a close eye on.

We realised just now that it didn’t actually exist. Until now.

Remember this Friday is SavyGamer game night, we’re playing L4D2′s new mutation mode, which is going to be Bleed Out. Join the steam group to play the PC version, and add We R SavyGamers to play the 360 version.

Here’s how you can be in with a chance of winning:
Via Email:
Use the contact form here to send me an email with your name and postcode, subject “I WANT TO WINFINITE SPACE”, and you will go into the draw.

Via Twitter:
Do a Twit shilling @SavyGamer somehow. Telling all your friends that it is a good website on the internet for the cheap games.

Via Facebook:
Make friends with us on Facebook, and do a status plugging us to everyone on your social network. Be sure to type “@Savy Gamer” in the status update so that we can track it.

The deadline is Saturday at noon. UK only.

It is a big deal.

This is what the House of Commons looked like as it was being debated:

Via fscked.co.uk

Both parties that are trying to push this bill seem to be happy to break the rules it outlays too.

Evil/Oblivious, you decide, but they are certainly hypocrites. Are they trying to make me vote lib dem?

I’ve decided to assemble an elite team of hot chicks who can show those boys that girls can kick ass at reading too! It is going to be awesome. Go super-feminism! You can dominate those boys if you try hard enough!

Phase 1: A competition. I need to find girls that can read the most words in a day, to prove that they have the most attitude and mad literary skillz. Being able to read lots of words proves that potential Book Bitchez have got what it takes to be supreme literacy aspiration figures, and just have lots of fun

Phase 2: Then we get all the successful Book Bitchez candidates from phase 1, and have a photoshoot of them reading books, to see who has got the real spirit within to spread the power of feminine reading to the world, and show once and for all that girls can read too!

Phase 3: Once we have picked our team of extra-awesome Book Bitchez, we set up blogs where the world can see the real side to our hot girls. We photoblog, videoblog, and most importantly wordblog about what it takes to fight the power, and promote reading for girls around the world! Go lady literacy!

Phase 4: Then we send our team of Book Bitchez to book events to push whatever the publishers that give us financial backing ask us to whore out, and spread the word about how girls can read just as well as boys. That way everyone can hear our message of female word power!

If you think you have got what it takes to be a figurehead for gals who like reading, email us at pleaseobjectifyme@formoneyandattention.com

Notes:
No fatties

It’s just beautiful.

Games need more that just good looks. We all know that prettiness only goes so far, but Limbo is probably the closest I have ever seen to a game that could get by on it’s visual merits alone.

It literally stopped people in their tracks. There was always a crowd of people just stood starring at whoever was having their turn at the time.

It was a fairly long demo. When I put the headphones on and fixed my eyes to the screen, the people in line, the rest of the convention, and the rest of the world just disappeared. I was playing limbo.

Let’s go back a bit though.

Lets go back to when I first saw that teaser trailer. I’ll admit it, I was sceptical. I saw that and said to myself “What a fantastic looking animation. It’s a shame no game could ever look that good in motion, or at least it would have to sacrifice having tight controls to do so”.

They only went and did it.

Limbo controls fantastically. The boy with those piercing white eyes does what he is told. He responds to the environmental, slowly extending his hand, ready to grab things as he approaches them. He walks, sprints, jumps, falls and dies with incredible realness. This is what Jordan Mechner was looking for in the footage of his brother in white pyjamas. One animator spent 3 years working on the animation of the boy, and it really shows.

From what I have played so far, you only die if you are doing something wrong. You will die a bunch of times, and are rewarded by some tragic death animations.

It is a puzzle platformer. You move from left to right, and solve puzzles along the way. Puzzles are clever, and rely on interacting with the environment in intelligent ways.

I’m sold.

I’m going to shut up about it and let Producer Mads Wibroe talk about it.
Interview with Limbo producer Mads Wibroe

Limbo is out on XBLA between June and August.

There was a huge hustle and bustle at the Aksys booth at PAX. A teeming crowd of geeks were crowded around their screens. All clamouring to take part in a BlazBlue tournament to win a T-Shirt or something. There was a screen with a Wii controller balanced next to it, and no one playing. I wormed my way to the front to see that it was playing Bit.Trip.Runner. I asked “Can I play this please”, and the nice PR man said “sure!” and gave me a badge.

I was a happy Lewie.

I didn’t really understand why no one wanted to play Bit.Trip.Runner, but it was their loss. It could possibly be the best of the Bit.Trip series yet. The previous three Bit.Trip games have been fairly abstract rhythm action games, with moving blocks and neo-retro graphic loveliness. Runner is essentially a platformer. The obvious comparison to make is Canabalt. Both constantly scroll from left to right, and have minimalist controls, but runner is much more like a proper game™. It uses three buttons to jump, slide and kick, which you use to get over obstacles, get under obstacles and to kick things. It has baddies and bosses and lives and things like that.

Commander Video has been the mascot and guy flying around in the background in the past, but he’s jumping to centre stage in runner, as you take direct control of him. He leaves a happy rainbow trail in his wake, and the graphics are just an explosive celebration of the beauty of pixels. The sweet sweet chiptune music that the series is famous for is back, although I couldn’t hear it anyway near as much as I would have liked to over the PAX crowds. Anamanaguchi is doing the menu and credits theme.

There is a cameo from Meatboy, and I bet there will be lots of other similar things to look for as the world scrolls by.

If you can watch this whole trailer without cracking a smile, there’s probably something wrong with you.

I walked over to the Ubisoft stand at PAX, grabbed a controller and stuck on the pair of headphones. Then a pretty lady in a skin tight Ubisoft shirt walked over to me, and started talking at me. I couldn’t hear, because I had put the headphones on. I took off the headphones purely out of politeness.

She said “Hi there. So this is the new Prince of Persia”. Which I already knew because of the huge 20 foot Prince of Persia banner, and the title screen.

I replied “Yeah, I am interested to see how it plays. I didn’t like the previous one at all”.

She said “Oh….OK. I don’t really know about that one. I’ve only played Warriors Within….The third one….That was the one where the girl followed you around, and you let the demon out of the tree right?”

I told her that I thought she was thinking of “Prince of Persia 2008″. Then she said “Yeah…sure. All I remember is that it was super awesome.”

I carried on playing the game, and I did an attack that was one I first remember seeing in the Sands of Time (you leap over a guy and stab him mid air). She then said “Now tell me that isn’t super badass!”

I didn’t think it was super badass.

I carried on for a bit, pretty much attempting to tune her out at this point. Then someone who was playing next to me got stuck somewhere. It turned out it was their first time playing a Prince of Persia game. I glanced over, and it looked like a bit that you had to do a walljump. In fact, it was obviously a bit where you had to do a walljump. Anyone who had played any of the previous four Prince of Persia games would have instinctively know that straight away. I heard the girl in the Ubisoft shirt say “Um…I think maybe you have to jump?”. Jumping didn’t work at all, so I leant over and suggested trying to do a walljump instead.

It worked straight away.

Then the girl in the Ubisoft shirt said to me “Wow! You should be doing this job!”

I’m probably far to jaded to do an effective job working for Ubisoft PR, but by her own admission I probably would have been better at her job that she was.

She turned around, and the back of her shirt said “Frag Dolls” on it, and it all made sense.

Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you for not sending over any of your hundred strong development staff to show off your new game. If indie devs like Hello, Play Dead and Mommy’s Best Games can be developers on the show floor so can you. If other big studios like Realtime Worlds, Ruffian, and Turbine can have large numbers of development staff on the floor, so can you. If I was looking at Lord of the Rings online, and I wanted to ask something about their audio, Turbine would have had a member of their sound team on the floor for me to talk to. If I wanted to ask Jason how Grapple Buggy was going, he was right there for me to ask. Why are you so terrified of letting your customers speak to the people that actually make your products?

Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you for not having PR staff that know their stuff. I went to see a presentation on Civ5, and it was a PR/Marketing guy giving the presentation. He knew his stuff. He spoke in detail about the intricacies of the Civilisation games, and answered questions in a coherent and knowledgeable fashion. If 90% of gamers who are playing your games at events like PAX know more about your games than the PRs responsible for showing them off, you are hiring the wrong PRs.

Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you for making me feel ashamed to be a gamer. PAX of all places is a hugely inclusive event, and I would have been embarrassed to have taken a female friend to your booth there. You have obviously not got the quality games to stand on their own, but promoting them to my penis instead of my brain is insulting to me, demeaning to women, and shows you up as the old boys club you are.

You’re an embarrassment to the industry. You are acting like pre-pubescent teenagers that have just discovered page 3, and the lack of respect you have for your customers will be your undoing.

Update: Follow the discussion on this post on the official Ubisoft forums, with their corporate mouthpieces giving their opinions on what I have said here.

Sean and Grant from Hello Games

In all seriousness, I caught up with Sean and Grant from @hellogames whilst at PAX, because why not fly halfway round the world to interview people who have also just flown halfway round the world.

They talk about the process they went through to decide which platform to release on. Joe Danger is on PSN for now, maybe other platforms (including Game Gear) later. How come they went to PAX, and what the hell “Indie” means to them.

Follow the game’s development here.

Twisted Pixel on Comic Jumper and more

See the game in action here.

Link

Selected for the inaugural Indie Showcase were:
Fire Hose Games (Slam Bolt Scrappers)
Dejobaan Games (AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!)
MIT Gambit Game Lab (Dearth)
MIT Gambit Game Lab (Waker)
Keith Morgado (Turba)
Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure)

I played all of them, and caught up with the developers of each of them. Here’s the evidence!

Slam Bolt Scrappers
Indie startup and nice people Fire Hose games were showing off the multiplayer of their XBLA title Slam Bolt Scrappers. It was a bit hectic, and I was really bloody good at it. Secretly I had played it once on the Friday with the some of the developers going easy on me, then I crushed some other people on their first go on Sunday. The multiplayer had four players on screen in teams of two. Enemies appear from the top of the screen, and you punch the enemies, which then turn into tetris style blocks, which you use to build towers, which in turn attack the opposing team. It works, and there really are too few same screen multiplayer games these days. I can’t to see how those mechanics work in Single Player too.

I spoke to Fire Hose’s founder and Creative Director Eitan Glinert. Sorry the sound isn’t great on this one, noisy people in the background were being noisy:

Eitan

You can follow the game’s development on their blog, and they are @firehosegames on twitter.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity
Probably the most established of the developers making up the Indie Showcase, Dejobaan have been around for a while, and made waves (and broke keyboards) with their recent title AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. I went for tea with Dejobaan head honcho Ichiro Lamb before the madness of PAX, to talk about indie games, game development, and how playing video games gives you cancer:

Ichiro

You can see what they’re up to on their blog here, they are @Dejobaan on twitter, and the you can (and should) demo/buy AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity here.

Dearth
Of all the games that made up the indie showcase, this one was the least like a ‘proper game’, and more just the result of an experiment. I think the process that created the game, and the experimental AI that it was designed around is more interesting that just the game on it’s own. I’d suggest playing the game first, then listening to this. Click here, and either grab a friend to play coop, or play single player and see how good a job the AI does in the role of sidekick. I spoke to Andrew Grant, who is technical director at MIT Gambit lab, who lead the project that ended up being Dearth.

Andrew

Waker
Another MIT game, this is a educational game that pretends to not be, shhh, don’t let the kids know. It’s a very clever way of teaching about speed, distance and acceleration, and how they are connected. It is a puzzle platformer, and I won’t spoil the puzzles, you go play it for yourself here. I spoke to Sara Werrilli, development director at MIT, who lead the project. She talks about how the game came about as part of Singapore-MITs summer program, and what the goals were:

Sara

Turba
An interesting take on the “use your own music to make a game” genre. This is a puzzle game that you plug MP3s into, and it creates a match three game where the puzzle design and scoring react directly to the audio. You have to match 3 or more connecting blocks of the same colour, and the score you get for them is in some part determined by how prominent the element of the song is at any given time. So in practise, you might select three blocks, and a score appears on each block, which is changing in realtime with what is going on in the song. It’s pretty cool.

I spoke to Keith Morgado, and he spoke about the game, and why he’s glad Penny-Arcade decided to keep it local. Since recording the Interview, he announced a release date, the 3rd April (This Saturday):

Keith

You can find out more about the game on the official web site here, and follow @TurbaGame for microdevelopments.

Miegakure
This game is a little bit harder to explain than it is to play. It’s pretty hard to play.

It is a 4D puzzle platformer. The player has the ability to swap between different spatial dimensions, and can move objects between them. The puzzles are nice and simple at first, very gently teaching you the rules, and showing you some of the clever things that you can do using the dimension swap. I was doing pretty well, but then when I tried the harder levels (apparently the hardest in the game) I really struggled. I can’t wait to play the final release of this, it’s very clever, and from what I have played already it is a very interesting design.

I spoke to the creator of the game, Marc Ten Bosch, both before and after playing it. The pauses are us chewing:

Marc

Read more about Miegakure and the other things Marc has done here, and is on facebook too.

That’s the Indie Showcase, a brilliant selection of what the Boston indie community has to offer. For more of my PAX coverage, click this useful link.

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Blogging above the Atlantic. Magic!

I’m off to PAX!

If you want to follow what I get up to, looky at my twitter.

Bargains resume next week.

Hugs, kisses and hi5s.

I had a great time at PC Gamer, everyone I met from PC Gamer, Edge and NGamer were very friendly. As were the two Future receptionists I spoke to a fair bit. Although one guy from one of the other magazines had a very annoying laugh.

I spent the week on a laptop (the one Rich spent a week for the feature in this month’s issue), and did a few different things. Some research into the Digital Distribution market, some time playing a fairly rubbish strategy game, a load of time in Minecraft, and surfing the internet for amazing videos of Just Cause 2, and a few other bits and bobs..

Bath is a nice place, although easy to get lost in. Thanks Nokia for the free SatNav.

I’m back and at my PC now, so normal SavyGamer service shall be resuming, I hope you didn’t all go crazy and buy games at RRP from the highstreet whilst I was gone. Thanks Tim and everyone else from PC Gamer, I appreciated the opportunity.

If you see any particularly good deals, twit them at me to either @LewieP or @SavyGamer and I will try to RT them. XxX

Looks like Steam is coming to mac, and likely with mac ports of Valve’s games.

Here is a list of all the games currently available on steam that have already had a native mac release. In addition to these, ones using dosbox or ScummVM should be easy enough to give a mac release.

Aliens versus Predator (original)
Altitude
And Yet It Moves
Ankh: Battle of the Gods
Ankh: Heart of Osiris
Aquaria
BioShock
Braid
Brainpipe
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror
Call of Duty
Call of Duty: United Offensive
Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Championship Manager 2007
Championship Manager 2008
Championship Manager 2010
Civilization IV
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
Civilization IV: Colonization
Civilization IV: Warlords
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Darwinia
DEFCON
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
Deus Ex
Doom
Doom 3
Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil
Doom II: Hell on Earth
Elven Legacy
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Eschalon: Book I
Europa Universalis III
Europa Universalis: Rome
FlatOut 2
Final Doom
Football Manager 2009
Football Manager 2010
Football Manager Live
Freedom Force
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Harvest: Massive Encounter
Hearts of Iron II
Hearts of Iron III
Heretic
Heroes of Might and Magic V
Hexen
Hexen II
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Jade Empire
LEGO Batman: The Videogame
LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures
LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
Loom
Luxor
Luxor 2
Luxor 3
Machinarium
Multiwinia
Osmos
Peggle
Peggle Nights
Penguins Arena
Penumbra: Black Plague
Penumbra: Overture
Penumbra: Requiem
Plants vs. Zombies
Prey
Prince of Persia (2008)
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Quake
Quake II
Quake III Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Rome: Total War
Samorost 2
Shaun White Snowboarding
Sid Meier’s Pirates
SiN
Spore
Star Wars: Force Unleashed
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Tales of Monkey Island
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
The Dig
The Graveyard
The Path
TOCA Race Driver 3
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield
Tomb Raider: Anniversary
Torchlight
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament 2004
Uplink
Virtual Families
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
World of Goo
X²: The Threat
X³: Reunion
X³: Terran Conflict

Here are the ScummVM games, that should be a doddle to release for OSX too:
The Dig
Full Throttle
Some of the King’s Quest games
Some of the Space Quest games
Some of the Police Quest games

Here are some DOS games that should play nice with DOSbox on OSX:
Wolfenstein 3D
Commander Keen
X-Com series

Let me know if I missed any. Interesting stuff, and I’m really surprised that Apple themselves haven’t tried to do games properly on OSX yet.