Anna Anthropy aka Auntie Pixelate aka Dessgeega — who you may remember as the creator of Mighty Jill Off — has just released her latest (and biggest yet) game, REDDER. I helped playtest this game, and loved every minute of it, and totally didn’t mind finishing it over a dozen times to help ferret out bugs and run it through its paces.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t say anything more about it, other than to call it a “Knyttrovania”; a 2D side-view exploration game, with discrete screens rather than scrolling.

Go play it now!

Anna also talks a little bit about the game’s development here.

There was a message in my coffee this morning. It told me to recommend Deadly Premonition to you. Practically anything I say about this game would be a spoiler, so I’ll just say that it’s 1 part Silent Hill, 1 part GTA, and 2 parts Twin Peaks. It’s also only $20.

The one additional thing I have to say about it is that the game starts out by railroading you through a bunch of combat sections all in a row (the combat isn’t bad, it’s just really tense, and the monsters in this game scare me more than the monsters in any other game I’ve played), but once you get past the saw mill the game opens up and lets you explore all the fun, GTA-ish stuff it has to offer.

Just a quick note that Nathan Fouts‘ awesome new game, Shoot 1UP has made it through peer review and should be hitting Xbox Live Indie Games any second now!

Nathan threw together an early build of Shoot 1UP in 7 days as an entrant in an Experimental Gameplay Project competition (which astute readers will also recognize as the origin of In the Pit) after he hit a few snags in the development of Grapple Buggy (I told him he was tempting fate by putting the word “buggy” in the title. ). He realized immediately that he had hit on a great idea, so he spent the next four months fleshing out that “proof of concept” into a full game, and the end result is fabulous.

Shoot 1UP has the foundations of a solid “bullet hell” shooter, but what it adds to that is the clever mechanic of adding every 1UP you collect not to your stock, but to your immediate on-screen fleet. Starting with a cluster of three ships, you’ll soon be controlling up to 30 ships onscreen at once, using the game’s simple and intuitive controls to expand and contract your formation. The smaller your formation, the easier it is to dodge enemy bullets, but the larger your formation the greater the power of your “plasma auger”, a giant, devastating, “wave motion gun” that plows through enemies but only as long as you’re willing to risk spreading your ships out across the screen. In addition to your maximum of 30 ships, the second player also gets a maximum of 30 ships, and with the “ghost” power-up that creates a ghostly duplicate of your fleet you can effectively have 120 ships on the screen at once, frantically battling against dozens of enemy ships and their hundreds of bullets. On top of that you have some wonderful super-gigantic bosses, an unlockable second ship class, an unlockable, more traditional, “single ship” mode, wonderful artwork (in a truly inspired move, the ground of the first level is littered with the remains of dismembered super robots), four different difficulty modes, diverging paths within levels, and… some other stuff.

I’ve had the opportunity to play several different builds of this game as it’s progressed through development (a process that Nathan has documented here on his blog), and have seen it grow from that initial “rough but with potential” prototype to the first beta of the Xbox version, to the final version, and now that it’s getting released I’m very happy that I finally get to tell people to go play it. Come for the robotits, stay for the rock-solid and addictive gameplay!

Get the free demo here!! And then buy the full version for a dollar!

This is a bit of a departure from the usual stuff here, but it’s good enough and video-gamey enough that I thought it was worth talking about.

A friend of mine recently posted on his tabletop-gaming blog his ruminations on running a tabletop RPG based on Day Break. I’d never heard of Day Break before (and I suspect most other people haven’t, either), but he gave an intriguing, spoiler-free summary of it in his post, so I decided to pick it up for $7.50 for the entire series and give it a whirl. My wife and I started watching it Friday evening, and finished watching the entire thing Saturday night.

Here’s my version of the gist of the show: Taye Diggs (who also starred alongside She-Hulk from Heroes in one of my favorite horror movies, the 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill) plays a police detective named Hopper in “a serious Groundhog’s Day“; he’s living the same day over and over again, but he’s trying to solve a murder mystery and unravel a huge conspiracy. I say “a serious Groundhog’s Day” because it’s serious, and also because it’s firmly established early on that Hopper’s injuries carry over from day to day, which quickly curtails any of Groundhog’s Day’s “toaster in the tub”-style antics. Other people can be injured and / or die and will be just fine when the day resets, but if Hopper dies it’s game over, and if he’s grievously injured he has to waste a few days being rushed to the hospital first thing in the morning and recuperating in an ICU. Still, Hopper at least carries over his memory from day to day, and if he spends all day going through some sort of grueling ordeal just to get a name, or an address, or some other important clue, then he still has that clue when the day resets, and can circumvent that ordeal completely. Hopper also gradually discovers that there are certain “side quests” he can complete (see? I’m tying this into video games. It’s not TOTALLY off-topic!) that have lasting effects when the day resets, but there’s no indication of what these “side quests” are and, thankfully, there’s no exploitable “gimmick” to making things carry over like “people remember things he tells them while a magic stopwatch is running” or anything like that, which keeps munchkin gamers in the audience from agonizing over possible ways to game the system.

This show only lasted one season, and only half of its episodes were originally aired. This is sad, but its short nature might actually be a blessing in disguise; it was created by a combination of one of the creators of Lost and one of the creators of The X-Files, two shows notorious for running WAY too long, and piling one mystery on top of another without ever resolving any of them. The creators of Day Break knew well in advance that the show was only going to last one season, and so, miraculously, all the major loose ends are tied up and there’s a great, satisfactory ENDING at the end of the last episode. I should also mention that the show features some stellar performances by everyone involved, especially Adam Baldwin (there, I just sold all the Firefly fanatics on this) and Mitch Pileggi.

You can watch the entire show on Hulu, or you can get it from Netflix (it’s not on Watch Instantly, though, unfortunately), or you can get it from Amazon for $7.50 for the whole thing (in a weird case with the discs themselves in black paper sleeves, but still — $7.50).

After blazing through all 13 episodes in a day and a half, I immediately tracked down and started playing the Gamecube port of Majora’s Mask (which takes place in a repeating 3-day cycle), unaware that I already owned but hadn’t yet played two games that revolve around “time loops”; Grim Grimoire and Flower, Sun, and Rain. So I think I’ll be living the same day over and over again for quite a long time.

UPDATE: ZOMG, I had no idea that I was posting this the day before Groundhog’s Day. Spooky!!!

My homies over at Call of Podcast have put together their lists of the top 5 games of the aughts, which has inspired me to make a “top [arbitrary number of] games of the aughts” list of my own! So, here goes!

Honorable Mention: Earthbound: Although this game came out in 1995, I only finally got around to playing it a few years ago, and holy cow is it profound. Where, oh where, is the Virtual Console version, Nintendo??

20: Ninja Gaiden: Be precise, or be dead.

19: The Suffering: An excellent game built entirely from elements that sound terrible on their own.

18: Game Center CX / Retro Game Challenge: The best NES games that never were.

17: Psychonauts: I suspect that someone mis-typed “beacon” in the design doc, and they just decided to roll with it.

16: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2: Ollie the bum.

15: Dark Cloud 2: The perfect game for the Diablo-fan / weapon-crafter / robot-builder / photographer / inventor / spell-caster / monster-catcher / coin-collector / fisher / fish-breeder / fish-racer / golfer / city-builder / time-traveller / train-engineer / realtor in your family!

14: Civilization Revolution: Communist America is the most productive country in the world.

13: Ico: Kufo! Kufo!

12: Professor Layton and the Curious Village: Over 100 of the sort of logic and picture puzzles I was obsessed with in elementary school + Miyazaki-style idealized interbellum Europe = deeeeelightful

11: Braid: A visual, auditory, technical, and level-design masterpiece. Just ignore the unrelated text about the developer mooning over his ex-girlfriend.

10: Rhythm Tengoku: NOT the DS one, this is the first game which was only released in Japan-land for the GBA, has all-different levels, and uses the GBA’s buttons rather than the DS game’s weird “flicking” mechanic which I felt was way too imprecise for a rhythm game. It saddens me that, now that Nintendo has completely abandoned the GBA, this will never see a US release. “Yo, wakarimasuka!”

9: The Orange Box: Half Life 2 convinced me that first-person-shooters have narrative potential. TF2 convinced me that multiplayer can be fun. Portal just plain convinced me. Listing The Orange Box lets me cheat and cram HL2, Portal, and TF2 all into one spot.

8: Shadow of the Colossus: Or “Shizzle of the Colizzle” as we call it in the hood.

7: Astro Boy: Omega Factor: Treasure’s best game of the aughts (which is saying a lot) and an excellent tribute to Osamu Tezuka’s HUGE body of work (which is also saying a lot).

6: Disgaea: The new benchmark for tactics games.

5: We ♥ Katamari: Save the pandas!

4: Rez: My drug of choice.

3: Fallout 3: All that “decisions you make have a lasting effect” bullshit that games have been claiming for years, except this one actually delivers.

2: Bioshock: Randian Objectivists are a whole lot scarier than run-of-the-mill zombies. Also, best video game setting and ambiance EVAR.

1: Bully: Proof positive that the GTA model works even better if nobody dies.

There ya go. Note that this list only includes games I’ve played; there are several games released over the last 10 years that I suspect would make it into the list if I’d played them, but I haven’t gotten around to them yet. I’m also sure that there are a few games that I’m totally forgetting about, and when I remember them I’ll say “oh crap! That game totally belongs at number 5!” so, this list is subject to a little bit of fluctuation. For the most part, though, them’s my favorite games of the last 10 years.

I feel dumb for being so nitpicky, but I’m really bothered by the audio in Wii Klonoa. The voices in Klonoa are sort of a big thing to me, and “wahoo!” and “eepow!” are an integral part of my wife’s and my vocabulary. Also, Ghadius’s first line of “HOOOAA… JOKE!!” has always really stuck in my mind.

So, last night I checked out Klonoa Wii. I immediately noticed that the music was a little different; not completely different, but kind of not-so-good renditions of the original music. And then I was SUPER TERRIFIED when I started up the game and discovered that Klonoa was talking IN ENGLISH, and voiced by this Cam Clarke sound-alike. Now, I don’t have anything against Cam Clarke, and this guy sounds like he’d do a great job of voicing ninja turtles and cool teens, but he is NOT a good fit for a character who’s supposed to be saying things like “wapow, eepa polly-o!!” in the voice of an excited 8-year-old. I immediately quit, and found an option to change the in-game language from English to “Phantomile”, which improved things considerably. However, it’s STILL not the original voices, and although Klonoa and Huepow’s voices are close enough, Ghadius and Joka’s voices sound AWFUL and completely different.

So, I played through the first level, and then quit in despair. I feel dumb getting so upset about such a minor thing, especially since the gameplay is spot-on and the new all-realtime-rendered HD graphics are beautiful, but the voices are really like 2/3 of the charm of the original game, and with them redone half-assed I’d rather be playing the graphically-uglier original PS1 version.

Just a quick note that the amazing Dr. Petter has released an alpha version of sculptris, an awesome freeware 3D sculpting tool. I used it to make this nifty old man face in about 5 minutes, just playing around with the default settings and brush, and just using my mouse. Cool stuff!

Dr. Petter is also responsible for the sfxr, a free tool that helps you instantly generate 8-bit-ish sound effects (all of the sound effects in Crosstown and Spelunky were made with the sfxr), and musagi, a robust and very easy-to-learn free sequencer for making chiptune music.

The other night I noticed that one of the things listed on my projects page pointed to a dead link, so I fixed that. In the process, however, I started looking at some of my old, abandoned projects, and that got me thinking about how cool I think it is that Konjak has a whole section of his website for projects he abandoned. So I started digging, and digging, and digging…

40 games later, I have an early Christmas present for you guys. Behold, the StudioHunty graveyard of unfinished games, and despair. Or rejoice. Or maybe a little of both.

Herein lie many — but not all — of the games that I’ve abandoned over the last 10 years, every one with some kind of executable or binary or swf!

Not that I’m comparing dicks or anything, but Cactus only has 39 games listed on his website, and I’ve got 40 games listed here. So, maybe he’s got me beat on finishing games, but I can start making games like nobody’s business!!

(Before anyone gets all indignant and rushes to defend Cactus’s honor: I am joking, and I’m not seriously comparing my number of unfinished games to his number of finished games.)

So… uh… Microsoft is starting the next Dream Build Play competition a little early, and this time it’s sponsored by Old Spice, with a separate, larger grand prize if you make an advergame for Old Spice. Wacky. But it means they can double their prize money and prize categories, so I guess that’s good news for entrants.

Remember that, as usual, registering for the competition gets you a free 12 month XNA Creators Club trial membership, which will let you play freeware XNA games like Kenta Cho’s GearToyGear on your Xbox (but won’t let you playtest or peer review XNA games that are on their way to XBLIG).

Somewhere along the line, I developed a certain weakness for sliding-block puzzles.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, honestly; Apple’s bundled Puzzle desktop accessory always drove me nuts, and I never bothered to finish the World’s Hardest Trick the first time around. Yet somewhere between gnotski during Computational Mathematics lectures and a surprisingly high-quality implementation of Rush Hour during the down moments of my first internship, I learned to stop stressing and love shuffling tiles across a board.

There are a number of games of this type available on the web; a basic puzzle of this sort is pretty easy to implement and have therefore been a staple of newbie flash developers for years. I usually don’t find them particularly notable (although I would like to work in a plug for Wooden Path), but sometimes something really standout comes along.

The Indie Games blog linked last week to a flash project called Continuity. Continuity implements the really clever idea of taking a sliding-block puzzle and combining it with a 2D platformer- the blocks that you’re moving around are pieces of a level, and your ultimate goal is to guide your character through it, collect any keys, and reach a red door. Moving pieces whose edges match next to each other allows you to move between them.

The game starts out fairly simple, but the later puzzles become increasingly mind-bending. It’s a solid implementation of a really clever idea, and I enjoyed it tremendously.

- HC