Lithium Leaf

Well, it finally happened, Cave Story to buy. I have it for free on my PC and PSP, but this might just be another excuse to play it over again (and buy a Wii at that).

Aside from the usual metroidvania awesomeness, the statement on nintendo's press release said there would be added, exclusive content.

Well, judge for yourselves:

Cave Story: This title is an action-adventure game with new, exclusive content and features created only for the WiiWare version.

Pixel also added a note on that on his desk.

He has also given the link to the game's official site, which will be launching this Monday 6th of October.

Damn that was a lazy screenshot.

Source: Kotaku (with the whole press release too).

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Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVCVwCnRY4

Kyle Pulver recently released a video showcasing the stages of development of his game Bonesaw: The Game. Genuinelly interesting to see how the game was done, and how things changed from the early stages.

Surprised me to see that the main character was fluently animimated from the early stages of the game.

TIGSource's Database Entry For Bonesaw.

Link: http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php

Iji is an action platformer by developer Daniel Remar. To be completely fair I wasn't too excited about this when the trailer came out, but I should have as it is one of the greatest games I have played this year.

As said, Iji is a mixture of genres, it's a platformer shooter with RPG elements, with lots of decisions to be made and diferent paths in each level, and tons of secrets and sidequests.

The control scheme is easy, arrow keys to move (up to jump, down to duck), Z to kick, X to shoot, C to interact with most things and the numbers to change weapons. Controls are very solid and intuitive. Personally, I don't like having up as jump, but that's personal preference. Sadly there is no option to change this (all other control keys can be changed except the movement ones).

The game tells the story of Iji, a girl who visits her dad's job with her family. While they are visiting an alien race takes over the planet. Months later Iji wakes up to discover that only her and her brother survived, and that some human scientists applied the alien's nanotechnology on her to turn her into humanity's last hope. The story varies depending on your playstyle, although I confess that I found being good and stealthy is much more difficult that simply killing everyone.

The visuals and soundtrack are outstanding, adding to the atmosphere, I specially enjoyed the various sound effects, such as the aliens' and Iji's warcries.

I think this is a game that no one who likes action games should miss.

Via IndieGames Blog

Follow the link to the full post to see how much I suck at taking screenshots.

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Link: http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/knock

Knock The Monster is another entry into Petri Purho's Big List o’ Games which he updates monthly. It was developed by him and Erik Svedäng during No More Sweden (which he describes as an indie game jam). It was originaly NSFW, but changed by both creators before it's release (there's a link to a pic of the NSFW version in the coment's section of Petri's blog).

The mechanics of the game are easy, big weight at the top-left part of the screen, monster on the floor, draw chains to re-direct the weight and hit the monster for it to fall down, you can also cut the chains to make the weight fall down. There's a nice tutorial in-game.

You need the newest DirectX 9.0c drivers and .Net Framework 2.0 installed for this game to work.

For those of you who don't know, the deadline of TIGSource's Bootleg Demake Competition has been extended, from the 31st of August to the 7th of september due to problems with the forums (now fixed).

Although the deadline is still a week away, a lot of entries have already been finished, other, sadly, have been dropped because of the deadline, hopefully this games will be finished despite not entering the competition.

One catched my attention today, The Black And White Plane is a self-explanatory title for the Ikaruga demake by PenguinSeph, Atari-ish style. Although lacking the music and the special weapon powered by bullet-eating from the game that served as "inspiration" it is still a great demake, very fun to play.

Arrow keys to move, SPACE BAR to start, Z to shoot and X to switch colours. To get a chain you must kill 3 enemies of the same colour in a row, the chains will build up and increase the score you get. Break a chain and the counter will go back to 0.

Download The Game.

Link: http://maglog.jp/gamesoft/Article98495.html

Homura - Dan is a vertical scrolling shooter by 2nd year students from KobeDenshi. It's a fairly standard shooter with low resolution but nice graphics.

Homura - Dan is your standard shooter, move with the arrow keys, shoot normal bullets with Z, shoot homing missiles with X, press both Z and X to shoot a laser. There's an energy bar at the left bottom corner of the screen, both the missiles and the laser draw energy from it, but it refills with time.

The visuals are pretty good, the resolution is very low but looks great, the only drawback is that the explosions are very big, and quite frequent, and hide the enemies' bullets making it hard to dodge them.

The music is also great.

Download the game.

Also: You need to set the non-Unicode language to Japanese to play this game.

Increasingly popular game reviewer and indie developer Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has recently reviewed Braid in his video review series Zero Punctuation for The Escapist.

His overall opinion is that Braid is a good and original game, although that does not stop him from pointing out every little flaw in the game, but as usual it only adds to the amusement I find in his reviews.

In the review he also touches 2 controversial debates: the problem with the gaming industry and Braid's pricing.

Watch the review.

Link: http://messhof.blogspot.com/2008/08/bike-game-video.html

That's right, indie developers cactus and messhof are making a game together, and it's looking awesome. It reminden me of AudioSurf at first. The trailer they released speaks for itself, be careful as it can be seizure-inducing (like almost any game from messhof or cactus really):

Hope to see this out soon.

On a related note, cactus released a video of his unreleased games (can you se the contradiction in that phrase?). Making the rest of us drool and wonder if they will all be released someday, as they all look fantastic:

Source: IndieGames Blog, TIGSource

Just today Luc Bernard, creator of Eternity's Child annouced that this game will be the first and last he makes. He will stil be supporting the game and all, though.

I haven't had the chance to play Eternity's Child yet,but thanks to Derek Yu's recent post on the events at Destructoid I know a bit of the story behind what's happening and the issues the games seems to have. Which will hopefully be fixed.

The original post, however, was edited by Luc and I don't know what it said originally but the guys at Kotaku posted an extract.

Source: Kotaku

Link: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/gamedesignsketchbook/5123-Game-Design-Sketchbook-Testing-the-Limits-of-Single-Player

Recently Jason Rohrer has written a new article in his monthly feature Game Design Sketchbook at The Escapist. He has written a very interesting piece about the depth of both singleplayer and multiplayer games. And tried to make a simple board game with simple rules but with infinite depth. Trying to avoid gimmicks like randomness.

His failed attempt is a single player variant of Go named i45hg. Jason himself admits that he now realises it's impossible to achieve a game of pseudo-infinite depth without things like randomness or two player interaction.

The article is really interesting, and poses interesting questions. And the game is quite fun, specially if you are into puzzle games. The download link for the game and the rules are in the third page of the article. The download also features previous versions of the game with different rules.

My highscore is 69.

Read the article.