Tag Archives: XBLA

The Awesomenauts

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Back in late 2011 I found myself spending a weekend in London to preview some of the biggest titles hitting our shelves; Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 3 – but amongst these mainstream gems I stumbled upon a small time indie dev stand looking somewhat lonely but brilliantly colourful, and truth be told I spent more time at this stand than I did previewing anything else that day.  It belonged to Ronimo Games’ MOBA: Awesomenauts which was recently released on both PSN and XBLA.

To start with I should clarify that the term MOBA is used in its lightest form when referring to Awesomenauts. Whilst it contains aspects of the genre, I wouldn’t compare it to Dota, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth – Or even Super Monday Night Combat. No, Awesomenauts represents the MOBA at its most innocent and entertaining; baby’s first “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena” If you will. This is actually the game’s key selling point, allowing both veterans to the genre to feel at least partially at home, whilst letting the newer players foreign to the concept get their bearings in an idiot friendly environment.

The game takes place in a distant future where corporations fight on a regular …

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Nioki Adventure: An Interview with Marc Lejeune

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When I hear the words “Paris” and “companionship,” I don’t think of videogames: I think of the woman I met in Charles de Gaulle whom I would follow to Poland and lose my virginity to in a converted occupation-era Soviet bunker.

But you know what, that’s probably just me.

For indie developer Marc Legeune, “Paris” and “companionship” mean Nioki Adventure, the first game from the Paris-based Bidogames, due this winter on XBLA and Steam. Touted as Terraria meets Castle Crashers, the game has a lot to live up to. Marc Lejeune seems to have his head on straight about the whole thing though–at least so far as I could tell in our interview this morning. At the very least I know that he cuts to the chase:

ERIC: So…Here’s a question: Have you ever been to Reddit.com and typed in NSFW, or just browsed the unmoderated pics? I ask because that’s what I was doing while waiting for our interview, but not looking for porn really. I like to see what the average person finds “sexy” or “thrilling”…because usually it’s pretty un-artistic. And the reason I ask is because I think that’s the problem I have with people saying Minecraft and Terraria …

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Fez’s shifting genres

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There’s a quote from Roger Ebert’s review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans which goes: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” It sums up perfectly how I feel about the alarmingly modernist Fez.

What Fez is about—the existence of a world, and its idiosyncrasies, fully formed inside a work of art—is not how it is about it. Fez wants to be about the befuddling puzzles that took the world a week to solve, but instead it’s a platformer. Fez oozes brilliant puzzles from every pore, yet the way it goes about delivering its exceptionalism comes in a series of decidedly mundane jumping puzzles and a startling screen-shifting mechanic that’s already old hat.

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Review: Rock of Ages

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Something went wrong here.

Let’s not talk about the Terry Gilliamisms. Those are lovely, and why you’ve already played the game. If you haven’t, and you appreciate Monty Python, here is my six word review for you: go watch Life of Brian again. If you’ve watched it a hundred times, maybe get Rock of Ages.

Again, something went wrong here.

Rock of Ages shares a lineage with its developer’s previous title, Zeno Clash, in that its taking a major genre (the Katamari, possibly Marble Madness, though it’s sold as Katamari) and mixing it with another genre (tower defense). They skipped an important step, though, early on in the process, something very critical: they didn’t pay attention to what made each genre enjoyable to play.

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Review: Skydrift

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A couple days ago I wrote about downloadable games, ideally, being perfect little bites of gaming designed for the short experience. They’re either well-crafted, focused experiences, or they’re grasping for big budget success and gasping for air.

Skydrift falls in with the latter group, but it does so with a huge asterisk. I’d say it’s a near great game. Yes, it feels like it’s missing something, and it’s definitely got aspirations bigger than its budget, but very few games offer quite as solid a core mechanic.

The core of Skydrift feels like a combination of the plane levels from Diddy Kong Racing and Hydro Thunder. That is, you fly planes around tracks at incredibly high speeds while your opponents shoot rockets at your tailpipe. It feels fresh, though. It does this by creating the traditional kart race “rubber band” without feeling cheap. In effect, everyone gets the same items, but everyone can turn these items into boost. If the player in first does this, they get a tiny bit; if the player in second does it, they get a few seconds worth; if the player in last does it, well, they’ll be boosting for fifteen seconds. Players can also do stunts …

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Differentiating downloadable games

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High speed internet has birthed the cheap downloadable game. If you’ve played video games in the past five years, you’ve no doubt played one: priced under $20, only a few hours in length, as opposed to priced at $60 with a few hour campaign and a multiplayer mode. In many ways these downloadable games should be the short stories of the video game world: smaller, bite sized, just as breathtaking as bigger titles.

But it hasn’t worked like that, not really. Most downloadable games are shorter versions of longer games: awkward first novellas instead of short stories. They feature much the same padding between amazing moments as longer titles but they end quicker; either that or they are homages to the retro, 2-D platformers that grasp for the greatness of classic titles.

The short story, as a literary form, is different from the novel in a way that a downloadable game isn’t different from a big budget. Both forms of games try to tell the same type of sweeping, long form narrative, but the downloadable titles attempt to cut the “fat” out of the experience.  For every well developed ‘Splosion Man we have many Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonances.  For every quality game …

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Valve’s Steam Voted Easiest Platform for Indies

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In a recent survey of 100 indie studios, 64% said that Valve’s Steam service was the easiest to develop for, thanks to both the tech itself and the support from Valve. However, 28% claim developing for Steam was “so-so” while 8% claim that it’s difficult. None claimed it was excruciating.

After Valve came Facebook, Apple iOS, and Google Android, in that order. Facebook with a 57% “very easy” and 47% “so-so”. Apple with 54% “very easy” and 46% “so-so”. No developer found either “difficult” or “excruciating”. Google pulled 27% “very easy”, 45% “so-so”, 18% “difficult”, and 9% “excruciating”.

Following them, came the three console publishers: Sony(PSN), Nintendo(WiiWare), and Microsoft(XBLA), in that order. The majority of developers found developing for PSN “so-so”, Wiiware “difficult”, and XBLA “excruciating”. Nobody found working with Microsoft to be “very easy”.

After them came cell phone carriers, with 57% saying developing for them is excruciating, and 43% said it was difficult.

This data was collected by Ron Carmel, co-founder of independent studio 2D Boy, developer of World of Goo

This news is re-enforced by past stories, like Cthulu Saves the World ”thriving” on the PC, indie developers turning their backs on XBLA, and gives a bit of weight to Team Meat’s …

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Indie Games Summer Uprising hotter than the sun

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Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games service has been much maligned since its inception, with good reason. It’s the equivalent of a dingy, shoddy restaurant with mediocre food and a waiter that seems like he’ll try to stab you and take your money the first chance he gets, and games from that service have made more money in one week on PC than they made during their entire lifespan on Microsoft’s fun toy.

Back in the winter, a group of enterprising developers decided to try to change this. Thus the Indie Games Winter Uprising was born. Okay, most of those games were mediocre, but there were some gems in the bunch (Epic Dungeon and Cthulhu Saves the World chief among them), and it obviously worked out well enough that said developers would try to do it again.

The imaginatively named Indie Games Summer Uprising launches on August 22nd, and will feature ten games, eight of whose identities are known and two of whose identities you can vote on on their facebook page. Watch the video below, then come on back for my thoughts.

Pretty decent collection of quality looking games here. We have a swell looking fighter in Battle …

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Review – Bastion

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Remember my Outland review? Of course you don’t. But everything I say there goes triple for Bastion. In a year of pretty incredible independent games, Bastion is the best of the year so far. It is a legitimately great game and you have to play it.

That’s the hook. Now back to the beginning.

“Proper story’s supposed to start at the beginning. Ain’t so simple with this one.”

We know about Bastion for one reason: its overwhelming sense of style. Usually, though, style in a video game is like a guy wearing a suit covered in shiny, reflective panels: eye catching but ultimately hollow. Even Outland, a game I will compare to Bastion relentlessly, had a hollow style, a beautiful face that would have grown tiresome if not for quality gameplay. Bastion, on the other hand, comes at you like an immaculated groomed man wearing a smoking jacket, puffing on a cigarillo, reading Tolstoy and asking to put classical music on the record player that’s materialized next to you. It is style personified. Bastion‘s style punches you in the face and asserts itself from the get go.

A lot of this comes from …

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Review: Outland

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“So much style without substance, so much stuff without style. It’s hard to recognize the real thing, it comes along once in a while. -Neil Peart

What do we expect from video games? Do we require innovation? New experiences? More of the same? Mysterious fun factor? I think what we should expect from games is a good usage of time, something that makes you feel like you haven’t wasted a large part of your life even if you actually have.

Outland, an Xbox Live Arcade Title released this year, succeeds at this in the most marvelous of ways. It is a game as sum of its parts and game as ethereal transcendence, a game grasping for those moments that make you remember why you love games. That fleeting moment of brilliance where nothing else matters.

As an arcade title it got some burn because of its style, but there’s only so much style can do without substance. And Outland, a great game, delivers. It is the marriage of style and substance.

Its inspirations are obvious, right down to its very core. Outland belongs to the ever-increasing cast of games that makes no effort …

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