High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks 
Sunday Comics: Dead Island 
Five weeks ago, I quit my job at Firemint, one of the world’s top mobile game developers, to pursue a career in independent games development. Whether or not this rather insane decision proves to be my undoing… well, you’ll be the first to know.
Wow – August is set to be a big month for the Sydney Opera House and games. Earlier today we posted that PaRappa the Rappa creator Masaya Matsuura is heading there for a show, now we’ve gotten word that the Independent Games Festival is showing a selection of games. The best news? The show is free.
Think you could create a fully functioning video game in 48 hours? The guys at Game Jam do, and we believe them. Game Jam is an admirable initiative where small teams of independent developers gather to conceive, and then create, a game in 48 hours – and it’s happening this weekend in Sydney.
OnLive, a cloud gaming service over in the US, has announced it will make its SDK available to independent developers, so they “can bring their games direct to market, bypassing traditional retail channels in the process.” And presumably, so OnLive can have some more interesting games as well.
Who said there would be no new games this week? Pish, and possibly posh. Independent PC developer Dreamspike has announced their real-time strategy title Space War Commander will launch on New Year’s Day.
Kotakuite Daniel Novais sent me an email this past week, asking me to take a look at his “little short artsy game” called Estamos Pensando (Portuguese for ‘We Are Thinking’). Inspired in part by Jason Rohrer’s Passage, Estamos Pensando is a sweet, sad, and polished little game. Daniel said that he’s now trying to work on something a little happier, since one comment on Rohrer’s Gravitation noted that these ‘artsy’ games are usually depressing. There are Portuguese and English versions of the game, and gameplay is quite simple. The game has apparently gotten some nice initial reviews since its submission to the Brazilian symposium SBGames 2008 festival, and it’s worth a little bit of your time.
Edmund McMillen (of Aether, Gish, and the game that shall not be named) is back with Meat Boy, a challenging little game that involves the titular blob of meat trying to rescue Bandaid Girl in a variety of levels. It took me a while to actually look at the game, since the designer woke me up a few nights in a row via IM asking me to take a look at it — I hold a grudge when it comes to my sleep being interrupted — but I’ve spent some time with it and it’s worth a looksee if you’re in the mood for a challenge on a Sunday afternoon. Controls are simple, the game is difficult, but you can skip two levels per group — so if you really get stuck, don’t despair.
Developer Arkedo Studio got off to a rough start in their career with Nervous Brickdown – the game scored well enough but nobody really played it (except in Japan). With their sophomore effort, Big Bang Mini, Arkedo is hoping to get more support from publisher SouthPeak Interactive than it did Eidos, says CEO Camille Guermonprez. He believes Big Bang Mini will appeal to more than just the casual DS crowd and stand on its own merits as a hardcore shooter.
Shooter? Fireworks? It makes sense in practices, trust me. In arcade mode, you appear as a little ship on the lower screen. You shoot fireworks at targets floating around in the upper screen. Hit the target, and a star-shaped power-up will drop. Miss and the firework will explode, raining down fiery projectiles that your ship has to dodge. You need to collect as many power-ups as you can to fill a gauge on the left hand side of the lower screen in order to get to the next level.
There are two dominant strategies for getting through arcade mode – a careful target-and-shoot approach and the all-out firework blitz. Target-and-shoot takes way longer and leaves more opportunities for the targets in later levels to hit you with their own projectiles that they drop into the lower screen. The blitz creates even more havoc down below as the bounce-back from the exploding fireworks will kill you as easily as it kills the targets you’re trying to hit.
In total, there are 90 levels in the whole game – 10 per world, 10 boss fights total. The worlds range in theme from Hong Kong to underwater; completing each grants you a special tactic such as a whirlwind that sucks in enemy projectiles, a charged-shot firework, or a homing missile firework. The design for each world is pretty detailed – even the music creates a distinct sense of atmosphere (I particularly liked the Paris rooftop level). And bosses like the Mohawk-sporting walrus or the secret last boss? I haven’t seen stuff that funky since Ren & Stimpy’s Powdered Toast Man.
