Earlier this week I told you about Spiral Knights, the upcoming free-to-play online space dungeon crawler from the creators of Puzzle Pirates. Now watch me play through the game’s Training Grounds and, if you’re lucky, try it out yourself.
Splatterhouse is getting a bloody, modern remake later this month, but that’s a gamble. The classic 1988 arcade Splatterhouse? We all know that’s a fantastic game, and now you can play it on your phone.
The Java4K 2009 contest will find the best Java game written in 4K in the year of 2009. It’s that simple. Oh, wait… you can enter it now in 2008. Crazy!
Now hang on a minute. It doesn’t seem like five minutes since some gaggle of market pundits were proclaiming that the iPhone had turned the mobile games market inside out and pointing at developers rolling around in pits of cash like Scrooge McDuck.
Sturgeon’s Law states that “Ninety percent of everything is crap”. I don’t think I am being too controversial by suggesting that if Theodore Sturgeon had ever encountered mobile phone games he would have revised upwards.
!’ve said it before (although possibly not in public) and I’ll say it again – turn-based games are a natural fit for mobile gaming. Any gaming device that you have to slip quickly in your pocket in case you get mugged demands a stable of games that you can take at whatever pace you like.
Former Edge editor Margaret Robertson has been musing on the nature of play in her Lookspring weblog, and has particularly been focusing on Newtoon, a Java-based play tool by Soda Play that “…lets you make little 2D physics-based games entirely out of balls and springs.”
She notes that “…the game bit comes in through some devilishly simple grammar. Each ball can, if you so chose, be designated a goal, hazard, or player token. The token can be controlled by the arrow keys: touch a hazard and it’s game over, touch the goal and it’s a win.” Robertson’s conclusion?
“I’ve done my time with idiot-proof game creators – with RPG Maker, and Dark Basic and various modding tools, but am usually defeated by the same failings that Meccano used to reveal. With Newtoon, it will take an actual act of an actual god to prevent you from making a game. It’s the Wario Ware of game-makers, something you really can play with for 2 minutes and find rewarding.”
Sounds like a bit of a laugh, then – and yet again showcases the fact that physics is the new black.
Doing it for myself [Lookspring]
