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Sunday Comics: Dead Island I was happy to stumble upon the free Kongregate game Midas today. Created by Melbourne-based Kongregate user wanderlands, it’s a simple 2D platform/puzzler based around the story of King Midas.
How do you create a competitive driving game with only one car? Bernhard Handler’s Roadeo offers a simple and elegant solution. Player one drives the car, and player two steers the road.
This game is not called ‘Big Orange Balls With Sunglasses’ – but it would be so much better if it was. Sadly, this game is called Orange Alert and it’s a puzzle game with a weird difficulty curve that still manages to work as a clever distraction.
The Kongregate Arcade app for Android brings more than 300 free games to your mobile phone… if you have an Android. The app also lets you check out ratings, high scores and comments and even download games to play offline. iPhone owners? Sorry it’s Flash.
GameStop, which most of us think of as a chain of stores where Americans buy disc-based games, has bought Kongregate, which is a website where one can play free games, including many hours of Desktop Tower Defense.
Your Friday afternoon timewaster today is a cute yet macabre puzzler in which you play Death.
Kongregate, the online community/portal dedicated to playing and developing games, is furthering the “democratization” of game development with Kongregate Labs. Using the simple-as-its-name-implies side-scrolling shmup Shoot! as a foundation, Labs features an ongoing series of tutorials (or *groan* “shootorials”) that help you, the little person, learn how to make your own shooter. You’ll get a primer on designing controls, scrolling backdrops, collision detection and so much more.
And if shooter creation fame isn’t enough to light a fire under you, Kongregate is handing out cold hard cash to the best shootorials-based user created game. Play Shoot! if you want — the fun lasts many, many seconds — but then read on to learn about Flash game development with handy illustrated examples. We’re hard at work on our own “Dude Huge” shmup, currently known as Cliffydius. Watch for it!
Kongregate Labs [Kongregate]
Chris Plante has posted a plea over at GameSetWatch — one for bringing more global entertainment to the West (well, America specifically). His idea? Some sort of portal that will be able to showcase games from all over the world, dragging American gamers kicking and screaming into acknowledging foreign countries that are outside of East Asia. Interesting concept, and one that could theoretically be implemented right now:
Kongregate.com is one of the several companies taking a swing at the “YouTube for Games” idea that makes Silicon Valley VC’s grin as they stare into their iPhones.
In a new interview with Kongregate games director Chris Pasley, who moved over to Kongregate from Turner’s game group, says their goal is to “make Flash games a legitimate business, by letting developers make a living off of [them] “.
Sounds good, but I’m just not sure that what games — or anything else — needs is another upload-your-content-plus-community-features ghetto. Especially the community features.
