Having been in development for over five years, Fez is a indie/special/something game that has embodied many of the personal challenges its creators have faced, not making the endless development of it seem any shorter. The attendees of the yearly Independent Game Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco were witness to the emotional release of Fez creator Phil Fish and his colleagues when they accepted the Seamus McNally Grand Prize and $30.000 dollars in prize money last month. Fish, a personal indie hero of mine, is currently starring in the renowned and Sundance award winning documentary Indie Game: The Movie, where he is followed through-out trials and tribulations of finishing Fez. His team’s journey up until receiving this award, touched me in a very personal way.
Continue reading “The trials, tribulations and faces behind Fez” »
The following article is based around an email interview conducted by our team with Naked Sky’s CTO Joshua Glazer. Naked Sky is also known for their previous XBLA title RoboBlitz, which was released back in November 2006z.
Microbot is a twin stick shooter that lets the player battle malicious viruses and diseases as a microscopic nanotech robot injected into someone’s bloodstream. As players travel travel through veins, bones, lungs and other organs, they can collected data fragments that allows them to customize their microbot with powerful weapons, defensive systems, movement parts, and special abilities. What got yours truly’s blood pumping about this title, is the planned cooperative drop-in/drop-out mode.
Continue reading “Robot enthusiasts rejoice: Microbot will offer twin stick fun on a cellular level with sparkly co-op sprinkles on top.” »
It’s been a while since we broke the big news that Czech studio Amanita Design will not be bringing their beautiful adventure game to XBLA. With the high piracy rate the game is currently experiencing on the PC, the developers decided it was time for a Pirate Amnesty Sale aka. ‘Now’s the time for all of us to make up for the lack of an XBLA version and make due with a 75% discount on the PC version’.
Xbox owning Pilgrim fans rejoice! The downloadable Scott Pilgrim beat-em-up with epic 2D pixel art is no longer a Playstation exclusive. The downloadable title based on the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series will be released on XBLA shortly after the PS3 launch on August 25th. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World offers a four-player co-op beat-em-up experience and will cost 1200 points.
Blacklight: Tango Down was developed by Zombie Studios and published by Ignition Entertainment for XBLA on July 14, 2010. Retails for 1200 Microsoft Points. A download code of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes.
What if the rumors of a futuristic setting for Infinity Ward’s next Call of Duty were right? It might’ve looked very much like Zombie Studio’s Blacklight: Tango Down. While the game was praised by many at E3 for it’s high price/quality ratio, the result is definitely remarkable for a downloadable title, packing a decent fast paced punch for a low budget multiplayer shooter.
THQ’s vice president of core games Danny Bilson recently revealed a new downloadable game strategy in an interview with CVG. The first title to experience the strategy’s treatment on both XBLA and PSN is Red Faction, with a downloadable title being made available about three to four months before the launch of Red Faction Armageddon.
“What’s interesting is that we will sell it to the fans, it will have content you can download that is TV show-related, it will build up to the new game and also we can use it to drive pre-orders, too; we can give codes and aspects of it, we can give the whole thing away,” Bilson told CVG. Joystiq suggests that the TV show to which Bilson refers to is most likely Syfy’s upcoming Red Faction program, produced as part of a larger multi-franchise partnership between the cable network and THQ.
Puzzle Chronicles was developed by Infinite Interactive and published by Konami. It was released on April 21 , 2010 and retails for 800 Microsoft Points. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.
Right off the bat, Puzzle Chronicles is going to be compared to Puzzle Quest by almost everyone. But it deserves a moment of our attention. After playing the game for more than 20 hours, Puzzle Chronicles appears to stand on its own as a quirky, simple and fun puzzle game. And after two weeks of trying it out for this review, we’re still playing.
Puzzle Chronicles openly admits to its simplicity from the start, only giving you one main character to play the single player game with. Mixing Conan the Barbarian’s cousin with a cookie cutter RPG story, Puzzle Chronicles quickly introduces the player to its distinct puzzle mechanic, which follows an approach similar to classic titles such as Columns and Lumines. Though this might sound like two reasons not to get the game, the developers have managed to give it their own witty twist and turn it into a fun combination with a somewhat cartoony look that might suit younger gamers a bit better.
This interview was conducted at the Casual Connect 2010 conference in Hamburg. It was used for a short article that created a lot of buzz about Microsoft turning down the chance to publish Machinarium on Xbox Live Arcade by Microsoft. Although our focus is Xbox Live Arcade related content, our editorial staff agreed that the following is an exception due to the recent circumstances.
Jakub Dvorksy, currently the lead designer at the Czech indie studio Amanita Design, is the original founder of the studio and brought together the team of creatives and artists that have been responsible for the highly acclaimed point and click adventure Machinarium. We recently had the pleasure of talking to this self-taught leader and look back at the history of the little studio in the Czech Republic.
Continue reading “Machinarium’s XBLA Refusal and more: The original interview with Amanita Design’s Jakub Dvorsky” »
Czech game studio Amanita Design, creators of the critically acclaimed PC point-and-click adventure Machinarium, recently announced that they are making plans to bring the game to different platforms. Asking founder and leader designer Jakub Dvorksy about their intent to port the quirky little adventure game to Xbox Live Arcade, Dvorsky informed us about Microsoft’s recent refusal of the game:
“Microsoft just refused Machinarium for XBLA after a half year of talking with them. They like the game and know it would be very successful on their platform, but they don’t want to support games which aren’t Microsoft exclusives. Machinarium isn’t, since we’ve also released versions for Mac and Linux. We have another option to approach some big publisher to bring the game to XBLA, which is quite absurd to do and lose maybe a large part of revenue because of that.”
Back in 2009, Machinarium took the prize of ‘Best Visual Arts’ during the Independent Game Festival. As far as we know Dvorsky and his team are still working on finding the right publisher to circumvent their earlier issues with Microsoft and end up on XBLA. Fingers crossed!
Update: After discovering that this story apparently created quite a buzz among many game websites, we just want to assure everyone that this story is indeed true in the following context: when asked about their plans to port Machinarium to different platforms Dvorsky confirmed having ‘talked’ with Microsoft. He did not specify if this involved being accepted for XBLA or being published by Microsoft on XBLA, but did put an emphasis on losing revenue through a conventional publishing deal. As our critical peers at DIYGamer have already confirmed, this is a legitimate outtake from an interview we had with Jakub Dvorsky during the Casual Connect conference in Hamburg two months ago.
Update #2: Joystiq has received an official response from Amanita Design that states the Czech studio has now submitted Machinarium to Sony’s PlayStation Network instead. As VideoGameBlog stated regarding this issue, “The key is that neither game has been refused space on the platform — Microsoft has simply decided not to publish the games itself. Microsoft requires all XBLA titles be attached with a publishing partner, meaning neither Amanita Design and Golgoth Studio can self-publish the games on the XBLA platform. Sony and Nintendo do not have the same policy for the PlayStation Network and WiiWare, respectively.”
Bargain time! Finnish game studio Redlynx is celebrating the fact that Trials HD won ‘Best Overall Arcade Game on Xbox Live Arcade for 2009′ and is celebrating with a discount on their previous PC title, Trials 2 SE. You can find the discounted game in their own RedLynx store. Before Trials HD, Redlynx already had a very long history of Trials games spanning back to simple flash prototypes. As a way of saying thanks to the gaming audience, RedLynx is temporarily lowering the price of Trials 2 SE, to just $1.99 until April 14. If you haven’t tried the trial version of presumably the most addicting XBLA game on the planet, you just got another reason to do so.
