With the TIGSource Assemblee entrants out in the open, I thought I’d blurt out a few words – or in some cases perhaps more than just a few – on each of the contenders, no matter how NSFW they may be. This could be an epic undertaking. 73 mini-reviews in under two weeks? Oh, crud. Bloody impossible, that’s what this is…

Quick note: click on the or icons for an appropriate download link, or  to visit the relevant thread on the TIGForums. Anything not safe for work is marked with a .

6nine by JMickle
Oh, good. A game packed with male reproductive organs. How original! This game isn’t just made of cocks – it is cock. Almost non-existant gameplay. In truth, a waste of perfectly good bandwidth. 15%

30 Bomb of Awesome Frags by C. A. Sinclair
“I seize my material!” Quite fun. Bonus points for nonsensical storyline. Short but tough gameplay in a style you could liken to  Meritous – navigate through a dungeon and kill enemies by charging your attacks to release bombs. 74%

87 Spiderbats go to the Inn by Sos
Points awarded for technical skill – this is a proper Atari 2600 game! Nice, but unfortunately the game itself is rather basic. Stop the dreaded spiderbats from invading your inn by killing 87 of them before you lose all your lives or too many get past you. 58%

Backworld by Juha Kangas & Anders Ekermo
An impressive game with an interesting gameplay mechanic. Guide the rabbit to the end of each screen in a grayscale world. To do so you will need to paint holes into the “backworld” to erase obstacles, reveal platforms or even reverse gravity. Good stuff. 84%

Expect more TAR over the weekend!

A clarion call sounds out amongst the many trillions of pixels of indiespace…

The TIGSource Assemblee Competition has concluded and is now  in the voting stage! It’s up to you to decide the ultimate winners. Should you wish to participate in judging what’s been quite an epic display of indie community teamwork, you should first of all familiarise yourself with the  full list of all 73 entrants (preferably by playing as many of them as possible). Then, as per the rules decreed by the competition’s masters, you should place up to 7 votes in  this thread sometime before the 3rd of February – so you have a whole fortnight to decide on who gets your backing!

Remember, the games created in part 2 of the competition were only allowed to use the resources made during the first part. If you want to vote on the graphics and music made during the first part then it’s a similar affair: see what was created over on this page (extremely image-heavy!), then place your votes in this thread. Easy, really.

Roll on judgement day… vote wisely!

Straight from Twitter (courtesy of UFHO2) comes  this list of what Nintendo plans to release over the coming three months. There’s some good stuff there, but also some glaring omissions. It’s hard, I know, but do try not to be too surprised when I say…

What, no Wii Cave Story?!

No sign of NIGORO‘s redone version of La-Mulana either, or indeed the blockbuster-in-waiting Super Mario Galaxy 2. But I suppose there’s a whole nine other months which they haven’t mentioned yet…

My pick of the list would have to be  Worms: Battle Islands, ‘cos you just can’t get enough of the classic 2D Worms action. But I really wish Team 17 would come back to their roots and bring out an updated PC version (that’s 2D, not those silly 3D versions). Worms Armageddon / World Party are beginning to show their age – they’re over eight years old, after all. Just think what you could do with proper physics! Ragdoll worms! Particles! Water with proper reflections! Bigger, better, more detailed landscapes! Local networking without the annoying lag! Even just the slightly-more-shiny graphics upgrades of the console ports would be nice. Please guys, you know you want to make it happen…

Time for an apology, I think.

See, there’s this site run by a mad coding genius called Jayenkai, and for a good long time now he’s made it his purpose to craft games of many and varied types, but limiting himself to just a week of development time on each. The prospect of keeping this up for even a month or two would probably scare the pants off most sane people, but in fact  AGameAWeek.com has grown to include an incredible library of his efforts! Sadly, until now, I have not advertised this incredible feat in any way. Sorry about that; a most lamentable oversight on my part.

Anyway, yes – do not be deceived, dear reader, into thinking that just because a game took only a week to make that it must somehow be a load of rubbish. Nothing could be further from the truth! Jay has mastered the technique to a fine art, and pretty much all of his projects – for the PC and also some for the DS – are worth looking at.

To make it easier for you, he has recently bundled together his entire collection of work in a series of Zip files, labelled according to their ranking. If you didn’t fancy browsing through the entire  Jayenkai Archive and downloading each title individually, you can now get the whole lot in party-sized compilation packs from this blogpost. Happy time!

You probably know by now that  Qwak is one of my all-time favourite retro platform games and is definitely a hidden gem of the internet. I try to spread the word about it as much as possible without becoming Mr. Spam of Spam Lane, Spammington – so here’s another shameless plug!

Jamie Woodhouse has followed in the trend set by World of Goo and Crayon Physics and decided to run a “Pay What You Want” special sale offer for Qwak. Whatever you decide to pay you’re going to get a lot of fun for your money! Don’t hang about, though… the deal ends on January the 22nd.

Normally you’d be paying £12.99 – still an excellent bargain – but for now you can purchase the PC or Mac version of Qwak for whatever you think it’s worth through  this ordering page. Marvellous!

In a brief period of scouring more images for the random snippets up top I came across  this handy site with information about the many remakes, past and present, of the venerable Speccy classic Chaos.

Some titles there were already familiar to me, like Chaos Funk and its excellent sequel  Chaos Groove by Richard Phipps. Out of all of the remakes that have appeared over the years, these are probably the finest and stick closest to the original with some nice 2D graphics upgrades, plenty of configuration options and some chuckle-inducing sound effects. I also found another, Duncan Timiney‘s Ataxia II, sporting a trendy isometric view, a 3D landscape and whizz-bang particle effects. I highly recommend checking them both out if you have a passing interesting for hotseat multiplayer strategy battles!

That said, though, there’s one other project which I’ll be keeping a close eye on…

Archaos, by Lewis “SEPTiMUS” Lane, aims to provide the holy grail: cross-platform multiplayer Chaos over the ‘net! Nowhere will be safe from the war of wizards should this happen. Its flash-based predecessor, Chaos Enhanced, isn’t configurable can be configured and played through this page after a recent addition – thanks Lewis! – and although it was apparently created only as a prototype, it still looks most tasty. Give it a spin straight from your browser, and follow the development of Archaos on the  rotates.org blog.

It made me laugh when I heard from a follow gamer in work today that Gran Turismo 5‘s release date of March for Japan has been pushed back yet again, this time indefinitely.

While us poor old westerners have never been given a solid idea of when we might see our version of the game, this announcement isn’t especially encouraging for those who are still waiting. Conspiracy theories abound (in several places) on exactly what the “production-related” issues are that Sony say have caused this latest delay – their unwillingness to set a new release date is a bit unnerving given how long the title has already been in development.

Now, I own a PS3, and although I can’t say GT5 was ever a game I was desperate to play on it, it bugs me how Sony have swung another hammer blow to a nail in the PS3′s coffin. How many more times are they going to drop the ball? Is it even a ball any more, or a mangled, deflated mass after being repeatedly dumped into a spiky burning pit of doom? Did they release the PS3 purely as an exercise in finding out the most cackhanded and drawn out way of systematically ruining a gaming platform? Sometimes it certainly seems that way.

Yes, I exaggerate. It probably isn’t that bad, and the pit wasn’t actually very spiky at all. Look on the bright side: at least Final Fantasy XIII appears to be on schedule…

Just a quick note to explain that, with the change in theme, links related to games have also changed slightly. Any time you see a  icon, go ahead and click it to take you to a place relevant to the discussed item. I think it’s neater than [link] having a load of [link] intrusive and boring links [link] that appear in square brackets for no apparent reason [link]. Don’t you agree? Good! We’re going to get along famously!