Crivens! Time to start (and finish) blazing a path through section C, but today, you’ll have to click past the jump to see the details – after I failed to post the third part yesterday, there’s now a whole seven games to cover in this installment!

Another new thing is that if a game isn’t downloadable, you can play it straight through you browser instead by clicking the icon. Ah, the wonders of Flash…

Covered today we have:

• Cave Explorer: to the right!
• Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine
• Chase Goose
• COIN
• Coin Hunt
• Cosmic Unleasher
• Cowgirl and the Mushroom Men Genocide

Read more…

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.

They said they were out of white emulsion and could I try and prevent myself from using any more?…

Yeah… I think it’s possibly a tiny bit uninspiring around here at the moment. It feels a bit like hospital decor, trying to be cheery in a way that isn’t forced, scary or mind-melting boring. And completely uncontroversial.

I’m wringing every single drop of creative juice from all of my 2.5 brain cells to attempt to remedy this situation! It’ll take some time. Meanwhile, some posts that have interesting content are just around the corner too, I promise.

While you wait, play  Realm of the Mad God from Wild Shadow Studios (and post feedback on the TIGForums), ‘cos it’s fantastic. You may even see me there later when I’ve had enough of tinkering here for the evening…

There’ve been a lot of good indie productions released this month (and in previous months when I’ve been slacking), so it’s probably time to catch up with a few…

First, from Amanita Design, comes Machinarium [link]. The winner of this year’s IGF Excellence in Visual Art award has been a long time in the works but looks, as you may imagine, absolutely splendid. Help a robot who’s been exiled from his city to rescue his girlfriend, kick out the bad guys and generally make the world right again. Essentially it’s a point-and-click adventure, but with fantastic hand-drawn environments and characters. There’s a lot to praise about this game, not least the sublime atmospheric music and perfectly-weighted humour. Check out the demo in your browser, or wander along here for their other games.

After running a competition to decide its new name, the game formerly known as Dyson has become Eufloria [link] – a far more fitting title! Rudolf Kremers and Alex May have finished up the game and it’s a perfect chillout RTS without any of the frills that often confuse rather than help. Control your flock (cloud?… swarm?…) of sentient seedlings to explore an asteroid belt and discover the cause of a hostile infection. Nice and relaxing, yet with a definite challenge toward the end. Get a taste of Eufloria with the demo.

More indie stuff to come over the weekend!

Ack.   Things have gone to dust of late, have they not? Can’t change that all in one go, but here’s a start…

Rather than do a splurge on every single interesting item that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, I want to take a more considered approach and give stuff the attention it rightly deserves. With that in mind, let’s start a week of at-least-once-a-day blogging with the return of some Retro Roundups. Today’s entry under the microscope is Chup [link] from DrPetter, a veteran of Ludum Dare and creator of legendary retro sound effect generator sfxr.

Somehow Chup, a classic platformer full of spikes and moving platforms, takes me all the way back to gaming on my Commodore 64. I can’t explain why, but there’s a very pure retro quality about it (similar to the sort of feeling I got when playing the likes of Ropor and Qwak). Your task is blindingly clear and comes coupled with equally obvious dangers to avoid – nothing except timing, skill and fast reactions will see you through to the finish.  If you’re good, you’ll be done in time for tea… if not, well, have another go! This is exactly how I think Flash games should be.

Read more…

Not that I would ever consider doing such a thing when there is so much else to be done, but here (in no particular order) are five ways I quite often end up using the interweb to waste time…

1. Watch stuff on YouTube. My personal favourites being anything in the Let’s Play… category. If you like retro games, and in particularly like watching other people suffer while playing retro games, my recommendation is DeceasedCrab‘s complete playthrough of La-Mulana. Yes, he does include Hell Temple. And yes, it’s quite frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious
2. Play random browser games. “You wake up in a room, but you have no idea how you got here. And wait – the only exit seems to be locked…” There’s more to online games than escape-the-room stuff! For example, the Java-powered Powder Game and Stick Ranger by DAN-BALL are famous around the net for good reason, and there’s also stuff like Desktop Tower Defense and Tumbledrop to suck up those idle minutes.
3. Find juicy loot in an MMORPG. My personal bad habit is World of Warcraft, but there are plenty of others (some – like Runes of Magic – are completely free). You could even mix an MMO with browser games and end up with Runescape. Hey, these days you can play it fullscreen with all manner of bells and whistles, so don’t turn your nose up just ‘cos it’s been around for ages!
4. See what other indies are doing. There are plenty of blogs and forums with interesting stuff that I check frequently, as well as the site of other indie developers. I won’t mention any specific ones because they’re pretty much all over to the left, just there, under “Fellow Developers” and “Links”
5. Create stuff. Okay, maybe this isn’t actually wasting time, but it can still use up lots of it There are more and more online tools around lately with which you can create and share content with others. A couple of my favourites that I stumbled across recently: FontStruct, a TTF font creator, and SumoPaint, a light-looking but fully-featured graphics app. There are also downloadable gems like MoonEdit, something Mauft told me about. It looks like a text editor, but it’s “multiplayer” – up to 14 people can edit a document simultaneously over the internet. Funky!

Gosh. I didn’t think this post would be so big. Never mind, eh…

So, after taking a few days to see what is happening next, I’m still no huge distance closer to figuring out my next project. Or am I?…

Being the tease that I am, I’m not saying anything yet. Instead, in suitable “hey, look over there!” style, take a gander at a quick review of recent Interesting Stuff ™:

• World of Warcraft got its first major content patch since the latest expansion was released. A whole lot of stuff has been changed, and even more stuff has been added. Fun times!
• Scarygirl is now available to play – full and for free – at its homepage! Like so much stuff lately, I haven’t had chance to play it myself, but I plan to fit in at least an hour over the weekend to give it a look.
• Judith is a short lo-fi first-person story about… well, better for you to find out for yourself. All I’ll say is one word: creepy

Also, today is the final day of the Poing Community Levelset campaign. Again! And unfortunately there haven’t been any more level entries Expect another couple of teasers over the weekend.

This is a game that I’d really love to see completed. Detonate! is a side project of Terry Cavanagh whose games you may recognise under the banner of Distractionware – he’s also the dab hand responsible for recent flash hit Don’t Look Back [link], which I still haven’t gotten around to playing… but I digress. For a couple of reasons, it’s not entirely sure that Detonate! will see the light of day, but I still reckon it’s deserving of a mention in the small hope I might encourage its development!

Many years ago I played an Amiga game similar to Atoms [link], a title that was itself based off a C64 game called Overload. The aim is to place atoms on the game grid and eventually make them kersplode into adjacent grids, capturing enemy atoms. If you do this enough and wipe out all opposition, you win. Simple, but addictive – and quite strategic, too. I’m a bit surprised that the concept hasn’t been picked up for a modern platform, and so I did a little happy dance when I unearthed this gem of a WIP.

This style of gameplay has a lot of potential, especially considering the “retro” versions are fairly plain. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this!