Whoa. Check out this post on metafilter by archagon. It’s a huge list of indie platformers, that’s bound to include some of your favourites (N & The Passage, for me) as well as many you’ve never heard of. Some of these have mac versions, but they’re generally all windows.

Oh Penny Arcade, how many laughs have you given me over the years? The many “ah ha!” moments of clarity wherein I felt such a kinship with my fellow gamers. Penny Arcade understood the woes, the worries, the awesomeness that is playing. So when they decided to make an actual game my heart and soul were all a flutter.

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1 wasn’t just fun to say, it was to be the first installment in the great Penny Arcade game franchise! Excitement! The beauty of Gabe’s visuals, the wit of Tycho’s words! What could be more titillating than that? Unfortunately, the masters of gaming comedy have missed the mark for me. Just ever so slightly, mind you, but still I have no urge to continue the gaming part of their game. I do, however, wish to continue their story and the way in which it is told. A conundrum to be sure, let me explain further.

I started the game and immediately became all a tingle, the music, the beautiful art, the sexy, slinky panel to panel movement! The narrator’s voice reminded me of John Hurt and I was taken back to the days of Jim Henson’s Storyteller. I says to Toku I says, “I want to watch this movie!” How those words would haunt me an hour later…

The game lets you design your own character, there only about three options per section (head, face, body, clothes) which disappointed me until the game began and the girl I had created was all animated and sexy fine! I was delighted! I extrapolated that they needed limited options to be able to animate all the variations.

You start out in your lil’suburban street raking leaves and listening to the narrator explain your purpose (he is quite vague) when a gaint robot (a certain fruit defiling machine) stomps on your house and runs away, being followed by a dashing pair of 20’s styled rogues: Tycho and Gabe.

You must follow the two and learn the rules of the game whilst doing so. You continue with the typical opening cans and such to get items, and then you learn combat as you battle a bunch of wee fruit…defilers. This is where the game begane to lose me. You have your basic attack, your special attack, and then items to use against foes all on different buttons, when you build up enough energy on your attacks you hit the corresponding button, target an enemy and attack. With special attacks once you select the enemy you go into kinda like a mini game “hit this at that time thing” which if you complete you get max damage on your attack. Special attacks vary between your character and your support characters. You can block enemy attacks at the beginning of their move, but I wasn’t fast enough for this and always got hit…

Anyway, when you have a whole team of characters it’s cool because you can rapidly switch between each character mid attack, which means you could have all of your characters and support characters attacking pretty much at the same time.

The rest of the gameplay is very much run along in this direction clearing enemies, collecting stuff, etc. It feels extremely linear which is kinda a let down in such a beautifully designed world, you really wany to explore the area with a free camera, not locked off and only facing one way.

Ack, that’s the thing here, I kept playing thinking “okay we’re building up to something really cool, keep playing and you’ll get to it” and then I was like “wait…this IS it…this is the game…bawls!” I had so wanted to play differently. I love the story and like I said I really want to just like watch the story, but the game…I don’t want to play the game. One thing I didn’t like, even with the awesome story, was in dialogue mode there is no music just this creepy static sound in the background. It’s slightly disturbing because you’re in conversations for so long it’d be nice to have some ambient music about…

So I will play the game more thoroughly on the weekend, I just really wish I could watch this as an awesome movie. I’m sure the voices of Gabe and Tycho wouldn’t be hard to cast at all. I love the artwork, I love the script, I just don’t like the game…It feels beneath what it should be for a Penny Arcade game. If only Insomniac made a Penny Arcade game…that would be totally perfect. Almost too perfect…Mmm…perfection…

This game has been making the rounds the last little while and is super fun, super cute, and super addictive. Just burn the rope, and have fun!

The music is enthralling…to say the least!

Check out Crayon Runner while you’re there too just for giggles at the crayon-ness of it all.

My roomate showed this to me on the weekend. Adorable and super fun looking! Developed by Montréal based Kokoromi, Fez is a “2D game in a 3D world”. So far I believe it is just for PC but with all the buzz since the recent GDC, and the fact that it runs on Mircosoft’s XNA, it’s probably gonna bust out on Live as well.

Regardless of release, this game is a bright happy joy on a Monday morning and says look forward to the future and rotate your perspective!

Wonderful!

Yup, Gabe and Tycho partner with Hothead Games (the Vancouver studio doing the Penny Arcade game) to create Greenhouse Games, a game distribution site. The idea is for the webcomic gods to point their massive following toward quality indie games, not just their own projects, but you can read all about it youself in this Wired interview.

We’ve been talking about JRPGs a lot lately, so this seems topical: a review of Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. Story summary:

Protagonist (and former NBA star) Charles Barkley is a haunted, troubled man with a dark past, but a noble heart. He lives in the future dystopia of Neo New York – a fearsome place where basketball has been abolished and most of his friends slain – trying, as best he can, to make a life for himself and his son Hoopz… but first he must dodge the authoritarian intentions of Michael Jordan, who believes Barkley to be responsible for the civilisation-wrecking Chaos Dunk.

Here’s a trailer.

So when Nadine and I were actually at the N+ launch party, I didn’t play the game. I had tried N on the website and enjoyed it but it was hard, so hard I figured I’d embarrass myself playing it in public. Last week, Mags was over ostensibly to play Rock Band, but we decided to give N+ a shot first. An hour later, we were yet to pick up the guitar and drums and continue our band Gunt’s glorious world tour.

Which is to say that this little ninja can handily compete in entertainment value with the big boys.

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… is pretty good and gives a sense of what it was like to be there.

Also in the GDC news pile: the sequel to one of the weirder games of last year , the RPG-puzzle game Puzzle Quest, is set in space. How awesome is that?

My new fave blog has a good writeup of last week’s GDC announcement from Microsoft, the xna Developer’s Club, which Redmond was positioning as ‘YouTube for games’. (Sure, if YouTube cost $100 and a computer science degree to join.) A little update on WiiWare, too. Neither is exactly revolutionary, but it’s a step in the right direction – opening the consoles up to indie developers just a little bit more.

Hipster, Please’s latest podcast has a terminator-transformer-themed track from alter ego Snake Eyes. Plus a lot of other awesome nerd music tracks.

Third, kind of on the topic, what do you guys think of the Terminator series? It’s on my mind as I watched a couple episodes today. I don’t think it’s Lost caliber let alone The Wire caliber, but I’m enjoying what they’re doing nonetheless. Hell, they namechecked the singularity! (also I just found that there was? is? an ARG going on based on it)

Fourth: there is a gaping hole in my giant robot knowledge base and its name is: Gundam. Let’s say I want to experience some of the magic. Where would I start?

The Game Developer’s Conference is underway, and lots of newsworthy things are going down, and many more will happen before it’s over. Kurzweil is speaking tomorrow, for instance. Gamasutra has a writeup of Mare Sheppard’s postmortem of N+, also. And a good place to follow along is waxy.org, as Andy Baio is using his new full-time blogger status to attend the conference and write up stuff of interest. His piece on indie games is worth reading, for instance.

Last week, Nadine and I attended the launch party for N+, the Xbox Live version of N, Metanet Software’s kickass ninja platforming flash game (which you can get right here) N+ is coming to the ‘Arcade on wednesday. It’s also in development for the DS and PSP.

The party was at the Gladstone Hotel. There was a little play area for trying out the game. Why not experience it in video form, it’s like you’re really there!

And then read on for the interview with the creators of N and N+, the charming Reigan Burns and Mare Sheppard. Symbolically anyways, it’s robots interviewing ninjas.

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So this site just started a up a while ago and already has a bunch of reengineered classic games up and running.

From the creators:
By “sabotaging” classic hits weekly, Retro Sabotage aims to entertain gamers but also to shed a different light on commonly accepted gaming patterns.

I have to say the results so far are quite satisfying!

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Sounds good, don’t it? Well, you can do it: Offroad Velociraptor Safari. It runs in full 3D in your browser window, which I didn’t even know was possible (but I don’t get out much). You ride around in a bouncy jeep pulling stunts and catching raptors. Go play it, it’s kickass.

It’s by Flashbang Studios, “a deliberately small independent video game developer.” (via Rock Paper Shotgun)

is a game in development that “has the potential to change the way you think about reality”, according to Arthouse Games’ exclusive preview.

At Lost Garden, an idea for a combination music creation / strategy game, based on a dream.

I love ideas like this. I like any music game, especially ones that don’t involve mindless “click when I tell you” gameplay, and I love games that combine genres, a la Puzzle Quest. There is beauty in the combination of things.

The MTV Multiplayer Blog has a great interview with Jonathan Blow, designer of the upcoming game Braid:

There are things you understand very well because you learned them via activities you do all the time. Let’s say, driving a car … There’s a certain feel to what it’s like driving a car, how things accelerate and slow down, how that feels, how turning happens, what the higher-level flow is as traffic lights go green or red, etc… I could write a whole novel full of words about what it feels like to drive a car with 10 years of experience, but those words wouldn’t be very effective at really communicating what it’s like to someone who never did it. It’s just something you have to do. I am going to call this intimate state of familiarity driving-ness, and apply it to other things…

Imagine a future where you have that driving-ness experience for a whole wealth of things — geopolitical negotiations, or marital infidelity and deceit, or calculus. And you didn’t get that by running a bunch of tedious programs in school, but rather, by engaging in activities created by skilled authors, that were compelling in their own right? If everyone had the same intimate understanding of propaganda dissemination as they do of the way buddy cops interact in buddy cop films, would we be at war in Iraq? Who would be President of the USA right now? etc.

This is part of the reason why I feel games can be important. Should be important.

Blow makes many other interesting points, so go read.