Hot on the heels of GET LAMP follows another film on a minority segment: Indie Game is set to be released next year.
Indie Game: The Movie
Game of the Week: Plants vs. Zombies
I bought PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies for the ipod Touch to serve as in-flight entertainment on the trip to Japan in April. While the game was definitely a good timewaster, it took me almost half a year to finish.
Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense game where the player uses toys at his disposal (different plants and plant paraphernalia) to stave off invading enemies (zombies).
The game starts off simple, with peashooters against slowly shambling zombies. But the evolving enemies (packing anything from steel buckets to zamboni machines) demand higher grade weaponry. And that is indeed provided – beating each level in the adventure mode puts a new plant at the player’s disposal.
Visually the game falls into the candy-colored-cuteness camp. Even the undead are given a pleasant coating on top of their festering skin. Tom Savini-style visuals would hardly have led to the massive sales the game has enjoyed.
Indeed, the game has been a great success for the kings of casual gaming. It’s been ported to quite a few platforms, with a version on the XBLA surfacing in September. No sequel has been announced yet, but it’s just a matter of time before a new horde of the living dead walks onto the consoles and computers.
Plants vs. Zombies features achievements on all platforms. Achievements that demand quite a bit of extra playtime after the adventure mode is completed, as only a few will get picked up during the course of the story.
A selection of minigames (including zombie-bowling) round out an entertaining package well worth the couple of dollars it costs.
How to annoy customers 101
The Facebook version of Scrabble has a pretty tight grip on the “bad UX of the year”. An unavoidable 30 second wait with a small and inappropriate advertisement is not really the way to encourage returning to the game often. Double annoyment demerits on account of the game status not being visible outside the application.
History of graphic adventures
Graphic Adventures, the Book is a book culled off wikipedia and supplemented with spot interviews and major editing of original content.
It’s a subject dear to me, so this will probably be my first plunge into Lulu-published books.
Guybrush Threepwood 2.0, part 2
Yay! The second “special edition” of a Monkey Island game has finally been given a release date.
The carefully crafted remake of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge debuts on too many platforms to count on 7.7.
I’ll be picking it up on Xbox 360.
Lost as a Lucasarts adventure game
Pure genius. And probably quite a bit better than the less than great Via Domus game from a couple of years back.
Akihabara
Akihabara is a seemingly very powerful javascript toolkit that allows creation of fluid arcade games playable in the browser without flash.
Monkey Island 2 on Xbox 360
Yay, the rumor’s proven true. Monkey Island 2, the Lucasarts classic from is set to appear in the summertime.
Steamy indeed
Now I have to start remembering my half a decade old and since unused password.
Rumors of LeChuck's demise exaggerated indeed
Monkey Island 2 is on its way to modern systems.
And there was much rejoicing.
Sudden steaminess on the horizon
According to RockPaperShotgun Valve Corporation’s Steam content delivery system is about to arrive on OS X. Or on the iPhone/Touch/iPad. Or it might be just a red herring in the ongoing alternate reality game that centers on Portal 2.
Considering the rather poor state of game offerings in local stores, even with a vastly shorter list of Steamed games with Mac versions available than on the windows box, this is a very welcome piece of news indeed.
And the arrival of Portal and/or Half-life 2 at the same time would not be raising too many eyebrows either.
Civ V
Firaxis announces Civilization V for the fall 2010.
Worrisomely enough “on PC” only, even though the previous parts were released on Mac OS X as well.
Elite turns 25
Elite turns 25 years, and is celebrated with origami designs of the ships.
Game of the Week: First Person Tetris
First Person Tetris is yet another take on the most famous Russian computer game. It’s a flash rendition of the classic, where the biggest difference is the fact that the whole world spins around the falling tetromino.
A /. triplet
Interesting pieces of news via slashdot.org:
- Printers cost less than replacement ink.
- Bad Code Offsets (to stave off guilt, like carbon offsets).
- A Taiwanese man has received all achievements in World of Warcraft.
Hooked on the feelies
Gladly spent extra 10€ on the collector’s edition of Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins.
After all, it’s been way too long since games included cloth maps in the package.
ASCIIpOrtal released
A liberal ASCII rendition of Portal is out. Versions exist for OS X, Windows and Linux.
Sprain your brain.
Images would spoil the surprise.
Return of M.U.L.E.
Yay, Dani (née Dan) Bunten’s legendary M.U.L.E. will return as a remake, with an iPhone version to follow.
Game of the Week: Canabalt
There’s been one-button flying games before. I was quite thoroughly hooked by the PalmOS version of SFCave back in the day.
An one-button platform game is a newer arrival.
Canabalt is definitely not a game with great longevity, but an interesting concept, and a great way to while away a murderously boring conference call.
8-bit trip
Retrogaming. Lego. Chiptune soundtrack.
It’s all here.
The fruit of 1500 hours of labour.
Stewart Butterfield’s new company, Tiny Speck, has revealed their first product.
Zynga’s 

