Death Game Hotel, White Owls’ VR title that forces players to ante up their body parts before playing games of chance and skill, recently relaunched as a free-to-play title which allows anyone with a Meta Quest helmet to get in on the bloody multiplayer action.
When poker moved largely online, the human element was stripped out of it. No longer were players able to read their opponent, analyzing their body language and tone of voice for cues to the strength of their hands. Suddenly poker, as much a game of psychology as it is of chance, had been reduced to a math problem. Any player armed with a calculator knew their odds of winning any given hand, and the only information they had to base their analysis of the opposition on was the length of time it took them to commit to a move.
HIGH We see the many faces of war through the characters’ stories.
LOW Searching through and replaying the extensive dialogue trees can be tiring.
WTF Why can’t we ask more questions? They’re still there!
After sinking my teeth into the preview for Out of Line, Nerd Monkey’s newest 2D puzzle-platformer, I was captivated by the art style, intrigued by the story, and challenged by the gameplay. Since then, I was fortunate enough to virtually sit down with Lead Art Designer Francisco Santos to get the inside scoop on the game’s development process.
When it comes to sci-fi settings that stretch beyond the stars, it feels like the stories too often land on a spectrum between Star Trek‘s pristine bureaucracy of benevolent space colonialism and the mythopoetic swashbuckling of benevolent space colonialism in Star Wars. Star Dynasties, the latest grand strategy from Iceberg Interactive and Pawley Games, tries to have it both ways by using a galaxy-shaping disaster as the excuse to dive headfirst into the administrivia of intergalactic feudalism, texturing its space colonialism with a tangled web of shadows and political intrigue.
This year at PAX West 2018, I had the chance to sit down with one of my favorite game developers, Hidetaka Suehiro — better known as Swery65. At the show he was promoting his Kickstarted project The Good Life, where a playable demo was on the show floor. Immediately before the show, he also announced a surprise second project, The Missing. We had a brief conversation about these two games as well as other topics with the help of an interpreter onstage at the Unties booth, and here’s what he had to say…
When you think of retro games, you’re probably picturing a pixelated 2D platformer or JRPG. That’s starting to change and Alec Stamos is among the next generation of indie devs aiming to shake things up.
Stamos is one of a new breed of indie devs that have an appreciation for the game industry’s earliest attempts at action and 3D gaming. He explores a world where textures warped along the edges of CRT monitors, polycounts could fit on two hands, and controls were as strange as the games they were built for.
I had the opportunity to wander the exhibition and seminar spaces and talk to developers about their work, which ranges from one-button rhythm games to VR experiments to installation-based, real-world office simulators, complete with computers, file folders, and ringing telephones. In this interview, I talk to Jordan Magnuson, an interactive media artist and gamemaker, who was showing off his political hypertext game Ismael.
With a new location in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, IndieCade celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Yet while the festival has been honoring and promoting indie game development now for ten years, it continues to remain at the cutting edge of art and innovation in the indie game space. The Japanese American National Museum graciously hosted the festival this year, creating a beautiful and reverent backdrop to the already eye-catching indie titles.
I had the opportunity to wander the exhibition and seminar spaces and talk to developers about their work, which ranges from one-button rhythm games to VR experiments to installation-based, real-world office simulators, complete with computers, file folders, and ringing telephones. In this interview, I talk to Justin Bortnick, narrative designer and jack-of-all-trades for Twinbeard Inc., which released Glittermitten Grove about a year ago.