Brandon Boyer

Beatles Hell: No Fun's quarter-note dodger Norwegian Wood

The new best Beatles game that isn't the other one: Montreal's No Fun Games has created Norwegian Wood, the world's first fab-four bullet-hell dodge 'em up.

The point? Escape the synchronized notes escaping from each corner's guitar/bass/sitar/mic as the disembodied head of John Lennon, gaining multipliers the longer you can manage to outwit the notes.

The catch? You'll have to supply your own original MP3, for obvious reasons (and beware the internet's false positives), but once you do, it's a surprisingly engaging experience, complete with an online high score table (of which I've been completely pushed off, after pegging #18 on my first go).

Download the game for PC, Mac and Linux here.

Brandon Boyer

Red 7: the first prototype screenshot of Die Gute Fabrik's swamp-opera Mutatione

It's been a good day for early looks at indie games that have been a bit off the radar, and next is Mutatione, the adventure game from Nils 'Die Gute Fabrik' Deneken, whose original concept image (embedded again below) surprisingly but rightly received a lot of positive attention on its first posting.

While there's still not much more to glean from the image above, Deneken leaves the following comments on the game, and is very much precisely speaking my language with its outside inspirations, and introduces its new heroine:

The game mechanics remind me a lot of the 2D Prince of Persia, Flashback or the polygon classic Another World. I just love those games. Anyways, for Mutatione we try to have a stronger focus on the story and the mood of the game, especially when it comes to sound and music.

The team, now six-strong and already plugging away for the past two months, is looking for more funding for future development -- Deneken will only say that much of the "development speed of the game" rests solely on that, and that he "hopes to work on Mutatione a lot more..."

Brandon Boyer

Abandon all ware: Bethesda release Elder Scrolls II as free download

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the franchise, Bethesda is offering The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall as a free download, the first game in the series that would set the first-person/open-world tone later popularized by Morrowind and Oblivion.

They've made no attempt to update the game for Vista/XP compatibility, which is actually for the best: the game requires DOSBox, which now runs on a variety of platforms. Skip (or at least only lightly refer to) the frightfully technical installation guide (pdf) they've included: frontends like D-Fend on the PC, and Boxer for the Mac are going to be your best friends here.

Brandon Boyer

Adventuretime approaches: pre-orders open for Amanita's Machinarium

Apparently neglected by more than just me over the holiday weekend: Samorost creators Amanita Design have opened pre-orders for their IGF winning PC/Mac followup Machinarium -- due for release in October -- and are offering a soundtrack EP and wallpaper pack as an early bonus.

Think of it as Amanita paying you the $3 discount to listen to the game's music early, and you'll see that there's no reason to not support them now for your inevitable download later. [via infinitelives]

Brandon Boyer

Dead pixels: Florian Hufsky's micro/massive wargame Puit Wars

Like Alpinist, one indie development I've been keeping a very quiet but steady eye on is Florian '1000points' Hufsky's micro-skirmish blowout Puit Wars, which he succinctly and comprehensively describes as a "world-exploration story-driven arcade-action-platformer rts-townbuilding and space-exploration game." Something for everyone, then.

Do I have any grasp of what's going on in that video above? Not especially, and yet, with every passing in-progress screenshot posted to Hufsky's work blog, I find myself minding less and less, and am incrementally more willing to put my trust in his pixel-sculpting hands. It helps that Hufsky is co-developer of the widely ported (and wildly IP confounding) four-player party game Super Mario Wars -- it also helps that Hufsky realizes, as I've suspected all along, that Aesop Rock should be scoring many, many more games (Fight Night 4 aside).

Brandon Boyer

8-bit VJs rejoice: Open Emu lets you control games with audio, MIDI

Very well spotted by friends of Offworld Create Digital Motion is this new modular emulation system for Macs that -- while performing all of emulation's standard grey-market duties -- is most notable for being able to add real time effects to the playback -- both visual and mechanically.

CDM lists its most important features:

* High-quality OpenGL scaling, multithreaded playback, and other optimizations * Audio or MIDI actually plays the game (and can also be used to make the game line up with music) * Play multiple ROMs at the same time * Real-time 3D effects, image processing - and route game controllers to those effects

Hit their full breakdown for example instructional videos, and be sure to ping us back to let us know what you're doing with it.

Open Emu: Free Game Emulation on Mac, Quartz Composer - Even VJ with Games [Create Digital Motion]

Brandon Boyer

Offworld Weekend Giveaway: Windosill & Space Invaders Extreme

In celebration of the now online playable (as opposed to the original downloadable) version of Patrick Smith's fantastic surreal adventure Windosill, the ongoing greatness of Backbone and Taito's Xbox Live Arcade version of Space Invaders Extreme, and partially because I've simply got codes to spare, let's have a weekend giveaway.

I'll make it easy, this time: at any point from now until let's say noon CST Monday morning, simply send me the following message on twitter: "I wanna be invaded. @brandonnn http://is.gd/10fzR" or "I do wanna see it at my Windosill. @brandonnn http://is.gd/10fzR" to specify which game you'd like (click either message to auto-generate the tweet, all due sincere apologies to both The Ramones and Arcade Fire).

I'll pick two people at random for Space Invaders Extreme, and three people for Windosill and send the codes from there. Note that while the Windosill codes will work worldwide, the SIE codes are available for North America only. Good luck!

Brandon Boyer

Youth's playground gets wider: Nokia's Reset Generation comes to Mac, Linux, Kongregate

This may be the happiest and most unexpected news I'll run all day: back in December in my Offworld 20 list -- compiling the best games of 2008 -- I noted a still-too-little-played game from Nokia and Red Lynx, Reset Generation, the flagship title of Nokia's relaunched N-Gage game service efforts.

Even as many months on, it's still a hard game to aptly describe: I suggest my more concise efforts over at Edge Online for that, but what you do need to know here is that this many months on there's still nothing like it on the market, and it still remains as vibrant and essential as it was back then.

And now, finally and surprisingly, Nokia's updated the Java player to support both Macs and Linux, who classically were barred from the experience, and copied the game onto web-portal of choice, Kongregate, as well.

If you play anything this week, make it this game: it's wonderfully familiar and deliberately obscure all at once, but it's a fantastic design lesson in perfectly balanced quick-draw strategy.

As a bonus, and in celebration, game music remix clearinghouse ocremix.com has just posted a new contest to have your way with 8-Bit Weapon's soundtrack to the game, with prizes including a fully loaded Nokia phone equipped with the mobile version of the game (which I've still kept around specifically for late-night pre-sleep sessions), and T-shirts and CDs from the Weapon, including the previously mentioned sample and loop CD just released by Sony.

Reset Generation [Nokia, Kongregate page]

Brandon Boyer

Time-shifting platformer Braid released for the Mac

Console-less and PC-less Mac user still waiting for your chance to play Number None's time-shifting platformer Braid? The wait is over: Penny Arcade Adventure devs Hothead have just announced the release of the game to their digital download service Greenhouse, alongside a free demo.

Braid [Greenhouse, Number None]

Tom Armitage

Something For The Weekend: Plants Vs Zombies

This weekend, I will mostly be playing Popcap's excellent new Plants vs Zombies.

That's not what I'm planning to play. What I'm planning is: ploughing on through the excellent Chronicles of Riddick; having just acquired a Wii after all this time, I'm hoping to dive back into Metroid Prime 3 and the sublime Super Mario Galaxy; and checking out Tale of Tales' The Path, now that a Mac port is available (as previously reported on Offworld).

Things won't go according to plan, though: the siren song of zombies, clamouring for brains, will lure me back to my garden.

It's hard not to have escaped the casual-games juggernaut that is Popcap, following the success of their previous titles, such as Bejeweled, Zuma, and Peggle. Plants Vs Zombies continues their tradition of making finely crafted, perfectly balanced, and maddeningly addictive games.

Plants Vs Zombies is Popcap's take on Tower Defence. I am not the greatest fan of Tower Defence games - even the delightful Fieldrunners. They're fiddly, require a great deal of information to be processed at once, and demand increasingly precise interactions as the playing field fills with tiny turrets. For something that is supposedly strategic, they seem to descend into motor-control tests all too quickly.

Popcap take all that and throw it away, reducing the genre to a skeleton: defending a house against zombie attackers, with limited resources and limited space on your lawn. No building mazes of little turrets here; there are up to five "rows' for enemies to walk down and you to build on. The play-field clears after every level. There's only one resource -- sunlight -- and it has to be gathered by hand. The various plants at your disposal are, like all the game's graphics, large, clear, and beautifully drawn. There's no "upgrading" of turrets; each plant has a unique function to perform, and all have strengths and weaknesses, which usually come down to balancing power against the cost to build and the time it takes before you can build another.

New plants and capabilities are added very slowly - one per level at most. You're never overwhelmed with choice. Even once your repertoire of plants is bulging, the game keeps that in check by limiting you to taking six different types of seeds to battle. And then, just when you think you've got the whole thing sussed... it throws night levels into the mix, where there's no sunlight to restock your supplies, but where fungi come into their own (as they don't have any need for sunlight). There's a lot more depth to Plants Vs Zombies than you might expect from a casual game, but that depth is meted out slowly and carefully. It has to be, given how useful the help screen is:

Popcap are well-known for their attention to their craft; Plants Vs Zombies has been in the pipeline for quite a while, but it's clearly not been released until it's absolutely ready, and the Popcap attention to detail shows. Plants Vs Zombies is really, really good. Like all Tower Defence games, it can get repetitive, but it's not designed for long periods of play. It's much better suited to frequent short bursts, and the charming character design and inventive array of zombies ensures that it's never long after a play-session before you're double-clicking on it again.

Plants Vs Zombies is available now for PC and Mac as direct download from Popcap, as well as on Steam and other services; it's currently only $9.99 on Steam, which is a steal. If you're anything like me, you'll be stumping up the second the hour-long free trial is up. And then not playing very much else. Whatever you choose to play, have a fun weekend, Offworlders; what's in your gaming future for the next two days?

Plants Vs Zombies [PopCap]

Brandon Boyer

Bread and cream: Tale of Tales' The Path hits Macs

So it's been some weeks since Tale of Tales' Red-Riding-Hood-via-coming-of-age-horror game The Path first hit the digital marketplace, and I haven't said a word about it since my IGF roundup, based on a build from a year earlier.

That's not an intentional snub, it's simply logistics, with my main PC now so horribly outdated it suffers under the weight of a Plants Vs. Zombies or a Today I Die, let alone anything taxingly 3D.

But those days might now be behind me, as Tale of Tales has just announced that The Path has just been released for the Mac -- which hopefully will keep the MacBook happy -- and alongside it, they've released their lengthiest and most 'traditional' trailer to date, which gives you just about everything you need to see to understand why it's quickly become such a critical darling.

The Path for Mac is NOW available! [Tale of Tales]

Brandon Boyer

Garden of the Dead: PopCap release Plants vs. Zombies demo

The time is now: after a long procession of teases and trailers, there's less than 24 hours left until PopCap officially unleashes the zombie throngs on your unsuspecting plants, and the company has opened downloads for the demo version of the game, alongside a discount code for those that order directly through PopCap themselves.

Sign up for the demo download location through PopCap's official game home for the Mac/PC demo and code.

Plants vs. Zombies home [PopCap]