PREVIEW: Wildhollow!

October 30th, 2009

Our next preview is a game called Wildhollow by KarjaSoft.  Now they bill this as an adventure game however it’s not strictly a traditional old school “graphic adventure”.  It seems to have some simulation type elements as well, such as breeding animals and stuff.  It is, from the looks of it, point and click though.  I’ll have to be honest here, as much as I hate anime and manga, this actually graphically looks on point for the style, and the backgrounds look pretty good too.

Here’s a teaser video for you:

You can read more about it after the dotted line.

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Bloom – Flower to the Power of Cute!

October 28th, 2009

Oct28 Every once in a thousand years a game comes along that redefines the meaning of cute!  This is not really that game.  Although it is cute.  It involves flowers, but not necessarily hippies as far as I can tell.  It is a platformer, although it’s not scrolling.  It is actually another game from Spell of Play, but it’s completely opposite of T.W.T.P.B.  The one, the only….BLOOOOOOOOM!  The totally awesome game about picking flowers…or not.  Okay, okay, I’m not actually picking on Bloom and this is not going to be a negative review.  I just meant the or not part if you didn’t really like picking flowers, or if you aren’t a girl.  Most girls like picking flowers, so you may think it’s awesome if you’re a girl.  Bloom is your typical platform-jumper-collect-things-get-to-the-exit game.  However it’s quite interesting.  It’s fun (if somewhat frustrating, but more on that later), it’s nice looking, almost-retro-quality-but-not-quite.  The music is calming as well as the sounds.  It makes me think of the original Ray-man a bit (in the sound department).  Would I buy it (if I could) ?  You betcha.  Actually I’m quite liking the few spell of play games I’ve already played.  Maybe we’ll see more reviews of them in the future.  Anyways if you want to know more, please read after watching this video of the game in action.

You can read more here.  Please I need all the eyes I can get, read the whole thing!

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10 interesting links

October 26th, 2009

Refrag.com – A personal website of a pro game developer, that still has time to work on hobby games.

Interview with Cliff Harris of Positech Games (remember the video I linked to last week showing a frame being rendered of Gratuitous Space Battles, yeah that was Positech) on indievision.org

Mode 7 Games co-head Paul Taylor discusses how to build buzz around your game so your independent game can become known on Gamasutra.

Juuso tries to list some of his ideas on why Garry’s Mod is the most successful Indie product in Steam and it’s not even technically a game, or at least the way Juuso puts it, on gameproducer.net

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software jots down a few notes on his blog, The Bottom Feeder, about the “gold rush” of iPhone apps, according to him, the only way to really make money in the long run is to make non-trivial games.

Game Set Watch has an interview with the developers of the Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom about to come out on Xbox Live Arcade.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford thinks Valve is exploiting people through Steam “in a way that’s not totally fair” gamesindustry.biz reports.

Maciej Biedrzycki, who is co-founder of Codeminion Development Studios, apparently found out recently that Codeminion’s game Stone Loops was removed do to Mumbo Jumbo complaining about Stone Loops stealing look and feel from Luxor, infringing on copyright, and confusing customers and explains about it on his blog Casual Games Harmony.

Gamesindustry.biz also reports on a a new Canadian study about how impulse purchases account for 40% of game sales by NPD.

Try wearing Mario’s (yeah you know… right Super Mario Bros Mario) Red Cap by making a paper-craft version of it, is a Luigi version next? from Paperkraft.net