27/05/2007 - Odds 'n' Sods

 

If a bit of news is tiny or I just don't care about something enough to write a whole post for it, then this is where it ends up. These are the odds and sods for the period ending the twenty-seventh of may, two thousand and seven. And I stole them all from Tim's Blog.

Fraxy gets yet another update. And once again the author hasn't bothered fixing the broken camera, the terrible mouse control which means you never shoot where you really want to and the reliance on an energy bar because the bullet patterns and enemy behaviours haven't been properly designed. It's a pity really as the central concept of the game is superb, like mechano for nerds. Well, a particular subset of nerds. Still, it's an arena shooter so I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before someone rips it off and does it better.

Are you listening, Mr Incitti?

Here we see the player in his natural habitat: the middle of a fiery explosion.

EO community, a group of people who make original indie games have just released a bunch of new screenshots. Firstly Wolverine's latest project is a lovely retro looking platform game which as yet doesn't have a name. But I hear that it's in rude health from a programming standpoint so hopefully this'll be a project which makes it to full term, rather than ending up in a backstreet dumpster along with Eagle's Nest, Hero 2 and any foetuses who's DNA tested positive for being ginger.

I didn't have to resize this image and so it looks just cracking here.
And there are even more pixel-perfect images on Wolverine's thread on Retro Remakes!

Secondly, Ultimortal has posted up a new shot of Iiji, which he's still beavering away on. I remember playing a demo of Iiji ages ago before Daniel inexplicably removed it from the internet and I hope he's streamlined the controls because it had a lot of potential but suffered from Flashback syndrome, where you spend the first five minutes trying to remember which button does what and accidentally shooting things you meant to pick up.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't resize palettised images.
See the original as it was meant to be on Ultimortal's blog.

Thirdly PugFugly has released a montage of shots from Return To Sector 9, his top-down space-ship based shoot 'em up. In an effort to keep bandwidth costs down he's only posted thin slices of the screenshots, possibly following in the footsteps of the popular but frugal website just-the-minges.com.

See this image in higher quality on PugFugly's blog.
Plus while you're there check out his profile to see conclusive proof that he's the Numa Numa dude.

And fourthly ChevyRay appears to be working on an isometric action RPG of some kind. I know less than nothing about this project, but that's purely down to my own ignorance and laziness, as ChevyRay has posted scads of information about it in his blog. Anyway whatever it is, it looks a bit like Wulfan on the Speccy, and I loved Wulfan on the Speccy. Even though it was shit.

Actually I just loaded Wulfan and it looked like a pile of pig cocks.
Did you know that pig cocks are corkscrew shaped? I wonder if that's how they make Turkey Twizzlers?

Richard Phipps, who's never happier than when he's remaking Chaos is at it again and has released an initial demo of Chaos Groove. What's different about this latest version, you ask? Well, for a start it uses sprites instead of vectors which will allow Richard to release alternative graphic sets - an exceptionally good idea given that the current graphics are... um... charmingly naive.

The main difference, though, is that it uses 3D accelleration for the graphics meaning that it's chock full of particle effects and swanky transitions, just like all them card games on Vista - man I'm so gonna' get vista now that the cards are all transparent, it's like Microsoft read my mind! While I was drunk! Chaos Groove also has proper path finding meaning that moving your wizard and his creations around isn't a tediously plodding affair any more. It will also include support for new sample packs and extra user-defined spells meaning this could well be the definitive version of Chaos, handily freeing up Richard to remake Laser Squad and Lords Of Chaos next, thank-you-very-much.

You can keep up with the development of Chaos Groove on Richard's absurdly well-updated blog at chaosgroove.wordpress.com.

Aaaaw shit! It's gonna' kick off! That Elf motherfucker has been seeing the Faun's lady behind his back! And hers, if you get my drift! Someone's gonna' get a cap in his ass!

Metanet's sort of ace but also stupidly hard platformer N is coming to the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS and I have no idea how they're going to do it without butchering the original game. N's levels are reliant on being able to see a lot of the screen at once, and the tiny wee resolution of the DS and PSP is going to cause real problems for some of the level designs with leaps of faith all over the shop. Either they're going to have to redesign all the levels so they don't have those wonderfully huge leaps in them or they're going to have to zoom out so far that your control is compromised.

This seems a very odd choice of game to stick on the portable systems, but then again some idiot thought people would pay thirty dollars to play Linerider on their DS. Of course that hasn't been released yet so we don't know whether it'll be a surprise success, but gazing into my crystal ball I see a lot of Nintendo DS carts joining the Atari VCS ET ones in a hole in Arizona, along with whichever fuckwit commissioned Linerider DS in the first place.

An artist's impression of how N+ might look on the Sony PSP.
NB. Mockup is massively exaggerated, critically biased and thoroughly unprofessional.

Bob Fearon's love affair with glowing vectors continues apace with several micro-screenshot-avatars of his latest game having appeared on his blog. The game, which is only known by it's pseudonym of Project M.F.O.R. at the moment is probably going to be a shoot 'em up. I mean I'm just guessing here, but I feel I'm on fairly safe ground given that Bob loves shoot 'em up so much, that he even plays crap like Tempest.

Anyhoo, I'm sure we're all very much looking forward to finding out more about it. Of course when I say we, I'm not including myself. To be honest I'm only mentioning the game as a courteosy and to avoid having my eyes scratched out by him on IRC.

Here we see the complete set of 8 avatars. The first one is available at the introductory price of £1.95 with subsequent ones costing just £6.95 each (inc p&p).After your first purchase you are under no commitment not to buy any more.

Finally, Craig Forrester - known as Ishi on the retro remakes forums - is apparently on the jammiest university course ever - assuming you ignore Teeside University's 3 year phd in getting wanked off by supermodels. Once again he's getting to make a lovely game as part of his coursework and after knocking out a shoot 'em up last time, he's doing a Doctor Who themed Mario 64 style platformer on this occasion.

I've had a play on it and although it looks like an abstract collection of platforms, it plays very well indeed once you get used to manually handling the camera. I had a lot of fun getting all the way to the top of the level.

For something this early on it's surprisingly great and hopefully it won't be cast aside like a puppy on boxing day once his educational requirements are met because I think it could really go somewhere. It's not often that people make satisfying 3D platformers in the indie scene and so I think that Craig has a moral obligation not to squander this opportunity.

Arsing about a mile in the air is probably how Tom Baker broke his collar bone during serial 4B, The Sontaran Experiment.

Graham