The Humble Indie Bundle - which lets players pay what they want for a selection of five indie games - has returned for a third time.
Included in the promotion are 2008 IGF winner Crayon Physics Deluxe, Indie Game Challenge winner and IGF finalist Cogs, Terry Cavanagh's excellent VVVVVV, Russian melée combat title Hammerfight, and Indiecade finalist and WiiWare game And Yet It Moves. Purchasing the games separately would cost some $50.
Electronic Arts has reported growth in profit and revenue for its first fiscal quarter ended June 30.
Net profit for the three months totalled $221 million, up from $96 million during the same period a year earlier, while revenue rose 23 per cent to $999 million.
Xbox 360 and PS3 software were the biggest revenue drivers for the publisher, bringing in a combined total of $653 million, while PC titles generated $205 million and mobile games $57 million.
Another World creator Eric Chahi’s latest is a surprisingly gentle game, given that its vocabulary is built of eruptions and tsunamis, and its founding principle is the chance to see nature working at triple speed. Oceans boil, mountains crumble and, somewhere in the distance, you might just hear the wails of some disciples that you’ve accidentally set on fire, but you’re pleasantly removed from it all – far too high up to feel the true sting of failure, far too powerful to see disaster as anything other than a fascinating setback.
QuBit is a great racing and crashing score attack game, with plenty of obvious inspirations without being quite like any of them. You control the titular cube as it travels into the screen, accompanied by an increasing number of floating cubes. Crashing into crystals that match the colour of the floating cubes dims them. Dim all the cubes around QuBit and that's a combo, and one step closer to the end of that wave. But crash into the wrong colour crystal or run out of energy and the game's over.
Talk about a classic: Z was released in 1996, and turned out to be the last great game from The Bitmap Brothers, the Wapping-based developer responsible for Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine. A realtime strategy game with semi-automated combat and economy, Z casts the player as a disembodied general constantly sending new troops to new battles, and watching what happens.
Perhaps we're cynics, but Reckless Getaway looks like a game made in anticipation of a license that never happened. It has a lot that's familiar, but what gives things away is the car – a 1970 Dodge Challenger, exactly as seen in Driver: San Francisco.
Perhaps we're cynics, but Reckless Getaway looks like a game made in anticipation of a license that never happened. It has a lot that's familiar, but what gives things away is the car – a 1970 Dodge Challenger, exactly as seen in Driver: San Francisco.
As part of our recently published feature on the complexities of localisation, we asked Iris Ludolf of translation/localisation specialist Partnertrans what advice she would offer a developer setting out to localise its games for overseas regions in today’s market.
"Why is Joe Danger such a typical fat, ugly American?” Of all the anticipated cultural and language problems that taking a western game to Japan could have thrown up, Sean Murray, managing director of Hello Games, was still surprised at the question posed by the journalists at Famitsu on his visit to Tokyo last year.
Paul Wedgwood, CEO and game director of Brink developer Splash Damage, has weighed in on the crunch debate, telling us that his studio goes to great lengths to ensure that excessive overtime is the exception rather than the rule.