Binary Joy

GameTunnel - Game of the Year Awards

Around this time of year is when people start producing their Top 10 games of the year lists and best game awards etc. So I’ll be posting a few links that I’ve found over the next few days (along with my own summary of games that I’ve enjoyed in 2007).

GameTunnel is a well respected site that reviews “Indie” games as opposed to the more “casual/portal” type games, and they manage to find some pretty decent innovative games (and some well done clones).

They recently picked their top 5 games in the following categories: Sports, Casual, Sim, Action, Adventure, …

The Great Tree - First Impressions

Reflexive Arcade have just released their latest game The Great Tree. It has a similar vibe to Wik & The Fable of Souls due to the graphics, fairy theme and music, yet the gameplay is more like Feeding Frenzy (well only slightly). I played the preview yesterday and thought it was pretty neat but I need to play it some more before giving my final judgement.

[photopress:greattree1.jpg,thumb,alignleft]The game has some great looking hand-drawn art cut scenes and the in-game graphics consist of a really nice rendered background over which 3D rendered sprites fly about, plus there …

Derek Yu - Aquaria interview

The Aquaria promo initiative is in full swing and recently Derek managed to get an interview with 1up about the development of the game.

It’s probably most interesting for developers, which would include me, so I’m posting it anyway :) The interview being by 1up should give Aquaria a nice bit of extra publicity. Whatever Jakes first impressions - I think the game is a big step for indies and I wish the BlitBlot team well (even if they don’t respond to my email asking for a review copy).

Aquaria - First Impressions

Well getting hold of the demo proved to be a challenge because the bit-blot site was down (probably overloaded), but it seems to be fine now.

My first impressions in a nutshell are “It looks great but it’s fairly boring”. Now I’ll explain a little bit…

[photopress:aquaria_1.jpg,thumb,alignleft]You play as Naija who is a female humanoid underwater creature on some kind of journey of exploration (metaphysical). The game struck me as vaguely similar to the classic Ecco the Dolphin which I loved on the Sega MegaDrive years ago. You basically swim around a seemingly endless maze of underwater …

Aquaria Trailer

In the last day before the release of the game Bit Blot have thrown out one final Aquaria trailer.

The game will be released within the next 24 hours. Here’s hoping it lives up to the hype.

In case you missed it before you can catch up on their other previews and updates on this Aquaria post from Wednesday.

Binary Joy