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Few things fill me with as such intense delight as light-than-air combat, and Air Buccaneers is the leading balloon in that race. The delicious remake continues apace, with a new version of the “playable Alpha” available to download, and a chance for free-account folks to win additional premium accounts for themselves in a new challenge. Ludocraft explain: “Today we’ll launch a new, unique 10,000 XP Challenge campaign. During this campaign, players with free accounts can redeem themselves a free Alpha activation key for AirBuccaneers if they manage to gather 10,000 experience points in two weeks. Time starts to run when player logs in to the new 0.45 version for the first time after today. This campaign is valid through April 2012.” Premium accounts secure a copy of the finished game, and get some extra in-game items such as shields and er… birds? Yes.

Trailer below decks!(more…)

Fan-made games rarely see the light of day, but Wing Commander: Saga is a success story that you can play right now. 10 years in the making, it features a full campaign, complete with cut-scenes, all developed in the Freespace 2 engine. It is a standalone game, and doesn't require Freespace 2 ...

Wing Commander Saga isn’t the long-awaited big budget continuation of Chris Roberts’ epic space combat series, but on the plus side, it’s not some Facebook bastardisation of it either. No, it’s a huge, spectacularly ambitious fan-sequel that’s been in development for the last ten years, which combines burning love for the franchise with the Freespace 2 engine to create a brand new, old-school instalment. But can it live up to its name? We jumped in to find out.

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Well well well. After writing about Dead State earlier today, I now discover that the public beta demo for long-awaited Age of Decadence, which is lending its engine to DoubleBear’s RPG, has been released. It would appear that everybody in the world is trying to download it at the moment and I’m probably not going to help matters by doing this but here’s the only working link I’ve found over on RapidShare. Because it’s downloading quite slowly I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet but here’s hoping it’s as good as it looked when Kieron spoke about it in olden times.

It’s all go in the free update business. First The Witcher 2, and now Defender’s Quest, the wonderful indie RPG squad-based tower defense game from Fortress of Doors we’ve covered in the past. Like Geralt, it’ll soon be receiving a totally free Gold update in the near future. These guys have always been keen to offer support befitting of a PC release, and this new update sounds like a meaty serving, starting off with a lovely new art style courtesy of Karen Petrasko and running the gamut through new features, enemies, side quests and replayability in the form of a hugely expanded New Game Plus option.

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Intruder is a forthcoming Unity-powered multiplayer tactical FPS that’s been in development for barely two months from a two man team and I’m already excited. As the team explains in their notes, inspiration is strongly felt from the SWAT series with the mission statement of “stealth and cunning over twitch gameplay”. The tense thinky combat is already on show, even if the build is so alpha nobody can see their own hands yet. What’s getting me so interested this early is how developers Superboss Games are handling doors. Click through for a demonstration video, but remember to check your six.

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You've likely already called out sick today, but just in case, we figured it prudent to remind you that Angry Birds Space is available now.

The game is the first true sequel to the Angry Birds phenomenon, which slingshotted onto hundreds of millions of devices across the globe and became a popular merchandising brand. It's all helped some formerly unknown little Finnish developer become valued in the billions off of one game (now, hopefully, two games).

I post about Kickstarter projects more often than I post about indie bundles, which is alarming and is also the reason I’d pledged not to cover any more of them this week…and yet this may not even be the last such post today. The proposed zombie survival RPG Dead State is a concept that sends shivers down my spine like a gentle caress every time I remember it exists. But then I realise that it doesn’t exist, to me, as anything other than a concept so in some ways I’m caressing myself. Now DoubleBear have announced that they’re considering a Kickstarter, which leads me to ask, what are the criteria you look for when considering a pledge?

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Yesterday, from Pendulo the creators of the Runaway series and The Next Big Thing, is now out. It’s £19.99 direct from the publisher and there’s a trailer below. Of the few companies plugging away at the point and click genre, Pendulo are the one I’m least acquainted with. I’ve seen videos aplenty and even played the first hour or so of the first Runaway but I never felt inspired to continue, let alone to plough through a trilogy. Yesterday has killings, cults, conspiracies and an amnesiac lead character, ideas which haven’t quite managed to send me cartwheeling around the room. In fact, I’ve actually nestled deeper into my chair and begun to grimace slightly. Trailer follows.

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Draw Something developer OMGPOP was purchased by social gaming monolith Zynga today, Zynga announced. No price is disclosed in the announcement release, but the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog is reporting that OMGPOP went for the lofty price of $200 million. Sources with "first-hand knowledge" of the deal detailed it as a combined purchase amount of approximately $200 million between an outright cash transaction of $180 million, and "$30 million or so in employee retention payments." Payday for the Draw Something folks!

Beyond OMGPOP's massively successful, Pictionary-esque iOS and Android game, Draw Something, the New York City-based developer also brings a variety of Flash-based expertise to Zynga. The team will also add around 40 employees to Zynga's swelling numbers - the company repurposed NewToy into Zynga With Friends late in 2010, and did the same with NYC's Area Code in early 2011.

Additionally, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter has become vice prez and general manager of Zynga New York (formerly Area Code).

The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital tech blog is reporting that Draw Something developer OMGPOP was purchased by social gaming monolith Zynga for the lofty price of $200 million. Sources with "first-hand knowledge" of the deal detailed it as a combined purchase amount of approximately $200 million between an outright cash transaction of $180 million, and "$30 million or so in employee retention payments." Payday for the Draw Something folks!

Neither company has confirmed the acquisition as of yet, but Zynga has a conference call in 30 minutes which will contain a "news announcement."

The Electronic Wireless Show is dead. Long live the Rock, Paper, Shotcast.

Brand new! In theory weekly! More confused than ever because we thought conducting it via Skype was a good idea!

Jim, John and Alec are your talking-all-over-each-other hosts in this inaugural Shotcast. Discussed – videogames, mostly. Videogames like Wasteland 2, Diablo III, Mass Effect 3, Rochard, City of Heroes, Sins of A Dark Age, Natural Selection 2 and The Secret World. Also height, hair, crying, hot drinks and why John still can’t accept that he’s a bad healer even after all these years.(more…)

On the move, you see, because all of the games have both desktop, Mac and mobile/tablet versions. It’s like a play on words,or something. Writer stuff. Yeah. Anyway, the latest Humble Indie Bundle – the series of spectacularly successful Pay What You Want game bundles – contains mildly creepy rope-puzzler Zen Bound 2, running and jumping phenomenon Canabalt, clockworky brain-befuddler Cogs, and epic turn-based role-play ‘em up, Avadon: The Black Fortress. To be honest this is the first indie bundle I’ve felt a bit indifferent towards – with the exception of Avadon I can’t really see myself giving much time to any of these games. Still, you get to give money to the EFF and Child’s Play, too, so there’s always that feeling of doing the right thing to help out with those other feelings of indifference.

The UK government’s man at the money-controls, Chancellor George Osbourne, has announced a tax credit for game development. He said: “The film tax credit, protected in our spending review, helped generate over £1 billion of film production investment in the UK last year alone. Today I am announcing our intention to introduce similar schemes for the video games, animation and high-end TV production industries. Not only will this help stop premium British TV programmes like Birdsong being made abroad, it will also attract top international investors like Disney and HBO to make more of their premium shows in the UK. It will support our brilliant video games and animation industries too.”

The details, of course, will be all important. If this is a tax break for mainstream game development then I fear it will mean little, due to there being just a handful of a big studios left in the UK and existing heavy investment in other countries. If, however, it extends to smaller enterprises, then it could make a real difference. I’ll update when we know a bit more.

Rovio has pulled back its mighty slingshot and launched the Angry Birds Space release day trailer onto the internet. We already know you are all calling out sick tomorrow from work and school to play all day, right?

Ah, FMV. It used to be the most exciting thing in the world to watch our PCs spin up interactive movies, but now you can do it in a web-browser. That’s the world Big Finish games are looking to bring FMV-led adventure game Tex Murphy into, a world where various little tricks pulled off using Youtube’s annotations can cobble together an interactive movie. But if the recent Kickstarters have taught us anything, it’s that age-old games with rabid fan-bases and a dream seem are managing to get by. Are there enough people out there looking for a cheesy noir detective? Tex’s Kickstarter won’t start until May 15th as they’re trying to figure out what exactly to offer as various reward tiers, so they’re asking for your input on those. Essentially they’re crowd-sourcing the crowd-sourcing, which seems ridiculously lazy, but if you’re a tiny developer with big dreams you do what you can. Announcement video announcing their announcement is below.(more…)

Morning, Internet. Lovely news from the West: The Banner Saga has been funded on over on Kickstarter. The collective approval of the internet found its way to over $100k in just 48 hours to ensure that the beautiful-looking turn-based RPG with Vikings would find its way into our game collections. This pleases me. Now let’s hope that Stoic – a handful of ex-Bioware staff – can really walk their talk when it comes to game design.

Before we say anything here, make sure you've got a firm grasp on your wallet because it might just jump out of your pocket. The odds are very good that Tex Murphy is coming back in a new game ... funded by Kickstarter. Whoa there! Hang on to that wallet, there's no place to spend your money just yet, kid!

As announced by the trailer above, Big Finish Games indeed has plans to start up a Kickstarter page on May 15, and try to round up fan-based funding for a sixth game in the fondly remembered full-motion video adventure series. What they're asking for right now is ideas on what to offer in the Kickstarter campaign, as well as written or video testimonials from fans extolling the series' virtues, to be delivered to the company's contact page.

On May 15, the page is supposed to go live, and at that point you can donate to your heart's content. Chris Jones, who both designed the games and plays Tex Murphy himself, is obviously on board, because you can see him mugging in character with the latest People magazine right there in the video.

"What Would Peter Molyduex, if he were here right now? We bet he'd kick an a..." and we'll let your twisted little minds fill in the rest of those lyrics. The What Would Molydeux? game jam has turned from a two-city semi-satirical proposition into a 16-city, truly international game jam, running from March 30-April 1.

What Would Molydeux? has developers choose a premise from any of @petermolydeux's brilliant and/or strange game propositions, and create it in 48 hours. It is important to note that Peter Molydeux is not Peter Molyneux, creator of Fable and former Lionhead Studios mastermind, but Molydeux does do a wonderful impression.

Molydeux is hopeful these proposals will see creation during the game jam, but anything from his Twitter is up for grabs. What Would Molydeux? begins at 7 p.m. local time around the world on Friday, March 30.

Preamble alert! The 7-day Roguelike Challenge is not new but this year it has drawn a record number of entries. More than seventy roguelikes were created, by individuals or teams, in the seven days allotted. Back in 2008, when the excellent Fatherhood was an entry, there were only nine successful submissions. I deeply regret that I don’t have time to play seventy roguelikes but that is the truth of it, so I am grateful to Andrew Doull of the stirring Roguelike Radio for providing me with a shortlist. It didn’t stop me playing a few others but it’s always good to know where to start.

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Commissioned to accompany the Brains: The Mind as Matter exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Axon looks a little like flOw, except it’s much more hectic, with short games and high scores.

The game challenges players to grow their neuron as long as possible; climbing through brain tissue, out-competing rival neurons and creating as many connections to distant regions of the brain as they can.

This involves clicking on nodes in an effort to climb higher and higher. A speedy mouse finger is essential as a rapidly shrinking sphere marks the areas that are accessible and once no unclaimed nodes are within it, it’s gameover. Brain freeze. Play it here and read more (silly) below and (clever) here.

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You might think that having more content crammed into its galaxies would make Space Pirates and Zombies more expensive but the addition of the free and bulky Bounty Hunters expansion pack has seen the game go on sale and not just a tiny sale. It’s £1.74 on Steam for two more hours, which is a 75% reduction. It’s available at plenty of other places as well but Steam is the only one that has such a sizable discount. More details on what the expansion includes below.

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All the heroes and villains are coming out to play in the cumbersomely titled Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, or at least a great deal of the heroes and villains created or legally owned by one major comic book publisher. I’d go through the trailer and try to identify as many as I can but I’m already confused as to whether there are several Robins running around or whether it’s the same Robin wearing different puzzle-solving costumes. Wonder Woman and Green Lantern are the only heroes known to be included beyond what we see here but it’s the villains I’m more interested in. Watch the first footage below, enjoy the reassuringly familiar musical themes, and see who you can spot.

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When I think about the golden age of farming, I personally can’t see beyond 1897. Don’t argue. I know the advances of ’98′s “Carrot Injection Engine” revolutionised the speed that a plough could zip across the fields, but force feeding a horse carrot after carrot after carrot lead to the the equine rights riots and the infamous “Neigh More” speech. After that, human and horse relations hit an all time low. That’s probably why Agrar Simulator – Historical Farming focuses not on classic horse and plough elegance, but instead looks to the tractorial advances of the 1950s all the way to the heady days of the ’70s.(more…)

Oh boy. Here’s my theory – throughout the year there will be numerous Kickstarter projects that people become excited about, pledge money to and then look forward to. Fatigue will set in due to the number of awesome concepts being put forward by wonderful people, but it isn’t fatigue alone that will end this fascination. My belief is that one day the perfect Platonic ideal of the Kickstarter project will appear, a game desired so long and so hard by so many that all money will be absorbed by it. In an interview with Gamespy, Beamdog say that the upcoming enhanced Baldur’s Gate games may open up the possibility for their “long-term goal”. Baldur’s Gate III.

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Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Jakob Haglof of Pajamahouse gets literally literary with his iOS title Desi Leaves Town, which follows the life of an eccentric, rich frog in the 1880s. As you do.
What's your game called and what's it about?

Our game is called Desi Leaves Town and it stars an eccentric frog that gets himself into all sorts of situations in his attempts to stave off boredom.

Desi is an escapist who blames the world around him for his predicament but everything is pretty much his fault.

The game's story is told through cartoon segments, puzzles and action challenges. You do all sorts of things like assembling the perfect chair to knocking kids out with bread.

What inspired you to make Desi Leaves Town?

Desi Leaves Town came out of a conversation Nicholas Kratochvil -- the game's writer -- and I had at a bar. I had this idea for a mini game with a pompous frog that would berate you if you sat him in the wrong chair.

Nicholas said it reminded him of Against Nature's main character Jean Des Esseintes and maybe we could do an interactive adaptation of the novel instead of a mini game. And the next day we started working on it.

Not content to announce a game at GDC, Super Crate Box creators Vlambeer decided to release one during the show. Yeti Hunter is the second most unnerving game I’ve played today. Hopefully I’ll have written lots about the most unnerving tomorrow but for now, if you feel you have too many nerves, you’ll have to make do with this tiny slice of freeware horror. There are yeti, see, but due to spelling quandaries I’m not sure if that’s singular or plural. There could be loads of them. And there’s blood in the snow. Whose is it? Am I a Yeti Hunter or is there a yeti wot likes to hunt stalking me? It’s a game of grammatical confusion and trouser-fouling.

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One of many 7-Day Roguelikes created for this year’s challenge (which Mr Smith will be presenting a more fulsome guide to in the not-too-distant), free browser-based game-ette Me Against The World further complicates the risk of perma-death with the concept of ‘Infinities.’ Either you’re trapped in a repeating angular vortex or you need to create one of your own in order to get the drop on dangerous enemies. Drag a square and anything it will be replicated to fill the screen – including you.(more…)

Turn-based combat, a low-fantasy approach to vikings and a scenario that is more concerned with surviving a world’s end than preventing it. That’s what The Banner Saga promises, as well as beautiful animation, conversations with consequences and a changeable world that doesn’t revolve around the player. It’s the kind of shopping list I so often take to the supermarket, only to return with the ingredients for a tasty Thai curry having realised that while the constituent parts of food can be purchased, concepts cannot be bought until they are given form. But they can be funded. Yep, it’s Kickstarter time again.

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Breakout games with a plot and monsters should appear more frequently, as should pinball games of the same sort. Wizorb is a neat take on That Sort Of Thing, with world that needs to be rebuilt by the player’s bearded wizard. He collects the money to do this by juggling balls with his wand, bashing bricks and beasties alike. There are spells that help with destruction and ball control, as well as a gentle dose of the funnies. It isn’t new but it is new to Steam and I revisited it just now and was reminded how much fun it is.

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