Another month, another big video game publisher puts a great big dollop of video game music online for zero pennies. This time, it's Bandai Namco, who have just uploaded every single Tekken soundtrack onto Spotify because, well, apparently everyone loves Tekken. I've never partaken in a Tekken, but with track names like "Massive Stunner" and "Lonesome City Jazz Party 1st", I'm already 100% convinced the music must be great.
However, given my rather lacking expertise in all things Tekken-related, I thought that instead of doing a big Tekken musical breakdown like I did for Capcom and all the Final Fantasy games, I'd take this opportunity to celebrate some of the other great gaming soundtracks you can currently listen to for free right now, because boy howdy are there loads of 'em. So bang on those headphones and turn up the volume, folks. It's head-banging time.
]]>You could put together a decent indie games showcase for nothing just by loading the Epic Games Store and clicking a button. The current freebie on there is Polytron's excellent, world bending puzzle-platformer, Fez. It's definitely worth the zero doubloons they’re asking for it. In fact, it’s worth at least 100,000,000 times that. Fez is great.
]]>Kentucky Route Zero, the game so good we declared it our game of the year back when only two of its episodes were out, is currently half-price. That's always worth pointing out, that. Sales from this latest sale will go to the American Civil Liberties Union, joining similar fundraisers with other cracking games. Also joining in are the delightful Fez, frightful treasures from Kitty Horrorshow, and the next game from Tetrageddon dev Nathalie Lawhead.
]]>Hey, do you remember Fez [official site]? You know, the clever little platformer where you could rotate your 2D world on a 3D plane to solve puzzles? The PC version may have released all the way back in 2013, but Fez has just this week, quite secretly, gotten its final patch.
]]>I love puzzle games. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?
I’ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness; Alan "Draknek" Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build; and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight.
]]>It's not Android games, nor soundtracks, nor books about kettles. The new Humble Bundle is the original, the Humble Indie Bundle 9. And for a ninth time in a row, it's a corker. With names like Mark Of The Ninja, FTL: Faster Than Light, and FEZ, you can see the dollar signs spinning already.
]]>First there was Fez, and now there is two of it. That was the scene yesterday at Horizon Indie Game Conference yesterday, and later confirmed via content-free teaser trailer. You can try rotating this post through four dimensions to find out more about the new game, but the truth is that this is all we know. Sorry.
]]>"It's a console game on a console. End of story," Phil Fish somewhat famously told NowGamer of Fez's PC prospects. But that was many embittered eons ago, and now gaming's most divisive documentary star is singing a different tune. Confirming yet another one of those increasingly prophetic Steam listings, the previously hardware-bound, headwear-powered dimension-shifter is finally scrambling onto PC. But when? And how? As with all the important things in life, you will have to cleverly rearrange key building blocks of time and space to find out.
]]>Hmm! The Klaxons of hype were blaring over the weekend, with Steam-database watchers claiming the appearance of Halo 3, Fez and Brutal Legend on the service's list of forthcoming IDs. As far as I can see these have now been changed to "test" names, which suggests revealing their addition was a mistake, but nevertheless the information seems to point to Double Fine's bizarre Jack Black-voiced rock RTS coming to PC, along with Master Chief's third outing and Polytron's dimension-rotating platformer. So that's interesting. Oh and Quantum Conundrum 2.
]]>The long-awaited documentary about the creators of Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez is out now and available for download from its own site, iTunes or Steam. Here's Mr Brendy C to tell you a few things about it before you spend your digi-groats on this much-feted film. Warning: could be said to include spoilers, if a documentary about some guys making videogames can be said to be spoilable.
Indie Game: The Movie is in the unusual position of being able to say it was using Kickstarter “before it was cool, man.” So it’s already vulnerable to the kind of folk who shout ‘hipster!’ at every twenty-something in a pair of milk-bottle glasses. Of course, our readers know better than that. As children, most of you will have undoubtedly been told the tale of The Boy Who Cried Hipster, the moral of the story being ‘don’t lie about there being a dickhead around, in case a real dickhead should actually show up one day to subtly insult your decor, or eat you.’ Being so well brought-up, I believe we can look at Indie Game: The Movie somewhat more fairly and see it for what it actually is: a good documentary which occasionally lapses into artificiality.
]]>Grumpypants time: I worry slightly that focusing on Super Meat Boy, Fez and Braid risks painting an extremely narrow picture of indie gaming, and as such Indie Game The Movie might be suffering from some of the same echo chamber issues that some felt this year's IGF did. But hell, let's celebrate that it has successfully brought an image of videogaming that isn't guns/boobs/guns/boobs/guns/boobs/guns/boobs into another medium and be happy about it.
]]>I've got a mighty fine idea. Why not point a camera at a bunch of creative sorts and let them speak their minds? That's how Indie Game: The Movie was made, although I suspect editing the hundreds of hours of footage into something watchable, fascinating and entertaining was the hard part. Perhaps that's why Swirsky and Pajot's film won World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at Sundance 2012. Everyone will be able to watch it soon, or at least anyone near an internet connection, as it will be available as a downloadable purchase on June 12th. What's most intriguing about this is that one of the download services carrying the film will be Steam. This leads to the obvious questions: will every film in the world soon be available on Steam and will Episode Three be a cinemovie?
]]>“There’s no plans to bring Fez out on any other platforms?” I ask Phil Fish, as he finishes off his sandwich. He chews and I mutter an inward prayer. Oh Gods, let him say PC. “We’re not even thinking about it right now,” he says. “I mean, ultimately, I would like to see it on everything. Why not? But we do have exclusivity with Microsoft, as you do – you find it’s really hard to not do that.”
The Gods are useless. Never pray.
]]>Remember Fez, that badass-looking indie platformer where you rotated the level to get around? Remember how it was scheduled for 2009, and then Microsoft bought it and it disappeared without so much as a scream into the oily depths of the Xbox Live Arcade release schedule? It's now arriving in "2011" as an XBLA exclusive. Sad times.
But the PC will not be crushed! Presenting Babel, a freeware game created for the Gamedev.net Retro Renaissance Challenge where devs add a modern mechanic into an old-school 2D platformer. Babel's creator, Endurion, happily describes it as "Fez ripped off". You can get Babel here, and watch a video after the jump. Thanks to Michael "Mike" Rose of the IndieGames Blog for the tipoff.
]]>The almighty righteous TIGSource totally scooped the second Fez trailer. The dimension-warping platformer still looks completely great. One day we hope Polytron will talk to us too. That would be a fun time. They even link to us on their blog, but they've never got in touch. Don't be shy Polydudes, we aren't just about the horrendous implications of journalist porn. Honest. Splendid safe for work Fez trailer below.
]]>Finally some new footage of IGF competition finalist Fez.
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