Cargo Bot is the first game “that was ever made entirely on the iPad”. It used the “Codea” Lua-Scripting environment, where you can code and run scripts directly on the iPad (which I recommend much!). Cargo Bot was made by Simeon Nasilowski, the guy behind “Two Lives Left”, who also made Codea itself.

And like Codea the quality of this game really matters: in Cargo Bot you use simple commands to program a cargo-lifter in order to solve simple tasks. You can build loops and little if-statements. In fact, this game is pretty close to programming (assembler for example), but it is still a very fun experience. This game is really fun and addictive as well – and it teaches you programming logic at the same time. Unfortunately only available for iPad, it is still an instant download, because the game is free at the moment as well. So don’t miss it!

Lately there was “Trip” coming around the corner. It is an audio-visual experiment made with Unity, that looks like a psychedelic game at the first glance – but that does not have any gameplay at all. Except wandering around and exploring this strange colorful world. And you can collect items. It is more like a 3d-exploration artwork, than really a game. An interesting work and a direction of making artworks, that really can be explored much more. With all this colors and things circling around “Notgames“. Some will remember Trip on the game Fract.

And while we are at, if you are able to read or translate German: the blog Superlevel made an interview with the Trip-creator Axel Shokk.

When graphic-designers meet game-design – this can be a very fruitful combination. The game Reprisal is a good evidence. Artwork and in game-graphic of Reprisal is one of the most clean and charming pixelartwork, that came within the last years – playing in the same league as Sword and Sworcery or Fez.

The game was made by Jon Caplin, a UK-based graphic-designer. He worked on this game in the last six month as a private project. His blog says: “Ever since having an Amiga 500 as a kid I’ve been interested in making a Populous styled game.” And now the game is really to play (in your browser). Watch out – there are Reprisal printout-posters coming at you, too!

Syder Arcade is a shooting-game in the style of a really classical vertical shooter, developed by Studio Evil. The game does not only have a clean gameplay, but also very polished graphics. This is how classical shooting games from the Amiga-times would look like today. As a special feature, the game offers some “graphic filter”, that lets you select very strange in-game color-schemes. You can select for example, to play the game in color-schemes “Apple II, C64, Amiga HAM or gray2bit“. And since there is a decent lack of good shooting-games on Mac OS-X, consider this a gaming suggestion! (The game is also available for Windows)

(via)

The great retro-casual game “Forget me Not” from Nyarlu Labs is now available in a browser-ready Flash version. The game features generative level processing, clean designed graphics, sounds and gameplay – and therefore a never-ending source of arcade fun! The game is already available for Mac/Win and iOS. (via)

PS: Nyarlu Labs has a good writeup in the blog, how he did the procedural level generation. Yay!

The art and research group “And-Or” from Switzerland released another interesting concept-game. Piksel Bacteria deals with Augmented Reality and the real world.

The concept is easy (and maybe not a game at all) – your mission is to “infect” as many pixels as possible with the “bacterium pikselum”. The bacteria breed, by looking at them with the iOS-camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along the edge. What I like about this concept is, that you do not need any QR-Codes or something other prepared, to step into the “Augmented Reality”-world, but that the “game” plays instantly from any phone in any environment.

Before “Piksel Bacteria” And-Or raised gameplay and reality questions in works like “Gamescape“, where the players input of the game results in architecture. Or Discrimination Pong, a work that raises questions about gameplay modifiers, asymmetric gameplay and discrimination.

Fez, award winning indie-game from the Polytron Corporation will be released after 5 years of development. And it simply looks gorgeous. According to the indiegames-blog it will cost about 10 dollars and is localized in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Iberian Portuguese. Holy shit. Check out this footage, even just watching is pure pleasure. (If you have no idea what game Fez is, this mini-Polytron-site will help you).