Popularity award of Cologne’s Global Game Jam 2011 goes to Krystian Majewski (I suppose to say so). He made a charmin’ retro-gameboy-looking Julian Assange game. I’ll bet you know this one. Just head over and have a play! Read a bit more about it in Krystian’s blog. (He’s the Trauma guy btw…)

Yes people, I did it! I finished a game for the Global Game Jam! It is a two-player-game and some sort of “space-fighting game”. (The topic of the game jame was “Extinction” by the way). Since I had extremely limited time at this weekend, I decided to make a game I can assemble in 30 minutes or so. In the end it took me about 8 hours.

This game reflects my growing interest in “fighting games“, that developed over the last 10 or so months. I like the idea of games, that do not have a “optimum strategy” to win the game, like “knowing and mastering all secret moves” or “pushing the button faster or harder“. The idea of having a game, where you can combine tactics to always make a turn on the game against your enemy was and still is of high interest. I am also thinking about stuff like the “All in” at a poker game: you can always be the matchmaker and win epic or fail miserably. Ok, enough of the theory.

“An Accident in Paradise” is a 2-player space-fighting game for iPod Touch and iPhone. You play with another human on the iPod as a playboard. The bullet strength is determined by the time-interval between the single shots. Stronger shots extinguish weaker shots. There is no optimal strategy to win, but you have to examine the enemies moves to decide, what works best for you to hit the enemy ship. Unfortunately there is nothing to play on the web right know, because I made this on the iPod Touch device only. I am heavily thinking about polishing the game a little bit and ship it with the Apple App Store. But this won’t be within the next 3 weeks.

Ah, I had a great inspiration this weekend by Sven Väth’s first album “An Accident in Paradise” from 1993. I can still recommend this 17 year old record much, much, much. Here is the title-track “An Accident in Paradise“, but for more popular I suppose is “L’Esperanza“.

Global Game Jam Link: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/accident-paradise

PS: Later this week I will post about other interesting submissions of the Global Game Jam Cologne. Thanks again to the Cologne Game Lab to make this great event happen once again!

Uh, it seems, that Jonathan Lavigne is growing into my all time pixelartist toplist, not only, because of his game “Ninja Senki”, that should be released at the 21 December 2010. He also did the artworks for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and other games, mostly for Ubisoft. Ninja Senki is his first indie-game. His graphic-style combines a modern and fresh approach with very classic 8-bit styles, that is absolutely unique. Less is more! You can follow his blog Pixeltao. Feel free to also read an interview with Jonathan. (via)

Based on the success of the first “Humble Indie Bundle”, that raised over 1 million dollars in a “pay what you want” manner, it is time for a second edition. Same concept: a bundle of great indie-games are bundeling together. This time it is Braid, Osmos, Machinarium, Cortex Command, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans. Plus bonus-features like soundtracks. The games are DRM-free and are available for all platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. Some games have their debut on Linux in this bundle. Once again you can choose to give your backs away for charity and spend some amount to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) or Childs-Play. Don’t hesitate, get the bundle here.

Flee is a neat game for Android-devices, that I want to call the “most complete LCD-handheld emulating game” that probably ever was. You use the touch-display to control a LCD-Handheld game. There is almost nothing to report about the gameplay itself, if you are familiar with this kind of games. But something to highlight is the focus on details, that try to mimic the “hardware-feeling” as much as possible. Like the video above shows, they even simulated dirt on the “plastic case”, that you can wipe and clean again, if it gets too dirty. Really refreshing point-of-view on software-handheld gaming! Also have a look at the website of the creators Frugal Games.

Zach Gage is about to release another fine app, this time for the iPad. It’s a neat puzzle-game, that can be called a little bit of “one step further” to his first game Unify. Zach answered some questions in an interview at CreativeApplications. He said about the app some interesting design decisions:

I borrowed management systems of drawing lines like in Flight Control, but reduced them to the simplicity of control in a game like Tetris. In Flight control you have to manage pixel perfect collisions, meaning a plane can be in hundreds of thousands of unique positions. Tetris (and other similar puzzle games) work so well because a piece can be in one of only a few unique positions on one axis. In Halcyon pieces can only be in up to 9 positions on the vertical axis, so instead of making dozens of tiny tweaks to individual objects, the player has to make one tweak to dozens of objects.

When you look at the preview-video, you will notice the elegant fine line between playing game and playing music. Most of Zach Gage apps have this kind of “precise poetry”. Sometimes I miss a little bit of that extra, extra mile of polishing, to have absolutely awesome apps.

We look forward to Super Crate Box, a fast paced arcade-shooter game, that looks like a wild ride on hot weapons. The mix of retro-graphics and that pushing music is booting the disk! The webpage about the game:

Super Crate Box is coming to bring back the glory of the golden arcade age, when all that really mattered was getting on that high score list. Grab your baseball cap and loosen your pants, it’s time to fight endless hordes of enemies and collect every weapon crate you can.

Let’s do it! Although the trailer doesn’t look like this, it totally seems to me, that a 2-player mode would highly increase the fun in front of the keyboard! The game should be released at 22. October 2010 is here. (via)