Time to give a bit of worship to a absolutely well made free indie-game. Beacon (.zip) is a wonderful little platformer with the most remarkable feature, that is plays in the dark. Your guide your guy through this dark world and have to follow a “beacon”, a light, that shows you the way.

Beacon combines wonderful storytelling with engaging gameplay. It maybe is a total esoteric story, about light, darkness and death. Until you see the end (no I won’t tell you, go and have a play yourself).

From the beginning of the game you feel a strong desire to reach the end of this dark world. Some moments are a little frustrating, i.e. like playing the same scene over and over again, falling into darkness, not know where to jump off right. I also didn’t liked the uncertainty, how many levels there are still to solve (like is it a mini game? A small or a large one?). A mini-map, that gives an overview about the game progress in general, would be a nice thing to have, giving more confidence to the player, enlarging the gaming fun. I also also want to doubt the replay value of Beacon. Maybe some small tricks would make this game interetings, to “play” it into more than only “one” direction?

Anyway, a great game, that should be checked out! Let’s do not forget, that it was basically made for the Ludumdare 48-hours contest.

Nobnox scored again! I am sure, you all still remembering the ToneMatrix from Andre Michelle. Along with the guys at Hobnox they took the concept to a whole new level – and reinvented the browser-based music-tools once again. Here comes inudge!! It’s a very simple tools, fun to play with, but powerful as well. It is basically like ToneMatrix, but with more channels and instruments. Even a drum-section. Like with ToneMatrix it is almost impossible to do sounds, that are not sounding good or interesting. The 16-steps sequencer leads mostly to hypnotic loops. The best: you can very easily share your productions, post them on blogs or send them via email to your friends or other people working on a project. Cool stuff. Also for decent game-loops. Just check out my first loop.

Update: It seems, that there are some bugs, when it comes to saving and sharing to loops… My loop was not saved…

Update2: Suddently, the data was there. Maybe there is some time-lag at the “making data available”-server at inudge.

(via)

Update: This is going to become a neverending story. Apple rejected the app again, after some user figured out, how to hack into the BASIC-interpreter via the iPhone-user-interface. After fixing this “bug” developers at Manomio re-submitted the app again – hopefully praying to get the approval once again…

Good news. The official C64-emulator for the iPhone was released! The guys had a hard time to get approval of this app on the iTunes-Store (read here about more backgrounds).

The official news are: “After months of work and two formal rejections, we’ve worked directly with Apple to make the necessary changes to bring back one of the best selling computers of all time.”

The emulator comes with the games Dragons Den, Le Mans, Jupiter Lander, Arctic Shipwreck and Jack Attack and is available for 3,99 EUR. [Direct iTunes-Link] Bad news are, that now only official approved games will be able to load on the emulator. If you have a request for acertain game or program, that should be licenced, here you can send the request to the developers.

Extremely fresh Mignonette

Hey, today is a good day. After waking up, I found an brandnew Mignonette in my inbox. This is a do-it-yourself assembly kit, an electronic game console “to learn about soldering, microcontrollers, and game programming”. True 8-bit style. Well, this will be a little bit of work… but extremely fun work!

Screenshot from Canabalt

Adam Atomic and Danny B teamed up again and created a very unique gaming experience. Canabalt is a one-button-game. You play a guy, he has to run for his life. While the scrolling is getting faster and faster, you have to push the button, in order to get the guy jump of at the right moments and at the right heights. Like the previous games Fathom and Gravity Hook, this game features only some minutes of core gameplay. But the look, the feel, the music, the soundeffects and the overall quality is definitely worth a try!

Well, today I came across some interesting content from totally different fields. But all with fresh style of animation.

First one is an animation from James Jarvis, animated with the help of Shynola. It is in general an animation about “running”, called “Onwards”. Read more about the project here. (via)

Next up is an so sweet animation with a very sweet song, too. It is about driving an electric car. Uh, careful, this video contains basically lots and lots of animals…

Finally we enter the gaming-area. “Bear on a wire” is an game for the iPod / iPhone, where you are a beat, that had to drive carefully on a wire. Weird content! (via)

Yay, this looks candy! Trailer from the upcoming Playmobile World MMO. This online-world from the traditional German toy-manufacturer Playmobil is primarily suited for kids older than eight.