Treasure Adventure Games by Robit Studios is a charming and fun piece of work and readers will know that I’m a big fan of the game’s soundtrack and its composer.
Now the game is receiving an ambitious remake in the form of Treasure Adventure World with new design, artwork, animation and, of course, new music. The original soundtrack was a masterfully modern take on old-school gaming. So how does the reimagined version measure up?
Game music posts may not be a weekly feature of Pixieland any more, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to put up a post when an album catches my ear. And oh boy, has the soundtrack to Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons caught my ear.
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I’ve spent a lot of time on the train over the past few weeks. I recently picked up a copy of One Finger Death Punch. These two facts belong together, as I’ve been playing a lot of One Finger Death Punch. On trains. In hotel rooms. At home. In my mind. In my dreams.
This isn’t a review and it’s not clickbait so I’m not going to make you click through for the conclusion: One Finger Death Punch is easily my favourite game of 2014 so far. And unless something seriously comes out in the next three months it’s going to my my game of 2014.
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Recently I’ve been passing the time on my commute by playing NES games on the 3DS’ virtual console. I say playing, but really mean “gnashing my teeth in controller-snapping rage” at how hard they are. But more on that in a future post when the red mist subsides.
I mention this so when I tell you that the Castle in the Darkness teaser is pushing all the same buttons you’ll know where I’m coming from.
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When it comes to video games ARPG is more of a marketing term than a real subgenre. Let’s face it, how many RPGs can you name that don’t essentially rely on progression-through-murder? Even games that hang heavily on their stories are afraid that if you don’t get to climb to the top over a mountain of skulls then the player might lose interest and go play Halo or something. Which is why the recently kickstarted Unrest by Pyrodactyl Games is so refreshing.
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OK, it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted. That’s partly down to family life and teething children sapping my will to live energy but mostly down to Minecraft. back in the pre-beta days I was pretty addicted to it but once the map I’d invested all my time in became increasingly incompatible with the game I drifted away from it more and more, and until recently I hadn’t in a couple of years.
Until I heard of Captive Minecraft.
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Mechanized dragon.
Sometimes it’s the little things that pique your interest, tickle your funny bone or prompt a sudden perception test. In the case of SanctuaryRPG the little thing was the phrase “Mechanized dragon”. Any game that has that as a boss fight gets two automatic thumbs up in my book. Or talons as the case may be.
SanctuaryRPG is part Nethack, part Final Fantasy, all text. The website is immediately arresting, probably the slickest, most advanced-looking text-based site I’ve ever seen. The soundtrack by Rafael Langoni Smith matches perfectly, a wonderful throwback to the best of the NES. Worth a listen and worth some of your gold pieces and/or credits.
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It was a year ago at E3 2013 that Electronic Arts officially announced a sequel to Mirror’s Edge to a mixed response of relief, elation, concern and frustration. The first game was born in 2008, that brief moment in time when EA was experimenting a bit, branching out and trying new things, a year that gave us Mass Effect, Spore, Warhammer, Dark Space, and of course Mirror’s Edge. Despite inevitable quirks the free-running gameplay garnered a lot of love. In fact the main complaint about the game was how unnecessary and counter-productive the combat was. EA might have been sticking their neck out but they couldn’t bring themselves to dial the combat down any further, which is a crying shame.
So when the 2013 E3 trailer heavily featured fighting joy was heavily tempered by disappointment. Had EA and DICE learned nothing?
A year has passed, another E3 has come, and some more Mirror’s Edge news has wall-run out of the studio and leapt wildly onto the internet. So what difference has a year made?
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So far in this series we’ve set up a basic framework to get us started and then added a render loop and some actual bubbles.
This part will make the game interactive, adding mouse and touch input, and discussing some of the pitfalls that can crop up as you do so.
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Now we’ve got graphics, animation and interactivity, what’s left? In this final part of my HTML5 javascript/canvas tutorial we finish off our little game by adding some sound effects – what good is popping bubbles without the satisfying sounds of destruction? Unfortunately, adding audio is far trickier than it has any rights to be, so hopefully this tutorial will save at least one person the troubles I had to go through.
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