October 6th, 2012 | By Erik Johnson
Tagged in: indie links | indie links round-up | industry news
Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”, from The Sound of Music:
Games based on Bosch, or on playing the cello,
History told by a puppet that’s yellow,
Hear what the team behind Octodad thinks.
These are a few of today’s Indie Links.
There, now try getting that awfulness out of your head with these:
Gimme Indie Game: The Improbable History Of TheCatamites’ Pleasure Dromes Of Kubla Khan (Venus Patrol)
“The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan, just released as a free PC download, continues right where Murder Dog left off: a brief but hilarious interactive history lesson of the Mongol emperor’s Xanadu. Like a modern-day punk Encarta (and as with Murder Dog), its best feature is its frantic and entirely unreliable Muppet-esque narrator, providing meta-commentary on all your actions (toss yourself off the edge of the world to smash further through the fourth wall), as you find yourself headed straight into the hedonistic heart of the pleasuredrome.”
Live Free, Play Hard: Strategic Torture Simulation (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“A day late due to, um, let’s say otters, here’s this last week’s finest free indie games. Take it away, Porpentine. Important historical edutainment game. Strategic torture simulation. What if Kirby were born billions of years ago. Ladder fortresses of jellyfish space. Lynchian piss world.”
City Tuesday’s Pretty Source Code (Hookshot, Inc.)
“The Xbox Live Indie channel may not be the most popular stop on the indie train line, but for that reason it continues to be a go-to destination for those who believe their game has more chance of being noticed there than on the brutal wastelands of Steam and the App Store. City Tuesday certainly stands out among the crowd, borrowing some threads of premise from Duncan Jones’ Source Code – in which a man relives the final few moments of his life before a terrorist attack over and over again, with the chance to change fate if he manages to find the bomb – and presenting it in sharp vector visuals and a generous spattering of Helvetica chic.”
Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Done: Octodad Team Interview (Sugar Gamers)
“Pax Prime allowed me the pleasure of sitting down with Young Horses, Inc., the team behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch, the sequel to OCTODAD.”
Forget Rock Band, Here’s Cello Fortress (Gamasutra)
“Cello Fortress is a work-in-progress by Proundeveloper and Ronimo designer Joost van Dongen, and as far as I’m aware, it’s the first video game to incorporate a classical music instrument (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!) into the gameplay. The game will first be shown at the Dutch Game Garden Indigo exhibition later this month.”
Boston Festival Of Indie Games Announces Lineup (Joystiq)
“The Boston Festival of Indie Games has revealed the 36 games that will be showcased at the event this Saturday, September 22. Featured games – with developers in tow – include Fire Hose Games’ Go Home Dinosaurs, Owlchemy Labs’ Jack Lumber and many, many others.”
Garden Of Delights: JB500 Opens Call For Hieronymus Bosch-Inspired Games (Venus Patrol)
“As a tyke, I had the extreme fortune of having at my disposal a number of art-history survey textbooks (thanks, dad) which I pored over daily — an early, self-guided & very valuable education in art appreciation — and I have very distinct memories of continually returning to one artist:Hieronymus Bosch, whose landscapes were littered with cartoonish-ly caricatured monsters, animals and half-humans that wouldn’t at all be out of place in a children’s TV show if they weren’t so overtly representative of grim morality tales. It’s with that said that I count myself super lucky to having been asked to be involved with a new art/game initiative from the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation itself — an organization founded to honor the artist on the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death.”
You Won’t Survive FTL‘s Space Mission, But You’ll Remember It (Kotaku)
“The flames shred through my vessel, eventually overtaking the populated rooms, but it didn’t matter. My men would burn, but there are worse ways to go than ablaze with the virtue of dedication. Of course I couldn’t give up. Not when good men and women spent their last moments proudly showing me the honor of what it means to serve a ship. It wasn’t something I understood before FTL: Faster Than Light, the spaceship roguelike by Subset Games where you command your own ship and its crew under a space exploration mission.”
Erik Johnson (294 posts)