InMomentum will be receiving a multiplayer update quite soon, a much needed one we might add, and there’s a developer vlog for you to watch all about it if you so wish.

It was way back in November 2011 that I took a critical look at inMomentum, mostly I quite enjoyed the game but my biggest criticism is that the multiplayer (like many games admittedly) was empty, but for reasons that could have been rectified. It seems that the time has now come that Digital Arrow are addressing some of those issues so with any luck there may be some online activity for the game yet – providing it’s not too late.

The update will be released as a free patch of course, and will add Universal Plug-and-Play multiplayer support, a new multiplayer scoring system, online voting for progression of hosts, achievement revamp, balances and plenty of other tweaks. It’s quite a big change for the game’s unused mode, with the plug-and-play support ensuring that setting up matches will be a lot easier for people.

Check out the developer’s vlog on the patch below for a more in-depth look at the changes:

More information on inMomentum can be found on the game’s official website.

Social Loner Studio has broadened its gaming horizons with the release of its arcade strategy shoot-em-up, SEAL Team 12, through Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games service.

The news should come as no surprise given that the game was developed using Microsoft’s XNA development kit. Having been released on PC via Desura in late April, SEAL Team 12 had been gearing up for a console release at an unspecified date, but the shroud of mystery has now been lifted, with the game available for 240 Microsoft Points.

SEAL Team 12 is perhaps best described as an anarchic, comic book-inspired destruct-a-thon in which players plow through progressively more antagonistic waves of enemy soldiers. Explosive weapons are in no short supply, with flamethrowers, rocket launchers and even killer tanks in the offing for a blood-splattered night on the town. Take the top-down viewpoint of Freedom Force, take away the superheroes and add in more pyromania and you’re more or less on the mark.

With online co-operative play supported alongside the conventional solo commando exploits offered in the game’s single player campaign, SEAL Team 12 promises to cater for both world conquerors and solitary one-men armies in equal measure. Either way you decide to roll the dice, it’s all backed up by a flavoursome mélange of comic book visuals and chaotic sound design, which, as I don’t have to tell you, is pretty smashing.

To purchase the Xbox 360 version of SEAL Team 12, hop over to the Xbox Live Marketplace, where a free trial version is also available. Extra details on the game are available on its official website.

Phil Hassey‘s rather explosive action-stealth game, Dynamite Jack, is now available on Steam for both PC and Mac, plus there’s a 20% launch discount too!

It’s a strange proposal – a stealth game in which you use bombs…a lot, but that’s exactly what Dynamite Jack is all about. You play as a space marine, who, after being imprisoned, is in need of traversing the dangerous mines of this mysterious planet with guards and weird creatures ensuring it won’t be easy.

Luckily, those bombs will make things a little easier but they do have the adverse effect of attracting quite a lot of attention. You also have a flashlight to use in all sorts of imaginative ways – luring guards into traps or keeping monsters at bay – but the game’s various challenges means you won’t always have access to these tools. As Dynamite Jack is primarily an arcade style of game, you’ll be pursuing high scores and speedrunning rather than a deep storyline, but that means there’s plenty of replayability up for grabs.

Currently, Dynamite Jack is available on Steam with a 20% discount, but it only costs $5.99/£3.99 anyway. Not sure if you’ll like the game? You may as well read through our review (video review included) to help make up your mind then!

It’s also worth nothing that you can get the game for PC, Mac AND Linux from Phil on the official website for $4.99 as he’s using that hand Humble Store we keep seeing everywhere.

More information on Dynamite Jack can be found on the game’s official website.

Orbs are funny things. They’re often used to imply a connection to the mind, as if a gateway – think of a crystal ball for instance. After playing Catch-22, which features a prominent red orb as the surface for its gameplay, I am pretty sure that they must have a way of wiggling under your skin, past your skull and into your brain. They just must.

The exhibition at Indie Connect laid out a single pew before a monitor for Catch-22. Upon said pew was an Xbox controller. Ushered over by my colleague who insisted that I “just have to try this game”, I shook hands with the developer and then assessed the game set-up as just described. Red. Orb. You couldn’t avoid that thing glaring at you. Making matters worse, the game is accompanied by a floaty, low-beat rhythm just willing you to play the game.

Having felt the naturally hypnotic pull of Catch-22, I looked back over at my colleague who had already spent at least 20 minutes with the game – was he possessed? It’s as if the game was capable of pulling people in and then refused to let them go, instead using them to bring in more players to spread the word, in a plot to (gasp) take over the world!

Brushing that nonsense aside, I sat down, picked up the controller and then faced the orb in alls its glowing glory. Atop of that was a simple message instructing me to press the A button to begin. In terms of game design, it doesn’t get any more simple than having a one button (to control them all!) interface and that is what Catch-22 rolls out with. On the controller, this was the A button, but the iOS version will transform this to just be a simple touch of the screen.

With a gulp, I squashed the A button with my thumb and we were off! Unfortunately it wasn’t long before I found out that I absolutely suck at Catch-22 (much to the amusement of the onlookers), but I couldn’t stop playing. Here’s why: you control a small blue orb to start off with which is constantly travelling around the bigger red orb. The idea is that you collect the even smaller white orbs that appear along your path – you’ll have to press the A button to jump on occasion. There’s another stationary orb at the bottom of the red orb that you’ll have to jump over too as touching it will reset the game.

That’s your first rotation at least. Once you’ve collected three white orbs, you’ll then switch to the aforementioned green orb during a bout of elegant slow motion. As the green orb, you’ll travel the opposite way around that hypnotic red sphere with the same task – collect three white orbs. The catch is that the blue orb is actually a ghost which performs the same movements as you did when controlling it before and contact with it means the whole game will restart and your score lost. Luckily, there is some help in dodging your previous self as the orbs leave traces of their movements behind them in a faint glow – they also double up as making the game look even prettier, I imagined I was outlining the petals of a flower to have it only make my task harder when switching orbs.

That’s all there is to Catch-22. It’s not a lot but the simplicity of constantly dodging yourself back and forth, combined with the games gentle, pulsing music and hazily colored visuals makes it very alluring. When you do collide and the game resets, it’s all to easy just to press the button and start all over again and you’ll keep doing this until a big enough distraction comes along to pull you away.

The version I played wasn’t the final version but I was entirely sunk into the game, so you can imagine my shock when the developer told me they’ll have proper leaderboards so friends can compete with each other. They’ll never be able to pull themselves away! Catch-22 is due for a release on iOS initially and will cost a dollar or two, but the developer also told me that they are looking at releasing the game on Facebook for free and with the leaderboards. It seems like a solid move to me as I don’t think many people would pay to play the game on PC, but once they do (and they will if it’s free) they will never be able to tear themselves away.

You can find out more information on Catch-22 over on the game’s official website.

Of the many quotes that people extract from the airy words of Peter Molyneux, one of the most recent and relevant to this article is when he complained about the lacklustre state of controllers – “[A controller] is about as experimental as a brick these days. Because you know what it is, whatever game you do, you pick up this controller and you do the same. Your thumb moves here, you can’t move your thumb like this, you can only move it like this.”

We all know that the reason for this is so we can pick a game up and get going with out any faffing about before even getting to the playing part of game interaction. However, indie developers have the opportunity to experiment with these established norms in gaming and where better to start than changing how players directly interact with games upon first contact. Of course, many developers have already been doing this on a grand scale with the swish touchscreens on mobile devices. Tilts, swipes and prods have breathed new life into games on these devices, the same can be said of the motion controllers for consoles – while some despise these experiences, they are at least something different. What platform seems to be missing out on all of this interface innovation though? PC gaming. Either stuck with gamepads or the more traditional keyboard, any innovation to be had with these interfaces was presumed dead and buried a long time ago. It’s completely wrong to think that though as has been proven recently and is being continued to do so with ASDFPLANE.

You’ve no doubt heard of and hopefully played QWOP and GIRP, yes? Now, these games take the keyboard and make it something alien by using a different set-up from the common WASD or directional arrow controls. It is this tweak to the keyboard controls and the player’s inability to master them immediately, that the entire game is based around in these examples. QWOP is less intuitive than GIRP though, merely because its controls are just plain awkward when combined with the gameplay.

Why is GIRP any more intuitive than QWOP? It’s simple really – the game has you climbing up a side of a mountain and this is actually emulated on a smaller scale on the player’s keyboard. Your fingers have to contort as if playing finger Twister in order to make sure your avatar reaches the foot and hand holds needed to ascend. Later on in the game, the player will have to let go of certain handholds and swing in order to reach higher places – all of this still be perfectly matched by the player’s fingers. Playing ASDFPLANE creates a similar physical connection between the player, the keyboard and what happens on screen and it’s great fun for it.

ASDFPLANE won’t be played by a vast majority of people simply because it is a local multiplayer game only (at least for the moment) and to play it each player will need a keyboard. The reason for this is because the act of flying a plane in ASDFPLANE requires the use of all of the lettered keys. You press Enter to join the game – players can drop-in and out at will – at which point your brightly colored plane will fall from the top of the screen amidst a heavenly ray of light. Immediately, your plane will start dropping to its untimely doom, unless the player has understood the controls; that’s rarely the case. Luckily, at least one person in the group can act as teacher, passing on their knowledge of this interface of which no one has encountered before. “How do I join?”, “Why do I keep falling?” and other questions of a similar ilk are heard from the pupils while the teacher holds the keyboard up and makes educatory gestures in demonstration.

What they should be telling them is something like the following. Using the lettered keys from here on out, the player will have to continuously mash the direction they want their plane to travel by hitting the corresponding direction on the keyboard. Simply put, hitting the bunch of keys in the top left of the keyboard will make the plane travel to the top left of the screen, the top right to the top right and so on. After about 10 minutes with these controls, the player will have advanced from crashing every five seconds to outmaneuvring the other players by taking risky dives across the screen and perilous ascents followed by sudden changes of direction. When not playing, it’s great to just watch new players slowly grasp the controls during the humming chorus of five keyboards being subjected to a barrage of eager finger bashing. You’ve never seen anything like it.

The way you accumulate a score in ASDFPLANE, because this is of an arcade styling, is to simply stay alive on the screen and the points will rack up. Flying to the sides of the screen will result in a wraparound effect such as in Pac-Man and flying up will just move the playing field higher. Fly beyond the bottom of the screen though and your plane will be lost until the Enter key brings it back again. This isn’t a game of just flying around though, by pressing the Space bar players can fire at each other with ballistic contact sending the receiving plane hurtling towards the dreaded depths of death at the bottom of the screen. They are given a chance at revival, though it’s not easy. The word ‘REPAIR’ will appear on their plane and the player will have to type each letter in sequence (mistakes don’t matter) with success in typing the whole word meaning that they will survive, presuming they can pull up before they reach the limits of the screen. Like the rest of the controls, this seems like an impossible task at first but a few minutes in and most players are making swift recoveries and partaking in quite the aerial battle.

What is really great about ASDFPLANE is that it puts everyone on an equal playing field, firstly by having a completely unique control system but also such a simplistic one. Keyboards have always been precise with their button presses and require hours of getting used to – think RPGs and FPS’ in particular and how intricate their control systems are. ASDFPLANE rids itself of that in every way and presents what is almost a keyboard resembling a touchscreen – a giant direction-sensitive interface. If you get the chance to play ASDFPLANE how it’s supposed to be played then you definitely should.

ASDFPLANE was developed by MESHOFF, who you can find out more information about and their other games over on their official website.

Revenge of Roger Rouge is not just a clever use of alliteration. Its developer, Trazzy Entertainment, worked to ensure that the game, which follows the tale of a maritime pirate named Roger Rouge (and his subsequent and expected revenge), seemed like an authentic seaside tale of pirate life. Unfortunately, for as gorgeous as the game can be, its gameplay falls short of holding your attention past the ten minute mark.

I never like to deride indie developers as we all know how hard they work and how much effort they put in. So it is not my intention to undermine the developer’s work, but rather just my (semi)professional opinion as a gamer and game critic when I say that the game really does fall short of a worthwhile experience.

To start with, the gorgeous animated introduction is a good indicator of how the game is treated visually: the artists have clearly done their jobs right, and it sure is a beauty. The 2D arcade look works really well with the animations that Trazzy has drawn up, and the ship models, pick-ups, weapons, etc. look good enough to be a selling point for the game. But aside from this extra polish on top, there really doesn’t seem to be much depth to Revenge of Roger Rouge.

In essence, the game is a side-scrolling arcade shooter. You can move your ship freely with the arrow keys, but you can’t go back to an area as the game screen scrolls on its own. Along the way, you’ll run into loads of other ships, all of which seem to want to take you down! You can shoot them by pressing the space key, and upon destroying a ship may be fortunate enough to find some weapon or health pick-ups. There are a variety of weapons, but essentially they play the same way: you don’t really do anything else but shoot them towards enemy ships. For example, there’s little difference between a cannonball on fire and a cannonball as is, aside from the amount of damage it deals.

Gameplay-wise, Trazzy has built a functioning and pretty game to look at. But the scale of fun with Revenge of Roger Rouge is pretty minimal. The environments, albeit they change from stage to stage – sometimes you’ll get dawn or dusk, islands nearby, or maybe some stormy weather – all end up feeling the same. Even whirlpools, when thrown into the mix, are not enough to make the stages’ difficulty varied. That has mostly to do with the fact that gameplay doesn’t change in the game, at all.

From the beginning of your playthrough until whenever you’re done, the game plays the same exact way: sail, shoot, die, repeat. The promise of pretty visuals interlaced with story elements fall short in the actual game itself, and what seemed like an intensely good-looking pirate arcade shooter ended up being a rather boring and conventional experience.

You can purchase Revenge of Roger Rouge over on Desura for PC or for your Windows Phone 7 on the corresponding Marketplace. You can find out more information on the game over on the developer’s official website.

Drive Fast Think Faster may be the name of the game but its fairly simple instructions have turned out to be asking too much of players in practice. That is, unless you can prove the developers wrong.

Game balance is an important consideration at all times and it’s one that many developers come very close to tipping over the edge, causing players to rage after hours of intense practice. Zebra Games think that they may have gone over the limit with their game Drive Fast Think Faster which they released on XBLIG just last week. It seems that of those who have played the game, only a few have even come close to completing it. This has led to them considering that they may have “overcooked” the difficulty.

This is a game in which you’re supposed to drive a vehicle through loops and jumps and in a certain time – like Trials which you have probably been playing. On top of doing this, you have to switch the color of the vehicle to the platform you want to drive on, otherwise it will fall through and you’ll have to restart. It will likely tie your brain in knots.

What the developers are hoping is for someone to prove them wrong – for one great achiever to step forward and nail the game. Upon doing such a thing, they will gift that person a prize which they can claim by emailing ideserveamedal@zebragames.co.uk once their score is on the leaderboards.

If you want to give the game a go, you can purchase it on XBLIG for 80MSP.

More information on Drive Fast Think Faster can be found on the developer’s official website.

Ironzilla has released their euphoric and slightly wacky downhill skiing game, Super Ski Runner, for PC and Mac as a pay-what-you-want title, with it costing just a dollar for the game’s Gold Edition.

Drugs. They do some wacky stuff to you kids and Super Ski Runner will give you a glimpse into that crazy world. This is a game in which you are stuck on Mt. Infinity and are skiing down it to no end of course. Things will start off relatively normally but to keep the score going in this game you’ll have to collect the many pills scattered around the slopes. Upon doing this, everything will go a brighter shade of rainbow and the techno music will match that with a thudding beat.

The more of those sweet tasting pills you take the more insane things get. Flying pigs, robots, weird birds and all sorts will fill your screen. It’s nuts, it really is. Fun though, especially when you collect a star and then turn into either a laser firing robot, a rocket, a fat rolling version of yourself or some other crazy incarnation. Super Ski Runner doesn’t lose its mobile game roots though, by that I mean it’s a game you’d only really play for short bursts – nothing wrong with that as those kinds of offerings are perfect for coffee breaks.

Now the game is released in pay-what-you-want form, you can actually grab it for free, but that’s the lame version. If you cough a whole dollar for the game then you’ll get the Gold Edition which comes with a ton of extra things, such as…you know what, I’m just going to quote the developer on this bit:

“5 special characters, higher quality graphics, 4 secret endings, 4 extra music tracks, digital soundtrack album, Full Screen mode, Rager mode (For those who just like the crazy visuals and running trees over), an exclusive Art Asset pack (Concept Art, Box Art, Developer Diary), 2 HD Desktop wallpapers, your name forever on the Super Ski Runner page as a Gold Supporter, and the warm fuzzy feeling you get inside for supporting an indie developer.”

Another cool thing I found is if you go on the Achievements you’ll see the game’s many playable characters, which include Gomez, Meat Boy, a Super Crate Box fella and a Minecraft guy. There’s loads of others to unlock though so if you get into that you’ll be revisiting this one a lot. One last thing, I’d advise not using the mouse controls due to too much lag for you to have control – WASD or arrow keys all the way!

You can download and purchase Super Ski Runner over on the official website – remember, it’s just a dollar for all of that extra content.

More information on Super Ski Runner is available on the game’s official website.

Those crazy Ostrich Banditos got in contact to inform of us a momentous event this Friday the 13th concerning their game High Vaultage, but whatever could it be?

Cast you mind back about a month ago and we covered a little game called High Vaultage. Back then the developers were holding a little competition that could be won by playing their game and travelling the furthest distance. The winner is apparently called ‘neon lane’ and it turns out that they were masked so they get said mask in High Vaultage as a playable character.

It turns out that this slightly spooky entrance from Neon Lane will be unveiled today in order to fit with day – “we’re taking all the lucky coincidences we can get (we’re going for 13:13 GMT as well)”. So there you go – expect a new masked character called Neon Lane in High Vaultage today you creepy lot.

If you haven’t already, give High Vaultage a go on Mochi Games, Newgrounds or Kongregate.

More information on High Vaultage can be found on the official website.