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Indie Pinata sale invites you to take a swing at similar games
The Indie Pinata sale offers discounts on 10 Steam games hand-picked by independent developers, available through July 26 at 10AM PT. The catch: You have to purchase or already own one of the games in the sale to get the discounts. That Steam backlog is looking pretty handy right about now. The 10 lucky games are Monaco, The Bridge, Flockers, MouseCraft, 10,000,000, Super Splatters, Dungeon Hearts, Jack Lumber, Triple Town and Contraption Maker. Indie Pinata is put on by Crunching Koalas, the team behind MouseCraft, so this sale features games similar in style to that memorable, puzzle-y tone. "Thousands of games available on Steam make it difficult for enthusiasts of certain game genres to find games that they really enjoy," Crunching Koalas writes in the sale's FAQ. "That's why we teamed up with developers that create games that are somehow similar to MouseCraft. Games we have chosen can be similar in terms of graphics, gameplay mechanics or general feel and we think that if anybody owns at least one title from our list, there's a high chance they will like every other game from our campaign. This is our proposition on how curated storefronts should look like." [Image: Crunching Koalas]
The Incredible Machine team is back with Contraption Maker, now on Steam
If you're a seasoned, old-school Mac gamer, there's a good chance you remember a funky puzzle game called The Incredible Machine. In the game, players had to perform simple tasks by building overly complex Rube Goldberg devices and experimenting with how each piece functioned through trial and error. The game spawned several sequels and even briefly found its way to the App Store. Now, the original team behind The Incredible Machine has evolved the concept with Contraption Maker, just released for OS X. Like its much older brother, Contraption Maker is a toolbox for puzzle solving. There's a huge learning curve and you slowly reveal what each of the dozens of balls, platforms, tubes, plugs, and gadgets actually do, but once you've scaled this mountain you'll spend your time constructing machines to complete a specific task. Each puzzle has a simple end goal, such as feeding a cat or lighting a bomb, but completing that task often requires an insane amount of planning and experimenting. For example, capturing a mouse in a case might be the end goal, but in order to accomplish it you'll need to launch a ball to scare a hamster, which runs on a treadmill that turns a gear and rotates a band, which turns another gear to power a generator, which turns on a light that focuses through a magnifying glass to burn a rope which drops the cage onto the mouse. And that's one of the simpler puzzles. Contraption Maker also includes a custom puzzle creator, so once you best the game's 140 official puzzles -- which you might never accomplish, to be honest -- you can try your luck at an endless number of community-created puzzles. In short, there's quite literally no end to this game, so prepare for some serious puzzle solving. Contraption Maker is currently $14.99 on Steam, which is a great price for this amount of content, especially if you're a puzzle fan. Definitely give it a try.
Contraption Maker, spiritual successor to The Incredible Machine, due this year
1992s Rube Goldberg-em-up The Incredible Machine is getting a spiritual successor this year, produced by the creators of the original. Contraption Maker will makes its debut on Windows PC and Mac, helped along by The Incredible Machine coder Kevin Ryan, producer Jeff Tunnell, and original pixel artist Brian Hahn. Expect improved physics, art and animations in Contraption Maker, developer Timothy Aste told Indie Games. "The higher fidelity graphics really shine on making the puzzles more fun an exciting (especially for those who enjoy flipping cats). In addition, we have some really cool things in development that are new to the series such as a super beefed up the sandbox mode and allow players to build much more elaborate puzzles and machines that can interconnect and be easily share-able over the internet." Aste added Contraption Maker will be mod-friendly. "We have even discussed some really 'out there' stuff such possibly support for Arduino to control real life puzzle elements, but we'll have to wait and see if we can get that far. The Incredible Machine tasks players with constructing a series of complex Rube Goldberg devices around fixed devices to complete an objective. The series was published by Sierra Entertainment. In 2009, Tunnell acquired the rights through his studio, PushButton Labs.%Gallery-188490%
