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Santa Ragione's VHS rewinds movie-selection sims at Fantastic Arcade
VideoHeroeS is a good fit for Fantastic Arcade, the annual indie game exhibition tied to Fantastic Fest, a genre film showcase held in Austin, Texas. VHS is a game about the nostalgia of picking out movies, on VHS, in the 90s from the local rental store – players are the store clerk and have to find the right tape for each customer. Customers have specific demands, such as, "I hate movies. They suck. Give me anything that is not a movie," and questions including, "Do you still have that martial arts movie with the screaming guy? You know, when he says, "Kiiaiii!" I played VHS during GDC Europe in Cologne, Germany, and it's more than a simple point-and-click method of movie selection. It's a physics game in the way that Octodad uses physics, flinging films around the carefully organized shelves to float above the floor in a jumbled, chaotic pile. This adds to the frenzy of helping customers as their demands pile up. As the clerk, you only get paid if you find a film to meet the customer's needs. It's a joy not only to pick the correct movies, but also to look at all that old-school box art. Currently, VHS uses actual movies and their box arts, but if the game takes off outside of Fantastic Arcade, developer Santa Ragione has a plan: commission famous and talented artists to design boxes inspired by classic titles, mimicking them enough for players to get a sense of each film's contents, but not enough so the devs get sued. As a bonus, this avenue would create tons of original artwork within the game, which could be an extra selling point. Anyone going to Fantastic Arcade in Austin on September 19 - 26, check out VHS – and please be kind, rewind.
These 8 Fantastic Arcade Spotlight games get custom arcade cabinets
"Going big" to Fantastic Arcade – the annual indie showcase in Austin, Texas – means building custom arcade cabinets for eight indie games. This year, the Spotlight games getting the full-cabinet treatment are Samurai Gunn, Wasteland Kings, Goblet Grotto, Panoramical, QED, Starwhal: Just the Tip, No Brakes Valet and Towerfall. "Fantastic Arcade's Spotlight games are selected by a hard-to-define quality we like to call 'arcadiness,'" says Juegos Rancheros co-founder Wiley Wiggins. The Spotlight games were chosen by Wiggins, Adam Saltsman and Brandon Boyer, the founders of Austin indie collective Juegos Rancheros, and Arcade Technical Director Joshua Fields. Towerfall has been a convention and Ouya favorite of ours for a while, while Wasteland Kings was just outed today as the next game from Vlambeer. It's an action roguelike starring mutants as they attempt to capture the Wasteland throne, and it's "a happy place where weird shit happens all the time," Vlambeer tells us. These games are part of more than 20 total coming to Fantastic Arcade, an offshoot of genre film showcase Fantastic Fest. We've been impressed with Fantastic Arcade's offerings in the past, and this year is poised to please as well.
Photo tour of Austin's Fantastic Arcade
Fantastic Arcade continues to be one of the coolest, most satisfying gaming events of the year. No other convention that I can think of would ever have a custom Luftrausers arcade cabinet, for example, nor is there an event with such easy, casual access to tons of indie developers.For those of you unable to make it this year, or those of you who happen to be local but haven't stopped by yet, we've got a gallery of pictures to help you enjoy the event vicariously. If you happen to be organizing next year's E3, we urge you strongly to look in here for inspiration.%Gallery-166309%
Steam Greenlight by the numbers
During a panel pitching Steam and Greenlight to indies at Fantastic Arcade, Valve presented some numbers representing the usage of the service.According to the slide, 949,156 users have participated, casting 9,998,476 votes toward getting games onto Steam. 3,195 games have been posted to Greenlight for consideration, of which 1,110 got banned so far, for various reasons ranging from content considered inappropriate to just being a joke.Finally, there are around 800 "Legitimate, Publicly Visible Items" on the service. And of those, of course, ten have been officially "greenlit."
Make an Adventure Time game in 48 hours next week
What time is it? Frantic, sleepless coding time! A last-minute event has been added to the upcoming Fantastic Arcade celebrations in Austin, TX: a 48-hour game jam in which participants will attempt to create games about, based on, inspired by, or otherwise tied into Cartoon Network's wonderful Adventure Time.The "Game Making Frenzy" from September 14-16 is open to anyone worldwide, with space available in Austin for local developers. "Guys, this is maybe the coolest Adventure Time thing.. for me.." Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward said on Twitter. "I'm super excited about this." Jake and Finn are also apparently super excited.
Go back in time, destroy warships at Austin's Fantastic Arcade next month
Fantastic Arcade, the annual independent game showcase attached to the Fantastic Fest film festival, revealed its official selections for this year's event this week. Capy's Super TIME Force, Vlambeer's Luftrausers, and Dennaton's Hotline Miami are on display as the "main competition," along with FTL, Super Hexagon, Unmanned, and McPixel.An awesomely eclectic variety of games will also be exhibited outside of the competition, including Proteus, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, The Banner Saga, Scale, BaraBariBall, and Realistic Summer Sports Simulator – "A ridiculous multiplayer summer olympics game where the athletes are controlled by giant springs." Fantastic!Fantastic Arcade runs September 20-23 in Austin, TX.
Pixeljunk 4am's cube of sound
"You have to play it to understand it!" That's about as big a cop-out as I could possibly conjure up, but if I learned anything from my half-hour, hands-off demo of PixelJunk Lifelike during E3, it's absolutely true of this particular game. It's devoid of pretense, tutorial or any semblance of a UI, simply asking the player to grab a PlayStation Move remote and, you know, make music happen. The stars aligned after I had a chance to try out Q-Games' curious music generator -- now titled Pixeljunk 4am -- during Fantastic Arcade, while two of my contemporaries listened in to my on-the-fly composition. While the tunes I created couldn't be considered "club bangers" by anyone with two functioning ears, the game's mechanisms revealed themselves completely during my demonstration: It is, at its recondite core, a game about pulling techno-sounds out of an imaginary space-cube. Yeah, describing this is going to be tough.
Faraway crowned at Fantastic Arcade festival
Fantastic Fest took place in Austin, TX this past weekend, and as part of the festivities there, organizers set up a Fantastic Arcade, to show off some of the latest and greatest indie games to hit the scene. There were a few good iPhone and iPad games out there, and in fact one of them took top honors, as Steph Thirion's Faraway (which we're eagerly awaiting on iOS) picked up the prize for Best in Show. Vlambeer's Radical Fishing (which was recently involved in an IP clash with another game called Ninja Fishing) also grabbed an award for "Most Punished for Lack of Ninjas," and is due out on iOS at some point in the future. You'll find the full list of games that won awards at the show in the press release below. It's great to see some popular iOS titles make the grade at an event like this, and boy, if the hype for Faraway wasn't high enough already, this adds even more icing to the cake. Hopefully we'll see the game released to the public very soon. Show full PR text FANTASTIC ARCADE 2011 INDIE GAME AWARD WINNERS HONORED Best in Show Awarded to Little--Eyes' Faraway AUSTIN, TX – September 25, 2011 – Fantastic Arcade, the second annual showcase of independent games from the organizers of Alamo Drafthouse's Fantastic Fest, the world's largest genre film festival, wrapped the four-day event tonight with the Fantastic Arcade Awards Party: Starcade. Fantastic Arcade featured eight Spotlight indie games in the juried competition, each housed in retro-arcade style cabinets and available to the general public for play. These eight titles, along with thirteen additional showcased indie games, were culled from more than 100 submissions. The following is the full list of indie games awards and winners presented: Best in Show: Faraway by Little--Eyes Audience Choice Award: Fez by Polytron Most Punished for Lack of Ninjas Award: Radical Fishing by Vlambeer The Bionic Commando Award for Grappling Hook Excellence Award: Capsized by AlienTrap The "You got 2D in my 3D, or maybe 3D in my 2D" Award: Fez by Polytron The Mandlebrot Award: Fract by Phosfiend Systems The Most Recent Use of Japanese Tradition by Westerners Award: Skulls of the Shogun by Haunted Temple Studios The Implied Cephalopod Intercourse Award: Octodad by Team Octodad The Teach the Controversy Award: Jesus vs. Dinosaurs by Martin Jonasson, Petri Purho "Fantastic Arcade fuses the world of genre film with the burgeoning indie game community," said Mike Plante, Arcade Artistic Director. "Each Fantastic Arcade Spotlight game proved to be compelling, fun, accessible and a blast to play. In fact, the audience reached new record levels of thumb blisters!" Video game industry luminaries Brandon Boyer, Mike Plante and Eddo Stern curated the 2011 Fantastic Arcade. Panel discussions, developer talks and game tournaments were held each day of the festival at The Highball in Austin, Texas.
Fantastic Arcade 2011 in pictures
The annual Fantastic Arcade event, attached to the insane Fantastic Fest film ... fest ... is going on this weekend at the Highball in Austin, TX. This year's layout includes the requisite array of custom arcade machines for indie games (this is a magical place where you can just walk up and play Fez like it's no big deal), along with a set of demo stations for PSN games including Papo & Yo and Journey, thanks to sponsor Sony. There are even regular arcade games in the venue, if playing all those exclusive indies grows tiresome.%Gallery-134758%
Fantastic Arcade to keep Austin weird on September 22
If you're fortunate enough to live within (or near!) the borders of Austin, Texas, you should clear your schedule for next weekend. Fantastic Arcade will take over The Highball from Thursday, September 22 to Sunday, September 25. The event will play host to 21 indie games, such as the psychedelic Dyad, the audio-only panic game, Deep Sea, the heartwarmingly bizarre Octodad, the perspective-shifting Fez, and the utterly magical Owlboy. There's also a Starhawk gameplay demonstration from fellow Austin-based studio Lightbox Interactive, and a panel hosted by a whole bevy of PSN developers. Check out Juegos Rancheros for the full lineup, trailers and a schedule of events for the weekend.
Super Meat Boy preview: Super masochistic
I almost didn't dare write a preview of the XBLA version of Super Meat Boy. When I approached the demo kiosk at Fantastic Arcade, I started playing the level the previous player had abandoned, and then proceeded to die -- about a hundred times. That's not hyperbole. If anything, that's a conservative estimate. I failed over, and over, and over again. "Well, that wouldn't make for a good preview," I thought, reflecting on the humiliating performance that I just wrote about in this preview. Later, after a brief mourning period, I returned to the game and started the demo from the first level. With the advantage of a bit more experience traversing Super Meat Boy's earlier levels, and having gotten a feel for the dash-jump physics, I was able to triumph over adversity and complete that one extremely difficult level. (Bonus: I could deliver my impressions of the game based on more than just the first three quarters of a single level played repeatedly.) My opinion? Super Meat Boy is an ideal game for people who became addicted to the extreme platforming challenges found in N+ ... unless they're squeamish about blood. %Gallery-103429%
Austin's Fantastic Arcade lives up to its name
You wouldn't expect to walk into an arcade and find a cabinet dedicated to Every Day the Same Dream, Molleindustria's browser game about white-collar malaise. If you happen to be in Austin, TX this weekend, you can experience this particular anomaly for yourself, along with refurbished arcade machines housing Monaco, Nidhogg, Norrland, Enviro-Bear 2000 and more. These unique machines are just part of the Fantastic Arcade event within the Fantastic Fest film festival -- an event that also includes panel discussions, tournaments, and demos of Microsoft's upcoming XBLA Game Feast titles. We snapped some pictures of the handcrafted indie arcade for those of you who couldn't be there. Find them in our Fantastic gallery.%Gallery-103291%
Garriott's Portalarium going the social media route
Our friends at Joystiq tipped us off to the latest endeavor for MMO legend Richard Garriott (and no, it doesn't involve the intrepid developer orbiting the earth). While speaking at the Austin, Texas-based Fantastic Arcade event, Lord British dropped a few hints regarding the social media stylings that his latest company (and game), Portalarium, will feature. "You play it by clicking on a link, nothing to pay for up front, no real installation and only if you decide you really want to play it will we decide how to eventually charge you money for it," Garriott enthused. While we're not quite as excited as we would be if he'd announced an updated Ultima Online project, Portalarium bears watching, if only to see whether Garriott can still walk the walk. "Since everybody else is doing Flash and Java games, I can kick their ass pretty easy," he told attendees.
Richard Garriott's next game goes 'back to my roots,' but in social media
Portalarium founder, Ultima creator and no-foolin' spaceman Richard Garriott delivered the keynote at Fantastic Fest's inaugural Fantastic Arcade event in Austin today. After giving the assembled audience his personal history, he offered a hint about where he plans to go with Portalarium (which is evidently both a company and game name). Displaying a slide about going "back to my roots," Garriott said his company planned to make "AAA games, meaning the games we find compelling to create and play, but distributed through social media." Why that medium? "The power is in that you don't have to make a decision to buy it, you play it by clicking on a link, nothing to pay for up front, no real installation and only if you decide you really want to play it will we decide how to eventually charge you money for it." Later, in response to an audience question, he explained his strategy a bit further. "Since everybody else is doing Flash and Java games, I can kick their ass pretty easy."
