Twinworld Game Reviews

Archive for April, 2015

Here’s our video review of Affordable Space Adventures by KnapNok Games & Nifflas’ Games for the Nintendo Wii U.

Shigeru Reviews recently did an interview (Q&A session) with Josh Hano, developer for Nefarious. Here it is for you to enjoy.

Nefarious is a game that offers an interesting perspective flip on the classic rescue the princess formula. Can you describe the genesis of the project? That is to say what led you to want to make this game?

Josh: The game has actually been stuck in my head since around 2006. It started out as a simple mechanic that I developed an aesthetic and story around. Though originally Crow was the actual antagonist. (Instead of being a villain protagonist.) We also arrived at a completely different game play mechanic than the one we started with.

Eventually I began to realize the hero character was dull. So then I thought it’d be fun if I inverted the norm, and let you play as a princess kidnapping villain. This led to a thought exercise that dictates the game design to this day. What mechanics would be different if you were a villain? This thinking has led to the princess mechanic and the reverse boss fights but It even informs small decisions, such as which side of the screen your health bar is on during boss fights.

I see that Mario is a big influence on the game as well as Zelda. What other games are among your influences in this game to create the world and characters?

Josh: Earthworm Jim is a big influence for me. It’s liquid smooth animation, quirky sense of humor and crazy environments are all things that I think go into an awesome game. There also a bit of Megaman thrown in there for good measure.

Related to the last question, Which games do you want to pay homage to with this game? I see some Megaman influence in the game, are there other games you wish to pay homage to among the classics ( or not necessarily classics)?

Josh: There is a lot of homage paying to games that really drive home classic tropes. There is a little bit of absurdity in the idea that certain princesses are kidnapped frequently to the point that you have to wonder what the princess does while she’s in the villains stronghold. What sort of relationship with the villain does she have? In Nefarious there is very little focus on the typical heroes of video game norms. It’s all about villains and princesses.

Nefarious by its nature stands out among indie platformers with its own unique identity. That said the indie game market can be a tough one. How do you plan to help get attention for Nefarious?

Josh: Getting the game into the hands of “let’s players” is a big part of it. We also try to make it out to shows such as PaxSouth. Reddit has also been a good place for us. The gaming subreddits appreciate the trope inversion, and we often share our knowledge and experience on /r/gamedev.

Nefarious is both a parody of classic games but also adds a new twist on them. What are some neat innovations do you have planned for the game?

Josh: Reverse Boss fights are always crowd pleasers. In a lot of ways the journey between the hero and the villain is similiar. Both have to dispatch waves of lesser defenders. But in one major way they are different. Boss fights.

In Nefarious, you don’t fight a boss, you are the boss fight. At the end of each stage a hero catches up to you, and you must use one of your many dastardly devices to dispatch them. (Sorry, villains are super big into alliteration for some reason.)

So you get to be the guy who takes up the entire screen, trying to squash a little guy trying to hit your weak point.

There is also the princess mechanic itself. Since you are kidnapping princesses from a lot of different kingdoms, they all have a different effect on Crow while he is carrying them. An insectoid princess flapping her wings might make Crow lighter. Or a princess composed of pure energy might super charge his abilities.

Nefarious will be coming to the Wii U. Obviously this type of game tends to do well on the system. What do you think of the Wii U eshop and the indie scene on Wii U?

Josh: Nintendo is super cool towards indies now a days. They are also very understanding when it comes to small budgets and like to help small devs get those much-coveted dev kits.

Do you feel Nintendo fans will appreciate the game? What do you think of the Nintendo audience in general?

Josh: I think Nintendo fans are going to have a great time with this game, a lot of the tropes were deconstruct and invert were popularized by Nintendo itself. So, they’ll be instantly recognizable. Plus Nintendo has been my personal favorite console since 1988. (When I was first old enough to play them.) So you can say I’m a big fan of the Nintendo audience.

I like that the characters are very fleshed out from what has been seen, all with distinct personalities. How important has characterization been in making the game universe?

Josh: We walk a very fine line of having a story, but not being over-bearing with it. Characterization is super important to me, because I think it’s one of the things we can explore with Nefarious that other games can’t, or don’t. In most games the princess is absent 90% of the time. They just show up as a reward at the very end of the game.

But Nefarious gives us the unique opportunity to make the princess a co-star with the player. It let’s us give them personality.

What is your end goal with Nefarious? Do you hope to create more games in this universe if it sells well?

Josh: I do have plans for games, post Nefarious. I have more mechanics in mind, and more tropes to invert with them. As for the ‘Nefarious verse’ I’m a big fan of how Valve handles their in-universe games. They are simultaneously connected, but also immensely ambiguous as to when they take place. Such as all the Half-life references in portal. They are practically just easter eggs for people who are fans of both games but you don’t need to play half-life to fully enjoy portal.

What replay value will there be in the game? Anything to keep players coming back again and again?

Josh: We have plans for replayability. A major component of that is mastering each level. Getting it down to a speed-run where you don’t die and you manage to grab all of the levels collectables. Our goal is to have this unlock additional content, hidden bosses, perhaps even a different ending. Star road from Mario has always been my favorite example.

As someone making an indie game what are some indie games recently released that you feel stand out?

Josh: Though it’s been out for a while, Shovel Knight is a big one that I really dove into. I think given the similar game types, there is a lot we can learn from Yacht Club.

Do you have any words for those looking forward to the game?

Josh: I just want to let you guys know we’re hard at work. I spend nearly all of my waking hours working on Nefarious. My personal goal is to not only deliver on the promises of the Kickstarter campaign, but to go above and beyond the call of duty. Nefarious is loaded with little rewards and surprises for players who explore off the beaten path.

Thank you very much for doing this interview and we wish you the best of luck.
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You can learn more about Nefarious here.

Source: Shigeru Reviews

Spotlighting Saturnine Games’ indie game, Turtle Tale, for the Nintendo Wii U!

If you’d like to see us play more of this game, let us know in the comments below.

Shigeru Reviews recently did an interview (Q&A session) with Image & Form. Here it is for you to enjoy.

SteamWorld Dig was an interesting take on the metroidvania genre. What was the genesis of this game, that is, how did it come to be in its final state?

It was actually a chain of events that made SteamWorld Dig what it became. First, before SteamWorld Dig we were a mobile developers with mixed success. We’d made a few iOS games with Anthill (https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/anthill/id414658364?mt=8) being the standout hit among them. But at the time in 2012 – aeons ago, in game dev history – we suspected that the App Store was becoming a dangerous basket to keep all our eggs in. It was getting very congested, and a reality where F2P games would be in majority was lurking around the corner. We didn’t want to make F2P games – we wanted to focus on gameplay, not monetization. (Recently it’s become increasingly obvious (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-02-04-if-we-look-at-casual-games-in-2015-whats-out-there-is-mostly-crap) that F2P exploits human weaknesses pretty much the way gambling does, which means we’re *definitely* not up for it.)

So in the fall of 2012 we started on a new game, and we called it SteamWorld Dig very early on. It was set in SteamWorld, and it was a digging game. As you can tell from the company name, we’re not very good at naming things. 😉 But one thing we’re good at is playing games, and SteamWorld Dig certainly is inspired by some other computer games. We’re impressed with the learn-as-you-go-along upgrade systems of Metroid and others. And there are elements from other mining (or digging) games, such as Dig Dug and Miner Dig Deep.

But the biggest inspiration was our own predecessor to SteamWorld Dig, a game called SteamWorld Tower Defense. It’s a mostly harmless tower-defense game we made for the Nintendo DSiWare Store back in 2010. It had a charming twist to it: the robots were the good guys and the pesky enemies were human. That twist made us return to SteamWorld, and we spent quite a few lunch breaks discussing SteamWorld before starting on SteamWorld Dig. We couldn’t help but wonder WHY the robots were upstanding folk running gold mines, and the humans were such greedy, aggressive lowlives. How had that come about, what was really the story here? So we decided to make another game in the series and give away a bigger slice of the background. The premise of SteamWorld Dig was interesting, because it built on the mining track established in SWTD, and we love games about mining.

(And at least I love mining itself – there’s something inherently wonderful about looking for and unearthing hidden treasure. I haven’t told my wife, but I’d secretly love to take her on a vacation on a historical beach somewhere with one of those metal detectors, hoping to dig up some old Viking or Roman treasure. I’ll operate the detector, she’ll operate the shovel. Just as secretly, she’ll not want to come.)

We discussed how we could mix mining with other great gameplay mechanics, and voilà! All this lunch-break thinking also means that we have *a lot* of different, yet-to-be-made ideas that fit SteamWorld as a universe. The gameplay of the next SteamWorld game, SteamWorld Heist, will be nothing like Dig, but the art style is instantly recognizable.

Were there any features in SteamWorld Dig that had to be cut for any reasons that you wish could have been put in the game?

Yes, towards the end of the production we came under some pretty severe financial constraints – we were quickly going broke. Anthill wasn’t making much money for us anymore, and we had to be done with Dig by the end of June 2013; we would have run out of money if we had continued over summer. In Sweden, summer works like this: *everyone* goes on vacation in July, and we had to send the game for a time-consuming lotcheck process. The most economic way to do it was to let vacation and lotcheck coincide – and then pray that the game would sail smoothly through inspection.

It did, but that also meant that we had to race to finish the game by the end of June. And there were a couple of worlds that we didn’t have time to finish. It was sad in every way, but we couldn’t have finished it otherwise – we would have gone bust. In retrospect we may have benefited from including them, but we had no idea whether the game would be successful or not. It would have been ballsy to include the extra content and hoped for the best, but at the same time it would have been reckless beyond description. A lot of us have families, and it would have been harsh.

How have you found the Nintendo fan community response to the game? Do you feel that The Nintendo fan community is supportive of the indie scene?

The community response to SteamWorld Dig was a lot better than anything we had dreamed of. I’m not sure we could have had the same success if we had gone day-one on another platform. Part of it is the die-hard perspective: the Nintendo community are fans of their platform in a similar way to Mac users back in the day – even at times when nothing indicated that Macintoshes were better than PCs, both in terms of hardware and OS, the Mac fans would still be staunch advocates of the platform. Another part of it is the relatively small number of games available for the 3DS, because the 3DS as a platform isn’t mainstream. For example, you can’t use Unity to port to the 3DS. You have to develop for it separately due to the dual screens, the low resolution and the comparatively weak hardware specs.

So yes, I’m sure that the Nintendo fan community supports and embraces indies. Partly because they’re starved for content, but also because they appreciate the effort. There’s no point in making bad games for the 3DS. The community has very high standards.

How did you find the development process on Wii U, was it like other consoles or harder/easier to program for?

It was harder in the sense that we had to come up with clever use for the gamepad – it couldn’t just be an HD reflection of the lower screen of the 3DS, which we used for the map and inventory. Otherwise it was more or less like the others. We already had the HD version in place on PC/Mac/Linux and PlayStation 4/Vita when we started making the Wii U version.

SteamWorld Heist looks to do for turn based strategy, what SteamWorld Dig did for the metroidvania genre. How did you come to decide on this genre for the game? Were there other ideas that were ultimately rejected or was this an evolution of ideas?

After Dig we actually started on its prequel, but thought it was too small a game to follow up Dig. We needed to do something bigger, so we didn’t exactly reject the prequel but decided to keep it for later. After Dig we also started on a totally unrelated iOS game because we had a great idea. We shelved that as well in the fall of 2013 when it was clear that we could release Dig directly to Steam without standing in line for Greenlight.

Getting this entry ticket to Steam felt very good, because it meant that we could postpone the decision on the next SteamWorld game a little. It was while we were making the HD (Steam) version that some of us (me not included) got together at yet another famous lunch break to come up with the seed for Heist. Our lead designer Olle Hakansson secretly fleshed out the idea for a while and then presented it to me. I loved it, and my only condition for it was that it be set in SteamWorld, because I liked the idea of using the same franchise as an umbrella for a wide variety of game genres. I believe Heist was conceived through a desire to try our hands at turn-based strategy. Olle and a few others are fans of XCOM; I’m confident that chess will never be surpassed by any other game.

So we’re not worried that Heist is very different from Dig. On the contrary, we want to set many kinds of games in the universe. Similarly, we have no problems messing with the SteamWorld chronology; if SteamWorld Tower Defense was the first SteamWorld game, then Dig is the third, and Heist is the fifth or sixth. That means that later we’ll make games that occur before Heist.

Will SteamWorld Heist expand on SteamWorld Dig in any way or is this a completely unrelated story set in the same world?

Heist is set in SteamWorld and follows the timeline, but several hundred years must have passed for the events in Heist to take place. Some things in Heist flirt with the past, but I’m sure you’ll be able to play and enjoy Heist maximally without having played Dig. I’m not sure, however, what would work as a good comparison. For example, Star Wars and Aliens use the same characters throughout, whereas SteamWorld doesn’t.

How have you enjoyed working on SteamWorld Heist? Has it been a fun experience, do you enjoy making a turn based strategy game?

Yes, we’ve enjoyed it very much – but making a turn-based combat strategy game easy to play is really quite difficult! Video games that employ turn-based strategy are often burdened with a heavy interface: buttons, settings and choices everywhere. I think we’ll succeed in keeping it simple and promoting the core gameplay, but now we understand better why turn-based combat games work the way they do. 🙂

The way we make games is also far from streamlined. A triple-A studio CEO (or better yet, CFO) would gasp in horror when seeing how we make games. At the outset we have an idea about what the game will be, and then we try very many different things. For the longest time Heist was a roguelike – or roguelite – game that would reward good play and be harshly punitive if you were sloppy. We’ve changed that, because dying – and losing your progress – was so heart-breaking.

Do you feel the inde scene is still healthy for new developers?

Not for all, but it all depends on the studio and the games. If you make great games, you deserve to be healthy on any scene, platform or market.

What advice would you give to new indie devs out there?

Since it’s hard to follow up games that get lukewarm attention, try to make your first games as good as possible. For that you need a great team, and perhaps financial and marketing backing in the form of a publisher so that you can focus on what you do best. No publisher will love your game as much as you do, so you may feel that you’re giving away parts of the proceeds to someone who isn’t trying as hard as you would. But it might be the best possibility anyway, because they will also ensure that you make a great game. And don’t – DON’T – make me-too games. There’s enough shovelware and match-three clones out there as it is. At any cost, make something original.

Do you have anything to say to the fans of your work?

As always, thank you for carrying us. We make money only from our games, so we are very grateful that you’re buying them and not pirating. It enables us to keep making great games. But support doesn’t only come in the form of hard cash. We get tons of satisfied shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook, and that counts for a lot both in terms of recommendations and encouragement. Happy gaming, and don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone by trying new kinds of games.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions and good luck with the game

Source: Shigeru Reviews

Terraria has been rated by the German USK board, indicating an imminent release announcement in the future. The ratings board rated both a Wii U and 3DS version of the title, and revealed that both titles are in development by 505 Games.

This is not the first time that Terraria has been spotted in relation to the Wii U and 3DS. Earlier this year, listings popped up on Gamefly for both versions of Terraria. There is still no official confirmation from 505 Games on the existence of these ports; however, the German USK board is very reliable due to the fact that all games cost a fee to be evaluated and cannot appear without the payment of the publisher.

Source: Nintendo Enthusiast

Forget the world. Fall in love with this enchanting zen puzzler.

Quell Memento is the sequel of the simple and easy to pick up puzzle
game, Quell Reflect. More mechanics are introduced and will be mixed with
its’ former ones.

Set within an old abandoned house as a precious guest, you must restore
order to the jumbled memories of the last occupant, and in doing so,
embarks you on a haunting journey of self-discovery and reflection.

* Over 150 cunningly freshly crafted puzzles!
* Perfectly balanced difficulty curve!
* Imaginative gimmick that never been seen before
* Achievement challenges also included
* New soundtrack by composer Steven Cravis

Suitable for all ages. This is an experience that will stay with you
long after you put it down.

Source: PR Email

Finally, after years of doubt and uncertainty, The Binding of Isaac – in its newer Rebirth form – is officially heading to Wii U and New 3DS.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, this remake of the 2011 top-down 2D dungeon crawler throws you into the maniacal world of Isaac, who must traverse through his mothers basement to escape religious sacrifice. During your adventure, Isaac will encounter various monsters and bosses that he will have to slaughter. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth features an additional 17 new “normal” bosses, plus 3 new “final” bosses (including Mega Satan). It also contains all content from the original Binding of Isaac and its expansion, Wrath of the Lamb, in addition to new items, rooms, characters, and enemies.

There was a lot of disbelief that Rebirth would not come out for Nintendo platforms, based on the original game getting rejected on 3DS back in 2012, which was due to its “questionable religious content.” When creator Edmund McMillen announced the ports to Wii U and New 3DS on April 1st, he revealed a version of the game that would be edited for Nintendo platforms. Thankfully, that was just a joke, Nintendo seems perfectly fine releasing the uncensored game, and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth will launch on Wii U and New 3DS intact. Older versions of 3DS and 2DS will not be able to play, unfortunately.

No date was revealed, but expect The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth to hit the eShop soon.

Source: 8-Worlds News.

Here’s our video review of Super Destronaut by Petite Games for the Nintendo Wii U.

Here’s our video review of Dot Arcade by James Montagna for the Nintendo Wii U.