iGame Radio

Shrapnel Games announced an update for Brainpipe: A Plunge to Unhumanity today. The update (1.02) can be obtained here. This corrects, among other things, a nasty lag in the use of your mouse to direct movement on the screen I mentioned in the review. The difference is definitely there, and makes the game much better. Go and pick up.

BURIEN, Washington – May 23, 2009 – Voting for the iGame Radio Logo Contest has begun and you can participate. Everyone may vote for their favorite choice of logo for the iGame Radio podcast…the original Mac gaming podcast. The vote lasts one week.

Started in February, the logo contest includes seven sponsors, eleven logo submissions, and a prize package worth $770. At midnight, May 23, voting commenced for all submissions by the public and will continue for one week, ending 11:59 pm of May 30. The vote takes place on the iGame Radio site, where all submission images can be seen.

Contest information, including rules for format and submission, are located at the iGame Radio Logo Contest page. The prize package currently valued at $770 will be offered to the grand prize winner, but all entrants will gain a free t-shirt of their choice from the iGame Radio Café Press store. The prize package features donations from sponsors MusicSkins, PopCap Games, Howling Moon Software, Creaceed, Griffin Technology, Codeweavers, and Omni Group.

For more ideas, come to the iGame Radio site. There you can listen to the podcasts, read blog posts about the game industry, and subscribe to the newsletter and the rss feed for the iGame Radio podcast.

Okay, the past couple of days have been iGame Radio design and logo contest stuff. Time to talk games! Three more Mac games released in the past few days to talk about:

Sandlot Games’ Tradewinds Caravans, released for the Mac by Red Marble Games. Take on the role of one of six different characters, each with his or her own back story, strengths, and weaknesses, as you travel from city to city along the famous Silk Road. You can buy and sell goods, go on quests, and fight battles with bandits along the way. Second in the Tradewinds series, you can download the demo here, or buy it for $19.95.



Virtual Programming releases Reel Deal Card Games 09, so you can fish while you deal your cards. Okay, no there’s no fishing involved. I have no idea why it’s called “reel”. Unless someone doesn’t know how to spell. And based on some of the card choices, that may not be far off:

2009 brings over 79 card games including All Fives, Cuckoo, Golf, Hand & Foot, Pedro, and Pisti.

I mean, who plays a card game called “hand & foot”, or “pisti”??

Unlockable slot machines, mini-games, an all new prize vault, side bets, cheats for games, new backgrounds, new music, new player movies, and new card backs; all of which make playing cards more entertaining than ever!

The addition of three new characters brings together a cast of fifteen animated and hilarious personalities to play against. Progress through the secret areas of the Prize Vault and Mall to unlock hundreds of items and surprises!

Lastly, Virtual Programming has also released The Golden Path of Plumeboom for the iPhone. I don’t even want to know what a plumeboom is.

Plumeboom the Peacock of Orniland found an ancient map that leads to the treasures that are kept in secret caves, and it is the player’s task to help Plumeboom uncover them.

Oh, Plumeboom is a peacock. Because all peacocks read ancient maps and travel to secret caves…

Claim the treasures hidden behind each of a hundred magical magnetic locks of every possible shape. Shoot colored orbs and be thrilled by the advanced physics system in the game. When there are three orbs of the same color aligned, they will burst. The more orbs you burst in one blow, the higher your score. The lock is opened, when there are no orbs left.

There’s a lot of exploding going on here. With a name like “Plumeboom”, I’d be worried with all that bursting and blowing. And now I have a bad ripoff game in my head…

You can pick up a lite version for free or get the full version for $.99 on iTunes.

BURIEN, Washington – May 22, 2009 – The iGame Radio Logo Contest has less than one day left before the submission deadline, after which public voting on all submissions begins. The contest has already reached seven sponsors, eight logo submissions, and a prize package worth $770. Launched in February, the logo contest seeks everyone with an itch to draw, paint, or move those pixels to create the right design for a new logo for the iGame Radio podcast…the original Mac gaming podcast. The deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm, Pacific Time, May 22, 2009.

All logo submissions are currently located on the iGame Radio Flickr site, where everyone can view and comment on each one. Access to the Flickr site can be reached from the iGame Radio site. At midnight, May 23, voting will commence for all submissions by the public and continue for one week.

“We wanted a voting process that was simple and straightforward,” said Omaha Sternberg, host and producer for iGame Radio. “We’ll have a link from the front page of iGame Radio directly to the voting page, which will include images of each submission, so no one has to bounce back and forth from the voting page and the Flickr site.”

Contest information, including rules for format and submission, are located at the iGame Radio Logo Contest page. The prize package currently valued at $770 will be offered to the grand prize winner, but all entrants will gain a free t-shirt of their choice from the iGame Radio Café Press store. The prize package features donations from sponsors MusicSkins, PopCap Games, Howling Moon Software, Creaceed, Griffin Technology, Codeweavers, and Omni Group.

For more ideas, come to the iGame Radio site. There you can listen to the podcasts, read blog posts about the game industry, and subscribe to the newsletter and the rss feed for the iGame Radio podcast.

One more day before the deadline to get your submission in for the Logo Contest. Then we start voting. Yay!

I’m looking forward to the vote. I’m testing out polling software right now. You can see it on the right hand sidebar…it’s called Democracy 2. Nice plugin, actually…if it weren’t for the pain of having to add the old widget folder (because this apparently hasn’t been updated since WordPress 2.2 or such, after which the sidebar widget thing was part of WordPress and one didn’t need a separate folder. Because now WordPress is trying to foist off on me a whole bunch of other widgets that it apparently thinks I want…without my permission. I’ll probably just code the poll into the sidebar css, and ditch the stupid folder so I don’t have to deal with this in the future after the contest is over.

However, when I actually do the voting, I’ll have it on a separate page. That way I can embed the images of the submissions right next to each choice box…no back and forth between pages or such nonsense. Also, although my marketing brain is really angry at me for not doing this, I’m not requiring any email addresses or such for voting. I will include a link to sign up for the podcast feed and the newsletter mailing list, though. But that’s not required for voting.

I’ve added a new widget to the right sidebar. It’s a polling widget, and I’m testing it for the Logo Contest voting. Test it out and tell me what you think.

…Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has now seen fit to waste more taxpayer money on appealing to the Federal Supreme Court a law which has been thrown down in both the state court and the Federal Appeals Court regarding violent video games. ‘Cause, you know, California is just sitting pretty financially right now.

Breaking news from GamePolitics reveals that the Guv has chosen to appeal this law which would prohibit the sale of “violent video games” to minors…or as Teh Terminator claims “…would allow parents to make better informed decisions for their kids.” I’m not sure how the government stepping in and telling folks what their kids can and can’t buy is allowing parents to make better informed decisions for their kids. As a parent, it seems like what the government is really saying is that I’m not a good enough parent to watch over my kid. But some people really do have different definitions about things.

Like Dick Cheney, and torture. Er, ‘scuse me…”enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Just got a great announcement from Hothead Games that Braid has been released for the Mac. This Indie puzzle-platform game with lovely graphics can now be obtained via PlayGreenHouse. I’ve been looking forward to this game because of its unusual nature of focusing on puzzle solving rather than survival, even though it is placed in a platformer style setting. I’m interested to see if that works for me. Different people have different views. The system requirements are reasonable, and the demo is immediately downloadable.

 

A Game Review Edition featuring reviews of:

Brainpipe: Digital Eel’s IGF 2009 awarded arcade game of psychedelic sights and sound.


A Vampyre Story: follow the unlife of an undead Parisian opera singer as she tries to escape her plight and accept her fate.


Pixie: Little Pixie is afraid of the night bugs…so she zaps them with her death vines! Well, you can read it that way…

And on the heals of the previous post about Sci-Fi, comes this gem through Slashdot regarding George R. R. Martin’s series, A Song of Ice and Fire, coming to a game near you. I don’t know how many of you have read the series, but despite my love for most of Martin’s stuff, I couldn’t get through this series. I read the first book, A Game of Thrones, and thought it was pretty good, and was ready for the next one. A Clash of Kings started getting way too dense, with waaaaaaaaaay too many characters to keep track of. By A Storm of Swords I was done. I got half way through and couldn’t finish it. That says a lot for me, the woman who devours epic fantasy.

Anyway, it should be interesting to see how much of this series ends up in the games, considering how incredibly dense the storylines are and how many characters you have to deal with. And I’d recommend that this be an RPG, no question. I mean, can you see this being turned into a RTS, or FPS? Ewwwww.