TIGSource have announced the winners of their Bootleg Demake game-in-a-month competition. The idea was to take a well-known recent game, and present it as if it were a bootleg on older hardware.

Congratulations to Superflat with his NES demake of Silent Hill 2, Soundless Mountain II:

Top #10 Entries:

1. Soundless Mountain II (superflat)
2. Gang Garrison II (mrfredman, MedO)
3. Aquarium (Oracle)
4. Little Girl in Underland (The Ivy)
5. House Globe (Oxeye Games)
6. S.T.A.C.K.E.R. (Pishtaco)
7. Squish (Terry)
8. Fillauth (Oxeye Games) / Macarena of the Missing (Noyb)
9. Sexy Seaside Beachball (lemmy&binky)
10. Advanced Set the Rope on Fire Cartridge (Blueberry)

There were a whopping 68 entries in total. Other notable entries include Overscan, a side on 2D version of Rez and Large-Scale Vehicular Stealing, a NES-style version of GTA IV.

All 68 games can be found and downloaded here!

Source: TIGSource

Uh oh.

The BBC is reporting that there’s talks of making downloadable video and videogames need a full-on BBFC rating too.

While that’s probably actually fair enough, it raises some concerns for those of us who make downloadable content for the web.

From The BBC Website:

Age ratings for downloaded video content and video games are to be introduced in the UK.

Overseen by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the scheme will see certificates appear on websites, via set-top boxes and portable players.

Mr Johnson said the scheme, called BBFC.online, was not an attempt to censor the internet, nor to regulated online video gaming.

Mr Cooke said the BBFC continued to work with the games industry’s self-regulatory body Pegi to find solutions to classifying the burgeoning range of online gaming.

“We don’t need to set up in rivalry with Pegi online. We can work cooperatively,” he said.

Without providing specifics, Mr Johnson said the BBFC expected all the leading content providers and aggregators to sign up to the scheme in the coming weeks and months.

Quite how it’s all going to work is anyone’s guess, but paying to have your game rated seems a tad too likely, even if it is currently ‘voluntary’. It’s possibly a problem on the horizon for Indie Developers who typically can’t even afford new shoelaces.

Uh oh. Watch this space.

Microsoft have announced that they’re opening up Xbox360 to User Generated Content, which presumably means more dross than you can shake a stick at.

Expect to sift through no end of rubbishy Breakout clones and an over-abundance of cornflower blue, all in an attempt to find the occasional gem.

Like bobbing for apples in a bucket of raw sewage. Can’t wait.

Press Release!

As everyone knows, the Indie Trade is something of a mixed bag. While the mainstream guys are all pretty much 100% focusing on games that involve Space Marines and explosions, indie developers like to spread the net a little further, primarily by making Match-3 clones, crummy flash 10 minute nonsense or potentially-quite-good but horrifically unpolished 1997-quality 3D masterpieces filled with people with angular faces…

Wired’s Clive Thompson has penned an interesting little article all about “woo, check out these Indie Games, aren’t they simply scrummy?”

“Two years ago, the number of people making genuinely polished indie games was pretty small, numbering in the dozens or scores. A single columnist could reasonably hope to sample the year’s offerings and make some picks.

But in the last two years, things have blown up spectacularly. There are now hundreds and hundreds of superb indie games coming out every year…”

It’s an interesting read, although I remain perpetually unimpressed with what’s coming out of the Indie scene. I’m yet to play a single Indie game that’s anything other than a pleasant distraction; in all honesty, they tend to leave me feeling like I’m wasting valuable gaming time — why would I piss about with some hacked-together arse-ugly little independent game when I haven’t finished Super Mario Galaxy, yet?

I’m convinced the problem is largely to do with plot and storytelling. As Portal showed you didn’t need an insane amount of resources to tell 2007’s most gripping story; just a knack for writing and a text-to-speech generator. Alright, so they got in professional writers and voice talent, but there’s nothing in Portal’s plot that couldn’t be achieved by an Independent Studio…

Someone please prove me wrong. Someone tell me an Indie has crafted a game that’s anything other than mindless action. Someone point me towards Indie Gaming’s Blair Witch Project, in which cashflow didn’t get in the way of a great (alright, ‘marginally above average’…) story.

So here’s the challenge for 2008, Independent Developers: we’ve got the tools and the talent to make technically great games. Now let’s inject a little character into them and make them worth playing…

… is Out Now!

If you’re using XNA you can now upgrade FOR FREE to the newer, more spangly version. Assuming you’re not too scared that doing so will screw up your current project like me, that is.

Here’s a list of the new stuff to tinker with and enjoy.

Chris from Introversion has posted a quasi-rant up on their forums about the state of Piracy and DRM.

“…there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they’ve lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed.”

For an alternative view on thieving scumbags playing indie games for free, check Cliffski’s blog. He’s an angry, grumpy man: but then teenagers are metaphorically whipping tenners out of his back pocket and laughing.

“I wish I didn’t have to take time away from game development to do that crap, but as usual in life 1% of people are screwing it up for the other 99%. People who pirate games might as well wear a T shirt saying ‘I hope PC gaming dies’.”

Where do you stand on piracy? And if anyone has time to make a really funky ‘I hope PC Gaming dies’ T-Shirt, I’ll buy one. I choose to be ‘ironic’ like that with my dress sense…

[chris’ rant stolen wholesale from the newly-legendary RockPaperShotgun]

Free from the shackles of grumpy marketing men in suits, The Indie Games Business is renowned for its supposed risk-taking brilliance.

Look at indie games! Look how they risk-take.

Except they don’t, really: the truth remains that it’s all still mostly portal-friendly cloned pap.

Sometimes, however, Indies pull something special out of the bag. Looking like a cross between the classic Armadillo Run and all those scribble-based indie games that have been oh-so-popular recently, Crayon Physics Deluxe is clearly going to be The Best Game Ever.

While people who do physics brilliantly are clearly the life-blood of Next Gen Gaming, they can’t name games for toffee. I had to muster near-Herculean strength to be bothered to watch that video, given the boring-and-predictable name of the game.

I’m damned glad I did, though. It’s brilliant and magic stuff made out of The Future.

A Wii version asap, please. Thanks.

As well as recognising the best Independent games each year, the IGF also feature a Student Showcase with prizes going to the Best Student Game and notable showcase entries.

This year’s entries have been announced on the IGF website and there is a gratifyingly high standard of work on show. Stand-out entries include Crayon Physics Deluxe by Kloonigames and Flipside by Team 3.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D puzzle game where your crayon art becomes real interactable objects, while Flipside is a platform game featuring an environment that can be viewed from two sides - a happy bouncy side, and a dark insane side.

Check out the other entries on the IGF website here.

It looks a bit like Super Paper Mario for the Wii. Except this ain’t no plummer… you’ve got a Fez!

The game, for obvious reasons called “Fez“, looks to be a cross between a platformer and a puzzle game, but all rendered in deliciously retro 2D. Except that it’s not. Here’s where it all gets a bit Paper Mario-y - the camera can be rotated to view the scene from four projections so that what was a mighty chasm from one angle is in fact a convenient bridge from another. Clever eh?

Yup, those wonderfully cute little 2D pixels are actually 3D trixels rendered to look like they’re flat. When the whole scene rotates to another projection it all looks extremely cool indeed - exactly how a 2D game should look if it was rendered in 3D, in fact!

The game is currently running on PC, but apparently it’s ultimately destined for the Xbox360.

Read the preview on Arthouse Games
View the Teaser Video

Well, not exactly… in actual fact, it´s an interview with James Whitehead, creator of the rather funky New Satan Sam - a delightfully retro-looking action adventure platformer sort of game. New Satan Sam is a testament to the power of games creation package, Multi-Media Fusion, and should be an inspiration to aspiring games creators who don´t have programming experience.

In the interview, he chats about himself, his decision to use Multimedia Fusion, and his next project Tormishire.

Read the interview here!