New posts!

Alright guys, I know I don’t update this thing as much as I should, to help remedy that, my fiancée has been making posts under ‘Fairly’s Corner,’ but now that the Flash Gaming Summit and Game Developer’s Conference are over, I want to try and do something special and post something new every day for a week.

That’s right, 7 updates in 7 days. Compared to my usual ‘whenever’ update schedule, that number is pretty mind boggling. On the last day, I’ll have some cool news and concept art for World 3 to finish the new post flood with.

So to start off the barrage, The Fancy Pants Adventures: World 2 won the indie game category at the Mochi award show! Most of you have probably read about it, but still, I think it’s way awesome, and just had to say it myself.

Sadly, there was some computer trouble, so there’s no video saved from the ‘what makes a game a hit’ panel that I was on 🙁

But wait, there’s more!!! Click below to read the reset of the post!

In other news, I’ve been going through DS games pretty quickly lately. I like to sit down and relax with the thing at night, so I tend to burn through handheld games pretty quickly. Just beat Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, and I’m left wishing I would have picked up the series sooner. I’ve played Advanced Wars since the second one on GBA, but this was the first time I picked up a Fire Emblem title. The game’s a lot like AW, only your units aren’t expendable, if one dies, it’s dead for good. It’s an interesting concept to see in a video game, and I find myself reloading the game whenever I lose someone. I could care less about watching the number of lives I have go down, but there’s something about losing a unique unit that just gets to me, it’s an interesting thing to contemplate, game design-wise. I feel like it’s a much easier game than AW. Since your units aren’t expendable, they tend to be pretty beefy, so you’re usually overpowering the enemy by a good margin. That doesn’t make it an easy game, I just don’t find the tide of battle turning nearly as much as in Advanced Wars, where victory can hang on a thread for a good duration of the match.

Started playing Rhythm Heaven, and again, as a developer, the aural feedback of that game is definitely worth studying. That development team is ace with user interaction, making every single action of the player feel ‘meaty’ (or ‘juicy,’ as TommyLM likes to use to describe Fraser’s Ride’s sound effects) and responsive. I remember that WarioWare: Twisted had me psyched about the Wii, though it seems like very few other developers put nearly as much thought into game feedback, making user interaction once again more about the software than the hardware (surprise surprise).

Ah, yes, one more thing. Anyone every hear of the old SNES game Spanky’s Quest? I rented it a few times from a Major Video by my house when I was young, and bought it for a few bucks when that place was closing. Anyways, I finally beat the thing for the first time a few days ago. No idea why, but I definitely love the game. Maybe it’s because attacking in the game is so strange. You basically toss a little bubble into the air, then either pop it, or bounce it on your head to make it larger. If you pop the bubble when it’s small, it’ll just be a tiny baseball, next size will be a string of soccer balls, then some rotating volleyballs, then finally, a massive line of death bringing basketballs! It’s probably the most unique version of the ‘charge beam’ concept that I’ve ever seen.

The moral of this game: Vegetables are evil!

Anywho, remember to check back again tomorrow for another post!

And Chuck says hi!

Annnd, um Maya says AROWROWROWROWROWR!

I post pictures of my pets on teh interwebs because I can.