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March 2008

Indie Tidbits

Submitted by gum on Fri, 03/28/2008 - 07:01
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According to Introversion, their popular (and award-winning) game Darwinia and the upcoming multiplayer Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest will be made available on Microsoft's Xbox LIVE® Arcade service.

BusinessWeek has launched a new feature called BusinessWeek Arcade, where BusinessWeek rounds up some of the "Web's best free, independently produced games." The new column features quite a few high-quality free games, well worth checking out.

The Art of Play, an event put together by Heather Kelley, will take place at Carnegie Mellon University on March 31st and April 1st. According to the official website, "The aim of this Symposium and Arcade is to survey the games that brought us to this moment with their unique creative vision, and to frame the field moving forward, as game makers finally abandon the question "CAN games be art," and begin to ask ourselves in how many ways they WILL be."

New some screenshots and video of JADE has been released by Thomas Biskup.

Voting for the VGNG Compo has begun!

TIGSource Launches TIGdb

Submitted by gum on Tue, 03/25/2008 - 07:15
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TIGSource, one of the premier blogs on independent gaming, has just announced the launch of TIGdb (in case you're curious, it stands for "The Indie Game Database"), a database for indie games that not only provides basic info and download link to indie games, but also lets users rate the games:

One thing that's pretty cool is that we have a rating system. Anyone can sign up for an account and start rating games (out of five stars). Eventually, these accounts will let you do more, like keep track of your favorite games or submit games to the database. The task of populating the database is a monumental one, so it'd be great to crowd-source this... but until we have some controls in place, me and Terry (and perhaps a few other people) will be adding the games. I will, however, take submissions/suggestions very seriously! See this thread for details.

Artist Links

Not sure how these have anything to do with gaming, but I like putting up banners of crazy Japanese artists.

cradlebanner Cradle, doujin circle and gorgeous Touhou artworks.
swaywindbanner01 SWAY WIND, another group with awesome Touhou artworks.

KaioShin Releases English Translation of Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart

Submitted by gum on Fri, 03/21/2008 - 08:47
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After 2 years in development, KaioShin’s Romhacking Aerie has released its complete English translation of Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart is the third game in the Dragon Quest Monsters series, released by Enix for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. In the game, the caravan plays an important role (not surprising, considering it's in the title and all!) For example, the player need to stop the caravan each night to rest and search for food. The caravan can also carry a maximum of twelve members, which is just another way of implementing the "you can only carry 6 Pokeball's worth of Pokemon" mechanism.

Other than that, the game plays out like an RPG we've all come to know and love. Humans and monsters enter battles (again, think Pokemon), monster can evolve, and so on. What sets this series apart from others? It's a Dragon Quest game, and it was developed by Enix!

Fate/stay night English Patch v2.0 Released by mirror moon

Submitted by gum on Tue, 03/18/2008 - 06:00
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After a long wait, visual novel translation group mirror moon has finally finished translating the second story arc of Fate/stay night!

The new patch, appropriately titled Fate/stay night English v2.0, not only contains translation for both the Fate route and the UBW (that's Unlimited Blade Works for those non-Type-Mooners) route, but also come with the option of adding voices into both the Fate and UBW routes, that is, as long as you have a (legal) copy of the PS2 version of the game, Realta Nua.

Download links: Direct, RapidShare, Megaupload, BT

And some places to purchase Realta Nua.

For those of you not in the known, Fate/stay night is a eroge (adult) visual novel made by Type-Moon. The game has three different "storyline" the player can play through, "Fate," UBW," and "Heaven's Feel."

Great to see a 66%-Complete English patch for the game coming out, considering a few years ago the only way to understand what's going on in the game is to read story summaries...it'll also be fun to see which patch reach the final version first, the English patch or the Chinese patch? (For those who doesn't know, the Chinese fan community has also made their translation patch that come with voice add-on, coincidentally, it's around 66% complete as well)

While on the topic of Fate translation...check out Multiple:Option's wonderful abridged version of the Fate/stay night trial demo and the Fate/hollow ataraxia Prologue (both translated!) to the DS, as well as the Fate