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December 2008

Phantom of Inferno Animated Once Again

Submitted by gum on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 07:51
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Not quite sure why Nitro+ would dig up a game that's over 10 years old and turn it into an anime...again, especially when the first attempt at adaptation did not cause a sensation of any kind, but whatever their reason, boys and girls, a new anime adaptation of Nitro+'s classic game Phantom of Inferno has been announced, the anime will be called Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom.

Phantom of Inferno was Nitro+'s first game, and is, in every way and form, a classic. The story revolves around a 15-year-old Japanese teen named Azuma Reijing travels to the U.S. to celebrate his graduation (who does that anyway?). While in the U.S., the poor guy witnesses a murder and is subsequently kidnapped by the criminal organization Inferno. Inferno brainwashes the boy and trains him into an assassin called Zwei. Zwei trains under Ein, also known as Phantom, a title given to Inferno's top assassin. The story has many routes, Zwei either goes with Ein as the two try to discover their true self, becomes the personal boy-toy of Inferno's top official Claudia as she tries to take over, or meets the little girl Cal who later become the assassin Drei.

Commonplace Book Competition Results Announced

Submitted by gum on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 06:51
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The TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition didn't really receive as much attention, mostly due to IGF and the fact that everyone's super busy around this time of the year (seriously, other than IndieGames and TIGSource, every other indie gaming blog/site stopped updating, this one included, lolz). All that is about to change, for below is a look at some of the games from the competition!

Before we begin, let's talk a little bit about the competition first. The goal of the competition is to design a game based on one of the ideas from H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. From TIGSource:

Renowned horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft kept a notebook, called "The Commonplace Book, in which he jotted "ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. ...Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on." As you might expect, these notes are fragmented, cryptic, and extremely creepy.

Anyway, there were 35 entries, and below is the winner and the first 9 losers (j/k but true):

Crayon Physics Delux Beta Out in the Wild

Submitted by gum on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 03:17
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Crayon Physics Delux is a 2D physics-based puzzle game from Kloonigames (which is really just a one-man team of consisting of the one and only Petri Purho). Based on Crayon Physics, Cray Physics Delux won the 2008 IGF grand prize.

The gameplay of CPD is very simple, in each level the player needs to guide a red ball to a star, however, the player cannot directly control the ball in anyway, but must instead move the ball by draw various objects, which is where the physics portion of the game comes in. In the original Crayon Physics, the player can only draw basic shapes like rectangle and circle, but in CPD, the player can draw anything he or she wants, meaning the player can beat a level in many different ways. When I play CPD, I think of World of Goo, not that the two games are similar or anything (aside from the fact they're both puzzle games and won awards in IGF08), but both games are just so very innovative and fun.