It's the first really successful translation of a 2D platform gameplay mechanic to 3D. Maybe it's the 'gravity system' (most objects you can walk on are like little planets with gravity pulling you towards it from all sides, no matter how small they are), the excellent camera movement (lot's of 3rd person games have the tendency to get that wrong) and the rewarding pulling of 'star bites' (little stars) towards you by pointing at them with the Wiimote. Also, the music is just perfect and the difficulty is exactly right (for me that is) with challenging but not ridiculously difficult bosses. It's all balanced very well, and it's, simply, fun! So if you're looking for a great game to buy a Wii for, you can stop looking! If you allready have a Wii, you should be playing the game right now instead of reading this!

In this post I just want to tell you about his upcoming xbox 360 game (it will be on xbla) Space Giraffe, which, in it's current form, looks like a high paced psychedelic shooter with some game play elements from Tempest and a Giraffe as the main character. I'm looking forward to playing this one (althought I don't owe a xbox 360 ... yet).

His journal is actually quite fun to read, and you can find it here : http://stinkygoat.livejournal.com/.

Manic Miner was originally a Spectrum game (I think), but I remember the c64 version. With these games it's all about perfectly timing your jumps, taking into account static & moving enemies and crumbling platforms. Collect all the keys and go to the exit. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, go ahead and try, this game is as hard as I remember it to be.

The graphics capture the atmosphere of a true 8-bitter, though slightly updated to a 256 color palette. Sound is also quite convincing. Really, if you're looking for a challenging classic platformer, this is as good as they get. In my opinion that is, don't hesitate to comment if you think differently.

The site to watch is OSFlash. Some quick links to interesting tools :
MTASC : A standalone Actionscript compiler.
Flashdevelop : An Actionscript IDE
swfmill : an xml to swf generator, often used as an asset library generator.

A Ludum Dare 48h Game Programming Competition entry from a few years ago, but still a blast: PuffBOMB.

An indiegamer forum thread started by James C. Smith from Reflexive Arcade fame, talking about setting goals & rewarding players in casual games.

You can download the beta from this link.
And als check out Darron Schall's blog for some interesting real life examples of neoswiff, e.g. this article about a port of a C# winforms application to Neoswiff.

Speaking for myself, I know I have poured lots of valuable energy in various frameworks, most of which are collecting electronic dust on my hard disk. Did I gain experience by doing that? Sure. Did I finish lots of games with it? Nope.

2 years ago, I made the move towards professional game development, since then I have been working on downloadable/casual games for/with nuclide, and guess what? Writing games has little to do with implementing technology! Sure you can write a library that fits your own programming style best, or has an über-elegant design, or makes better use of the latest pixel shader API, or has a way-cool software fallback, so your game can run on a 8086 too! But you have to ask yourself, do you want to write games, or do you want to write libraries? If the former, choose an existing library or framework, there are lots of high quality open source and or commercial alternatives out there. Pick one, and start writing that game! Get over it!

He states there is

No feeling of ‘progression’ – Almost all of the puzzle games last 2-20 minutes, with no larger meta-game to encourage you to play it ‘just one more time’.

Well, if you take a look at the successful casual games, you clearly see that communication of progression to the user is one of the things that separates them from the less successful ones. Take for instance Big Kahuna Reef by Reflexive. Currently RealArcade’s nr.1 seller. This game clearly shows a good implementation of different levels of progression. For instance, if you finish six levels, you unlock a new fish species, which you can then add to your reef.

James C. Smith, the developer of Big Kahuna Reef elaborates on this principle which he calls James’ theory of multi-tier goal oriented game design in this thread on the indiegamer forums.

Furthermore, mr. Steinmeyer says

Virtually every game involves some variation on grouping shapes/colors/words to remove them from the board. This is fun for a bit, but if new users keep finding nothing but variations on this same basic theme, they will quickly abandon the genre.

Well, the numbers prove you wrong so far. The ‘match three of a kind’ principle seems to be holding up very well. Big Kahuna Reef is indeed a Bejeweled clone, with a twist. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it shows that the crowd that buys casual games is not looking for originality (What are they looking for then? What makes them buy? I’ll try to dig into this in another post.)

Licensing needed – OK, I’m pretty reluctant to even suggest this, but the downloadable market needs to explore licensed content/stories/brands.

Well, in fact there are casual games that have gone this road. Take e.g. a look at
Spiderman 2 : Web of words
Scrabble Rack Attack
Wheel of Fortune
And that’s just looking at MSN Games. Does this model work as well as in console and retail gaming? I guess time will tell, but so far, non licensed content seems to be doing pretty well!