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!