The new Cloud Assassin smartphone game makes the dorm (and boring workplace) game mobile and accessible. Playerscan challenge and invite players by phone number, and map their last known locations. In an awesome cyberpunk move, completely unimagined in my college water-pistol and rubber-snake assassin games, checking another player’s last known location also reveals your own. You make your kill by snapping a photo of your target’s back, and uploading it. And, yes, there’s a space for text-based trashtalking.

Ah, technology. Changing how we pretend to off our friends. Isn’t it great?

Via iheartchaos: Cloud Assass.in

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I Heart Chaos: Cloud Assassin

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Socks, Inc. is a supercute AR game. Players create a sock puppet character, and set off to do real-world challenges, like snapping a picture of your sock out in nature, eating a snack or playing a sport. The uploaded pictures and videos are moderated and then shared with other users (answering the obvious questions about a children’s game and user-generated content). Check out the hilarious Alien Overload sock photostream for an example.

(This is an adorable and informative trailer, even though it includes my unfavorite games-related slogan. I admit to finding World of DateCraft pretty cute and clever in 2007, but I wish we could all lay off “World of ___Craft” in games journalism.)

Via Socks, Inc. | The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Game Reviews, Previews, News & Downloads

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Still, I was attracted to the cyberpunk awesome of arranging Red Bull empties into a racetrack, scanning and filming them with a smartphone (iOS only, which seems more like a branding choice for Red Bull than a technical requirement), choosing a background, and letting the app creating a playable, unique racetrack.

The social element comes in when players upload and share their tracks, with the ability to race the ghostcars of friends and strangers. Of course, there’s the ubiquitous social leaderboard (guess there are some elements of a typical branded reskin), and the ability to like and share on Facebook.

In conclusion, I still don’t really like Red Bull. I don’t really like racing games. But the juxtaposition of empty cans of chemical energy, and the augmented reality pocket tech is way too cyberpunk to ignore.

Twitter meta-game Zeitheist also demoed at the NYGaming at AOL Ventures the same night.

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Red Bull Augmented Racing

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I want the Droid app market to take off. I want there to be as many wild indie games for my Droid as for my friends’ iPhones, all organized into a market that’s easy to search. But I’ll settle for a dozen more games like Droid Odyssey.

Droid Odyssey is an adorable puzzle platformer from new indie devs Carbon Crystal Entertainment. Your goal is to guide your robot avatar through the level, whether that means avoiding obstacles or solving puzzles.

Players have a simple set of controls to manage their robot. Everything can be defeated using the left arrow, the right arrow, and a special robotic power to pick up or put down an item. Although it takes a little while to adjust to using the arrows as thrusters in flight, the controls never left me feeling the unresponsive frustration that plagues mobile touchcreen games.

Via Droid Odyssey on Indie Game Mag

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Zeitheist, which demoed last night at NYGaming at AOL Ventures, is a new web-based Twitter meta-game. The idea of a Twitter-based game may be new, but Zeitheist is a pretty addictive thirty-second challenge, asking players how well they know what’s popular on Twitter right this second.

You’re given a random number of instances, and your goal is to pick 5 words that will appear on Twitter that number of times in the next 30 seconds. Your goal is to get as close to the randomly generated number as possible, so you can’t just toss lol or the into zeitheist for the obvious zillion hits.

Via I Heart Chaos — Zeitheist, The Twitter Trends Meta-Game

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Deep Sea, Robin Arnott’s terrifying sound-based undersea adventure pushes boundaries between game and interactive experience. Sure, there’s combat, a battle between the player and some sort of killer leviathan, but the focus is much more on an experience than a high score.

Deep Sea caught my eye in a sea of stunning indie titles at SxSW’s indiePub pavilion because of all the apparatus. Players wear a modified gas mask, covering the entire head and blocking out all light, and a set of headphones, blocking all the noise from the show floor and playing Arnott’s creepy undersea audio.

Via Deep Sea at SxSW’s Screenburn | The Indie Game Magazine

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Remember those old Sierra games, where you’d go to cross the road and get hit by a car? Get into an elevator and plunge to your death? Pet a cat and contract a particularly virulent strain of rabies? Well, you see where I’m going with this. Games that screw players for creative problem-solving or exploration just aren’t fun.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is an excellent sandbox game in that it’s never punishing for players to experiment. If your experiment fails, a new red ball appears. You’re not timed, you’re not losing points for screwing up, the only real effect of failure is that you haven’t met your goal and so you need to try again. With unlimited attempts, feel free to try any crazy ideas that come to mind. Write your name in crayon and see what happens! Build a swing or a seesaw!
The endless supply of new chances has a Civ-like “one more turn!” effect, and coupled with the rewards of seeing what’ll happen, can make this an addictive game.  And, although you’ll be trying again and again, CPD thankfully stays clear of all those annoying attempts at encouragement. No saccharine requests to please try again here.

The sandbox-y aspect, and the lack of punishment make Crayon Physics a great game to introduce to a non-gamer in your life. Because the controls are so intuitive, you won’t be spending a long time explaining the many uses of the A button. Everything in CPD is done with the mouse, so if you can master Paint, you can start crayoning creations. A simple, intuitive set of controls goes a long way towards making a game playable, you don’t want to mash buttons while you sort out what A and B do in each situation. CPD eliminates that learning curve without eliminating the new-game challenge.

Crayon Physics keeps the cute crayon style throughout the game. After completing the basic levels, players hop in a messy crayoned boat and sail to new green-outlined islands, full of new levels. Even the game menus look like something your little niece or nephew would want you to hang on the fridge.

By being so brilliantly simple, Crayon Physics Deluxe highlights everything that’s overblown in typical mainstream games. It’s an addictive game, without any half-naked women, any explosions or any blood, it’s great to see a game that goes in a totally different direction.

Originally written February ’09, for AngryGamers.com

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CotV asks players a lot of questions about their goals for their, uh, un-life. Do you want to create lasting art, find true love, rise to the top of the vampire society or accumulate power? This helped me feel like my character had actual motivation, but I was frustrated by the lack of progress towards my stated goal. Choice of the Vampire is the first of several planned installments, so hopefully I’ll get another chance at rocking the undead art world.

I couldn’t quite work it into the post, but it’s worth mentioning that the CotV story includes the botched Jackson assassination, one of my favorite bizarre history moments.

Via Choice of The Vampire | Review (PC and Mobile)

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Pretending To Be A Vampire

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MyTribe also has collections made of random drops now, but I haven’t seen them add anything to gameplay, so virtual packratting doesn’t appeal to me. I’d like at least a veneer of gameplay over the acquisition of imaginary items. I mean, I’ll still rerun Van Cleef a dozen times to get the whole set of matching Defias armor…

But… I started playing MyTribe again because there are new mysteries to unlock. Flotsam’s Call (or as I like to call it, the Hatch), is the first of six new mysteries, so start building your Great Ark now to get to a new island with three new mysteries.

Solving Flotsam’s Call takes advantage of the new crafting recipes. Crafting was a great addition, I tend to like crafting (If I’m not wearing the Defias leather, I’ll endlessly mine and level my blacksmithing to craft another complete set of armor) and it adds a little bit of individuality to your tribe’s island. You’ll need to craft 4 torches, so to solve the mystery, you’ll need the recipe for torches (found under Supplies, then Decorations, then Decorative), 40 wood and 40 mushrooms. Then place one torch in each hole in the hatch. The reward is an increased drop rate for regular and silver crates and barrels, a nice bonus if you are interested in completed collections.

To open the Jewel Vault (because, seriously, what tropical island doesn’t have a jewel vault?), you’ll need to find four gems, one each from the Common, Uncommon, Rare and Scarce categories. Apply these gems to clothing, and dress your tribespeople in their sparkly new power-up clothes.

It seems you can use the same tribesperson wearing different clothes each time to unlock the mystery, but that even if he’s wearing two or more gems at a time, he can’t fulfill two or more requirements at once.

As a reward, you’ll get four new gems. Any one know if these are the same four every time? You’ll also be able to remove gems from clothing by putting a gem-wearing tribesperson on the Jewel Vault. So, hey, getting gems stuck on clothing isn’t a design flaw! You just need the Jewel Vault mystery!

More mysteries will be out on August 23rd.

What do you think? Are you excited about the new MyTribe  mysteries, or burned out on all the giftspam?

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MyTribe’s New Mystery

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So I was pleased to see a variety of coloring in the four choices for your avatar, but disappointed that race seemed to be the only distinguishing characteristic. I’d have liked to choose my hair and my clothes, or just been given some differing accessories, so I didn’t feel like I was choosing between Blonde, Hispanic, Asian or Black, but between, say, Artist, Tomboy, Bookworm, etc. This disappointing start set the tone for a well-intentioned but ultimately flat game.

Regardless of which ‘toon you choose, your character has recently moved to a new town, and you parents promise to take you on a super exciting trip, if you can achieve Girl Scout-style badges in different areas, like life skills, arts & literature, world knowledge, sports & games, adventure and ‘girl lore’, and make enough money to fund your trip.

To do this, you’ll play a bunch of minigames based on summertime activities and friendly interactions. You might plant seeds (and you won’t even have to harass your friends to water them) or help a friend find missing homework or jump rope. You can make and sell lemonade and craft projects to earn money. There’s enough variety in the items that the game avoided the awful cycle of making money to buy materials to craft items to make money to buy materials…

Crafting puzzles were a slightly less sadistic version of building in Lost in Blue 2. (I guess Cooking Mama has ruined me for games that are essentially tracing a stylus along a dotted line.) The items for the collection missions respawned fast enough to avoid frustration, but there wasn’t much difference between walking back and forth looking for feathers, or between walking back and forth looking for science homework. Overall, the minigames lived up to the game’s promises of female protagonists and family-friendly activities, but they weren’t particularly challenging, innovative or even fun. They felt more like phoned-in mini-versions of other popular DS puzzles.  I think it takes more than the absence of boobs and beer to make a really good game for preteen girls.

If the female-empowerment message is supposed to validate a pretty underwhelming collection of minigames, what about the other messages in the game? What about the stereotypes in the game, the shy glasses-wearing girl who does literature trivia or the black girl who only wants to play double-dutch? What about the in-game warnings that caving and fire-starting are dangerous should not be tried at home, which seems to defeat the whole girl-power theme of the game? Be daring with your stylus only!

And what is up with the friendship bracelets? Throughout the game, you’ll meet shy or suspicious girls who don’t automatically warm to your friendly overtures, and the solution is to give them a bracelet and automatically become friends. I don’t know if the message here is trust people who give you stuff or maybe gifts are the same thing as affection or just girls are shallow, but either way, I don’t like it.  I’m confused that we should read realism into girls starting campfires or exploring, but not into little girls trading trust and affection for jewelry.

Overall, The Daring Game of Girls gets close to success on gameplay and close on theme, but ultimately falls flat on both.

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The Daring Game For Girls

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