All Walls Must Fall is an upcoming “tech-noir tactics” game by inbetweengames, a Berlin-based studio made up of 3 guys who used to work for Yager (best known for Spec Ops: The Line, one of my favorite games from last gen). It’s being pitched by the devs as “XCOM meets Braid”, a pretty high-concept thing to reach for, but I mean these guys have SPEC OPS: THE LINE on their resume. They could make a free-to-play Minions-themed board game for smartphones and I’d still play it regardless of whether it was actually good or not.
Luckily, All Walls Must Fall looks absolutely beautiful. Screenshots don’t do its art style justice but there’s tons of video footage on the various websites and social media pages the developers are currently running. inbetween is being extremely open with the game’s development, in fact, so there’s no shortage of information on this game out there if you want to dig deeper into it (you want to, trust me).
There’s no set release date for this game yet but inbetweengames is planning on releasing it as an Early Access title on Steam so you’ll probably get to play it sooner rather than later. They’ve also got some equally-gorgeous games you can check out on their itch.io page.
I’m extremely pleased with the recent resurgence of arcade-style racing games that’s currently happening in the indie dev scene. I mean, sims are cool and all but, to me anyway, nothing will ever top the feeling of a good arcade racer. So far we’ve seen a lot of stuff inspired by Sega’s work in the genre but, surprisingly, not a whole lot of devs have tackled futuristic combat racers a la F-Zero and Wipeout yet. Montréal, Québec-based developers Dopagames are looking to channel the spirit of those titles into their upcoming game Super Pilot, and it’s looking great.
Super Pilot has only been in development for a few months but it already looks like a ton of fun. The developers are including a track editor with the game too so those of us who never got to experience the F-Zero X Expansion Kit back in the day (aka everyone reading this post, probably) will finally get to create their own roller coastery deathtraps to race on. I can’t wait to give this one a go.
Check out Dopgames’s Dev Blog on the TIGForums for more info on Super Pilot. Given that it’s so early in development there’s no release date set for it yet but there’s tons of pretty pictures out there.
YouTubers Shishirara TV uploaded roughly an hour of footage of the upcoming 32-bit horror homage Back in 1995 yesterday. It reminds me a whole lot of Doctor Hauzer for the 3DO but there’s some Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower and Silent Hill in there too.
Apparently this is releasing on Steam this month(!) courtesy of Degica, who are also set to basically stealth release a port of the cult classic 3DS title Code of Princess this month too. Pretty exciting.
Anyone else remember UK Resistance’s Blue Skies Forever campaign from over a decade ago (also holy shit, it’s been over a decade since UK Resistance was relevant)? Lucky Mountain Games Ltd. remembers (or not, who knows) and they’re embracing it completely with their upcoming title Racing Apex.
Racing Apex combines the car combat of titles like Full Auto with an aesthetic heavily inspired by early 90′s arcade racers like Winning Run and Virtua Racing. I like all of those things and, if you’re reading this, you probably like all of those things too. Currently slated for a PC release (with consoles to follow later on), the developers have included all sorts of rad features like full vehicle damage and multiplayer modes like Capture-the-Flag and Bomb Tag that can be played on over 16 different tracks. They’re also going to support multi-monitor setups and steering wheels for a full arcade experience.
Oh, also the core team of developers consists of two guys that worked on the Burnout games. That alone should be a major selling point for most people.
Lucky Mountain is currently running a Kickstarter for the game; they’ve got 24 more days to raise the full $49,820 needed to finish development so hopefully that happens. You can do your part by donating here, upvoting the game on Steam Greenlight here and (obviously), sharing this post or others like it to spread the word.
The Not-So-Incredibly Trick Crucifixion of Candice Debébé
The game most of you have been waiting for since the dawn of the modern indie boom spurred by titles like Braid and Super Meat Boy and the rise of Steam as a game delivery platform came out last week. It’s a comedic RPG largely created by one person (who also did most of the voice acting, music, and presumably the graphics) with a battle system ripped out of a twin-stick shooter, and an Adult Swim-esque story that not only feels like a bizarro Barbarella crossed with a 16-bit JRPG, but also passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. It out-quirks every game that tries overly hard to be quirky without so much as batting an eyelash, and while they’re still pretty hard on the eyes, the graphics have an extremely unique style that feels more like a Klasky Csupo cartoon in 3-D than a videogame. The game’s creator even runs both the official Twitter account and Steam forums for the game as the main character, and does an amazing job of never breaking character.
Unfortunately this game is being used by many people right now as the prime example of the type of unimaginative, shoddily-made shovelware being dumped en masse onto Steam on a daily basis. Never mind the fact that Early Access games that will never actually be finished but are still sold for upwards of $10 at times are released all the time, and this one’s a fully featured, completely finished game with lots of content and only retails for $5.
Fuck the haters, let me sell you on Candice Debébé’s Incredibly Trick Lifestyle.
Candice Debébé’s Incredibly Trick Lifestyle tells the story of a perpetually pregnant, yet always glamorous trailer park girl named Candice, and her quest to rescue her trailer park’s “Tan Van” (a full-sized mobile home dedicated solely to giving Candice and friends glowing fake tans) from the clutches of Krystal, a down-on-her-luck pop singer who hopes that having the powers of the Tan Van all to herself will make her famous again.
This is the game’s plot. There has never been a game with a plot this batshit, yet incredibly mundane, and it gets even crazier.
Basically the story is moved along by Candice’s attempts to get cool new “Magical Bitch” powers. She bangs a Male Mermaid (not a Merman, they’re entirely different as the song that plays during the sequence will tell you), bangs a Russian programmer who teleports her into a Tron-like world to hone her powers, etc, etc, if you’ve seen Barbarella you probably know where this is going, but then there’s a twist. And another twist. And yet more twists, and then you’ve been playing the game for 4 hours straight and have hit level 30, and Candice is shitting bowling balls at a flying whale boss while every NPC she’s met so far is watching her rap battle the Male Mermaid from earlier, and you realize the plot of this game, which could’ve easily just have been a one note joke, had a whole lot of thought put into it.
The entire game is way more lovingly crafted than any of the Early Access shovelware bullshit it’s being associated with. Listen to this soundtrack; almost the entire game is filled with original music with vocals, and yeah, none of these songs could be considered absolute masterpieces but they’re extremely catchy, pleasant, and entertaining slices of lo-fi indie pop that wouldn’t be too out of place on a college radio playlist back in the 90′s when K Records and The Frogs were huge. Other indie game developers would kill to have one song as memorable as “Digital Sex” or “Challenge Urself” on their soundtrack, and Candice Debébé’s Incredibly Trick Lifestyle is full of them. I can’t even really think of any other semi-recent-ish games that had this many original, vocal-heavy songs on it. There are people out there that would have you believe this game is on the same level as something like Romero’s Aftermath or The Slaughtering Grounds.
I mean sure, the whole thing does feel a little amateurish most of the time (not in a bad way, but in charming way reminiscent of basement punk rock shows or something), but it’s to be expected given that it was made almost entirely by one person. That doesn’t make it the slight against humanity people are making it out to be, especially considering there’s far worse games (from both a technical and entertainment standpoint) on Steam that cost far more, and were made by larger teams with a lot less love. Why does Candice Debébé’s Incredibly Trick Lifestyle, a completely finished product with way more entertainment value and content than a lot of stuff being released to unsuspecting gamers these days, have to be the spokesgame for awful shovelware junk? It may be a joke game (oh my god do I hate that term), and we all know those are plentiful these days, but it’s the only one I’ve played outside of Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015: Do You Still Shower With Your Dad? that actually rises above the initial joke, and becomes something worth spending a chunk of time with.
More importantly, if you’re a person who buys videogames, but likes to complain about them, you should probably be playing offbeat things like this. You can complain all you want about “AAA shootman games”, Early Access titles, visual novels and survival sims that all look the same, games that are shipped unfinished or unpolished and require purchasing DLC later on for the full experience, game stories that are derivative of stories that were already derivative of something else, etc, etc, etc, but if you’re not supporting games like this when they come out you’re part of the problem. We need the Candice Debébés of the world to continue to be able to make bizarre games like this instead of trashing them when they dare to do something weird and different. Where would we be if everyone dismissed Toby Fox’s Earthbound Halloween for being a stupid edgy ROM hack? Undertale would have never happened and that would suck.
I do take a little solace in the fact that the game is starting to get a small audience. Steam currently has 15 positive reviews for the game compared to 5 negative reviews, but the review stats show that people are taking the negative reviews far more seriously than the positive reviews. Predictably, the negative reviews harp on the perceived lack of quality of the game with few of the reviewers having played it for a considerable amount of time, while the positive reviews basically echo a lot of the things I’ve mentioned in this article and, for the most part, were written by people who have actually played it for longer than 30 minutes.
Hopefully Candice Debébé’s Incredibly Trick Lifestyle eventually finds the following it deserves. All the ingredients for a cult hit are there; maybe if the price gets cut massively during a seasonal sale at some point more gamers will be inclined to pick it up. As of right now though it’s looking like it’s heading down the fast lane to becoming yet another forgotten indie game that got a few moments in the spotlight as a punching bag and that’s a shame.
Candice Debébé’s Incredibly Trick Lifestyle was released on March 22nd, 2016 by Havishamone Games. You can purchase both the game and the full soundtrack on Steam.
Kero Kero King is a PS1 game developed by Amedio and published by Media Factory in 2000. It is the precursor to the cult classic frog golfing sim Ribbit King for the PS2 and Gamecube and is basically the same game but with mostly 2-D graphics. The characters are still designed by Japanese artist Yosuke Kihara though and the art absolutely shines in this game. This video contains all of the game’s wacky FMV sequences ripped directly from a copy I picked up last Summer at a retro gaming convention. If you liked Ribbit King I highly recommend checking this out too.
Advertisement for a 16-bit era Tommy Tallarico Greatest Hits album from Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 58 (May 1994). You can buy this on iTunes or stream it through Spotify.
The newest Kickstarter-exclusive Drift Stage alpha came out today. It still feels like the best Sega Saturn game we never got and I wish more games that blatantly copied 32-bit aesthetics as well as this were being made.
Whoa, this came out of nowhere. Apparently Volume 2 of John Szczepaniak’s Untold History of Japanese Game Developers series released today and, according to this write-up on Hardcore Gaming 101, it sounds like it could be more jam-packed with interesting information than the first one. The marketing materials are really playing up the whole Yakuza in the games industry angle but I’m most excited about the Hudson Soft, Fill-In Cafe, and Human Entertainment chapters along with the write-up on the unreleased full 2-D high definition remake of Golden Axe.
Unfortunately there’s no Kindle version yet but you can pick up a phyiscal copy on Createspace and both digital and physical copies of the first one via Amazon if you missed out on that one.
Shumplations.com released a new batch of interview translations today, the highlight being a 1998 interview with Hideki Kamiya and Noboru Sugimura from a few months after Resident Evil 2 was released in Japan. The interview goes really in-depth into the unfinished RE1.5 with tons of interesting new information on the game. Highlights include an explanation of the game’s original intro and concept art involving a return visit to Spencer Mansion that was scrapped along with the rest of the game when it was rebooted into the RE2 we know and love today.
Check out Shumplation’s website for more interesting interviews with Japanese developers and, if you really wind up liking their work, consider donating to their Patreon as well.
Trailer from The Troma Project, releasing October 28th on Steam courtesy of TopWare Interactive. Supposedly this real-time strategy game featuring Troma mainstays like Lemmy, Matt Parker, and Trey Stone was canceled back in the day but the Troma store has exactly 9 physical copies left and it looks like they’ve kept it in stock off and on since the game was originally completed in 2001 so who knows what’s going on here.
It looks really terrible; not in an enjoyable way like the older Troma stuff but like all the painful Troma films that came out after the mid-90′s. There’s a ton of live-action cutscenes though so at least it has that. If you want a game with Troma-y cutscenes that is actually good you should just play Lococycle, which even has a Lloyd Kaufman cameo.
A company called H2 Interactive (mostly known for releasing 2K Sports games in Korea and late ports of the BlazBlue games on Steam from what I can gather from their website) is sorta-stealth-releasing (does it count as a stealth release if there was a trailer released 5 days before the game’s launch?) the PS3 remake of Bikkuri Nekketsu Shin Kiroku! (aka Crash and the Boys: Street Challenge) on PSN on Wednesday. This came completely out of nowhere, sucks that there’s no marketing for it outside of a mention on the Playstation Blog and the aforementioned trailer. I also don’t understand why this is coming out on Wednesday instead of Tuesday when the store normally updates; it’s almost like they don’t want people to buy it.
Found this really awesome documentary about Sega Technical Institute from the 90′s yesterday. It’s only about 20-30 minutes long but there’s a lot of cool stuff (and godawful haircuts) in it. I’m assuming it wasn’t actually released in ‘93 because it shows some pretty far along footage of some Saturn games and Comix Zone near the end.
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