The Swindle is dead, long live The Swindle. This Steampunk heist game was what Size Five Games planned on doing in lieu of another Ben & Dan / Time Gentlemen, Please point and click adventure, but lead dev Dan Marshall wound up quasi-cancelling it when he couldn’t find the fun, to borrow a line from Blizzard. Given that he’d also axed third Ben & Dan game Revenge of the Balloon-headed Mexican, he was in danger of developing A Reputation.

Instead, perhaps his reputation will be as the Uncanceller, for The Swindle is resurrected and rebooted as a quicker, simpler, gadgety action-stealth game, with its new form borrowing a few pages out of Spelunky’s high-speed procedural generation book. … [visit site to read more]

The Indie Royale bundles are certainly amongst the more hit and miss out there. But their latest is a definite hit, simply by containing Hexcells. Have I mentioned Hexcells before? One might argue it’s also worth purchasing for some of the other games in there, like PixelJunk Shooter, Gun Monkeys, Megabyte Punch, Ride ‘Em Low and Stronghold HD.

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It’s no Monkey Tennis but Size Five’s Gun Monkeys has found its fans. It’s a procedurally generated, physics-based 1 vs 1 deathmatch game and, being a multiplayer sort of thing, it is hungry for new players. To entice fresh monkey-handlers, Size Five are allowing people to play for free this weekend, on Steam, and reducing the price of the game by 50% during that time. That makes the price £1.99 and that’s for two copies of the game so you can pass one along to a friend. And then kill their monkeys. I haven’t played it yet but I may jump in this weekend. Video below.

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What a strange time for game selling we live in. Not ten years ago the idea of doing basically anything other than heading down to your local Woolworths and picking up an honest-to-goodness box was madness. Now, not only would there have to be a special case for a game to come in any sort of packaging but you can do anything from pay for a game before it’s made to never pay for it at all. And here’s yet another method: distributing copies of multiplayer indie platformer blast-em-up Gun Monkeys to those who spend a long time waiting to find a game. In a blog post yesterday, Size Five Games man Dan Marshall outlined the plan as a way to drum up interest in the game and ensure current players get the experience they paid for. Full statement below.

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Are you Slightly Old? And British? And of broadly good humour? Then you will doubtless be at least passingly familiar with the work of The Actor Kevin Eldon, quiet mainstay of some of this nation’s greatest televisual comedy. As well as Brass Eye, Alan Partridge, Nighty Night, The IT Crowd and more, he can now add Size Five Games’ Gun Monkeys to his CV. Witness a sad lack of weak lemon drink references, but a positive bounty of warm, chummy tones, below. (more…)

Oh, he just had to release this just as the RPS Hivemind was about to slump into its weekend-long coma, didn’t he? The punishment for that is a shorter post free from our usual witticisms. Actually, no, I’m going to twist the knife and say ‘bum monkeys more like’.

I don’t know if Gun Monkeys is fun or bum in fact, as I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play it – it was at Rezzed, but I was dashing about like a monkey with its bum on fire so I didn’t get the chance. The people who did seemed to be having a good time however, but maybe that’s just because they enjoying harming monkeys. Anyway, this “procedurally–Generated, physics-based, online deathmatch platform game”, starring murderous simians and the voice of the actor Kevin Eldon, comes from the studio behind Time Gentlemen, Please, Privates and the upcoming The Swindle, so it bears investigation, I’d say. (more…)