Times are strange and frightening. But one point of great solace for me has been hearing people celebrating things in their lives. It feels especially important right now to hold on to what makes us all proud about what we do and who we are. And what I really love is people showing off things they’re proud of making.

So I’ve been asking a bunch of developers to pick out something they’ve created that brings them pleasure to look back on. And here they are, including Harvey Smith remembering his input on Deus Ex and Dishonored, Derek Yu on one of his first-ever games. There’s pride in doing something for someone else’s game, in the power of details and in little inventions, and ah gosh, shut up, let’s just tuck into a big slice of escapist positivity. (more…)

Gravity-swapping platformer VVVVVV is 10 years old as of today. For this big birthday, creator Terry Cavanagh is releasing its source code for free. You can dig into the guts of a breakout indie game from the booming years of the 4:3 aspect ratio which might actually be a more interesting prospect than it sounds.

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I love a spin-off. Angel? Great stuff! Count Duckula? The Better Call Saul of cartoons. Kourtney and Khlo Take Miami? Take me, I m yours! I could go on and on cutting-and-pasting from this Wikipedia page, but I ll get to the point. Games also have spin-offs. Often they ll be forgotten about. Sometimes they re even disowned. On a few occasions, they ll take on a life of their own and exist apart from the game that spawned them, never calling, never visiting, only sending a multipack Christmas card. Below are a few stories of surprising spin-offs. The 2D Half-Life 2, the Fortnite that failed, the single-player Counter-Strike that no-one asked for, and more.

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The biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC – including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping.

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Though Half-Life [official site] is almost nineteen years old and its sanctioned fan remake Black Mesa is nearing completion, Valve have launched a wee patch for their pretty okay or whatever vintage FPS. The patch fixes a few crashes and exploits, and hit other Half-Life engine games too, such as classic Counter-Strike. Given how much of modern PC games history connects to Half-Life and its mod scene, I’m glad Valve are still tinkering a little. Earlier this year, they finally got Half-Life an uncensored release in Germany too. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

VVVVVV is about you and the challenge in front of you. Are you fast enough with your left-right maneuvering to dodge spikes as you fall upwards into the sky? Are you skilled enough to reverse gravity the second your feet touch the ceiling, to send you tumbling back floorward to dodge spikes in reverse? There are no other controls to consider, no lives to protect and restore, and generous checkpointing means you never need to repeat yourself. The game asks you a question and removes everything else in between: are you good enough?

… [visit site to read more]

The noisE3 is dying down and we’re returning to some semblance of normality. That means I might actually find time to play some games on this here computer rather than watching hundreds of trailers and livestreams about games that I probably won’t dabble with even when they are> released in December 2015. It also means I can take a moment out of my day to report some jolly good news from Camp Cavanagh. The designer of fiendish musical masterpiece Super Hexagon has released a free version of his acclaimed spike-dodger VVVVVV and it’s available now for Windows, Mac and Linux.

… [visit site to read more]

Naya’s Quest, the latest from VVVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh, is an incredibly stressful game. You know that whole relationship you have with your eyes where they by and large tell you the visual truth of a situation? That thing your entire basis of reality is more or less founded upon? Yeah, well, forget about that. You play as a girl (presumably named Naya, unless even that part is an insidious trap door of a lie) who seeks “the edge” in a world that’s falling to pieces. So you hop between squares and everything is just dandy until – if you’re anything like me – you fall right through the ground. Or so you think. But actually, the isometric viewpoint just made it look> like a square was right in front of you. In reality it was above you or on the other side of the level or in outer space. And that is when the (exceedingly nauseating, nerve-wracking) learning begins. It’s occasionally frustrating, but also frequently brilliant.

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The ever-reliable Indiegames.com notices that Increpare, the devilish mind behind English Country Tune and other mind-twisters, has released MMMMMM, a free spike-laden tribute/alternate take/sequel to Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV. It’s a puzzle game about trinket collection and spike avoidance, with success being reliant on forward thinking and, of course, gravity manipulation. I was playing for about thirty seconds before diagonal surfaces were introduced and after five minutes I’d become intimate with more spikes than there are atoms in the universe. Sometimes the rules of a game create a sort of synthesis with my mental workings; in this case the two were at war and I was caught in the middle, hoist by Increpare’s pixel petard. Everyone go and beat it then tell me how rubbish I am.

Good news and less good news from the Humble Bundle camp today. The happier end of the bargain is that purchasers of the current Humble Bundle 4 now get the base contents of Humble Bundle 3 (i.e. VVVVVV, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, And Yet It Moves, and Hammerfight) added to their pack. That’s if they’ve bought HB4 already. If they haven’t, they’ll have to beat the average price to get the bonus goodies. The average price is currently $5.17 million. (more…)