In Africa Unleashed 3D for the Nintendo 3DS you charged into Africa to hunt wild animals like the leopard, rhino and elephant, bringing more than 30 weapons to bear on 15 different types of wild beast. Shouldn't this be called Hunter Unleashed 3D?

Granted I don't believe any of the animals roaming deepest Africa are wearing leashes. That would make the game far too easy. Instead they are running about, desperately trying to avoid becoming the subject of a Disney animated movie. Stupid animals, Disney doesn't make animated movies anymore.

I am not anti-hunting. I enjoy the flesh of tasty animals. I'm just not a big elephant eater (I prefer mini elephants).

Along with the senseless slaughter of a nature documentary, this week sees the release of a demo for Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, a 3D futuristic tunnel racer (as opposed to a Victorian tunnel racer), and Game Boy Color classic Toki Tori.

Suddenly I'm craving eggs.

Games

SpeedX 3D
Platform: 3DS
Price: $3.99

SpeedX 3D for Nintendo 3DS is a stunning tunnel racer that tests a player's skill and transports him or her into a trance filled with great electronic music and hypnotic graphics SpeedX 3D offers four game modes introducing the player to more and more challenging places at a speed that increases with every second. The question is: how far can the player go without losing concentration? Four game modes - Stages, Endless, Survival, and Zones - will test even the most experienced players. Speed beyond the limits - first-person view and 3D effects immerse the player in the game world and deliver brand new emotions. Start small - a perfect learning curve will hook new players and hold the attention of even the most proficient.

Toki Tori
Platform: 3DS
Price: $3.99

Get cracking on an egg-cellent adventure. He may be a small, yellow chicken, but Toki Tori is no coward. He's the hero of this egg-cellent puzzle platformer. He must rescue all of his kidnapped brothers and sisters, who are still in their fragile eggs. In this Game Boy™ Color classic from 2001, you must keep Toki Tori safe by avoiding monsters and traps while working out how to collect all the eggs in each level before time runs out. Luckily, there are lots of items to aid Toki Tori's mission.

Africa Unleashed 3D
Platform: 3DS
Price: $3.99

Head into the deepest reaches of Africa, armed with your wits, your skills, and an array of high-powered weapons and accessories! Experience action arcade hunting excitement like never before as you explore 35 challenging missions across a variety of terrain. Match the right weapon to the situation to maximize your score, as you hunt over 15 different big game animals and birds. Pull off amazing long shots, zoom in for spectacular head shots, and take down dangerous predators before they attack! Earn achievements, purchase new weapons, and aim for the best score as you fight your way through the safari!

Escape the Virus: Shoot'em Up
Platform: DSi / 3DS
Price: 200 Points / $1.99

The battle for micro-world domination is not over yet! Escape the Virus, an action puzzle series, is back with totally new game-play modes. In the Shooter mode the prey is now the predator. You will chase down and shoot hordes of vicious viruses. It's time to take the medicine! In the Territory mode you will protect certain zones and prevent enemies from getting too close to them. Accumulate enough energy and the zone will disappear giving you more time to smash enemies. Never stop running and dodging to avoid hostile attacks. Use all bonus items, power-ups and ammo and don't let the enemies surpass you. Get into the ultimate DNA warfare and kick viruses out of the micro-world once and for all!

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Demos

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy
Platform: 3DS

Tap and slide to the rhythm of over 70 tracks from the FINAL FANTASY series while joining forces with iconic characters and facing off against memorable monsters and villains. Unlock unique items and deeper challenges in three exciting game modes, as you help restore the Music Crystal to its former radiance! Enhance your game play experience even more by downloading additional songs from your favorite FINAL FANTASY titles.

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Videos

AWOLNATION is Back!
Available on Nintendo Video on: Aug 31, 2012

If heading back to school has you feeling a bit rebellious, don't miss this 3D video premiere of the latest hit song from Nintendo Video favorite, AWOLNATION!

Edmund McMillen speaks his mind. Whether it be about games, religion or poop, he never holds anything back.

The indie superstar responsible for Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac drops his latest bits of wisdom in this fantastic interview by Nathan Grayson over at Eurogamer.

In the interview, Edmund talks at length about his childhood wherein he found the inspiration for Isaac and in doing so manages to make some very interesting comparisons between games and religion:

"People wonder why there's a lot of violence in my work. I grew up with a picture of a bloody dying man who is suffering for everybody, a martyr, and it's the whole idea of self-sacrifice. Your exalted God, your God, rips his body to shreds for the good of the world. Violence becomes holy. And in a lot of ways, in the Bible and Catholicism, violence and gore is considered holy. You drink the blood of Christ, you eat his flesh. How does that not come in to me? When I'm going through seven years of catechism growing up and they're teaching me, you know, spells... I'm learning how to cast incantations before I receive the blood and body of Christ, you know? So I can be protected from the devil. It's total magic, and I totally love it for that, I love it for its mysteriousness, I love it for its ritualisticness. I think Catholicism is quite interesting. It's very close to D&D. It seems like such a natural progression."

That is just a tiny part of this fascinating case study of a fascinating indiviudual and you'd be doing yourself a disservice to not read the full interview.

Today, Super Meat Boy, Braid and Lone Survivor were added to the fifth installment of the Humble Indie Bundle. Just when you think things couldn't get more awesome. [HumbleBundle.com]

When Dejobaan Games, the developer behind The Wonderful End of the World and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity create a first-person shooter that's all about building and demolishing gigantic robots, they don't need to name it Drunken Robot Pornography to get my attention; the name it Drunken Robot Pornography because there's something wrong with them.

Wrong in a good way, mind you. The way that makes game developers pit a fleshy human against multi-story robots named Titans. The Titans are armed with everything a giant robot should have, including lasers and missiles. The human has a jet pack, a gun, and the cheers of an adoring crowd. That's all anyone needs, really.

And when you're done fighting giant stylized robots, you can make your own via a handy-dandy in-game editor.

Because in order to create, one must first learn how to destroy. Or something.

Check out an entire gallery of Drunken Robot Pornography at the game's official website. With a playable prototype having recently been shown at PAX East, Dejobaan expects the game to drop on Mac and PC later this year.

Drunken Robot Pornography [Dejobaan Games]

If you ask Frictional Games' developers, horror games haven't evolved much since the genre's late 1990s/early 2000s heyday where Silent Hill and Fatal Frame showed off just how scary a video game experience could be. Sure, titles like Dead Space and Frictional's own Amnesia capture new glory for the horror category but other former heavyweight franchises like Resident Evil seem to have lost their way.

What's the way forward for horror in video games? A new post on the Frictional blog outlines ten ways that games aiming to terrify the player can do it better. Among the concepts put forth about improving video game horror are the ideas that a slower ramp-up and less fighting would make the overall experience more effective:

2) Long Build-up
Most games want to kick off the action as soon as possible. Even games with a drawn-out introduction, like Silent Hill 2, introduce the horror elements very early on. The problem is that sustaining a really high level of terror is only possible shorter bursts and the more the audience has to contrast to, the greater the peaks intensity will feel. Ring (Japanese version) is a prime example of this. While it does kick off the horror early on, the whole movie is basically one long build-up to a final scare moment. Horror video-games need to embrace this sort of thing more, but in order to do so a two common traits need to let go. First of all, the game must rely a lot less on a repeatable core mechanic, since we want the player to deal with actual horror elements as little as possible. Secondly, we must perhaps revise the game length and be satisfied with an experience lasting three hours or less, so that all focus can be on establishing a single (or just few) peaks of terror.

4) Minimal Combat
I have talked plenty about this before (see here and here for instance), but it is worth stating again. The worst thing about combat is that it makes the player focus on all the wrong things, and makes them miss many of the subtle cues that are so important to an effective atmosphere. It also establishes a core game system that makes the player so much more comfortable in the game's world. And comfort is not something we want when our goal is to induce intense feelings of terror.

Still, combat is not a bad thing and one could use it in ways that evokes helplessness instead. For instance, by giving the player weapons that are ineffective the desperation of the situation is further heightened. This is a slippery slope though as once you show a weapon to the player it instantly puts them in an action game mindset. That does not mean weapons and combat should be abolished, but that one should thread very carefully, and finding the right balance is a big challenge for future horror games.

The post describes 10 elements in total and is well worth a read for anyone looking for clues for creating a foreboding atmosphere in interactive entertainment. It'll be interesting to see how many of these ideas get implemented in Frictional's future games.

10 Ways to Evolve Horror Games [In the Games of Madness]

When Team Meat set out to create a Super Meat Boy version for touchscreen mobile devices, creators Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen vowed they wouldn't just slap a virtual gamepad on the thing and do some half-assed port of their downloadable hit for PC and Xbox 360.

They've fleshed out their vision more, and offered this first screenshot to show that the game is not the Super Meat Boy you've played on a big screen. "Super Meat Boy is a twitch platformer with precision controls, there was no way in hell this would work on a touch screen with buttons all over it," they write."We just started working on it so I'm are sure a lot will change as development unfolds but we do have a few major talking points of what the game is and what the game isn't."

More details at the link.

Super Meat Boy for iOS (and more!) [Super Meat Boy]

One of the scariest games in recent memory came in the form of Frictional Games' Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And while there's a sequel underway—titled Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs—the indie developer's not the one making it.

Instead, Frictional has handed the reins to the next Amnesia period piece scarefest to TheChineseRoom, makers of interactive story piece Dear Esther. An interview at Gamasutra quotes TheChineseRoom's Dan Pinchbeck on the challenging of following up such a success:

"The thing is, if we don't frighten people as much as the original, then we've failed. But now we have to frighten people that know what to expect," Pinchbeck said. "The big design challenge is: How do we protect the things that make Amnesia great, and how do we evolve everything else to make a really fresh experience?"

The concept art for A Machine for Pigs looks beautiful so far and the lush design's part of a particular tension that will be key to the in-development game's experience:

"With this new game, we want to create a world that is so rich and dramatic and beautiful that the player is constantly torn between wanting to go around the corner to see what's there and not wanting to go around the corner because they're frightened of what's there," said Pinchbeck.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about The Chinese Room handling the next Amnesia will be just how different it will be from Dear Esther, which was criticized for not feeling enough like a game. Look for Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs to make you pee your pants this fall.

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs: A collaboration of indie horror [Gamasutra]

You may have heard that it's tough to make a living as a musician. You heard right! It's a tough world out there, and very few people get paid a good living to make music. But while it may seem daunting from the outside, there is actually a greater demand for music than ever—there is more media created each day than ever, and most of it needs music. TV shows, movies, commercials, websites, podcasts, web series, promotional materials, and, of course, video games.

Writing and orchestrating music for games has evolved and branched into an accessible, entirely viable way for today's composers to make a living with music. Big-budget AAA games have co-opted the studio orchestras and recording spaces of Hollywood films, and smaller indie games provide independent composers a means with which to broadcast their music to a massive and enthusiastic audience. Any way you slice it, video games are the newest, broadest, and most exciting way to make a living writing music today.

"I tried to do music for films for seven years," composer Danny Baranowsky told me. "I did around twenty projects. And over seven years of indie film music I've made probably $2,000. Total. I'm not saying you can't do it. But I did not find a way to do it."

Baranowsky put aside film scoring to move into the world of video games, and today he's a well-known name in the world of video game music—his soundtracks for Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, as well as his work on several successful iOS games, have earned him critical accolades and financial success. He's a regular speaker at conventions like Minecon, PAX and the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGfest), and he's providing music for Minecraft creator Marcus "Notch" Persson's next game. In other words, Danny Baranowsky is making it happen.

"I was glad when I finally got my break in games," he told me. "I was so sick of feeling like I was spinning my wheels. I was getting better, I was improving, but the idea of making a living at it was something that I couldn't get any traction in at all."

Baranowsky laughingly told me that the first game he got paid for was a puzzle game for the Nokia Sidekick, which he actually had to do in MIDI. He did another game for the same company, this time for the iPhone, composing five minutes of original music for, as he recalls it, $70 a minute (this is very, very low for a composer). The game was never released.

Soon after that, Baranowsky provided the music for Adam Atomic's iPhone games Canabalt and Gravity Hook, both of which were App store hits. His subsequent work on Team Meat's Xbox Live Arcade hit Super Meat Boy locked him in as a composer to watch, and finally started putting some real money in his pocket.

That's in large party because Baranowsky owns the rights to the music from the game, which he sells through his Bandcamp page. Baranowsky told me that independent music sales have accounted for about double what was paid for working on the game.

In fact, had the soundtrack been bundled through Steam as it was with The Binding of Isaac, he would have made much, much more. " Isaac was a fairly successful game, but I made ten times as much money on the Steam bundle option as I did on Bandcamp. It just goes to show that although Steam isn't where you would go to get music, the reach of Steam is… it's fucking amazing."

In other words, Baranowsky made ten times more money selling music through an online video game store than he did through online musical outlets. Many artists think of making a living by selling tunes through iTunes or Bandcamp or CD Baby, but the idea of tying original music to a platform like Steam is smart, focused, and at least in the case of The Binding of Isaac, really works. (Surely it helps that the Isaac soundtrack is very, very good.) Other artists have found similar success by doing work for indie games—both Bastion's Darren Korb and Sword & Sworcery's Jim Guthrie are songwriters whose work has received huge amounts of new attention thanks to their involvement with successful video games.

Not every musician working in video games makes a living by going indie. Jeremy Levy, a friend of mine and fellow University of Miami jazz graduate, has been doing just fine following a more traditional route. He's a session trombonist, orchestrator and arranger in Los Angeles, and has provided orchestration work on video games from Batman: Arkham City to inFAMOUS 2 to God of War III, as well as TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Pushing Daisies and The Event.

Levy told me that shortly after leaving Miami to spend ten months in a touring horn section, he decided to head out to California to give Hollywood film-scoring a shot.

"I had pretty lucky go of it," he said. "I made a good amount of connections either from UMiami or from touring, and Gary Lindsay (Miami's arranging professor) gave me a few composers out here to get in touch with." From there, Levy wound up working with Tim Davies, the Australian Orchestrator who conducted and headed up orchestration for many of the same games that Levy has worked on, as well as a bunch more.

(While looking Davies up, I found that he worked on both Prototype and inFAMOUS. Ha!)

While Levy started out doing grunt work—taping parts, printing out music, and other things like that, he quickly graduated to the kind of jack-of-all trades work that is necessary to make a living as a professional musician. "It's whatever and wherever work comes in," he said of his day-to-day gigs. "Writing, orchestration, arranging, music prep, anything I can get my hands on."

Unlike Baranowsky, Levy works very much in the Hollywood model, which means he has to live in Hollywood. By way of contrast, Baranowsky remarked upon the locational flexibility of the indie games scene. The internet, he said, has leveled the playing field in a lot of ways, from distribution to promotion, but one of the biggest ways is geography.

"I live in Phoenix, dude," Baranowsky said. "The asshole of suburbia. And I work with people in Britain, and Sweden, and New Zealand, and South Africa, and Santa Cruz and North Carolina, and it doesn't matter at all. It's cool to see people, and meet people in real life, but still, anybody can do it, as long as they have an internet connection."

For a long time, Baranowsky composed with a low-key setup, mostly using Propellerhead's Reason, though he's switched up these days and uses more elaborate sample libraries. His process sounds idiosyncratic in that way that only solo composers can be—he described banging out the music for Canabalt in a single session and sending it off to Adam Atomic immediately afterwards.

Baranowsky is no longer living from project to project, something that's in large part attributable to the fact that he can independently sell his own work. "I'm not living check to check," he said, "which is a new thing for me." He says that while he's always interested in talking about bigger projects, the idea of taking on a big-budget AAA game soundtrack doesn't really interest him. "I think it would be less money, and less fun, and I wouldn't have the rights to my music."

Levy, on the other hand, is much more of a hired gun. Much of his work is through the local California musician's union, and it's much less likely for a composer to retain full ownership of his or her compositions; if they're lucky, they'll retain some of the publishing rights.

AAA games are currently very focused on making everything sound big and exciting, just like Hollywood soundtracks. Levy said his ability to find work making video game soundtracks depends somewhat on the whims of the market—will the public always want game soundtracks that sound like movies? Will there always be as much work for arrangers, conductors and orchestrators in the gaming scene? When I asked him how sustainable the kind of work he was doing is, he wasn't sure.

"I don't know if I have an answer for that," he said. "Music will always exist, and if anything there will only be more need for it in the future. What I do is very dependent on live performers, and it's dependent on the type of project that would need that. Now it's popular with games, because they're trying to make everything as epic as possible. Who knows if that will stay. Like how in the 80's [in film], all of that stuff went away."

Levy makes a good point—there really is more cross-media demand for music than there ever has been. And, of course, he doesn't only make a living from games—much of the work he does comes from TV shows, films, and other musical projects.

Between them, Levy and Baranowsky perfectly demonstrate the disparate ways that professional musicians can make a living making music. Both make a living writing a lot (Levy) or exclusively (Baranowsky) for games, but they're almost opposites in terms of their daily work and their approach. No one way is "better" than the other; both have their strengths, and both are fueled by demand for very specific kinds of work.

"I'm much more of a traditional writer," said Levy, "I write scored charts, so I fell into this because it was what I'm good at. But if things need to change, they need to change. You start using a sequencer, you start using a sample library—everything can become about tech. I certainly have plenty of that dabbling in my life, but I prefer to have my music performed by real people. It's really hard to tell right now where it'll go."

Baranowsky says he knows plenty of composers who have headed up the soundtracks on AAA games, and says that the things he hears about the trials and tribulations of AAA game-composition turn him off.

"All I can think is man, I don't want to be AAA. If some AAA studio gave me an offer I'd have to really think about it." (He was quick to say that he has a Star Wars Exception: If anyone ever asked him to do the soundtrack to a Star Wars game, he would be required to say yes.)

Levy told me that he'd certainly like to do more independent scoring, working on smaller, more self-contained projects, but wasn't sure if his current trajectory would end up there. "I definitely think it's something I'd be interested in doing, it's something that I never really had the opportunity to do. When I got [to L.A.], I fell into what I'm doing pretty quickly, so I never really went [the indie] route, you know, scoring films for film students. I sort of missed out on that. That may be something I need to address in the future. But I never really presented myself as doing that; you go down one path, and it leads to other things along that path."

Near the end of our conversation, Baranowsky shared an anecdote: "I'm friends with a band here in Arizona, they're fairly big; they've sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of albums. Now, they have to split that five ways, which that's something to keep in mind. But: I've made more money by myself than they did with with their album sold in best buy, doing a national tour."

Whether composing music in an Arizona apartment or running parts with an L.A. studio orchestra, there are more ways to make a living making music than ever. It requires hard work and talent, but there are scores of creative outlets for composers that didn't exist even five years ago.

Video games provide a fantastic new venue for talented young composers, and I for one can't wait to find out who we hear from next.

Despite the fact its creators have railed against the quality of iPhone games, and openly trolled consumers on the iTunes store by selling a parody game for $350, Super Meat Boy is being rebuilt to be playable on touch-screen mobile devices, the game's two-man team said in a Twitter conversation today.

Yes, that could mean SMB is released only for Android and/or Windows Phone. But it's intriguing enough given Team Meat's history on the subject. Back in 2010, at Game Developers Conference, Team Meat's Tommy Refenes ranted that he "absolutely fucking hate[s] the iPhone app store," and compared the platform to the shitty Tiger handhelds of the early 1990s—moneygrubbing LED games that capitalized on a popular brand without doing any justice to the console game it invoked.

Refenes went so far as to develop a Super Meat Boy LED-style app (pictured) to prove this point. An earlier game he made, Zits N' Giggles, saw its price go up every time someone bought it. It actually sold for $350 at one point before Apple removed it.

So will Team Meat retreat on its hardline stance against the iTunes App Store, or will it suckle from the teat of that good, good money cow? If Super Meat Boy isn't coming to the iPhone, don't worry. You can always get CheeseMan. Though Team Meat promises its port won't have "shitty touch controls," CheeseMan gives an idea of what the game plays like with them.

Super Meat Boy to be torn apart, rebuilt for touchscreen devices [Joystiq]

It was independent games development's darling of 2010, and all who dared cross it risked the righteous anger of its creators and fans. But badass platformer Super Meat Boy still is not available on mobile gaming's No. 1 platform. And I don't think it's because one of its creators got into a pissing contest with Apple.

It's probably because this kind of game really isn't fun with multitouch screen control, a conclusion reached after spending some time with CheeseMan, the best port of Super Meat Boy you can put finger quotes around. Frankly, I'm not sure it wasn't published by proxy for Team Meat. Either way, it's available now for 99 cents on the iTunes App Store.

CheeseMan is, evidently, doing its thing with the blessing of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, the creators of Super Meat Boy. Dr. Fetus, their game's antagonist, is right there staring CheeseMan in the face on the first level, after all. Other Meat Boy characters will appear later. And the same gameplay style is there throughout—you're an anthropomorphized cheese cube instead of a meat wad, zipping through a platform level, avoiding spikes, sawblades and other gruesome instant-death traps, clinging to and double jumping from walls and trying to reach the goal in as little time as possible.

Your strategy evolves as it did in the original Super Meat Boy, too. Basically, you go haul ass into some uncharted part of the screen, die, remember there's a hazard there, and try not to hit it in your next life. Controls are carried out on a virtual game pad of left and right and a jump button.

These are not ideal controls for this kind of game. So much of Super Meat Boy involved technical, perfectly timed jumps that you really need fixed, physical controls that you can feel with your digits through a long gaming session, rather than virtual squares that feel no different when you reposition your hands after picking your nose.

My parkour jumps between walls never went smoothly, even without hazards forcing me to act quickly. Too many times I simply wall-humped my way to the top rather than try to switch my left thumb while hammering the virtual jump button at the same time. This is on an iPhone, whose playing surface dimensions reasonably approximate a gamepad controller. On an iPad, I'm not sure what it's like.

CheeseMan is allegedly published by AlphaNoize, a German shop founded in November of this year. It, like Team Meat, is a two-man outfit made up of Hicham Alloui and Arne Worheide. I have no idea if these are pseudonyms, aliases, alter egos or secret identities. They don't appear to be anagrams. Alloui's bio lists work for Ubisoft in his credits.

Maybe CheeseMan is totally original; maybe it exists with a license from Super Meat Boy. Maybe it is the game that allows Team Meat to reach the iOS without compromising the intellectual stance Refenes took way back in March 2010, when he declared iOS devices to be the "Tiger handheld game of this generation."

None of the intrigue changes the fact that you are still playing an extremely demanding platformer with virtual controls, whether meat, cheese, or something else is involved. Good luck.

CheeseMan [iTunes]