Did you know that when he’s not delivering presents or selling Coca-Cola, Father Christmas actually spends his days in cocktail bars enjoying the good life, the old rapscallion? Why, he’s even been known to frequent the racetracks and beaches of Monaco in the company of young starlets. That’s his reward for picking a job where he only has to pull on the costume once a year. But not everyone has it so easy. Let’s take a peek inside door number thirteen.

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Mojang’s first foray into the world of being a publisher is about to happen. As developers OxEye told us back in August, Cobalt, the running, jumping, rolling, shooting, throwing, dancing, hacking, rolling, flying, sliding, climbing, looting, deflecting, racing, piñata-ing, passing, scoring-em-up was always aiming for its first public alpha to appear before the end of the year. And that, according to the EDGEBORG, is going to be this Friday, so long as Mojang can “tie up a few loose ends”. So, it may yet slip, but it’s clearly going to be soon.

Walk to the right and talk to dying women. That’s my hastily written but accurate tutorial for Increpare and Starfruit Games’ collaboration, Pirouette. The animation and backgrounds are rather beautiful and the dialogue is chucklesome in its deliberate formality, with a staged quality that seems to laugh in the face of accusations of pretension. These are people, or ideas of people, who speak like exaggerated versions of the expected types. The end seems to have serious intent, or perhaps pretends to, but I was smiling throughout the 10 or 15 minutes it took to play. Pirouette is free and is also available on iPad, which led to Apple categorising it as a book rather than a game. Perhaps that’s a punchline of sorts.

Rumour 1! Said Remedy’s Aki Järvilehto to a Finnish site on the subject of Alan Wake on PC: “We have received feedback from a lot of PC gamers, and I have to admit that yes, we somehow ignored that. Let’s see if in the near future we could have some positive news to tell you about dating!” (Positive news about dating? You mean she liked me after all?) This seems something of a change of tune.

Rumour 2! Via the same nefarious database-exploring methods as turned up the apparent leak of the latest Humble Bundle contents, we have the below image of the game apparently> readying for a Steam release. Rumour! Speculation! Possible Photoshopping! But what the hell – it’d be lovely to have Remedy back, even if Alan reviews were decidedly mixed. (more…)

Details of the next Humble Indie Bundle have once more leaked, because Steam’s Content Description Record Viewer Thingamie is so ludicrously easy for people to spy. And it looks like it’s going to be a bit of a corker, as spotted by DIY Gamer. In the pay-what-you-want collection it seems there will be Super Meat Boy, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, Jamestown, Nightsky and Shank. That’s the first wave, and then there’s even better to get added in.

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There’s probably some irony in the latest title from a man whose name appeared in big huge letters on the front of so many game boxes involving the word ‘BigHead’, but I’ll be damned if I can tell what it is.

BigHead BASH is the latest move from American McGee and his Spicy Horse studio, and it’s a forthcoming social network game. I don’t know whether this means Alice: Madness Returns wasn’t the hoped-for success or just that McGee fancies a go at the Facebook goldrush before it dries up, but I do know that it’s a side-scrolling 3D shooter with tons of shooty-jumpy activity. (more…)

Having garnered some attention on its mobile release, These Robot Hearts Of Mine has found its way to PC via Newgrounds. A puzzle game combined with a story of young lovers and robots, Alan Hazelden’s game aims to create an emotional tone to a more traditional puzzling idea. Does it work?

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Dirt! I’ve always thought it was an odd name for a series of racing games no matter how you choose to muck up its capital letter placement, although I quite like the idea of a snooker game called Chalk. Here is the newly announced Dirt Showdown, a spin-off from the main series that has more of the destruction and less of the speedy driving. It’s the kind of game that the press release informs me will be ‘uncaged’ in May 2012 rather than just released. That should tell you something about how off the hook Showdown is going to be. Cars spin around for your pleasure in the trailer below and I’ve also included some easily digestible details.

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Almost everything is procedurally generated these days. When I look in the mirror every morning, the non-Euclidean angles to which my hair terrifyingly conforms are different every time but always unhelpful, being a clear result of sloppy and overambitious coding. Bust-n-Rush’s levels are also variable but they look a lot better than the mess atop my head and they make more sense as well. It works like this: you are a large man running along a series of tunnels/tracks, dodging certain obstacles and smashing through others. If you can jump, sidestep and hold down a ‘rush’ button, you’ll be fine. Try the demo here (or on Mac), or watch a trailer below. Maybe even do both!

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Aha! Sensible Sophie Houlden, of Sarah’s Run, BoxGame and The Linear RPG fame, has sensibly done the sensible thing for her new, vector-y maze navigation game Swift*Stitch and sensibly released a free demo. It runs in a browser, and you should absolutely play it – it’s (very) loosely in the vein of Snake, but all controlled with two mouse buttons. One makes your right-angular character immediately move downwards, the other temporarily slows it down so you’ve got time to move downwards before you smash into a wall. And then it builds quick-thinking puzzle-complexity from there thanks to gradual additions to the environment.

It’s very clever, a little bit fiendish, I’m really quite fond of it and you can buy the full thing for $7 if the demo rings your bell. There’s also a video below if you can’t/won’t run the Unity plugin for the demo. (more…)