Here’s some encouraging news. Mode 7 Games has opened Frozen Synapse to pre-orders, and you don’t have to wait until release to play the game.

Everyone who puts down the asking price — £16.99, €18.99 or $25.99 depending on where you’re from — gets access to the beta. For a few more units of your currency, you can get music, your face in the game and a copy of Determinance, the game that combines flying and swordplay. Oh, and you also get a copy to give to a friend.

Frozen Synapse is a top-down tactical game. Each side plans out their turn, and then the movement plays out simultaneously. So whoever is better at anticipating the other player’s actions holds the advantage. You can even run simulations with the other player’s team while you’re planning, so you can fine-tune your strategy.

Right now the beta focuses on the multiplayer modes, but a solo campaign will be included in the full release, which is expected near the end of 2010. And for those who missed it the first time, the trailer is below.

[via Mode 7 Games]

Welcome to Wake, an indie platformer from Boss Baddie. It was released about a month ago, and the two charming chaps from over in the UK were kind enough to send me a copy to review.

Yes, it is another indie platformer. But it does have two things going for it. Most platformers ask you to go to the right, but Wake asks you to go up. And Wake makes you get wet.

Gameplay

Wake is a race against the rising waters, so the dryer you are, the safer you are. You start near the bottom of the ship and have to work your way to the top. When you’re dry, it’s a pure platformer. You can run and jump, hang onto walls and, if you find an ax, chop through wooden doors. You can also find flares and flashlights to help illuminate the ship. The running feels great, and changes as the ship shifts in the water. Running uphill is slow, and running downhill is fast. The only weakness in the dry controls is that you can’t jump off of walls, except when you can. There are a few things on the walls that you can hang onto, and you can make small jumps off of them, but I never quite got the hang of it.

Besides ascending the ship, you have to worry about the large areas of the ship that are on fire, and the ship’s security system, which is online and shooting at anything that moves. If you’re shot too many times or burn for too long, you pass out until the water rises high enough to wake you up, which is a pretty clever way of doing things.

The only way to die is by drowning, but that’s pretty hard to do. A circle forms around you and slowly contracts as you run out of air, but you can hold your breath for a long time. Also, there are trapped air bubbles in most rooms to keep you oxygenated without getting out of the water. While you’re under water, you can’t do anything but swim. The swimming feels pretty natural, but getting out of the water and onto land takes a while to get used to.

The goal of Wake is not just to escape the ship, but also to score as many points as possible along the way. There are keys and bits of meteor strewn about the ship, and each one you have in your inventory at the end adds to your score. You also get points for any distance between you and the water and a score multiplier for the difficulty setting. My first score was the lowest on the board when I submitted it, but my second submission was considerably higher.

Style

Wake combines pixelated characters and backgrounds with some high-end lighting effects. The flames and other light sources look wonderful, though they can be too bright on occasion, so bright you can’t see anything. The ship lists as it sinks, and the generator stops and starts, flickering the lights before they go out or go on.

And the music does a great job of conveying the mood of the ship. It’s upbeat when the lights are working and foreboding when they’re not, and the transition between the two states is perfect.

Story

You uncover the story as you go through the ship. It comes to you through radio signals and you learn why the ship is sinking and who the captain was. There isn’t much of a story, but it helps you connect with the engineer you’re controlling and care a little more about the situation.

Everything Else

The game is pretty short. My first playthrough on easy took a little over an hour, each subsequent game was shorter. It’s designed for replay and exploration, and bitter feuds on the leader boards. There are also quite a few easter eggs and achievements to unlock, so it should keep you occupied for as long as you’re interested.

[DIYgamer.com was provided with a copy of this game for review purposes. This in no way affected the outcome of the review. A demo can be found at Boss Baddie's website.]

I’ve been following the two-man team behind Boss Baddie’s games for a long time. They’ve been working on an epic platformer called Tormishire for a long time, but they released Lunnye Devitsy last summer, and Wake just over a month ago. After Wake’s release, I asked the team if they’d be willing to sit down and talk with me, and they obliged.

Since a sea separates me and them, we had to converse through other means. MSN was the intermediary, and it gave up on the connection at least three times. But after some heavy stitching, I’ve managed to put together the words we exchanged in some semblance of order.

If this is your introduction to Boss Baddie, you can find demos for their released games here. A review of Wake will be somewhere on this website tomorrow.

DIYgamer: First things first, can you introduce yourselves and tell me a little bit about what each of you do for Boss Baddie?

James Whitehead: I’m James, I do all the graphics, coding and website stuff. Sometimes music too.

Alex Sumesar-Rai: I’m Alex Sumesar-rai, aka MrPineapple, and I make music a lot. I tend to throw idea sin and test as well, but I started as a musician. I didn’t test before we started Tormishire.

DIYgamer: What brought the two of you together?

Alex: Well, thats a long story. Long and dull. I’ve known James for nearly 10 years now, but we’ve never met in real life! How very progressive of us.

James: Gamemakers! An age old MSN Group. Alex was pimping his MrPineapple game and I was causing trouble with the admin.

Alex: Haha.

James: Then when Tormishire was being made I dropped in one of his tracks and we decided to team up and just make beautiful games and music together.

DIYgamer: You guys released a new game earlier this month called Wake. What’s it about?

James: Last summer I saw that horrible Poseidon remake. All throughout it I imagined playing it as a game, I’d just finished work on Lunnye and thought “why not!”

DIYgamer: OK, and why should people buy it?

James: People should buy it because it’s awesome. One of the players described it as an escapevania, so it’s in fashion too.

DIYgamer: Do they escape from a sinking ship in the Poseidon remake?

James: I think a few survivors do. They don’t get a high score though.

Alex: They don’t get that title screen either. The title screen alone inspired me to make the soundtrack.

DIYgamer: The title screen is hauntingly beautiful.

Alex: And it should be, James spent literally days on making it look that way. You should see all the half-finished versions of it I have on my desktop!

DIYgamer: You’re selling Wake and your first game, Lunnye Devitsy, together and calling it the Lunar Pack. Is there something that ties the games together?

James: Their themes just seemed similar. In Lunnye you play a moon damsel who has to find abstract methods to get home in an open world. In Wake you have to travel through a large open ship to get to safety. They both just seem to be about a person making their way home any way they can, with the moon being a continuing theme. Tormishire follows this too, except you’re running around inside a moon.

DIYgame: Hence the term escapevania?

Alex: I do like that term.

DIYgamer: So do you consider Tormishire the third in a series of thematically related games?

James: Definitely, and once it’s released there will be a bundle containing all 3 games. Tormishire is what binds them.

Alex: Although it’s more than capable of standing on it’s own.

DIYgamer: When did you start working on Tormishire?

James: December 2006. What seems like a lifetime ago!

Alex: I think i joined it about a year in, which isn’t that far in really considering the scale.

DIYgamer: Has it been in constant development, or do you take breaks to work on other games like Lunnye, Wake and the one you just announced?

Alex: Well, there’s only really been one break so far, it’s just been a large one in which yes, we’ve worked on Lunnye and Wake.

James: We have made some minor updates along the way. The next big one is to enable DirectX graphics and shaders and all that.

Alex: That and add the other two chapters.

DIYgamer: So far you’ve made 2D games with pixel art, but you’re dropping the pixels for the next project. What brought on the change?

James: The next game is going to use a different art style again just because I can’t settle on a single style. I like to experiment whenever I can and this next game required a HD resolution. Seemed the perfect opportunity to try something new.

Alex: Hopefully the music side will reflect that too.

DIYgamer: How do you approach the music when working on a new game?

Alex: It depends. Usually I’ll wait until James has a test level, or even a title screen, then work off that. But sometimes it works the other way round. There are a few areas in Tormishire that he made from listening to tracks i made.

DIYgamer: You released a sampler of music from Tormishire a few months back. Is the soundtrack basically finished?

Alex: More or less. I expect we’ll find a few places to stick some more songs in along the way, but we do have a lot of music for it already from both of us, and a few which we both worked on together.

James: One of my favourite tracks that too.

Alex: Ditto.

DIYgamer: Which track is that?

Alex: The one used on the Hi, Boss Baddie! video. I believe that was a collaboration.

James: Also used in Boss 5.

DIYgamer: You developed an online scoreboard and achievements to work with Wake. The game hasn’t been out for long, but have they been busy?

Alex: Melcadrien’s score impressed me.

James: The scores haven’t, though we did have to remove all our test scores. We want that board filled up so we’ve dropped the price of the game.

DIYGamer: Have any users beaten your own high scores?

James: It seems a bit unfair to put my own time on, not that I’m bragging or anything!

Alex: Well, being able to ace your own game isn’t that much of a thing to be proud of. More a fact of life.

DIYgamer: It would give players something to brag about.

James: One of the achievements is a time I set on hard mode, but that’s to do with getting to an exit under a certain time rather than getting a high score.

DIYgamer: So which game can we expect first, Tormishire or the new project?

James: The new project, oh yes! We’re hoping for a short development time with this one. Tormishire will hopefully be back with a vengeance after that.

Alex: Even though we still haven’t thought of a name for it yet.

DIYgamer: When you announced the new project, you also called off the Satan Sam 2010 port. How much work had you done on that?

James: The visuals had been updated and we were still redesigning the powers and upgrades. But Sam’s time had been and gone. If we could click our fingers and have it magically ported, that would be great. For now we’re busy with bigger projects

DIYgamer: You guys certainly seem busy enough.

Alex: Thats just James being a workaholic, I think. Always with a million projects up his sleeve.

DIYGamer: Well, I think that’s all I meant to ask about, unless there’s something either of you want people to know about.

James: Just that Wake’s entrance fee has been dropped and there’s a patch out. Our next game should be out within a couple of months so stick around or something!

DIYgamer: Thanks for talking to me, guys.

Alex: Thanks for letting us type at you.

James: No problem, its been fun! Barring the connection and messenger problems. Always with the problems.

Alex: I blame Microsoft and BT respectively.

The preview video did not lie. Mr Runner is platforming at its purest. Bit Battalion’s flash game went up on Kongregate earlier today, making the game available to all.

The game is a fast and pure 2D platformer. Your 8-bit character can wall jump and slide, and as you zoom across the screen the camera narrows giving you a real sense of speed. There are coins to collect, but they actually help you by reducing the time on the clock. Also, for some reason ice makes you go even faster, and you can get a platinum medal for finishing super fast.

You can play the game on Kongregate or on Bit Battalion’s site.

If you’re really into the game, you can make your own levels share them through Kongregate.

[via Twitter]

If you’ve been dying to die as a ninja robot, today is your lucky day. Plain Sight is now available for download on Steam, Direct 2 Drive and Gamers Gate. Beatnik Games planned a late March release, but pushed back the date to today to squash bugs and get ready for the show.

If none of those distributors strike your fancy, you can probably find the game on your preferred digital distributor in the coming days. Beatnik Games has a list of expected distributors on the Plain Sight website.

The development team created a new trailer to accompany the launch. Get a better feel for the gameplay below.

[via Plain Sight Blog]

Touch Arcade has the first gameplay trailer from Rocketcat Games next iPhone release, Super Quickhook. Like in Hook Champ, you’ll be doing a lot of swinging — this time to escape an avalanche while stealing food and jetting around endless, procedurally generated levels.

The trailer is a little underwhelming though. Hook Champ is my favorite game on the iPhone. That’s partially because of the great hooking mechanic, but also because it oozes with 8-bit charm — charm I don’t see much of in the design of Quickhook. Well, OK, that gnome is pretty adorable. But there’s a general lack of cohesion between the main character, the scenery and the avalanche. They don’t look like they belong together.

My hope is that Rocketcat Games is working on the graphics between now and the release date, which is scheduled for late April or early May.

[via Touch Arcade]

This is a hard review for me to write, and it’s all Penny Arcade’s fault. By the time I had played the game to the point where I was comfortable reviewing it (beating it and then some), I had time to either pull my notes together to and sit down to write or prepare for PAX. Thinking (because I’m a fool) I’d have plenty of time to write while in Boston, I put it off.

Now I’m back and decompressed, but more than a week away from the last time I summoned souls to save myself from a bat, so we’ll see what emotions I can pull out of these notes. Because Soulcaster is a love letter to the games of my youth, and yet the actual game is nothing like what I remember. The retro graphics disguise a deeper complexity.

Gameplay

You control a wizard that stumbles on the souls of the three immortal spirit guardians of Averica. First you meet Shaeda, the archer. His arrows are strong, but his body is weak. Before long you stumble across Aeox, the knight. He’s the bruiser with a tough hide and a sharp stick. Finally you obtain Bloodfire. He throws explosive potions — even over walls, but he’s even weaker than Shaeda, and explodes when he dies.

The game works like this. When you meet each guardian, they give you a soul. You can then buy two more at the shop, giving you five souls to work with. You can use the souls however you like, summoning the three heroes in any combination.

As you move through Averica, looking for a chalice to cure the land’s ills, the dead come after you. They spawn when you cross certain tiles, and you have to summon your souls to protect you. If the souls die, they take a few seconds to become unsummoned and usable again. A few seconds you usually don’t have.

It plays a bit like a mobile tower defense game. Your wizard can summon souls anywhere he can stand, though he can’t pass through them (so don’t trap yourself). He can also unsummon the souls. The most basic strategy is to put an Aeox or two between you and the monsters, then place Shaedas or Bloodfires in sniping or bombing positions.

Earlier stages give you plenty of gaps in walls to plug with Aeox and impassable rivers for Shaeda to snipe over. Later in the game, the environments are mostly open, and you have to make your own cover. The open fields for you to be constantly on the move, rapidly summoning and unsummoning souls. If you get in a jam, there are scrolls the wizard can use to damage everything nearby, but you can only carry three and they don’t kill everything outright.

That’s really all there is to the gameplay. But there are a dozen or so monsters, each with different attributes. Some are fast and fragile, others slow and powerful. They come at you in combinations, so you have to prioritize your targets. You have to decide when to engage and when to retreat.

It’s thrilling and hard, but totally worth it.

Style

Soulcaster hearkens back to an older generation, right down to the 4:3 aspect ration, the 16-bit graphics and the passwords. Keep a pencil and pad nearby, because if you want to stop playing you’ll have to write down 24 characters. Given the self-imposed limitations, the graphics look great, and they suit the simple grid-based gameplay.

Going into the store starts off some heavy rocking. I don’t know why the developer went in that direction, but I’m not complaining.

Story

The story really only serves to introduce the game’s central mechanic. But it does have some charm and some amusing moments. There isn’t much text, but what is there is worth reading.

Everything Else

I’m a pretty big fan of the tower defense genre, and Soulcaster has probably supplanted Defense Grid to take the No. 2 spot in my heart. Aside from the passwords, which are a pain to enter, I can’t think of anything bad to say about this game.

Go buy it, it’s worth the 240 points.

[DIYgamer.com was provided with a copy of this game for review purposes. This in no way affected the outcome of the review. More information can be found at the Xbox Live Marketplace]

For the first week in April, 10 Xbox Live Arcade games are going on sale. Among those 10 are Hidden Path Entertainment‘s Defense Grid and Torpex Games‘ Schizoid.

Both games will be sold for 400 points, which is half the normal asking price. If I didn’t already have Defense Grid on the PC, I’d jump at the chance to own it. It’s one of the best tower defense games I’ve ever played, up there with Desktop Tower Defense and Soulcaster.

I don’t know much about Schizoid, but it sounds a bit like a co-op Ikaruga, with each player controlling a color. At 400 points, it’s probably worth picking up.

The sale runs through April 7, and also includes: Age of Booty, Lumines LIVE, Mad Tracks, Rocket Riot, South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!, Super Street Fighter II HD, Track & Field and Wallace & Gromit Episode 1.

[via Facebook]

The guys at Klei Entertainment had the first demo available to play at PAX East, and it was a sight to behold. It takes you through a bunch of jobbers, a few bigger guys and one beast of a boss over the course of one stage.

The controls are simple and intuitive. You switch effortlessly between a knife, a chainsaw and a few guns during combos, and you can also pick up smaller enemies and smack them around with your various instruments of pain.

You also have grenades, which are a joy to use. You don’t lob them so much as fling them, kunai style, and they explode on contact. It’s tremendously satisfying, and the quickness of the strike makes grenades perfect for suppressing anybody trying to sneak up behind you.

The most satisfying thing to do after you run out of grenades is is to pounce on the enemies. I don’t think the pounce would work without Shanks fluid visuals, because when you land on people, they react like they’re being landed on.

Plenty of games have stellar animation, but I don’t think I’ve every seen a 2D game that shows the interplay between the player character and his opponents as well as Shank does. Clearly, after the boss, Toro, runs into the wall and stands stunned with a flashing button above his head, the game is waiting to run the animation of you applying a chainsaw to his neck. But the second you try to grab the boss when he’s not stunned? That’s a different story. Whether you pounce at him or grab at him, he’s ready to fling you away like one of your grenades.

The Toro fight is bookended by short, sweet cut scenes. Shank doesn’t say a word, and it conveys so much. Shank is so cool, it’s like they’re not even trying (Wet developers could learn a few thousand things from Klei).

One thing bothers me, now that I’m back home and no longer in range of a developer to ask the question, is that the game was ridiculously easy. The difference between The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and Shank was night and day. I watched a few people play through the demo and not one finished with much of a dent in their life bar. People playing Vampire Smile were lucky to get through the first miniboss. I should have asked if the difficulty was scaled back for the floor demo, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

The gameplay trailer at the end of this post shows off the moves of someone a lot more familiar with the game than I could get in 10 minutes, and it’s actually got me hopeful. The person holding the controller is doing some impressive air combos. So the more complex combat is available, if you want it.

Below is the official gameplay trailer and a video I took of someone fighting Toro, the boss in the demo. Pay close attention to the parts where the player tries to grab Toro. Those are my favorite parts.

Michel Gagne announced Monday that the long-awaited Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet will premier on XBLA. In the beautiful 2D shooter, you control a flying saucer while dark, creepy things try to get you.

Reading the comments on the developer’s blog, it’s clear that many of the people following the game are dissapointed with that announcement. But developer Gagne said in the comments that “No one here is saying that there won’t be a PC version.” So that’s good news for anyone without an Xbox 360.

Still, there’s little information aside from the platform announcement, so we’ll have to wait for details like a release date or price. But stick around and we’ll keep you updated.

[via Michel Gagne's blog]