Longbow Games dropped into the PAX 10 with a profoundly complete and complex strategy title that traces the historical rise of an iconic ruler in Hegemony: Philip of Macedon. The game released in May of 2010, but the trouble with indie releases that it’s all about getting the word out, and luckily PAX 10 was able to show off the impressive depth of this well-constructed title.

The unique element to this strategy game is that you can zoom from a full map of Ancient Greece down to an individual unit on the ground of a historical battle in real-time. This depth creates for multiple battlefronts at once and an intense amount of resource management as you have a lot to keep track of. But unlike most real-time strategy games these days, you can pause Hegemony at any time in order to rethink your strategies and queue up moves for the way forward. If you can reach the end of the lengthy campaign, you can even undertake some conquests as Alexander the Great, Philip’s son.

While a show-floor demo can’t do the game justice, we’ll be bringing you a full review soon, but we needed to point out just how intriguing this game is.

Longbow Games formed back in 2002 and have been working on Hegemony for around five years. The long development cycle, compounded by the indie development team, make sense as the game reflects a lot of hard work. Many of the members of the team were wrapping up school, so it also extended the life cycle of delivering a finished product. Seumas McNally founded the company, but after passing away in 2000, the company is carried on by three other McNallys and the rest of the talented Longbow team. Longbow’s game Tread Marks won three awards in the second annual Independent Games Festival. After Seumas’ passing, the Grand Prize award was named in his honor. Longbow also created the title DX-Breaker 2 and several other arcade titles, which are a long shot from the depth and scope of the historical title they’re now showcasing.

You can buy Hegemony: Philip of Macedon on Longbow’s website right now and keep an eye out for our review soon. Here’s the game’s official trailer:

The students at Digipen never cease to amaze me. Throughout my time writing at DIYgamer.com I’ve played many of the projects that the school consistently churns out and each and every one has had a unique hook in it that made it a wonderful game to play. Solace, another Digipen student game, was actually good enough to make this year’s PAX10.

Solace is a unique shmup that’s based on the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Each level you play is based on one of these stages and depending on which stage you are playing will depend on the flow, the enemies, and even your own character.

Of course, it’s not only about gameplay with Solace. Each stage is actually there to represent something and this shows in not only the way he game is played, but the music that is played as well. In Solace as you shoot at the enemies you’ll be playing music. Each level has a different style to match the stage. For example, on the first stage,  denial, as you shoot enemies you’ll be playing a classic piano with a very easy melodic tune. Once you reach the anger stage, however, that melodic classic piano becomes an electric guitar with a much faster tempo.

In addition, the enemies themselves will also reflect just what stage you are on. For example, when you are playing in the bargaining stage you are actually fighting a giant looming boss. This represents the struggle of how hard it is to get over the fact that whatever it is that you’re grieving about is bound to happen no matter how much bargaining you do. Each other level has their own enemy style that actively reflects the stage you are on.

Solace is a great game and it’s one that’s truly a beautiful experience. Is it an art game? Yes, but don’t judge it immediately based on that. Underneath all the messages and music lies an enjoyable shmup experience. It’s artsy but not at the expense of fun, and this is why Solace is such a great game.

Solace is available to download and play for free right now for your PC. It’s a relatively short game lasting only about 15-20 minutes so it doesn’t require a serious investment of time. I highly recommend you check this one out.

[Solace]

Trailer

Late last year a small, but incredibly well made action RPG was released that, eventually, went on to become a footnote in the annals of RPG history. That game was, of course, Torchlight, a game which was not only well received critically, but also went on to be a financial success for Runic Games as gamers were heralding the title as the next best thing to Diablo 2.  Luckily for us the guys over at Runic were on hand at PAX showing off the title and Max Scheafer himself helped guide us through the bigger and better world of Torchlight II.

To say that Torchlight II is simply a bigger version of Torchlight would not be doing any justice to the title. Let’s put it this way. The first Diablo was good. A lot of people really enjoyed the game and overall it was a success in establishing a franchise. Diablo 2, on the other hand, not only continued that franchise, it established a legacy. This is the volume by which Torchlight II will surpass the original game, which makes sense since Max himself worked on both the original Diablo games as well.

So, first off, there are four brand new classes. While the original three are no longer playable they will appear as NPCs in various areas of the game. Unfortunately, only two of the four new classes were playable on the floor: the Outlander and the Railman. The Outlander plays as a sort of gunman/shooter character with a bit of magic enhanced abilities. The Railman, on the other hand, is a sort of engineer tank. What this means is that you’ll be building up runes in order to help bash your way through waves of enemies. It’s an interesting concept and one that isn’t easily grasped unless you play the game. Still though, both new classes are incredibly interesting and fun to play. The final two classes have not yet been announced.

Continuing on, and this will be a delight for those of you who like to play with others, Torchlight II will ship with online multiplayer/co-op. It’s a pretty simple service, basically just peer-to-peer. There’s no chat rooms or other such areas a la Diablo 2, but what is there seemed solid. While the actual multiplayer functionality will be pretty barren, Max did say they would include clan tags so that you and your friends could form up official-ish groups.

Of course, what would all these great new toys be without a great new world to explore? This, in my opinion, is where Torchlight II will really shine. Where as the original game simply had you in a single town going down various levels in a mine, Torchlight II features an overworld with plenty of outside areas to explore. Additionally, the game will features a number of environments and more than a single hub town, similar to what you had in Diablo 2. And, as with Torchlight, all dungeons — caves, forests, underworld, overworld, etc. — will continue to be randomly generated to ensure a unique experience through each locale.

Finally, as with the original game, Torchlight II will ship with the complete engine that the game was made on. This means that the entire game will be modable. You can create new weapons, maps, dungeons, skills, and even new classes should you decide to invest that kind of work. The tools the developers are using right now to create the game will be the same ones you’ll have access to upon the release of the game ensuring that the game has an active modding community attached to it.

Torchlight II is destined to be another smash hit so long as Runic can keep up with the same level of polish that the first game had. Overall, and this is from Max himself, the game is roughly four times the size as the original game, which means you’re not only getting a meatier game willed with features lacking in Torchlight, you’re also getting a much longer game.

Torchlight II is set for release in either April or May of 2011 with the same price as the original ($19.99), and, as with the original, you can expect the game to be available on a number of digital distribution platforms as well as the developers own site (where they retain 100% of the profits).

We’ll keep up with our Torchlight II coverage as we get updates from the developer. Stay tuned!

[Torchlight II]

Trailer

Seeing as how we know you guys love video content so much, we were able to take a couple videos on the show floor at PAX showing off a couple of Retro City Rampage’s more unique areas.

The first area is a simple casino/gambling area. This is just a video showing off the slot machine. In addition to this there is also a match the cards type game. It’s nice to see that the developer is putting large amounts of extra content into the game, as playing through just the story can get old.

And then in this second video is an area that’s supposed to be a spoof off the original Zelda game. Brian (the developer) had originally thought nobody had done it, but unfortuantely, upon arriving it had already been completed by one of the other PAX attendees. What’s supposed to happen here is that you’re supposed to be given a sword by this guy in the cave. Kind of a bummer, but it still shows that there is extra stuff to see and explore in this ever expanding 8-bit game.

[Retro City Rampage]

While roaming around the halls of PAX10, we were lucky enough to stumble upon Ska Studios, the guys who made both the original Dishwasher and I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1. And, since we’re super best friends with them, we were able to sit down with both James (the founder) and the their new game for an off-hand interview as well as a preview of their upcoming sequel: The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. We’ll have our interview piece up later, but, in the mean time, enjoy this lengthy preview of what can only be called a bigger and better version of the origjnal.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is one of those sequels that retains all of the good things about the original, and then continues to expand into new areas of gameplay so that you feel like you’re getting a true sequel instead of just a simple story continuation. Vampire Smile is what a sequel really should be, and I’m happy to see Ska Studios really make an effort to improve their original vision.

So what are these updates and enhancements?

Well for starters there is now two primary campaigns. Both Yuki and the Dishwasher each have their own campaign games. Yuki’s campaign has 13 levels and the Dishwasher’s campaign has 12 levels. Despite the actual campaign levels having only subtle differences, the actual stories between the two will be different. For those of you who haven’t played the original Dishwasher, having Yuki as a playable character in Vampire Smile is kind of a big deal.

Of course, if you’re a co-op gamer you won’t be left out either as the game will feature an entirely original co-op campaign. This isn’t the same stories as the regular campaigns but with just another player, this is a new campaign with new levels. The one caveat is that the co-op campaign is less story-driven and more killing-driven. What I mean by this is that there’s more of an emphasis on the playability of the game rather than the story.

In addition to the campaigns, Ska Studios has also gone and included a 50 level arcade game. Each level only takes a minute or two to complete but it should be enough to provide a meaty experience after you’ve completed the campaign. Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually able to see any of the arcade levels so, beyond knowing how many of them there are and the length of each, I don’t have much information to share just yet.

Finally, should you make it through all of this content and still find yourself needing more Vampire Smile you’ll be happy to know that the first game’s “Dish Challenge” mode has returned for a second time with leaderboard support. If you don’t know what this is, it’s a  simple single-roomed challenge mode where the game will just send wave after wave of enemies at you until you can’t take it anymore. The gamers who survive the longest will make the leaderboards.

As you can see The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is planned to be a meaty game, in both respects. If you were ever a fan of the original, I see no reason why you won’t enjoy this one as well. The combat is similar, if not bloodier, and the game, as a whole, just feels like a solid sequel to the original. Plus, James has assured to me that he has gotten better at coding this time around, so any hiccups you might have experienced prior, should be ironed out this time around.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is scheduled for release in early 2011 exclusively for the XBLA. While James couldn’t comment on any specific price points he did say that the game will probably be the same as the first title, although it’s still up in the air at this point.

[Vampire Smile]

Trailer

What do you get when you attempt to develop a action puzzle platformer in the span of a single month with a group of students from all across your country? While it might seem like the answer would be something along the lines of a disastrous game, or some other sort of dysmal failure, the actual reality is something completely different. Plane Weaver was, in fact, developed in the span of a month, by a bunch of students from Denmark from various art and design schools.

Plane Weaver has a unique concept. In the game you play as a girl named Silke. Now the story goes that your brother’s soul was stolen by something called the soulgrinders and is kept imprisoned in the mechanical fortress Itzhal. As a tribe of the plane weavers, you’ve decided to go into the fortress/prison and free your brother’s soul and destroy the colossal machine made out of steam and steel.

Now, being that you are a plane weaver, you are, obviously able to shift planes to alter things in different ways. In total, you have three forms (planes) in the games: normal, spirit, and spirit demon. Each form allows you to get through the world in various ways. For example, the spirit demon is a huge, heavy demon who can spray spores which will gum up the gears inside the machine. The spirit is able to use steam to go through various obstacles and get blown across gaps. Using all three forms you’ll be able to successfully complete the game.

Now, as you may have surmised so far, Plane Weaver is a puzzle platformer. There’s little in the way of raw action in the game as it’s mostly about figuring out how the machine works and how to overcome a mechanical obstacle in such a way so as to get to your brother’s soul. The game gives you a unique 3D perspective that allows for complex puzzles with gratifying results.

Over all, the game is a rather simple, but fun, 3D puzzle platformer. There’s not much to say about it explicitly due to the fact that the game is still very early on in the development process (being one month old and all). Still though, if you find yourself interested enough to try it out, the game is available right now to download to your PC.

[Download]

PAX Gameplay Video

Pixelante Games, the Vancouver-based group of independent developers, want to make you laugh at all the dick jokes in their new game Fowl Space, or at least it shows that they cracked themselves up while creating the title. And I think there’s something to be said for developers who enjoyeds creating the product they release, because the enjoyment definitely shows in the finished product.

Fowl Space is about an Astronaut Chicken (who Eddy Walters, one of the game designers, lovingly dubbed “Astro Cock”) that must battle hoards of Vikings (obviously a clichéd plot). The game uses a beautiful art style that is set in a quirky, silhouetted world. The chicken has a bubble for a helmet and a giant gun strapped to its back. The gun blasts shots of white goo, which I already overheard being called “spunk,” that takes down the enemies in the game. Did I mention there are a lot of dick jokes in the game?

The game was conceived during a particularly grueling summer class up at Simon Fraser University where “Astro Cock” was born in doodles. For the two years thereafter, the team worked on the game at various points for around six months of actual development and the game that was shown off as part of the PAX 10 was born. And with representatives from several of the major digital distribution portals dropping in on them, the young team was getting extremely excited about the game’s future.

The game is built in flash, due to the vast experience of Evan Miller, who is best known for his his free flash game Hunted Forever. They decided on a silohuetted look because of its practicality, but it also makes for a more stylized appearance. The chicken can gather additional weapons, charge the gun for a bigger blast of white-attack and even unlock hats around the game world to wear on top of its space helmet. The team made sure to point at that not only can the chicken wear hats, it can also stack hats so by late in the game you’re wearing an entire tower on top of your head. A nice touch for an already quirky game. College students know what works.

As far as the bad guys in the game, they are all vikings. They start of small and mean and then later in the game progress to machine driving behemoths that are more difficult to take down. As you kill vikings, they’ll drop women’s underwear and lingerie (obviously) from which you start building up your high score. The game is also full of tongue-in cheek pop-culture references, from LOLcats to Dinosaur Comics to Splash Attack. The team likes comedy and it shows.

The game is about a month or two away from full-optimization, and since they’re currently talking to reps from different outlets we don’t have a final platform or release date yet.

For more about Pixelante Studios check out their website.

After creating software and apps that had nothing to do with gaming, the three-person development team of Nevercenter decided to turn their talents on creating a compelling puzzle game for the iPhone and iPad. Without any games released between them before, on the opening morning of PAX they launched Shibuya, the difficult and compelling puzzle game they’re now going to be known for. And their inclusion in the PAX 10 with their first effort out of the gate seems to indicate we’ll see a lot more good things from them.

The team calls their game “Tetris with colors,” but to me that just means it’s a puzzle game involving colors because there weren’t too many similarities with that iconic Russian block game. While you do have to think a few steps ahead and plan for lines clearing in order to clear more lines, Shibuya feels original on its own.

The game screen is big and full of clarity. I played the demo on an iPad, which was really just an upscaled iPhone version, and the graphics still looked great. Gameplay involves gray bars dropping from the top of the screen, and five different colors queued up to insert into the bars. The object is to match 2, 3, 4, 5 or more of the same color in order to clear the lines for the highest score. Any time you match 2 colors, you can clear the two lines but you’ll score lower. So with the multicolored queue telling you what’s up next, the object of the game is to pick the best order of colors in which to match the most and score the highest amount of points. As the speed is raised choosing where to insert your colors becomes even more paramount. You’ll quickly screw up your pile of lines and hit the top of the screen and lose without realizing what happened.

Still a little confused? It might be one of those games that needs to be experienced to be understood. But if you look at that screenshot, you can see the queued up colors in the upper left corner, and the gray bars in which the colors can be inserted. From the bars already down, the player could touch the two green ones in order to clear them and score a few points. You get to pick which gray bar to drop your color on, so that’s where the technique comes to play. To truly succeed you need to be thinking multiple moves ahead and knowing which bars will drop once you clear the next color in order to create combos and more matches.

There is the Two-Minute Modes which are great for high scores and short trip, and the Endless Mode which can keep you going for as long as you can handle dropping bars and choosing colors. The App also uses OpenFeint to keep track of high scores around the world.

For this weekend only, you can nab Shibuya for $0.99 in the App store. After that it’s supposed to go back up to $1.99. From the time I had with the game, it’s succeeded in taking on the puzzle dilemma which is that it’s easy to learn and difficult to master.

So when I originally covered Retro/Grade in our run up to PAX10, I had noted that the game was quite a unique shmup in that you actually play the game backwards. Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t quite grasp just what that mean and how it would affect the game. Today, however, I’ve played the game, tested out just what it is, and came away with a completely different, but not entirely bad, opinion.

As I stated in my introductory post, the premise of the game is that you play as a protagonist named Rick Rocket who has just heroically saved the universe from a marauding group of aliens intent on destroying everything and everyone, yada yada… Unfortunately for Rick, just as he destroys the final boss and saves the universe, something disastrous happens: a temporal anomaly has begun reversing time so that time is going backwards.

It’s an interesting plot line, but one that is, unfortunately, superficial. After speaking with the developers I was informed that while the games story establishes the setting, gameplay, and plot it does little else within the context of the game. Meaning, beyond the first few minutes of the opening sequence there really isn’t a storyline anymore.

As I mentioned above, I originally noted that Retro/Grade was a shmup. This, however, was pretty much entirely wrong and it’s just one of those things that you’ll need to play in order to entirely grasp just what the game is. But I’ll do my best to explain it to you in the written word and then swing by the booth later to snag a new gameplay video.

So, first, Retro/Grade is not a shmup. It’s actually more of a rhythm game that anything else. Not to say that’s a bad thing though because, in fact, the game is actually really fun and the plot line does help establish some unique properties about the game.

Since you are traveling back in time, you have but a simple directive: don’t do anything your character didn’t do on his was forward. This means any enemies you shot and destroyed must be properly “rewound” to ensure that you take the bullets/missiles back in. The game does this by making it a sort of rhythm game which can be played using a guitar or controller. As Rick is flying backwards, you’ll use the guitar/controller to move up or down on a colored line (the difficulty will change this between 3-5 strips) and you’ll simply have to move your character up or down and then strum (or press X) as soon as the bullet has arrived at your ship.

Additionally, there is another mode where you’ll simply have to dodge the enemies rewinding fire. This mode is even simpler as you won’t really have to actually strum, you can just move up and down to navigate your way through the fire. Once you reach the more difficult levels of the game, you’ll have to do both, dodge and absorb, at the same time.

My only problem with the game so far is that, during the moments when you are required to dodge and absorb, the game can get pretty confusing, visually. For example, the top line of the game is the yellow line. When it comes time to dodge and absorb, you’ll have one yellow bullet coming from behind you and one heading towards you. Both are different sizes, but beyond that there’s little to differentiate between which is which and it can get very confusing.

Retro/Grade isn’t scheduled for release until 2011 and is currently being developed for the Playstation Network, although other platforms are a definite possibility, including the Wii, despite the obvious graphical downgrade which would be required. I’ll work on getting a gameplay video from the show today to upload later, until then enjoy the regular trailer below.

Trailer

While Peter covered most of the basics in his preview of the brand new Slam Bolt Scrappers Volcano level, unfortunately, he didn’t have a video at the time to actually show it off, mostly because it was on my video camera and I was off to check out more games for our awesome PAX coverage. Now that I’ve finagled some down time however, I was able to upload and post a short 2 minute clip of the hectic/crazy fun that is the newest edition to Slam Bolt Scrappers’ already impressive gameplay line up. Enjoy!