Apparently more than a few players had qualms with the beat detection system of Binary Takeover’s casual music-powered puzzle game Turba, so the developers took the feedback to heart and have completely reworked the beat detection system in the game.

Anyone who has downloaded the demo and used up some or all of their track count will get a reset to check out the new system. The dev does this in hope that those who were put off by the original system can give the demo another chance and possibly change their opinion of the game.

Additionally, the new update brings top 10 lists of most played artists and songs, makes it faster to unlock powers and implements a few bug fixes. The file can be downloaded now for owners of the game on Steam.

From the change log:

Turba Update

The biggest change in this new update is the reworking of the game’s beat detection system. After a lot of feedback, we overhauled the system in hopes of improving the experience for our players. We have also made it so that everyone’s song count in the demo version will reset. We want everyone to be able to try out the new beat detection, and hope that if there are any people out there who were put off by the previous system, they will give the game another chance and possibly change their minds about buying the full version.

In addition to this, we have also fixed several bugs and added a couple of new features. Here is a list:

• Added top 10 most played artists and songs to the Scores menu.
• Roulette, Auto Combo and Zapper powers are unlocked faster. (25, 50, 75 activations down to
• 20, 40, 60 activations to unlock)
• Fixed leader board scores not updating correctly sometimes when you got a higher score.
• Fixed bug in file browser that didn’t allow CDs to be played.
• Fixed bug in file browser that made folders not show up under certain drive letters.
• Fixed Last.fm account name input to accept underscores.”

Binary Takeover has released a new update for its casual puzzler Turba, now available for owners of the game on Steam.

The patch brings a handful of fixes, additions and improvements to the game. Now, players have the option to preview songs in the file browser, adjust menu music and sound volumes. Additionally, the update brings left-handed mouse support for southpaws.

The file can be had as an automatic download, if you’ve purchased the game and have yet to receive it, restart the Steam client or fire up the game itself.

From the change log:

Turba update features

• Folders can now be pinned to the root of the Computer section of the browser.
• Added option to preview songs in the file browser.
• Added options for menu music and sound volumes.
• Added option for a left-handed mouse.
• Game remembers what mode/power you last played with when going back to menu.
• Old Colorblind blocks are now the default. Colorblind mode now has higher contrast colors.

Indie Sales reappears after a bit of a hiatus. Several sales this week; some little, some big and all awesome. Let’s take the tour.

Direct2Drive, often absent from our inconsistent weekly segment, boasts the best offer both in discount and quality of game. Multiplayer Robot Exploder Plain Sight is 50% off, taking the title down to just $5 through the middle of next week. Check out Geoff’s review for more on the game.

Impulse is running a couple of deals as part of their weekend sale. Christian Teister’s Grappling Hook goes for $9 instead of the standard $15–Arsen and I have covered it fairly extensively. Sigma’s top-down action title Alien Shooter is just $3 instead of the typical $5. However…

GamersGate is offering a better Alien Shooter discount in the three-game Alien Shooter Gold Pack which contains Alien Shooter, Alien Shooter: Vengeance and Zombie Shooter. A $15 price tag slashed down to just $3.73! Not to be overlooked at all, The Scourge Project Episodes 1 and 2 is still 75% off. Check out our coverage here.

In the wake of its enormous discountocalypse, Steam isn’t running any standard sales this week. However, they are offering a few launch discounts including dollar discounts for Binary Takeover’s music-powered title Turba and Telltale’s adventure game Puzzle Agent. The new “Class 02 Shunter Pack” DLC for RailWorks is 33% off as well.

Did we miss something? Email us or leave a comment below so we can share.

Following in the footsteps of Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, the four-man squad of Binary Takeover has released their music-powered match-3 Turba. Now available for purchase and download on Steam.

In the game, players will select a song of their choice off of their PC library and jump into the gameplay. The pieces on the board generate and move to the beat of the player’s song choice. Clear blocks in time with the beat and make expert combos to maximize score and compete in online leaderboards for any and all songs played.

The title includes support for Music CDs, Mp3 Flac, Ogg, Wma, Ape and Mpc files, and also offers its own soundtrack dubbed “Turba Originals” to show they weren’t just looking to cut the soundtrack corner with this whole (awesome) player-music integration stuff. A demo is available on the game’s Steam page if you fancy a try.

The title runs $10, but goes for a dollar less its first week. A small amount of info digging (we really take Google for granted) led me to the developer’s site. Turba is actually Binary Takeover’s second effort. The first is a puzzle platformer, and IGF 2009 entrant, by the name of Lost Marbles. The game is free to download here (scroll down).

On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, design, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

This past weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time walking, reading subway maps and fiddling with my Pokéwalker. The first annual Penny Arcade Expo East was held in Boston and I was, of course, in attendance as I cannot manage to keep myself away from these things. And while on the show floor, I considered it my mission, my responsibility even, to play each and every independent game I could get my filthy mitts on while there.

And I so did. I managed to drag my tired body through the expo hall a great many times in order to play everything I possibly could. Before the article goes any further, I’d like to apologize to the creators of Miegakure. When I came past the booth, people were playing, the game was down or I was on my way to another appointment. I was unfortunately unable to play it so I feel like I somehow let the ball drop. But I did watch it for a good deal of time and feel like I got a grasp of what the game was about.

But even though I managed to miss Miegakure, I did find the time and energy to play (deep breath): Slam Bolt Scrappers, Dearth, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, Waker, Turba, Shank, Charlie Murder and The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. As well as a huge smattering of mainstream titles of which none will be discussed here.

But what kind of impression did all these games leave on me, in total? Well, it further cemented the idea in my head that indie games are necessarily quirky and their creators are, for the most part, human in nature. The product of the minds of a very small group of people tends to be more specifically unique than one that requires a bureaucratic entity to govern it and even indie developers want to play the next biggest game.

But those are all broad, general statements. The specifics are of far more interest to you, Constant Reader, so get to them I shall. The first annual PAX East was actually host to their very own Boston Indie Showcase, which collected a number of local indie developers together to show off their games. The first six in my list above, Slam Bolt Scrappers, Dearth, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, Waker, Turba and Mieagakure all sat together in a little circle near the edge of one of the halls. And, besides the previously mentioned Mieagakure, I played all of them over the course of the convention.

Of the six, the first I managed to get some time in with was AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! by Dejobaan Games. If you don’t already know what the game’s about, you’ve clearly not been kept up to snuff on indie game news. Sufficed to say, it’s been out for a bit and has garnered some positive reviews. If you haven’t played already, you really should.

In the game, you fling yourself from the top of a building of some sort and try to accomplish a number of tasks on the way down before gracefully landing in a predetermined zone. Hugs, kisses, flipping the bird and giving thumbs up to different sections of the level will net a varying amount of points depending on your timing. Like old-school arcade games, the point is to get as many as you possibly can. It’s fun, has huge replay value and one of the developers mentioned, off-hand, that he must have been drunk when coding one of the levels. I wasn’t actually sure if he was joking, but I like to think he wasn’t. It’s way more amusing that way.

After AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! came Dearth and then Waker. I lump the two together here as they were both developed by MIT Gambit Game Lab. If you can’t already tell, this means that both games have somewhat ulterior motives: academia. It’s all so ingrained, however, that you’d be hard-pressed to know that they were trying to gather data if they didn’t tell you so up front.

Dearth is full of sketched out Egyptian or Mayan imagery wherein you and a partner can control tiny fish people and run around in circles attempting to get the water beasts chasing you to crash into each other. You heard me. The express intent of the game is to reach the next level but the game is actually trying to gather data on how to make artificial intelligence. I’m not entirely certain how it works, but it does. And my playing through of a couple of levels with another human, dubbed Random Stranger #117, further proved to me that having two brains trying to solve one puzzle at the same time leads to confusion, hilarious confusion that has only bad consequences.

The second of the two MIT games, Waker, has two versions: one with and one without narrative. Otherwise, they’re exactly the same. The idea is to see if gaming narrative actually helps engage children and have them learn easier. The game follows a little black shadow of a thing with a tail as it tries to make it from one end of a stage to another. Imagine Braid but instead of time puzzles, it all depends on how fast your little creature is moving. The intent is to help kids learn about velocity and all that good stuff on a mostly observational level. See how it works, understand it better and therefore be able to use the concepts more easily later. You run, and drop the orb when you want to solidify the line you’ve created so you can traverse it to the next stage.

Turba by Keith Morgado was the second-to-last game I gave a go. It’s reminiscent of Bejeweled and a number of other puzzle games that have you match three but it has one little twist: the puzzle moves to the beat of whatever mp3 you happen to have available. Keith was luckily at the station as I began my play to Gorillaz, as I’m not exactly a puzzle game junkie, as he explained to me some of the more specific functions like clicking three of a couple different colors to knock them out at the same time and so on. I’ve never played a single one of them before so this was all new to me. After helping me to actually play the game, he admitted that he’d made the entire game in his room and that, due to using the player’s music, it avoided any copyright infringement. Either way, my time with Turba went entirely too quickly, but the timing just so happened to coincide with the line ceasing to exist in the booth right next door.

And that was rather fortuitous as the line had been going strong since the first day I’d put my eyes on it. Fire Hose Games had brought the best of the litter and the line to play proved it. They’d brought Slam Bolt Scrappers. The gameplay is an intoxicating mixture of a simple fighting game with a large dose of Tetris and some influences from the tower defense genre. You beat up enemies which then turn to a colored Tetris block, which you then drop on your team’s area in order to build up towers of the same color. Red makes rockets, purple makes lasers and blue makes some kind of shielding mechanism. The point of the game is to decimate your opponent’s tower and destroy their gold-rimmed blocks.

And goodness, did I destroy some blocks. I was teamed with an odd fellow who only spoke in broken English so we communicated almost entirely through yelps of joy and high-fives. The opposing team was composed of two middle-aged women. I couldn’t make this stuff up. Our first match started and me and my English-butchering partner won within three minutes. Our opponents had thought they were supposed to beat our two avatars up, not build a tower to beat our tower. The developers even let us play another round which wound up being pretty similar.

In the end, each game was quirky, imaginative, interesting, surprisingly addicting and just plain fun. After watching a good deal of Mieagakure, I can safely say the same of it as well. If these are the kinds of indie games we have to look forward to in the future, the future sure looks bright. Here’s to the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle at the end of the year and its, hopefully, equally amazing lineup of indie titles.

We already announced that Slam Bolt Scrappers from Fire Hose Games had made it into the PAX East Boston Indie Showcase, but the full list of titles has been announced.

The rest of the competition includes the oft mentioned AAAaaaAAA, Miegakure, Dearth, Waker and Turba. They’ll all be given booths at the show to present their titles.

Here’s the full press release breaking down what each game is (for the one’s you don’t already know about:

PAX EAST ANNOUNCES SELECTION FOR BOSTON INDIE SHOWCASE

BOSTON – March 16, 2010 – PAX East has selected Boston’s best up‑and‑coming studios to show their titles for free on the exhibition floor. Fire Hose Games, Dejobaan Games, MIT’s Gambit Game Lab as well as developers Keith Morgado and Marc ten Bosch will present their games to thousands of gamers on Friday, March 26 – Sunday, March 28 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

The Boston Indie Showcase was created to support start-ups that don’t normally have the means to demo at major shows.

“Boston welcomed us with open arms and we wanted to give a little of the love back. We knew there are some great companies in Boston that can’t normally take booth space, so the Showcase was born,” said Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade. “Our winners have put together a selection of titles that are fun and original; but most importantly they show what gamers with passion and dedication can do.”

The winning entries are:

·Slam Bolt Scrappers – Fire Hose Games – A unique combination of engaging in building challenges while fighting off wacky, cartoon baddies in a beat ‘em up brawler

·AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – Dejobaan Games – Jump off buildings floating above Boston performing stunts and making split-second decisions as you weave around buildings to score points

·Dearth – MIT Gambit Game Lab – Save the Tribal Lands from monsters and drought playing as a great shaman in this exciting co-operative action-puzzler

·Waker – MIT Gambit Game Lab – Players are challenged to use both mind and reflexes to solve puzzles, creating platforms to form a path in this puzzle/platform game set in the world of a child’s broken dream

·Turba – Keith Morgado – A puzzle game where each song played will generate unique game boards on which players much create combos of 3 or more of the same color

·Miegakure – Marc ten Bosch – A platform game where you explore the fourth dimension to solve puzzles.

In addition to the BIS winners, Boston game companies will be out in force at PAX East. Local stalwarts 2K, Games Universe, Harmonix, Muzzy Lane Software, Medaverse Studios and Turbine are exhibiting on the show floor. Meghan Rodberg from Turbine will speak on the “Community Managers: More than Forum Monkeys” panel, Ken Levine from Irrational Games is on the “Sequelitis Snake Oil: Quack Medicine for the Video Game Industry” session and Harmonix is hosting a roundtable titled “An awkward hour with Rock Band designers.”

2Bee Games’ second Independent Game competition is winding down. There are now four finalists to choose from:

DriftMoon – an RPG title by Ville Mönkkönen which is currently in its early stage.

Kablooey! – an innovative point-and-click game that promotes logical thought.

Turba – a puzzle/rhythm title in which the gameplay is directly relevant to the music the player chooses.

Vector Conflict: The Siege – a first person 3D retro shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world.

It seems that the final of the selections, Vector Conflict: The Siege, has been the polling favorite so far. But it is suggested you take a look at all four of the finalists and, the fun part, play each of the games in order to make a choice yourself. Voting ends November 30th at 11:59 PM EST.

DIYgamer wishes luck to all finalists!