Stickmen Studios’ invent and adventure game Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time is heading to the Playstation Network sometime soon, so says the New Zealand-based developer. The port will receive Move motion control support, a sandbox level to tinker around in, and new in-game abilities.

Great news PC gamers who also love platformers (me!) as it looks like the formerly PSN exclusive physics platformer Rocahrd is set to launch on PC next week! That would be November 15th, for those of you who want something more concrete -and- didn’t read the title.

[Earlier this month, DIYGamer met with Shawn McGrath of ][ Games prior to the start of IndieCade to get an exclusive hands-on session with the PS3-bound Dyad--currently targeted for a release next Spring on the Playstation Network. Ken Ellis shares the experience of his lengthy playthrough of the game off of the notes I was able to jot down from Shawn, and his own thoughts. Filmmaker Kevin Harland was in tow as well to capture footage, and edit together a comprehensively concise gameplay video of the title's latest (and word is near-final) build.]

One time I saw a unicorn stab a clown on a rainbow while he was juggling jelly beans. Shawn Mcgrath’s tube shooter Dyad made that seem like a scene from Eraserhead. It’s that vibrant!

The tube shooter genre is an interesting beast to begin with, and Dyad takes it to vast new heights. Moving through each level as fast as possible is the basis of the game. How to do so changes each and every time you play, however, and new techniques learned are built upon in each subsequent level. At first you simply latch onto enemies up ahead and launch yourself off of (while still avoiding) them to progress. Eventually you learn that combo-ing off multiple enemies of the same color will increase your speed, and give you a boost to your Lance ability that makes you invincible against all enemies. Later enemies even create zip-lines behind them when latched onto that can increase your speed by riding. Don’t rely on the ability to practice each level to get better at it either. All levels are progressively generated, so each and every single time you play a level, it will be different.

Music is seemingly the key element of Dyad. While it is not a rhythm game, music is infused into every aspect of the game. Each level has its own song, and each enemy creates a unique note when it is latched onto. Lances used speed up the overall tempo of the music . Even the menu’s themselves are musically interactive! Menu screen music can be adjusted to play backwards, as well as, with or without bass and rhythm. An audiofile gamer would be out of their mind not to try out this game.

Do not think for a moment that this game is easy or a short play. Once you complete a level, an optional harder version is unlocked in which you can challenge yourself with tougher completion times and higher objectives to earn. This is also the point in the game where you can start to earn your trophies–and yes you WILL earn them. This game was not made with the lazy trophy earner in mind. Most are earned by beating a very hard time trial. What time trial? Why Shawn’s own personal best time.

He told us, with a devilish grin, that since the game is on the PS3 and will have online capabilities, whenever someone beats his time that NEW time might become the time to meet or beat. I personally think this would be a great idea. Dyad is already set up to create great meta-gaming in competition for the fan base, so adding this little bit of ownership and inter-player challenging could be something to take it all to the next level. Especially with the random nature of the game, personal times are going to be completely based on the player’s skill, instead of memorization.

The demo session ended up going a solid hour, as I made my way through most of the levels available on the standard difficulty in the near- finished build. Erik, who watched the session in full, had to be convinced he hadn’t taken LSD that night. We put together a video to summarize the whole experience of confusion, discovery, and even anxiousness brought about by the sights and sounds. Also included is Shawn, the combo-king, pushing the game to its extreme with a ridiculous combo string:

The Worms series has always been a personal favorite game of mine, eveer since the mid 1990s when I first discovered, I think, Worms: Armageddon. Since then the Team 17 guys have consistently churned out great expansions and sequels to the venerable turn-based artillery game.

Their newest Worms title, however, take a bit of a departure from as the game is primarily focused around the sport of golf. But wait! Before you go running off yawning to death at the mere mention of a sports game, allow me to assuage your worry a bit. Worms Crazy Golf is, at it’s heart, still very much a Worms game. It’s just now instead of trying to blow the bejeezus out of other worms, you’re put into wacky gold courses where you must angle everything correctly to make it home.

Check out the official description:

Worms Crazy Golf is a hilarious mixture of the explosive action of Worms and the puzzle-based challenges of crazy golf! All of the trademark Worms humour, comic violence, and cartoon visuals are present, combined with addictive yet accessible golf gameplay. With extensive and replayable single-player options, and hot-seat multi-player for up to 4 players, this is not just a load of balls!

The game looks like a great addition to the series and I, for one, can’t wait to give it a spin.

Worms Crazy Gold get released next week, October 19th, on PC (Steam), iOS and the Playstation Network. American Playstation 3 owners will have to wait until October 25th.

[Team 17]

Trailer

After playing the Jon St. John voiced Rochard, “I don’t know whether to pick my nose or scratch my butt,” to quote the hero. While these may sound like the lesser of two evils (they really aren’t), Rochard is actually a really fun PlayStation Network game, it’s just hard for me to nail what kind of game it set out to be.

That said, Rochard nails and combines many gameplay mechanics far better than the vast majority of its downloadable and AAA counterparts. The game is spent in a 2D perspective fighting, shooting, jumping, and solving. I’m going to say Rochard felt like a fun but mostly linear Metroidvania (if this isn’t an oxymoron). And in Metroidvania form, Rochard receives power ups and expansions that help the gameplay evolve until the end of this 6-7+ hour intergalactic blue-collar journey.

I think I was enjoying Rochard most when I was solving its puzzles and using the recoil jump. Door jammers of various colors litter the land; each color has its own peculiarity. The red door is anti bio-matter, so Rochard, being the living breathing, son of a bitch he is, under no circumstance can pass through. However, he can fire weapons and fling boxes through the doors with a lassoing gun power-up to help him.

Blue doors prevent anything but bio-matter pass. Put those together, and I was having a puzzling good time. Add orange doors that have an affinity for absorbing ammo and explosions and white doors that don’t let anything at all pass through, and players may feel like they stepped into a Portal-esque game, with various rules on what can and can’t go in and out of all the doors.

Even fighting enemies sometimes felt like a puzzle. Rochard can easily run and gun, and even ram enemies up close with the brute force of the gun. However, players can opt to be sneaky and hurl boxes with the gun’s first grappling feature. Throughout the game, each tactic becomes obsolete; the gun can eventually throw grenades, timed explosions, and even enemies themselves in the end.

After the mid-point of the game, the puzzles felt much less in number, and a couple of the powers at the end seemed very hastily introduced and explored. I also died much more frequently in the enemy-centric, two final chapters, despite Rochard’s health automatically regenerating when not under duress. Fortunately, Rochard offers several checkpoints in each scene.

While I may not sound happy at this point, the recoil jump thankfully made for some sublime exploration and platforming. I wasn’t expecting this gem of a mechanic. But to explain the recoil jump, I have to spill the beans on another game-changing mechanic: with some tweaking in each stage’s main frame, Rochard is able to lower the gravitational pull. This allows Rochard to jump much higher and pick up items that were too heavy otherwise.

All of these variables mix to help Rochard complete the recoil jump. Players must first use the gun’s grappling feature to grab an object. While Rochard jumps in the air under reduced gravity, he must then release the grappled item while pointing down, and the propulsion will give Rochard added height to his jump.

All of this is very fun, until some sections where I need the low gravity often. I can sense the developers wrestled with this light weighted, slow feeling to keep the physics realistic at the expense of essentially slowing down a portion of the game.

I like doing super jumps and recoil jumps, though, despite them happening in slo-motion. The only things I really didn’t enjoy taking too long were some of the load times I faced (I sometimes counted to 30) after dying in the enemy heavy second half of the game.

Rochard gets much harder than this

Rochard has a good amount of collectibles that I kept even in death. In addition to upgrades for health, ammo, and weapons, there are well-hidden gold trophies for the hunter/gather in us all. The game explains how to use a flashlight early on, but I don’t recall using it to solve a puzzle or uncover a collectible, so I’m not sure what greater purpose it served. Even its primary function of lighting areas didn’t seem necessary.

Rochard’s hero is a heavy set hillbilly, and his dialogue made me never take him too seriously. Recoil Games follows the “fat guy, skinny girl” formula by giving Rochard a slimmed down, sexy Native American companion. Recoil wrote an intriguing narrative involving her heritage that unfortunately feels abrupt in the end, but I won’t spoil past this sentiment.

Rochard offers some replayability, but because of the ending, I don’t want to play Rochard again until there is more story. Those who want to get 100% can select scenes from each of the game’s 5 chapters and will be told how many “somethings” were collected. I don’t know if the number shown is the total of collectibles and upgrades, or just the trophies. I also never knew when what I collected was the “right amount” in a scene. Though eventually I didn’t care, because I was genuinely having fun most of the time in Rochard.

Releasing patches nowadays is the norm, so I wanted to give Recoil my laundry list to make the really fun Rochard experience “tighter than a frog’s butt.” How Rochard knows this sensation is beyond me, but I appreciate Recoil Games humor and various mechanics and suggest all PSN users try the demo as soon as possible.

[A copy of Rochard was provided for review. Rochard sells for $9.99, or $7.99 for PS+ users and is worth every cent.]

According to World of Goo developer Ron Carmel, the XBLA service needs a heavy overhaul to make it more appealing to developers and better known to users to thrive, otherwise it’s looking at continuing a trend of losing out at least to PSN, if not most of the digital arms race.

Ron states that “Having unlimited shelf space is, after all, one of the great benefits of digital distribution” and yet consoles’ digital stores, both the PSN and XBLA, fail to use this unending shelf space. In a sense, he makes the argument that 7 years ago when the service was launched such a curated selection was appropriate because there wasn’t a lot of good content out there, however, as the market matures there is less of a need for such a tightly controlled market.

He even goes so far as to poll around 200 indie developers (of which about half responded) on what platform they’ve developed on before and which they will develop on in the future with regards to XBLA and PSN. The result? 2011 was a turning point for XBLA and PSN where traditionally more developers would create games for Microsoft’s service, many are now switching to Sony’s…

And these aren’t run of the mill developers either. Ron cobbled together the Metacritic scores for these developers’ work and got an average of 78. That’s hugely impressive coming from a large group and should make Microsoft a bit worried about where the bulk of their developers might be heading.

Ultimately he boils down the results to largely having to do with Microsoft’s lack of ease in working with developers. Essentially they seem like a real pain in the ass.

0% rated Microsoft as “very easy” to go along with a generic “cell phone carriers” or companies who have in almost no capacity before worked with game developers. As a software company you’d expect Microsoft to perform better than that.

It really is a fascinating article and Ron really, really did his homework on the subject and provides a compelling argument as well as a list of ways to alleviate the current situation by doing such things as:

• Creating a fair contract without the need for negotiation.
• Stop requiring indie devs to publish through Microsoft. (XBLA requires a publisher)
• Removing exclusivity requirements for independent developers

Among other things.

All in all, I largely agree with him. Microsoft has this nasty habit of controlling too much when there’s no need to be controlling. We’ve seen it already in the mainstream game space where developers aren’t allowed to give away DLC for free or when they refuse to allow Valve (who used to be their staunchest proponent) access to some interconnectivity a la Steam.

XBLA is merely the latest noted area where Microsoft is strangling itself. I’ll admit that XBLA in 2008-2009 was one of my go to hubs for indie games. Today it’s mostly the PC. Is that due to what Ron has been seeing? Quite possibly. It definitely seems like XBLA is pushing passed its prime…

What are your thoughts? Do you like XBLA the way it is? Do you agree with Ron’s analysis?

Check out the full, very interesting article via the link below.

[2D Boy]

Would virus’ be more acceptable in today’s society were they given names, like pets? Let’s say a virus named Tom, to pick a name that I just made up right now… Would a virus named Tom be accepted? Probably not… BUT! What if said virus was actually an adorable robot scooting around? I think I might have to reconsider.

Developed by Misfits Attic, A Virus Named Tom is exactly that, a small adorable robot virus who’s only goal in life is to “Destroy Tomorrow, Today!” That’s all! Who needs a tomorrow anyway, when we have a tiny robot?

At its core we’ve seen the type of action puzzler that A Virus Named Tom is. Really, it’s nothing special. You follow along a grid and try to connect tubes from one end to the other to connect your virus while dodging or fighting various anti-virus’. It’s a tried and true formula, really. What A Virus Named Tom does is bring with it the presentation that we’ve come to expect out of our video games these days. In a few words: this game looks pretty damn good!

Of course, it’s also shipping with 4-player co-op and competitive play which looks very interesting in the trailer (below) although I’m not quite sure if this is planned for local, online or both.

A Virus Named Tom is scheduled for release next year on XBLA, PSN and PC (tentative). Until then enjoy the trailer below and stay tuned as we try and get some previews in order.

[A Virus Named Tom]

Trailer

As we ready ourselves for another strong PAX Prime showing this weekend in Seattle, developer and friend Matt Gilgenbach (24 Caret Games) has passed along word of some cool happenings for his shooter you play in reverse Retro/Grade. Specifically a high score contest “where the winners will be forever immortalized”, will be taking place during the now imminent event.

The game has been development for sometime and it really shows. Just by looking at the new screens and video, the game would appear to carry a new coat of polish since it first caught our eye at last year’s PAX-P. Exciting to get another look at it this year as it nears the end of its development. No release date yet for the upcoming PSN title, but we’re hearing “soon” thrown around quite a bit.

24 Caret will be running the high score contest all weekend, giving out plenty of swag as well as the awarding the overall winners with an everlasting spot in the game’s credits. In fact if you pre-register, you’ll end up with your own personalized ID badge as opposed to the standard card:

So if you’re heading to PAX this weekend, you already should be planning to stop by booth 6415 to get a demo of R/G. Might as well go ahead and sign-up a sweet custom card, complete with picture and call sign. Of course if you don’t, you can get a standard card and still have your shot at topping the leaderboard.

Check out the aforementioned new trailer for the game that actually begins where it ends:

As Xbox’s Summer of Arcade draws to an end, Sony’s PlayStation Network has a trio of console exclusive titles lined up, with the first available digitally in the end of September. Rochard, PAYDAY: The Heist, and Sideway: New York offer something different to help satisfy gamers who want (hopefully) fresh, solid gameplay.

Rochard is an action-adventure, side-scrolling puzzle platformer from Recoil Games. It follows the story of astro-miner John Rochard who uses everyday mining tools to fend off space pirates and can manipulate gravity to solve environmental puzzles and advance through each level. Rochard releases on PSN September 27 for $9.99.

A bit larger than the other developers, OVERKILL Software is bringing PAYDAY: The Heist to PSN (and PC) October 4 for $19.99. In this squad-based first person shooter, players will join a four-person crew of hardened career criminals to execute six heists, including bank robberies, prisoner extractions and armored car hijackings.

In Playbrain‘s  Sideway: New York, players navigate through a 2D adventure platformer set in a 3D world. Using window ledges, drain pipes and graffiti tags, players will guide Nox around corners and onto roofs on a quest to defeat his nemesis Spray, rescue his friends and ultimately escape back to the real world. Sideway: New York will launch on PSN October 11 for $9.99.

Anyone excited for these games coming out this fall? Do you have your eye on any other upcoming PSN titles?

Video source: Machinima

24 Caret Games’ shmup/rhythm game hybrid Retro/Grade is reportedly headed to the PlayStation Network soon, along with future ports including PC. Last time on DIYGamer, 24 Caret was seen programming for two days all sped up into a one-minute video.

24 Caret has uploaded another great video to show how it defies the laws of gaming convention once again. This time, we get to see how Retro/Grade starts: from the end. This is not only a clever gameplay mechanic; it’s also a great way to force gamers to see the credits (even if they are sped through).

Retro/Grade has been impressing people for a while now: it was a finalist in the 2009 IGF awards and won the Audience Choice Award in IndieCade 2010. For even more information on 24 Caret Games’ Retro/Grade, make sure to check out the official website.

What are your thoughts on this innovative title? What platform would you tell 24 Caret to port Retro/Grade to?

Source: GameSetWatch