I can’t tell exactly, what is so cool about Saintrooper, but there is some magic included to this freeware game for Windows. This platformer got plain level-graphics like Boulder Dash has for example, the controls and action reminds me little bit on games like “Gargoyles Quest”. You can jump, climb on walls, have to find keys, unlock doors, rescue friends and defeat big boss enemies. Sounds like arcade? Yes! The game also feels a little bit of a Japanese action game – no wonder. It is from Japan, so find your way through the foreign letters at the download page. Some hours of action-arcade fun will be guaranteed to you!
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New stuff from the Processing-community. Karsten Schmidt, better known as Toxi has released an respectable collection of libraries for the processing-scripting-facilities. It’s a collection of classes and tools, he developed over the last years of Processing-practise. Nevertheless, the Toxiclibs are not constrained to work only with Processing itself. Even Java-heads will have pleasure:

Even though these libraries have been mainly developed for use in Processing related projects (see examples below), there is no explicit dependency on the monolithic PApplet or any other classes of the Processing toolkit. This is intentional & should be considered as a feature. Also, please note that all code in this project is now using Java 5 syntax and so will not work with older versions (before 0140) of Processing. Personally, I’ve been mainly using Eclipse for my larger projects and the “new” syntax just speeds up development time (if not execution time too).

The showreel is a chance for you to see the toxiclibs in action. Unfortunately there is no way, to get toxiclibs get running on the iPhone. But if you want to buy an iPhone, you are unlikely to buy an iPhone without looking at an Iphone 4 review or two. There are other libaries, like makes grafic-coding fun on this devices, like Cocos2D.

I especially like to see the Processing-community really growing into serious and professional things. Look for example at the HYPE-framework, that was developed for Flash/Actionscript 3 and released some weeks ago. It seems, that sophisticated high-level stuff is about to come!
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Tweakbeat: Everything happens on this single screen!

Tweakybeat is an extremely reduced sound-(beat)-sequecer, availlable for iPhone / iPod touch for free. Tweakybeat basically only has 16 steps, a little bit of tempo and shuffle and you can customize 16 different “instruments”. Each one is a basic synth with elementary parameters like pitch shift, waveform modulation, decay, tone, release. Although it is only monophonic and doesn’t even has anything like cutoff or resonance it rocks like hell!

I’ve never seen such a small music-application, that was so well balanced with the features. If you got one of this magic-phones: a must download! Here is the developers site and the app-entry on playstate.org.

Nintendo DS homebrewers will love this new synth, that is about to be released officially. The Tonesynth DS looks like a fancy “all in one” music tools, combing current trends of mobile- and webbased music-creation like “ToneMatrix” or “Korg DS-10″ with a crisp classic tone-generation. (via)

Chip everything, chip the world! Not long ago, we had with Da Chip the ultimate collection of Daft Punk tracks in chipmusic-style. And today we present “Wanna hld yr Hendheld Vol.1“. A collection of Beatles-tracks, that got chippyfied by famous artists like Anamanaguchi, Glomag, Goto80 or Psilodump. It took over two years in the making, and some of the sounds compiled there are phenomenal. Both from the uniqueness of sounds, as well as from the composition. This tracks are more, than just “Beatles played on chip”. Worth trying!

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I can remember releasing music from Minusbaby several years ago on some of my first own netlabel experiments, (i.e. here and here). His music was always a little bit of extraordinary and just like today never to put into genre-categories. Well, meanwhile I switched from releasing music to developing and writing, but Minusbaby still makes music and releasing it as well.

The latest work “Left” is tight and magic at the same time and from his 8-Bit-People release emerged a “community-driven remix project”. Extravaganza! Creative Commons galore! Best directly head over to the mini-site, enjoy, do, create and share the magic!

Time to give a bit of worship to a absolutely well made free indie-game. Beacon (.zip) is a wonderful little platformer with the most remarkable feature, that is plays in the dark. Your guide your guy through this dark world and have to follow a “beacon”, a light, that shows you the way.

Beacon combines wonderful storytelling with engaging gameplay. It maybe is a total esoteric story, about light, darkness and death. Until you see the end (no I won’t tell you, go and have a play yourself).

From the beginning of the game you feel a strong desire to reach the end of this dark world. Some moments are a little frustrating, i.e. like playing the same scene over and over again, falling into darkness, not know where to jump off right. I also didn’t liked the uncertainty, how many levels there are still to solve (like is it a mini game? A small or a large one?). A mini-map, that gives an overview about the game progress in general, would be a nice thing to have, giving more confidence to the player, enlarging the gaming fun. I also also want to doubt the replay value of Beacon. Maybe some small tricks would make this game interetings, to “play” it into more than only “one” direction?

Anyway, a great game, that should be checked out! Let’s do not forget, that it was basically made for the Ludumdare 48-hours contest.