Jillian Aversa is a game music vocalist singer and you maybe already know her voice from the remarkable Zircon-Album “Identity Sequence“. She now wants to produce an own album – a concept album with little about atlantis, “self-awakening” and such things.

Maybe the music sounds a little cheesy and esoteric at the first listen. I also though so about at Zircons “Identity Sequence”. But from my experience this impression leaves after some listening. It did at least at the Zircon album with I really listened heavily to.

The project got completely funded after just 12 hours – now bonus-programs are offered if the Kickstarter reach higher points, like Orchestra recordings, videoclips or remix-album.

Retro Game Crunch is an interesting project, that can be backed on Kickstarter. It’s for people who a) love retro-styled games and/or b) like to influence the game design process. And have six instead of just one game!

The team around the Retro Game Crunch wants to make a new game every month. The people who back, can give the theme / topic of the new game to make – and they can debate and make critics. In order to get something great done. In the end there hopefully will be six nice looking fun-arcade games.

Well, at the Kickstarter page, the game creators say with a smile, that “biggest challenge will be burnout”. They “promise to take regular breaks, drink plenty of water, and remain functioning members of society.” So stress or back – in the end enjoy!

A neat small browser-game for people who are into, zelda-clones and nice pixellated graphics. This game called Reaching Finality was made by Cory Martin in two weeks for the Stencyl Jam 2012 competition on Newgrounds.

The game itself doesn’t add anything innovative, but there is something really well balanced, that makes this game fun to play. It’s the dose of the enemies, the music and sound effects – even the used colors of the pixel art. A great game to fiddle away 30 minutes of time!

Cargo Bot is the first game “that was ever made entirely on the iPad”. It used the “Codea” Lua-Scripting environment, where you can code and run scripts directly on the iPad (which I recommend much!). Cargo Bot was made by Simeon Nasilowski, the guy behind “Two Lives Left”, who also made Codea itself.

And like Codea the quality of this game really matters: in Cargo Bot you use simple commands to program a cargo-lifter in order to solve simple tasks. You can build loops and little if-statements. In fact, this game is pretty close to programming (assembler for example), but it is still a very fun experience. This game is really fun and addictive as well – and it teaches you programming logic at the same time. Unfortunately only available for iPad, it is still an instant download, because the game is free at the moment as well. So don’t miss it!

Lately there was “Trip” coming around the corner. It is an audio-visual experiment made with Unity, that looks like a psychedelic game at the first glance – but that does not have any gameplay at all. Except wandering around and exploring this strange colorful world. And you can collect items. It is more like a 3d-exploration artwork, than really a game. An interesting work and a direction of making artworks, that really can be explored much more. With all this colors and things circling around “Notgames“. Some will remember Trip on the game Fract.

And while we are at, if you are able to read or translate German: the blog Superlevel made an interview with the Trip-creator Axel Shokk.

Syder Arcade is a shooting-game in the style of a really classical vertical shooter, developed by Studio Evil. The game does not only have a clean gameplay, but also very polished graphics. This is how classical shooting games from the Amiga-times would look like today. As a special feature, the game offers some “graphic filter”, that lets you select very strange in-game color-schemes. You can select for example, to play the game in color-schemes “Apple II, C64, Amiga HAM or gray2bit“. And since there is a decent lack of good shooting-games on Mac OS-X, consider this a gaming suggestion! (The game is also available for Windows)

(via)

The art and research group “And-Or” from Switzerland released another interesting concept-game. Piksel Bacteria deals with Augmented Reality and the real world.

The concept is easy (and maybe not a game at all) – your mission is to “infect” as many pixels as possible with the “bacterium pikselum”. The bacteria breed, by looking at them with the iOS-camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along the edge. What I like about this concept is, that you do not need any QR-Codes or something other prepared, to step into the “Augmented Reality”-world, but that the “game” plays instantly from any phone in any environment.

Before “Piksel Bacteria” And-Or raised gameplay and reality questions in works like “Gamescape“, where the players input of the game results in architecture. Or Discrimination Pong, a work that raises questions about gameplay modifiers, asymmetric gameplay and discrimination.