First Person Tetris… hmmm….. What could that be? I just do not want to spoil you, just have play! Yay!

A casual Basketball-game really do not sound like an enhanced bundle of fun, doesn’t it? Time to learn a lesson, because this Baskeball game is so simple like throwing balls at the basket in the real world. At the same time so well executed, that it is somehow a must-play game over the christmas days. Get some friends, maybe booze and let the fun begin.

Your aim is to throw balls at the basket using the mouse. That’s basically it. The one who throws the most and best baskets wins. The significant detail here are various multiplayer-modes. You are able to create group-contests. Also statistics about every throw are delivered somehow in realtime. Well, best just have a short play to get the idea. And yes, this feels like the Commodore 64 / Amiga “playfever” is coming back home again. Lift the cup for this unusual “winter game”. (via)

Captain Forever is a silent space game with a simple gameplay: Shoot other ships and upgrade your own with the parts, the destroyed ships left over. A deep game, with a dense atmosphere. Fun. For the silent season of the year. (via)

The AppStore is bringing math back again to game developers. Lately there we had Jeff Atwood thinking out loud, why setting the price to the lowest possible, 0.99 cent, is the best way to go for iPhone-developers. Adam Saltsman now takes the turn and doing math the other way round: If you sell a certain amount of games, a higher price might be better, just because revenues grow as sales grow. He writes the whole turn at Gamasutra:

The best case scenario here is that we’re all working from home and have cheap mortgages, and only need maybe $5,000 per month for living expenses (before taxes). We’re going to ignore health insurance and stuff like that for now too – very rosey best-case scenario! So, quick mental math, we need to recoup about $30,000 in net revenue just to break even, much less earn a little extra to put toward the next project.

So, let’s check out the bottom three pricing tiers (in USD only for sake of simplicity):

50,000 copies x $0.99 = $49,999 – 30% = $35,000

50,000 copies x $1.99 = $99,500 – 30% = $70,000

50,000 copies x $2.99 = $149,500 – 30% = $105,000

Which brings me somewhat circuitously to my main point: selling your game for $0.99 means you have to get in the top 10 to make it worth your while. Selling your game for $1.99 or more means you can get by and maybe even fund your next project even if you’re only in the top 100.

Simple math, isn’t it? What do you think?

(via)

Pixeljam are back. After Dino Run they made in cooperation with Adult Swim Games the game “Mountain Maniac“, a strange mixture of Frogger, Pachinko, a fun casual game and some irritating storytelling. You play the “montain maniac” and have the goal to score points by destroying the city below the mountain. You do this by shooting of rocks out of the mountain. Insane stuff. A very retro-gameplay, if you ask me.

What once again is so cool about the Pixeljam-style is the “neo-retro” artwork, that are blocky, pixeled, but at the same time huge and detailed as well. The games are somehow “airy”.

I am glad to annouce the preview from Krystian Majewskis upcoming game “Trauma“, that will be released for free later that year. He worked at it for really a long time now – and renamed the game now from “Illucinated” to “TRAUMA”. The game is a little bit like a “point and click adventure”, but it focus is on “creating a rich experience rather than an elaborate puzzle challenge”. The game is meant to be played by a literate and mature audience. The game features an unconventional approach, telling the story of a woman, that tries to get herself after having a car accident. Watch the video, to get convinced, that this game follows more higher reasons, than just to please for some minutes of fun.

Majewski submitted TRAUMA to the Independend Games Festival (IGF). The good news are: in any way, this game will be available for free in a Flash-enables browser near you by the end of 2009.

Uh, I almost forgot… The game features real pictures from the Cologne-cityscape. There are work-in-progress pictures available.

Heavyweight testing. How far can you push Tetris in the NES? That was the guiding question from this game hacker here. Let’s see his results. (I skipped part one, where the player failed the game, instead of the gaming-system.)

(via gameslabor.de)