Ahwww. Time F**k is an upcoming game, that will be released on the 1st September and I’ve never seen a game, so sad and happy at the same time.

The main character of this game is so adorable, despite (or just because) being so much of an unhappy creature. The poor existence is only made of some pixels with almost no colors, but is good at communicating the emotion. Well done.

“Time Fkuc is a game about perspective, growth and self reflection.”

More about the team at Edmunds blog. I think that power of three development teams can really work out good things.

Extra-paranoids will draw a line between this game and the works of Boris Hoppek.

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A clever and sometimes really confusing concept has the game “Boxgame“. The playfield is a three-dimensional box. If you jump over the “cliff”, than you fall on the other side of the cube. Imagine it a little bit like a mix of a platformer, a puzzle game and a Rubik’s-cube. The game was made by Sophie Houlden and is extremely playable. For me as a player I sometimes do not understand the 3d-dimensional connections with all this twisting and turning, but I can just go out and play. But the level-designer was having a real hard time, to test things our correctly, I guess.

You need the Unity-3D-player installed to play the game, but the installation is far away from being a pain, so just try it out. The other games from Sophie look also very interesting.

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Over at the Flixel-board good thing are happening ultra-fast and in a reliable quality. Flixel is only some weeks out (read interview with Adam who did Flixel), but the community flourishing.

One of the highlights is FLAN, a tile map editor especially made for Flixel. This tool is still in alpha-version, but also proceeding ultra fast. It is free for personal use, but if you use it professionally, it is available for a really nice price below 10 dollars (read about software-pricing here).

Nitram-Cero, who wrote Flan, made a neat micro-game to promote his effort and show off some features. It is a mini-narrative and feature some very lovely wacky motion of the player-character. Play it here.

Just show me just one single person, who does not love the Samorost-series, made by Amanita design? Now he came up with new work, that is as charming as Samorost. Machinarium takes you into a magical, magical place, where you have to click on the right objects in the right order to make things happen. The music alone grabs your hand and takes you to an epic journey. Combined with the extremely-solid graphic… jackpot!

Machinarium will be released in October 2009 and will cost about 20 dollars. Pre-orders get a 3 dollar discount bonus. Let’s hope that the ratio between free / paid content is much more balanced than on Samorost 2. Uhm, will there be actually a free version after all?

AirDoo (2006): Use control and cursor keys

Darthlupi made an very short, but outstanding interesting game called AirDoo, several years ago. Notice the decent sound-design of the game. Very well made. Unfortunately PC-download only. (You maybe also want to check out his latest game Wonder Palm as well. Its got an interesting game-mechanic and was made with Flixel.)

Exotic stuff from Japan. Once again. Kuma-Uta (Bear Song) is a game, that was released on the Playstation2 in 2003, that is sort of… experimental… even in 2009-categories. It is about singing so called “Enka-Songs“. The bear gets answers from you on some questions (unfortunately my Japanese totally sucks, that’s why I really don’t know what they are about). The bear than “sings” his song based upon the answers, using a speech-synthesizer-engine. Totally awesome! Somehow bears begin to get my attention as gaming characters. Just have a look at Enviro-Bear, too.

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Hey, did you noticed it? The Experimental Gameplay Project is back. The very origin of the meanwhile good-selling “World of Goo“. They somehow switches to a “monthly challenge” mode, based on a certain topic every months. Challenges are good, and perodic compos also. So welcome back EGP.

The topic of this month challenge was about “unexperimental shooter” and the contribution most worth to mention was the “Post IT shooter” from Petri Purho aka Kloonigames (the very creator of Crayon Physics Deluxe).

The Post IT Shooter

The Post IT shooter derives its optic from the videos, where people “simulate games” in stop-motion videos, using plain post it notes. Petri turned the direction around, and he wrote this game, that uses the optics of Post IT notes, in order to let a shooter game out into the internet. What a nice twist. You shoot at space-invaders looking aliens, that are generated randomly by a special algorithm. Don’t forget, that this game is not meant to give you pure playing pleasure for hours and hours, but to stand out by its great idea. Mission accomplished!