Well, the long wait is almost over; Cheezia: Gears of Fur will be rolling onto the App Store tomorrow, Febuary 23rd! This just in from Cheezia.com: “The game’s first 6 levels will be available for free so remember to charge your iPhone/iPad/iPod battery tonight and be prepared for some awesome platforming action tomorrow!”

In the meantime, be sure to check out the official trailer below and give both our hands-on preview and recent interview with Jyri Kilpeläinen of Attido’s Team Cheezia a quick read too.

One way of succinctly describing Crow is that it’s what you’d get if you shoved Star Fox into a blender with Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. If you’re familiar with those golden oldies that should sound completely bizarre, but stay with me on this. Roaming a series of desolate overworlds as the titular raven, the player seeks out bosses and their attendant guardians with hopes of clawing them all to shreds. Only gradually does the player become aware that a dark god has put the Crow up to this, promising eternal sustenance for all ravenkind if the sleek blackbird should follow through.

Once the player has discovered a level with the aid of pinch controls that offer a bird’s-eye view, the raven dives in for some flying action. Crow carries the partially on-rails, partially free roaming Star Fox style here, with the Crow making a swift and harrowing circuit through trap-laden caverns, forests, and valleys. The Crow flies according to a preset path and the player drags onscreen to make the bird shift around and avoid obstacles. A creature that serves the area boss usually hangs in front of the Crow dishing out attacks; avoiding these builds the Crow’s magic meter. Once it’s full the player taps it and the action slows down, Matrix-style, affording ample time to issue commands by tracing out emblems. So far we’ve had a shield and a basic claw attack to work with, the former triggered with a circle and the latter with a swipe over the target.

Our first battle with a giant demonic owl was pretty basic since it’s a tutorial after all: we just dodged and swiped away until the Crow made a puff of white feathers out of that thing. Our second battle with a ghost turned the tables on us by making the enemy invulnerable to direct attack. One has to think outside the box here, letting the enemy smash against the Crow’s shield to damage it — pretty nifty! With those guardians down, it was time to take on the first boss: a creepy scarecrow that tears up its environment with telekinesis, flinging debris as the Crow swoops in to offer the player a return shot. Between levels the player can splurge upgrade tokens on various stats and abilities, and seek crystals that flesh out the game’s story when plucked from the overworld.

But here’s where things get really interesting: after you defeat a boss, the Crow can choose to lay a curse on it or spare it. We took the latter route and got quite a chewing out from the Crow’s godlike superior. What happens if the player keeps that up? Something tells us an optional super boss, multiple endings, or some unpredictable twist is in store!

While we fly around searching for an answer to that burning question, you’d do well to keep an eye on Sunside’s website and Facebook page for the latest announcements. Let’s leave you with this humongous 10-minute gameplay preview courtesy of Sunside, and especially check out the last five minutes to get a sense of the somber mystery that fills this game. It looks like we may be treated to some serious art nouveau in videogame form when this one releases. We’ll let you know how the whole package shapes up in our review once that time comes!

As you no doubt gathered the last time I posted about it, Project Spectral is easily one of my most eagerly awaited iOS games of the year (due in no small part to how much I loved this indie studio’s weird and wonderful debut Antistar), and these fascinating new images and snippets of information have only served to further heighten my anticipation! Anyhow, enough about me — without further ado, I’ll hand you over to Mr. de Souza:

The story

Our story takes places in an alternative future, on an island to the east of Japan known as “The Sun’s Cradle” or just “Cradle Island”.

Cradle Island harbors a deserted city created around 2025 by a rich entrepreneur. The project was abandoned a few years later following a string of unexplained incidents.

Silence and mysteries shrouding the failure of the “Sun City Project” gave rise to an urban legend involving “shadow dwellers”; observers lend little or no credence to this, noting that such rumors awkwardly mimic old tales whispered by fishermen on the mainland.

With Project Spectral what we’re looking at is the case of Kagami, high school student, dead in November 2035. In spring 2036, Kagami was spotted in a railway station and we are led to believe that she is the only passenger on a train bound to Sun City.

About the gameplay

I guess you could classify Spectral as “survival horror”; the game uses multiple viewpoints and exploration takes a significant part. I created a navigation system designed to make 3D accessible to more players without putting them on a rail.

While gameplay will mainly require timing and reflexes, there is a strong element of stealth/tactical gameplay as the player need to evade collaborative AIs combining super-natural powers (e.g telekinesis) with realistic sensory models.

About the pics and the ‘Spectral Team’

With this game I set up a very open process allowing guest artists to contribute work to the project. For many of them, “Spectral” is a first experience. I won’t mention everybody today as we have more than 10 collaborators around 7 countries or such.

Kagami’s diary is an experimental collaboration between a very young Mangaka, Olivia van Gorden (US), and Zhang Chan (China) who already signed cover art for Antistar.

From early on we had a partnership with a Beijing studio creating 3D content, Bihishijia Media; they contributed a fair bit to the creation of the Kagami character. We swap models and designs around a lot and I got a very dynamic newbie on our team, Török Zsolt (Hungaria), who just finalized the Inter Island Commute for us starting from one of their designs and is giving a lot of momentum to 3D production.

Once again, our heartiest thanks goes to Thibaud for sending along the pics and indeed taking the time out of his undoubtedly busy schedule to pen the illuminating accompanying text. If you want to find out even more about Project Spectral, I thoroughly recommend visiting DeviantArt, Anime 3D SFX’s official site and OOgtech.org.

]]> http://ifanzine.com/another-behind-the-scenes-peek-at-project-spectral-an-ios-survival-horror-masterpiece-in-the-making/feed/ 0 http://ifanzine.com/desi-leaves-town-review/ http://ifanzine.com/desi-leaves-town-review/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:14 +0000 Sean Koch http://ifanzine.com/?p=54305 Every once in a while we love bringing you something completely out of the ordinary, and for that we don’t have to delve too far into the wild and zany genre that are visual novels. Pajamahouse Studios’ Desi Leaves Town ($2.99 iPhone Edition; $3.99 iPad Edition) seems to have flown completely under the radar, but I decided to take it for a spin after a friend tipped me off to its existence. Not that I’m familiar with the book on which it’s based (that would be Huysmans’ Against Nature); I just happen to have a soft spot for frogs in human clothes that I blame on Arnold Lobel. What I found in Desi was no children’s book, though — it’s a fully animated 19th-century style novella with a tough casual puzzle game smushed inside, and for that reason it’s one of the most interesting pieces of iOS artistry I’ve seen yet.

Why Desi exists as a humanoid frog isn’t explained, but it does emphasize how absurdly different he is from your average Joe. Desi just can’t find a comfortable spot in society despite his immense wealth, so he abandons the city for a countryside villa where he can live in decadent solitude. The script is just dripping with dark irony, but dialogue and narration are both heavy in the way you’d expect of a 19th century novel — so you’d better bring a love of Brontë, Dickens, or a favored Gothic author to this one! That said, Pajamahouse carries the weight beautifully in my opinion, making Desi one of the best-written apps of its type.

As a game, Desi has its ups and downs. With the decadent anti-hero’s tastes continually jumping the shark, it falls on the reader/player to solve casual puzzles and get Desi out of whatever jam he’s found himself in. These range from well-worn genre tropes – picture puzzles and a variant of the dreaded block slider – to more bizarre things like constructing a chaise lounge or coloring diamonds to meet Desi’s fastidious desires. The scenarios leading into them may be worthy of a good head-scratching, but the puzzles take a satisfying amount of brain power to resolve.

What I’d love to see in updates is more work on instructions and touch sensitivity. Every puzzle or minigame is completely different so it would be great to have an on-the-fly reference instead of the vague one-screen tutorial that usually precedes them. The puzzles themselves are generally well controlled, but finding the right areas to touch on their introduction screens and “submit” buttons can be a hassle, and the recurring diamond color puzzles can feel too picky for their own good. Pausing Desi’s auto-running narrative and puzzles requires a two-finger tap, and the game occasionally gets testy in this area as well. These complaints are directed at the iPhone/iPod Touch version in any case.

What props up the whole package is its ambitious production value. Pajamahouse found a stellar character actor in Sirius radio personality and apparent alien abductee Riley Martin, whose voice absolutely steals the show and makes Desi a believable character. Seriously — this is exactly how a comically over-cultured, talking frog with decadent tastes should sound. The long-running animation wrapped around Desi’s narrative may not carry the smoothness of a premier anime, but Desi and the rest of the cast tend to be quite expressive nonetheless, and fun little details ensure there’s seldom a dull moment. One thing to note: puzzle clues are highly dependent on sound and voice clips and captions aren’t available for them, so this is definitely not a visual novel for the hearing impaired.

iFanzine Verdict: A unique visual novel/casual puzzle mashup that benefits from strong writing, standout voice acting, and clever minigame design. Touch sensitivity issues occasionally butt in on the smaller iDevices at least, and it does take a strong appreciation for 19th century literature to truly enjoy.

Now, if you checked out our recent hands-on preview of this one, you’ll already have a pretty good idea of how Four Hats’ fast and furious gameplay works (and indeed how much I dig it!), but for those of you who may have missed that article, I’ll backpeddle slightly and bring you up to speed.

Basically, each stage plonks the player right in the thick of a crazy chase sequence; The Four Hats are fleeing a throng of googly-eyed groupies and paparazzi, and your job is to ensure they all make it back to their tour bus in one piece. The initial handful of levels act in lieu of a tutorial, allowing you to get to grips with the game’s control scheme (pretty standard fare for an iOS sidescroller, really: you’ve got virtual directional arrows positioned on the bottom left of the touchscreen and a chunky contextual action button on the right) while incrementally introducing each band member and their special hat power into the fray.

Yes indeedy — I did just say “special hat power”! You see, each of the fab four possesses a unique piece of headgear which imbues them with a special ability: frontman Parker is a super-fast sprinter, Holly, the group’s keytarist, can float thanks to her propeller cap, bassist Danny rocks an over-sized stovepipe hat in which he hides from paps, while Danny, the drummer, can smash through otherwise impassable obstacles with his construction helmet. As you dash through levels, the idea is to quickly switch between characters and use their special ability in order to skillfully evade the murderously over-excited fans and photographers who launch themselves at you from all angles.

Four Hats barrels along at a rollicking pace and it’s quite tricky having to worry about switching protagonists on the fly at first, but once you get the hang of things and start to appreciate the game’s madcap rhythm, it’s pretty much impossible not to have an utter blast. Also, Taco Graveyard crank up the craziness with each passing level and all 4 worlds boast an original song by “The Four Hats”, so this is one of those games you’ll keep playing just to see (and hear) what lies around the next corner!

From the hugely unique gameplay to the quirky art style (courtesy of ace comic book artist Stephen Emond) and toe-tappingly excellent tunes on offer, there’s a whole lot to love about this game. To be honest, the only thing I can see making Four Hats more of a crowd pleaser than it already is is some manner of unockable endless mode with Game Center and/or OpenFeint leaderboards and achievements to work towards. As is, this groovy little sidescroller still comes highly recommended.

iFanzine Verdict: The Four Hats is an exhilarating and raucously entertaining sidescrolling caper that wows with its increasingly madcap gameplay, lush, hand-drawn visuals and rockin’ tunes.

“…The Curse is a story-driven puzzle game unlike any other, tasking players with solving the mystery of an ancient book in order to defeat the Master of Mischief himself: ‘The Mannequin.’ Each of the book’s 100 pages presents a unique puzzle to be overcome, ranging from cryptic riddles to fiendish trials of logic and skill.

Each puzzle has been designed to provide a unique challenge. Players will need to reveal hidden riddles, test their reflexes against the clock and flex their memory skills: all in hopes of unlocking the game’s ultimate test – the infamous ‘Puzzle 101.’

The Curse also introduces a mysterious adversary that must be defeated. Upon activating the book, players unwittingly free The Mannequin, an antagonist unlike any other and a worthy foe. Players will be drawn into the experience in exciting new ways, bridging the gap between game and reality. Be astounded as The Mannequin reads your mind, plays tricks on you, and invites you to take part in various challenges.

Will you be able to solve all 100 pages and banish The Mannequin back to the pages of the mysterious book? Will you be able to shake the curse and reveal the final challenge – the cryptic Puzzle 101? Only time will tell…”

The Curse will be available on iOS and Android but no price or release window have been announced yet. No word on the possibility of The Mannequin Halloween costumes yet either, but we’ll let you know if we hear back on that. Mojo Bones’ latest promises an experience suitable for all ages (with the exception of young children afraid of creepy masks, no doubt!), Game Center support, and a 1930s jazz-inspired soundtrack.

We can’t wait to find out more! Be sure to keep an eye on the developer’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed. Also, don’t forget last year’s studio interview!

Courtesy of our good buddy Ash Jackson — Monster Robot Studios’ main man and comic book artist extraordinaire — check out a gallery crammed chock-full of mouth-wateringly gorgeous conceptual drawings of SZC‘s gun-toting heroes, enemies such as hordes of flesh-eating zombies and a humongous winged boss (amongst others), various in-game environments, weapon designs, and more!

And just think: if even the concept art is polished to such an impressively high-degree, how visually stunning the finished product is actually going to be!

Like what you see here? Well, then I’d also definitely encourage you to swing by Ash’s Flickr photo stream, where in addition to Bridge the Gap and GravCat artwork plus shed-loads more SZC-related stuff, you’ll find tons of original comic book art, including some amazing takes on iconic DC and Marvel superheroes like Batman, Wolverine, and Thor!

SZC is due to blast onto the App Store on the 22nd of this month, and we’ll have a full iFanzine review ready to rock ‘n’ roll then. In the meantime, stay tuned to Monster Robot’s Twitter and Facebook accounts for more juicy news.

Saturday Morning RPG is poised to be that game. Mighty Rabbit Studios lent us preview builds of the first two episodes over the weekend, and if these were VHS rentals, why, I’d have to ask for an extension because I’m enjoying these so much. We’ve knocked back Episode 1 so far, and seeing as it’s a giant showoff of all the game’s systems, that’s what we’re prepared to report on at this point — Marty’s story kicks off in earnest with Episode 2.

While last week’s interview prepared me to expect a battle system that’s more interactive than the genre norm on iOS, I was still blown away by just how deeply ingrained that interaction is! The most succinct way I can put this is: if you look back fondly on Super Mario RPG’s battle system, you need to keep a very close eye on this one, aesthetic differences aside.

Here’s the long version. As in most JRPGs, regular attacks are your bread and butter — only here they put your sense of timing in direct control of whether Marty delivers a puny punch or socks it to his target with a critical hit. A color-coded power gauge gives the player a handy visual aid for this. The game also puts you in charge of telling Marty when to block enemy attacks, which is incredibly important because he’s flying solo as far as we’ve played; there’s no way he’ll survive a protracted battle unless you get the hang of defense. Marty can charge up for a mega attack power boost, drawing from a gauge that’s refilled with successful parries and critical strikes.

What I love most about all this is that every enemy has its own particular timing for attacks and the player has to gradually feel these out foe by foe. Bosses are especially good at whipping out the unexpected; Episode 1′s climactic battle left me with the impression Marty was facing off against an intelligent nemesis rather than a meat shield with loads of hit points. This is how JRPGs always should have felt!

If I make it sound like the odds are heaped against Marty, I want to be clear on this — they absolutely are. For those who’ve felt JRPGs are far too soft on iOS, consider Saturday Morning RPG a love letter addressed to you! Thankfully battles aren’t so frequent that the player gets worn down by stress, and once enemies are removed from an environment they appear to be down for good. Another break Saturday Morning gives the player is the ability to re-start a failed battle from the top, something that tickled my fancy in Fantasy Chronicle last month. It’s put to even better use here because the interactive element gives it that “just one more try” magic. Finally, Marty’s supplies and health are replenished after every battle, which is perfectly appropriate because every encounter is a true grudge match!

We really should save some commentary for our review when Saturday Morning releases in late March (hopefully — keep an eye on Mighty Rabbit’s Kickstarter campaign, as that’s kinda-sorta important to the release date question). Before closing, I want to mention that if Episode 1 is any indication, Saturday Morning RPG is shaping up to be just as enjoyable outside of battle as it is in-battle. The first episode features a dungeon minigame with musical chimes, and secret special attacks reward the adventurous player. Like regular attacks many of these involve interaction, and they’re equipped on Marty by way of his trapper keeper — an authentic ’80s inventory management system! Indeed, if this isn’t the first coverage of Saturday Morning you’ve seen, you’ll know to expect copious pop culture references from that decade. Be that as it may, in this writer’s opinion it’s the lessons Saturday Morning takes from the 1990s that make it a must-watch title.

As always, be sure to keep an eye on Mighty Rabbit Studios’ website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed for the latest news!

You totally need to listen to each level’s music while perusing these, so here’s some timed links to EPF’s soundtrack reel on YouTube: “Alpine“; “Crystal Cave“; “Sunset Peak“; “Neon City“; “Reef“; “Desert“; “Orbital“; “Factory.” And don’t forget our huge interview with the developers, where you can find out more about Gorilla Gondola’s development history!

Mike Ouye: Thanks! We are extremely proud of Life Is Crime. Android (over 1 million and counting) and iOS gamers alike have embraced the game. The entire Red Robot team loves games and we (co-founder and CEO, Mike Ouye and co-founder/CPO, Pete Hawley) have extensive industry experience in both console and social gaming.

I ran monetization and revenue efforts for leading social gaming start-ups, Playdom (Social City, Mobsters, Sorority Life) and Crowdstar (Happy Aquarium and It Girl). Prior to my work in social gaming, I worked in performance advertising at online agency Adteractive and led integrations at online payment gateway Cybersource.

Pete Hawley: I was the Vice President of Product Development at Electronic Arts, Executive Producer at Criterion Games, and led the Burnout Paradise development team before moving to Redwood Shores and co-starting the EA2D label.

Back in the UK, I was Development Director at Sony Computer Entertainment, leading Europe’s External Development team in London. I handled European talent procurement and studio investments, resulting in projects like Guerilla Games’ Killzone, Freestyle Games’ BBoy, and Ninja Theory’s Heavenly Sword, as well as funding the start-up of Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet.

I was one of the first employees at British game development studio, Lionhead, where we launched Black and White, Fable and The Movies. I was also a Producer on the international hit PS1 title, Driver, back in 1999.

Red Robot Labs is one of the very few studios I’ve seen where the job openings website page actually contains, well – job openings! And you’ve just sealed a partnership that gives your studio direct access to the European market, right?

Yes, we opened offices in London that will focus on expanding the game portfolio of our R2 geo gaming platform. Red Robot’s R2 platform allows mobile developers to leverage RR’s location-based gaming services, proprietary game engine technology, and social-mobile gaming network.

We also acquired a subsidiary in the UK, the independent gaming company Supermono, who will continue to produce cutting-edge indie games for our platform.

We’re now up to 30 employees in the US (we started out at three).  We outgrew our Palo Alto office so a couple weeks ago we moved into a new space in Mountain View.

Why the ambitious expansion in today’s economic climate – do you see this as a head start for continued success rather than a huge business risk?

As an independent studio, we can move really fast and iterate on product and games even faster. You don’t need three years, 100 people, and $20 million to produce a game anymore. With iOS and Android, you’re able to create games quickly, efficiently, and get them to millions of people. It’s an exciting time to be an indie game creator in mobile. There’s tons of opportunity, big audiences, and the ability to build a successful business around it.

One of these opportunities was to launch on Android first, and then approach the iOS market – a unique approach that went against the status quo. So far it has paid off; Life Is Crime has over a million downloads on Android since its launch at PAX West in August 2011. This created momentum so that when it released on the iTunes App Store on January 5th, it rose to number two on the Free Apps list.

But to answer your question about risk: there’s risk in any start-up, but the reception we’ve received from the gaming community has been overwhelming and awesome. We also have an amazing set of advisors who really believe in our product. We saw an opportunity to leverage the explosive growth of smart phones and massive adoption of location-based applications and produce something really sticky. And we’re seeing the rewards of that decision. We’re ambitious, but we’re not impulsive. We strategically think about what we want to produce and how we’re going to present it to the public. We’re off to a good start, but by no means are we done.

And we are still hiring, so if mobile gaming is your thing you should come work for us!

Tell us a little about the R2 geo gaming platform and what features make this one different from other location-based MMO game engines – how does it enrich the player’s experience in Life is Crime compared to previous releases in this genre?

We’ve taken a unique approach with our platform — it’s built from the ground up to support location-based and mobile-social games. Social games are unique in that game design is very metrics-based, so we have BI built in and ready to go. They also need to have strong, fun, local-social components, so we built a social graph that drives discovery of people and places by location. Our backend technology allows cross platform, persistent game worlds across iOS and Android. The platform is really built to allow game developers to focus on building location-based games quickly and easily, without the constraints of building a backend location-ready game engine. We built it to help accelerate the location gaming space, and we’re hoping to get a lot of traction on it this year.