Thought I was clever, didn’t I, posting a link to this on TIGForums? Then realised the authors themselves had beaten me to it. I’ll get back into my hole. Anyway, Nudo is well worth all the links and mentions it’s bound to rack up. Developers Ben Esposito and Manuel Pardo describe it as “a platformer on top of a Rubik’s Cube”. Apt description: you slide each screen’s rows and columns up, down, left and right until …
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Blockage
Guilhermo v.S. Heldt’s Blockage is much better than its name. It’s a puzzle game, pure and simple – not flashy, not very long. You guide coloured blocks to their homes, with the trick being the ability to ‘lock’ blocks in place to form helpful new platforms. 20 levels of that, and it’s over. But it’s one of those games where the increasing complexity of the puzzles is so perfectly tuned – making your brain stretch …
Cassette 50: the interview
I’m pretty proud of this one. The authors of Cassette 50 – a notorious collection of primitive, mostly BASIC games advertised in seemingly every single ’80s game magazine, every single month – were mostly anonymous, uncredited kids, paid just £10 for their efforts. In 2005, thanks to a name left on a title screen and a few hopeful phone calls, I tracked down one of the games’ creators, now all grown up – and able to tell the …
Radial Plus
Something Awful have been running a game development competition, but many of the entrants must have wept tears of pure wasted effort when Radial Plus was submitted. Sticking to the challenge’s theme – ‘You can’t…’ – developer Spatial (aka LSnK) has created a puzzle-shooter where you’re unable to hurt enemies with direct fire. Only wall-bounced shots are effective. It’s a lovely little idea, but in Spatial’s hands it isn’t just that – it’s also hypnotizingly …
Matthew “Manic Miner” Smith: complete transcript of 2005 interview
Matthew Smith, the eccentric creator of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum, was ‘missing’ for years. He reappeared in the mid-2000s – and made his first public reappearance on stage at Nottingham’s Screenplay festival in February 2005, interviewed by journalist Paul Drury. No doubt there’s a video or audio recording of this interview out there somewhere – but I can’t find one (let me know if you can). Happily, I was …
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