Tales from the Old School

Two very cool peeks into the fascinating days of the 80s and 90s games industry.

First, a half hour documentary about Ocean and Imagine games circa the early 80s. The boom and bust stuff is so over the top that it couldn't even be scripted. An absolutely amazing look into the world of the early UK development scene and gaming culture.

Secondly, listen to episode 91 of the 1up podcast Retronauts. It's a round table interview of developers from Tengen. It's a great conversation about NES development that goes into everything from unreleased games to Sega Technical Institute to how these guys are starting to find a place again in the age of Flash and iPhone development. Pretty awesome stuff.

Ripple Dot Zero

My future favorite game. Beautiful colorful spritework. Yamaha-style Sega Genesis synths. It's the real Rocket Knight sequel as far as I'm concerned.

http://blog.pixeltruss.com/
http://www.simonstalenhag.se/

This Cat Is Horseshit

A videogame I'm developing for Something Awful's Development Challenge IV. The theme is Deals with the Devil. The game is called This Cat Is Horseshit. It's the Garbage Pail to the Cabbage Patch of Petz games. You have to pet sit for Satan's unruly nightmare cat. Working now on AI for the cat and balancing the resource management. This engine test is being manually controlled to show off the early level design. Here is a demo of the theme song.

Pandaland

Pandaland is a Windows platformer based around Swedish indie-girl culture.  It was first announced about 2 years ago, but the creators finally got around to finishing it up.  It's about as difficult and lengthy as your average promotional flash game (although there is a hidden hard mode), but the chiptunes and pixel art 110% nail a perfect "informed-by-but-better-than-NES" aesthetic that for once doesn't feel like a programmer who couldn't afford artists.  Using up to jump is kind of weird and Amiga-y, but this thing really sings and swings.  A perfect videogame after dinner mint.  Go play it!