I would provide context but I feel that telling you Satan made this is good enough.

I then graduated to getting TF2 and for the first time in my life have fallen in love with a multiplayer FPS that has me actually doing well against others while still having no real idea what the hell I am trying to do about 70 percent of the time. The reason I bring all of this up is because I just bought the Humble Indie Bundle 4, for an undisclosed amount that I chose to pay that was above the average. For all of the people that used to be like me and have no idea what I am even talking about I shall explain. If you go to www.humblebundle.com you will see an offer to pay whatever you want for 5 games that are all on steam for much more than what you can pay if you decide to go this route. You offer what you want for the games, and the money goes to the site hosting, the developers, and charity and the best part is you can adjust where you want the money to go. If you feel that the devs deserve it more than breast cancer awareness than you can do that. If you are like me you just split it the best that you can right down the middle. Right away I had to get it for Bit.Trip Runner, and Super Meat Boy alone, and I can tell you that every single cent I threw towards this noble cause was worth it about 30 seconds into me playing Super Meat Boy for the first time.

Seriously after playing this for a while I know the price I paid was highway robbery.

I even got introduced to what is already my third favorite birds eye view Shoot-em-up of all time in a games named Jonestown. I mention all of this because my next few reviews I will focus on this bundle I have picked up and I will pour my heart out into the reviews. I keep making promises about me and how I will post very soon, and I keep fumbling over and over again like Peyton Hillis in the second half of the 2010 season for the Browns. You the reader deserve more for me as a writer and with the ideas being thrown around on how we can give you guys more just like you deserve, a change will hopefully soon happen. I will have a post up about one of these games probably around the holiday (I hope to make it a post on Christmas just for the sake of making puns and calling it a gift.) I promise it will be worth your while if you stick around.

Martyr Out.

This post is in response to the wonderful post over on Engadget about the latest release of NPD numbers concerning portable gaming.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/10/timber-ios-and-android-take-60-percent-cut-of-mobile-gaming-dol/

Saw an interesting story fly across the wire on Google Plus. Apparently, nearly 60% of all portable game software sold is on Android or iOS. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, most of the world’s high-tech industries are seeing major changes as mobile platforms become the dominate form of computing, business, and entertainment. Gaming is just one of many industries being completely changed from the ground up.

In the classic system, becoming a game developer on a console or handheld system is extremely difficult and expensive. First, you must contact Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo to obtain a very expensive development kit for your particular system. This is a hard enough barrier to entry. If you have the creative ability and development skill to put a game together, but don’t have the funds for the development kit, too bad. You don’t get to create a game. Even worse than this though is the fact that game companies can deny you the sale of the developer kit for just about any reason, especially if you are just one guy who wants to make a game. Its happened before and it will happen again. The next thing you need to worry about is licensing fees. Can your game make enough money to pay the console manufacturers off so they will sign off on your game and allow people to play it on their console? Hopefully. This is why games today have publishers and game publishing has become an industry of its own. Just like artists used to need record labels before the internet music scene changed everything. Video game developers need someone to pay the bills for all the big fees and purchases. As an indie developer who wants to put out a boxed copy of your game, the barriers to entry make it almost an impossible reality.

Game companies have been attempting to help the small guys out with online stores such as Xbox Live Arcare and Xbox Live Indie Games, the PlayStation Store, and DSiWare and WiiWare. These stores have helped a great deal, but it doesn’t help capture the one thing that will make an indie game endlessly profitable: Market. Yes, all of these stores have huge numbers of users, but for the most part, people are tied to a device that are tied to a wall. In the case of the PSP or DS, indie developers run into many of the same licensing and dev kit cost issues that console developers do. The price of entry is too damn high.

Enter: The Smartphone. With the meteoric rise of smartphones and powerful always-connected mobile devices, it was only a matter of time before games on these devices took over the industry. Recent NPD numbers indicate that iOS and Android mobile game sales account for 58% of the total revenue of U.S. Portable Game Software. 58% of the industry’s revenue is because of iOS and Android games. Even the once-proud king Nintendo is down to 36%. Nintendo has always had a very cocky attitude towards competition in the mobile space after they launched the original Game Boy in 1989, always quashing the competition without so much as a second glance. Even the PSP, their biggest competition yet, stood no chance against the DS’ onslaught of sales. Nintendo has always battled against other gaming companies, but they’ve never battled against a different business model entirely, and they’re losing the game. For the first time since 1989, Nintendo isn’t winning the mobile games race.

One point to consider: These numbers signify revenue, not sales numbers or profits, but actual money brought in from sales. Some may claim that the statistics are unfair to Nintendo and Sony, its two companies versus the entire world of developers, but that’s exactly the point: Smartphone developers have no barriers to entry (aside from the $100 or $25 developer fees depending on platform) to get into the market and sell their game to the world of smartphone users. People who want to develop for the DS or PSP need to jump through rings of fire to do so. The old theory from the IBM and Microsoft days stands true, if you make it easy for developers, that’s where the programs will go, that’s where the people will go, and that’s where the money will go. And that’s exactly what’s happening in today’s smartphone-powered world. Great games can be created with small teams and put out for sale in the public market for the cost of a developer account and the time it took you to make your game, nothing more. No publishers, no additional licensing fees, no hoops. Just you, your game, and your potential customers. At this point, the developer doesn’t need to worry about making enough money to cover fees (if you make a game for $1 on either platform, 30% is taken from that, not up front like most manufacturers require), they don’t need to worry about playing politics with exclusivity, they don’t need to find a publisher for their game, they only need to worry about one thing: Reviewers. Just like its always been, the great games rise to the top. The thing developers need to concern themselves with making a great game and making sure bugs are fixed. If that happens, if the game is good enough, it can make an incredible amount of money, with almost no overhead costs, and end up fueling their bank account for the next several months.

One of the reasons that people are buying games on smartphones instead of handhelds is that the smartphone markets offer better choices for consumers, a better buying experience, and a better way of treating your customers. When I buy a Virtual Console game on the Wii, I can’t play it on my 3DS. It doesn’t work that way, Nintendo wants me to buy it twice. No thank you. If I buy Fruit Ninja, however, all I need to do is download it onto my tablet, and I’m gaming in no time. Its that easy. I buy it once and I have it forever. I upgraded my phone to the Nexus S and all of my games re-installed, it was so simple. When I bought my 3DS and the e-store opened, I couldn’t have been more disappointed. Even though I had bought games on the Wii, I thought a few would allow me to re-download them and play without being tethered to my Wii all the time, but no. They wanted me to re-buy them. The e-store on the 3DS is slow, buggy, crashes, sometimes downloads don’t complete successfully. All in all, its a bad buying experience. Because the e-store is so slow, I never open it, I check for new games every two months, if that. The e-store is simply awful to use. Now, with Android, I can read a game review of Angry Birds Rio, go to the Android Market website, and have it download without ever having to touch my phone. I get up from my computer and the app is right there on my phone. Seamless, easy, simple, helpful. These are the things I, as the consumer, should think of when I use an online store.

On Google Plus, Darnell Clayton shared this link with me and said, “Apple and Google are killing the gaming industry.” This got me thinking, are Apple and Google killing the gaming industry. Yes, but only this chapter of the industry. Here’s my response (which was a comment on the original post):

Actually Apple and Google are becoming the gaming industry. The gaming industry itself is just fine, alive and well, its just trading out cards, just like what happened with the fall of Atari. The big companies aren’t Atari and Commodore, and it isn’t going to be Microsoft and Nintendo anymore, with platforms that support open development without the need for hugely expensive SDKs and hardware, just about anyone can make a game in a few weeks that could become the hottest thing ever (see Angry Birds). Sony is in an interesting position because they aren’t only accepting this change, they are embracing it. With the release of the Xperia Play and their official PlayStation app, they wholly admit that the best gaming device is the one you have on you (like the best camera is the one you have on you), and they are making moves to thrive in that market.

If existing gaming companies don’t get a handle on the changing market, they’re dead. They will be killed by companies like Gamevil, Glu Mobile, and Halfbrick Studios. These tiny dev houses haven’t just survived the harsh gaming industry, they’ve thrived in it. Even EA Games, classically one of the more stubborn and un-inventive publishers, has made moves to exist in emerging markets like social network games (Facebook and Google+) and smartphone games. The games industry is like any other industry, when your industry is undergoing rapid change, you either evolve with it or die.

The next few years will be interesting. With Nintendo claiming that they’ll never embrace the future, clinging to their rotary phones and cassette tapes, and Sony jumping headfirst into the mobile phone space, things are going to get very interesting very quickly.

Releases:

This month we’ve seen some interesting new IPs come out of the wood works.   The long awaited PS3 exclusive “Heavy Rain” brings adventure gaming to the next generation of consoles.  “The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom” for the Xbox 360 acts as this months “must get” indie game, with puzzle platforming to rival that of Jonathan Blow’s “Braid.”  “Star Trek Online” adds another frontier to MMORPG gallery.  And “Bioshock 2″ (a much talked about game on the site) brings us back to Rapture for another adventure; this time as a Big Daddy.

So it’s been another month that will be favorably looked upon throughout history, if history judges the past solely on monthly video game releases.

So what were we doing?:

This month Rob discussed his experiences with “Mass Effect 2” and “Bioshock 2.”  Speaking of “Bioshock 2,” Skizz also brings up his play through of the game and also talks about “WET.”

Chad plays some more of The People’s Games, this time featuring: “depict1,” “Cosmosa,”"Starfeld,” “Balloon in the Wasteland,” “Vatn Squid,” and “Nuclear Baby.”  He also reviews “Vanitas” and “Noby Noby Boy” for the iPhone and retrospectively looks at “Feel the Magic: XY/XX.”

And Tom plays for us another Battle Tunes.

“Balloon in a Wasteland” is a defense browser game by Armor Games, where you play a tiny man with a gun who crash lands his hot air balloon in a dark and stormy wasteland (hence the title) and has to repair while hordes of flesh rending monsters try to kill him.  It’s a fairly simple concept, and not very hard to beat, but it’s a lot of fun.  The goal is not to outlast the waves of creatures; it’s to repair your balloon as quickly as possible.  The creatures come in numbered waves like in most defense games and you can buy new weapons, traps, or fortifications to help defend yourself.

The core problem I had with the game was that I always would get the balloon up and go before getting any of the coolest items.  That’s not a bad problem to have.  So I just wasted time instead of fixing the balloon.  Each run felt pretty fun, and it’s just a good waste of time.

Give the game a try.  It has a unique art style and some fun gameplay.  You can play it: HERE.

“depict1″ is a freeware title made by Alec Holowka and Kyle Pulver for the Global Game Jam, and it does pretty much what every game does (keep reading).  It’s a platformer which starts you off by having a(n essentially) disembodied voice instructing you by simply telling you the basic mechanics of the game (arrow keys are for movement, hit space to jump, etc).  Which sounds very standard until you actually play the game.  The game is best described as a “total mindfuck.”  And I’m trying really hard not to give it away, but it is brilliant.  Aside from the “total mindfuck” the massive depth of the game’s abstract story will made me replay it, five seconds afterwords in order to re-experience everything it did right, which was EVERYTHING!  I’m having a very hard time describing the game without giving away any amazing, so I’ll just finish by saying that only a moron wouldn’t love “depict1,” and you should all play it. Go-!
LINK HERE

Releases:

There were a ridiculously large number of surprisingly good games that came out just in this first month of the year.  Some beckoned us to be nostalgic with them: “Darksiders” and “Bayonetta” come to mind.  Some of them were critically praised sequels: “No More Heroes 2″ and “Mass Effect 2.”  Some of them were innovative in scope: “MAG.”  And some were nostalgically experimental: “VVVVVV,” I’m looking at you.

The greatest part about the releases this month was that there really was something for everybody.  A hardcore/indie game, an arthouse slash-em-up, a space opera epic, “Devil May Cry” with tits, “The Legend of Zelda” with portal guns, and a MASSIVE online shooter.

This better be a good omen for the rest of the year, or else twelve months from now, we’re going to be talking about “that one good January.”
“Yeah, those were the days…”  Then we’ll sip our beers as we watch the sunset off of our rickety, old porch swings.

So what were we doing?:

This month, Senior Skizz was playing Zuma and Turtles in Time Re-Shelled, going crazy with Arkham Asylum, and watching his girlfriend play Wii Fit.

Chad was up to his usual indie game snobbery with the People’s Games, playing Sunshine and Trundle, as well as indie titles, Guru Meditation and VVVVVV.  He was also playing Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes and Sonic Adventure.

Rob gives his thoughts on Wings of Prey.

And the always lovely Tom (King of the Site) was playing Half-Life 2 mods: Dear Esther, The Radiator, Goldeneye Source, and Missing Information.

We also discussed (in two parts) our Games of the Year, and there was a list of great freeware games that came out in 2009.

Jason Rohrer, famed creator of brilliant freeware titles like “Passage” and “Gravitation” recently put up a new website for his next game, “Diamond Trust of London.”  So far it’s just a partially censored document and some screen shots, but that’s a hell of a lot more then there used to be.  It’s looking like an old school strategy game, quality unknown, but it’s not like Rohrer hasn’t had at least one similar project.  “Cultivation,” a real-time strategy about community and compromise is among his best works so far.  Here’s hoping this will be another great game.

“Diamond Trust of London” will be released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS and is being distributed by Majesco.

I’m sure that everyone has at one point considered all the perks of being shoved away by their uncaring children into a nursing home.  For example, you get to go to the bathroom anywhere and can’t be blamed for it.  You also get a nice window to stare out of and all the day-time TV you can handle.  On the other hand there’s Home, a sim game developed by increpare to give the player a glimpse of the horrible reality that is life thrown away in an old folks home.  You play as a slow moving old man that has to maintain his levels of happiness, hunger, waste, and sleep.  This will involve slow treks from one spot to another, like from a table to the bathroom and as one stat slowly increases the others slowly decrease.  It’s an interesting and well done concept, and the ancient PC graphics remind me of my younger years…and now I feel old…and useless…

You can download Home at this link.

Happening Game (by Increpare Games) is a
freeware download that seems to mock (or maybe embrace) the very idea of goals in video games.  Instead of interacting with the game world – the world inside the video game – you are given tasks to do in the real world and by achieving those tasks you can continue on in the game.  It’s best played as a two person experience, and is more sad than anything else to play alone.

The tasks you are given are based on the relationship you have with the other player, they may be [Friends], [Family], [Lovers], or [Strangers].  So you could either be kissing the other player, shaking hands, or giving hugs.  The single player experience is kind of depressing if you get the following message and then can’t find anyone to play with (luckily, you should be able to… unless you don’t have friends… in that case, make some friends!!! )

It’s a wonderful little experiment and a game that requires a lot more real human interaction than most.  So shrug off that head set, throw done those plastic guitars, and try out a real man’s interactive game.

RunMan: Race Around the World is a freeware game Matt Thorson and Tom Sennett about running really fast, bouncing off stuff, being chased by robot snowplows, and everything else that is good about anything ever, yes it is that good.  With fast paced gameplay, a child-like art style, and the bluegrass and blues music playing you through each level the game is all around fantastic.  The levels you run through are all fairly short but exciting and manages to be both forgiving and challenging.  But I really am not here to give a “review,” just spreading the word!  So I want everyone who ever lived to try it out.

Link: ENJOY!

RunMan: Race Around the World Release Trailer from Tom Sennett on Vimeo.