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Arcade Day 3 - Murder, Twister, and… Eddie Murphy? | Fantastic Fest
September 23, 2012 | Wiley Wiggins
Arcade Day 3 - Murder, Twister, and… Eddie Murphy?
Fantastic Arcade today was so packed full of madness that it’s difficult to recount in one sitting.
First up in today’s unending cavalcade of indie videogames was Capybara Games upcoming run-and-gun time traveler Super Time Force. Developer Ken Yeung walked us through the project’s birth as a 48 hour game jam entry to its eventual publishing deal on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade. A thick, timey-wimey soup of Contra, Super Meat Boy, and Braid(?) Your best introduction to the game is to simply check out Capybara Games’ trailer.
Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini and No Media Kings’ Jim Munroe were both attendees at the first Fantastic Arcade, and they returned this year to show off their subversive experiment in play, Unmanned. Unmanned follows an air force drone pilot as he kills strangers in distant locations and negotiates the mundane maze of his own personal life, without ever aknowledging the dissonance between the two.
Returning Fantastic Fest Alumni “Cactus” brought partner Dennis Wedin (Keyboard Drumset F*ucking Werewolf) to Austin to show an eager crowd a glimpse at their Cocaine Cowboys , Drive and Beverly Hills Cop(?!) inspired killfest Hotline Miami. Attendees who sampled the game in its custom Fantastic Arcade cabinet were treated to a special Highball level, that allowed them to brutally murder (or just say hello to) Fantastic Arcade creative director Wiley Wiggins. And if you wear your special unlockable fish mask the whole exchange will be in French.
Next up were Fantastic Arcade 2011 favorites, JW Nijman and Rami Ismael of Vlambeer, showing off their relentless new seaplane shooter Luftrausers. Both Hotline Miami and Luftrausers have won publishing deals through Devolver Digital, and both share a fine tuned appreciation for play feel, action, and a twistedly beautiful pixel-art style.
JW and Rami (fresh off his victory at the previous night’s Spelunky Deathmatch tournament) described the evolution of Luftrausers from a free Flash game that no publisher would touch, to a runaway internet hit, to it’s new, hugely improved incarnation- with configurable planes, character art, cutscenes, and music custom-tailored to each player’s plane.
Following Developer Steve Swink’s experimental puzzler Scale, the first tournament of the evening was Mega-Girp - created by rockstar/bioethicist/game artist Bennet Foddy, Mega-Girp replaces it’s standard, less-mega iteration’s keyboard controls with a spine twisting dancepad, as the player attempts to climb a cliff face, button-by-button, all the while kicking interfering pigeons.
Finally the event many had been waiting for- The Super Hexagon tournament, overseen by developer Terry Cavanagh- who, after watching over a sound win by Austin Chronicle screens writer James Renovitch, stepped up for an exibition play, and once again left jaws in the audience slack, and finally had the crowd chanting his name.
Sunday is the final day of Fantastic Arcade! Watch @fantasticarcadefor updates, and be sure to witness the winners from this year’s selection at the Fantastic Arcade Awards, directly following our annual Starcade trivia and classic gaming contest!
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Arcade Day 2- The Dancingularity | Fantastic Fest
September 22, 2012 | Wiley Wiggins
Arcade Day 2- The Dancingularity
A DIY dance-controlled video spectacle and a blow out 24-combatant ultimate Spelunky Deathmatch tournament topped a great day for Arcade.
The fruits of the Adventure Time Gamemaking Frenzy- playable on a custom BMO arcade cabinet!Today’s panels started out with Erin Robinson’s work in progress, Gravity Ghost, and proceeded through some developer oriented talks with Sony, Steam and Adobe, a talk with interactive art collective Kokoromi and a preview of the evening’s party in planning, and then directly into bloody, bloody carnage as the Spelunky Deathmatch tournament gripped the whole highball. The winner was Vlambeer’s Rami Ismael, who won an AMD processor, and the runner up was Tiger Style’s Randy Smith, who won a stack of Fantastic Fest DVD’s.
We closed out Arcade for the night with a collaboration between Kokoromi and all our feet
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Fantastic Arcade opens with a bang! | Fantastic Fest
September 20, 2012 | Wiley Wiggins
Fantastic Arcade opens with a bang
Fantastic Arcade starts off right with a string of intense creator panels and tournaments.
At 11:00 today (and repeating each day to 8:pm until the 23rd) Fantastic Arcade made a chaotic bang with developer commentaries from indie videogame luminaries and tournaments with prizes from AMD.
First up today was a glimpse into the working method of Terry Cavanagh, creator of the runaway action game Super Hexagon- a game so difficult that it is usually heralded with (respectfully exasperated) obscenities, but which Terry routinely calls ‘easy’.
we were treated to a sight that virtually no human eyes have seen: the completion of the game in “hyper hexagonest” mode- a feat of human hand-eye coordination that people don’t tend to witness outside of the air force.
Following commentaries only ramped up from there, Stoic Studio’s eagerly anticipated strategy game The Banner Saga turned heads with its stylized animation and thoughtful story and gameplay, and Banner Saga’s composer Austin Wintory stayed on to give a solo panel that cruised through the anthropological origins of music and how it has changed in the service of each new modality of art. In case anyone thought that the talk had gone too academic, fellow musician and Proteus co-creator David Kanaga engaged Austin in a lively debate about whether music depends on linearity for its emotional impact, and how much control in the music-making act can be handed over to a player without handing over authorship, and well, minds continued to get blown left and right.
Local startup White Whale (God of Blades) got similarly heady when they phrased their run-and-slash pulp fantasy homage as a treatise on the loss of memories and the inevitable decay of media, but the show got plenty gutsy once they started their head to head tournament, and rotty moster-flesh was cleaved apart by oversized swords, and a good time was had by all.
At the halfway mark in the day was a fabulous half stream-of-consciousness gun advertisement, half philosophical treatise by POP Methodology: Experiment 1developer Rob Lach. We’ll be sure to post videos of the talk on our new youtube channel as soon as they come down the pipeline.
Outside of the ballroom, Sony treated us to rows of glistening Playstation 3 and Vita kiosks, with sought-after gems like the Japanese post-human oddity Tokyo Jungle, Frobisher Says, and the incredible Sound Shapes. Sony PlayStation will be sponsoring throughout the event, showing games that were selected by the Fantastic Arcade curators, We really feel like this is going to be Sony’s watershed year as a gateway to indies, and we’re happy to have them back at Arcade. In the console space, Sony is the most open and flexible platform for self-publishing, and we wanted to shine a light on some of the best upcoming independent games in the world.
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From the frontlines of the Gamemaking Frenzy | Fantastic Fest
September 15, 2012 | Wiley Wiggins
From the frontlines of the Gamemaking Frenzy
24 hours in, Gamemaking Frenzy participants are going strong.
24 hours ago, participants in Fantastic Arcade’s first gamemaking frenzy, both local and worldwide via the impromptu adventuretimegamejam.com website were delivered a deeply appreciative and weird love letter from Adventure Time creator Pen Ward, in which he promised to award the highest rated game in the frenzy some Fruit. It’s really, really nice fruit. Just watch for yourselves:
Since then there has been a startling amount of creativity and craftsmanship rolling in, as people work as individuals or teams to offer their own take on the Adventure Time world. All games created will be playable for free, a few will be chosen to be featured on a custom arcade cabinet during Fantastic Arcade. Game submissions will start going live soon on the adventuretimegamejam site, so everyone will be able to look at games and pick their favorites.
Brandon over at Venus Patrol has also been keeping an eye at some of the games as they develop.
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