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GoNNER wants you to cheer up a sad whale by dying over and over

GoNNER creator Mattias Dittrich—who goes by Ditto—describes his game as “tough as hell,” and he’s not wrong. It’s one of those games where I ask myself just why I keep clicking continue; death after death, I am thrown back to the beginning of the game. That is, unless I have enough currency to buy my way back to the level I died in—which I never do. GoNNER is a 2D platformer by creator Art in Heart with serious roguelike elements, not unlike The Binding of Isaac (2011) or Downwell (2015). It’s almost as punishing, too. But that’s not to say GoNNER is unfair or impossible.…

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1930s-style animation game Cuphead won’t arrive until 2017 now

Cuphead creator Studio MDHR was trying to get its game out exactly 80 years from 1936—the year when a Japanese cup-headed character in a short propaganda film turned into a tank to defeat a bunch of evil Mickeys. Now, however, Cuphead will be released 81 years after Cuphead’s grandpa was introduced to the world. Studio MDHR announced this week that Cuphead will be released for Xbox One, Windows 10, and Steam in mid-2017 now. And this isn’t bad news; it means Studio MDHR won’t have to cut content from the game to make a tight deadline. “It would have meant releasing with fewer bosses, less platforming levels, as well as…

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Kinky visual novel Ladykiller in a Bind is out right now

This is exciting: Ladykiller in a Bind is out now on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You’ll find the visual novel—by Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) creator Love Conquers All Games—on the Humble Bundle store. For now, Valve deemed the game too sexy for Steam, but writer Christine Love hopes to get it on there one day. Love and her team have been working on Ladykiller in a Bind since 2012—full-time for three of those years. Its story is in stark contrast to the “brutally oppressive societal misogyny” in Analogue, of which Love has said her team was pretty burnt out on writing about. Ladykiller in a Bind celebrates consensual,…

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The Festival Floppies is a treasure trove of forgotten videogame history

Archivist Jason Scott is attempting to preserve the inherent historical value of videogames. The Festival Floppies is part of this project. Years back, Scott acquired a load of floppy disks that a friend found in 2009 at the Timonium Hamboree and Computer Festival in Baltimore, Maryland. Back then, the disks were just a collection of software in a big plastic box. But now they’re The Festival Floppies. Scott unloaded each of these disks, unearthing the software using a USB floppy drive and a program designed to pull stuff off the disks. All of the imaged files are available on the Internet Archive for…

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Composer makes Metroid even more eerie with new synth soundtrack

In 1986, Metroid was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since then, Hirokazu Tanaka, Metroid’s composer, has been revered for helping create the game’s iconic, eerie atmosphere. To up Metroid’s creeping feeling of loneliness some 30 years later, composer Luminist is rerecording the game’s music using actual synthesizers. “My initial interest behind doing this was thinking that if the technology were available back then to put hi-fi recordings into a videogame, they might have done it this way with Metroid,” Luminist said. “I’m just interested in bringing out more of the inherent alone-in-space factor that the original gave us with bleeps and bloops.” So far, Luminist has…

SHENZEN I/O
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Shenzhen I/O, a game that lets you be a fake engineer

Those who’ve devoted their lives to the Cartasian Discipline in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008) are subject to rote memorization when they’ve broken the rules of their society. The book in which they’re to memorize from is filled with illogical nonsense, like nursery rhymes that don’t quite rhyme—a particularly aggravating punishment for a group of people dedicated, simply, to the pursuit of knowledge. “The way they punish them is by making them learn stuff that literally means nothing and is just making their lives harder,” Shenzhen I/O creator Zach Barth said. “I think of [Shenzhen I/O] in that way.” But, like, in a good way. “We’re inventing these…

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That Dragon, Cancer is available on iOS today

That Dragon, Cancer was released back in January this year, shortly after my father’s cancer diagnosis. My first real brush with cancer, I clung to the game for guidance. That Dragon, Cancer didn’t necessarily tell me what to expect, but helped steer me through the things I needed to feel. I wished desperately that my parents would give it a try. But they wouldn’t—and not because they didn’t want to; they just really didn’t have a way to play a computer game (they’re tablet folks). Amy Green, Joel’s mother and writer on That Dragon, Cancer, wasn’t surprised by that. “We have suspected for a…

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A game about sacrificing villagers will challenge belief systems

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. In publisher Kitfox Games’s upcoming The Shrouded Isle, those sacrifices are lives. It’s a cult village management game to be released in February 2017 by design lead Jongwoo Kim, writer Tanya Short, and artist Erica Lahaie. The Shrouded Isle is meant as a haunting game that forces players to contemplate the lengths they’d go to provide for their people. This goes beyond the food and shelter they must provide for those who live in the village, as the player must placate the gods, too—by offering up a human life. It’ll be a game that evokes apathetic power outside of human…

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Social Interaction Trainer will help you in life’s awkward moments

Don’t know how to socially interact? That’s okay. Neither do I. And I suspect there are lots of us, too—the ones who always respond “you, too” after the movie theater ticket taker tells us to enjoy our movies; the party-goers who’d rather sit on the couch and pet cats than talk to other guests; those of us who stare at the ground instead of making eye contact with folks we know at the grocery store. Hell, let it be known: in kindergarten, I peed my pants standing at my desk because my teacher didn’t see me raising my hand to ask to use…