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With a trailer released just before Christmas, Eon is now available to play over at Newgrounds. It is indeed a take on Cypher Prime's Auditorium, with particle manipulation used to fill containers.

It's got a lovely feel to it, with the retro graphics and atmospheric soundtrack really doing it justice. I found it to be just a little too difficult from the get-go, but if you're looking for a challenge, this is it. There are even user-created levels (and the ability to create your own, obviously). Check it out.

Level Up! is a platformer with light RPG elements by Duncan Saunders that uses an interesting ability mechanic and is a good addition to the ranks of Flixel powered games.

This snippet from the game’s page at Newgrounds sums it up well:

“Inspired by Upgrade Complete, This game is a tribute to anyone who has ever sat there playing a game doing the same repeatable set of actions in order to get a arbitrary number to go up… You can gain levels in just about everything you do, from Jumping to Taking Damage to standing still and doing nothing at all… There is a catch though. Every night a re-occurring nightmare will rob you of everything if you can’t survive it.”

Indie game designer Edmund McMillen (Gish, Super Meat Boy) revealed that Time Fcuk, his time-bending puzzle-platformer co-developed with William Good, has so far been played more than 3.5 million times since launching two months ago, with 1 million of those plays from Newgrounds.com.

To celebrate the game's popularity, Newgrounds.com added a feature to view user-submitted levels (nearly 7,000 created so far) by category and with thumbnails of their layouts. McMillen also published a postmortem on what he felt went right and wrong with Time Fcuk's development.

He begins by naming a recent high school reunion as a major source of inspiration for the game, especially its intro animation.

"I had recently attended my high school reunion, it was a very strange and depressing event. Lots of drinking, crying, and sadness mostly from people who never seemed to progress past that high school mind set, most complaining about how they felt stuck in a situation they weren't happy with. ...

I wanted to write about a man who was at war with himself over his future, one side of him wanted 'enlightenment' the other wanted 'comfort'. And that's is essentially what Time Fcuk is all about. Every bit of text throughout the game has substance and meaning to me, even down to the description."

One of Time Fcuk's features that McMillen didn't feel work out as planned was its use of alternative levels:

"Half-way through development, I came up with this amazing idea of having alt levels, so for each level you play, there's a chance you will play one of 2-3 levels, giving the game a more dynamic feel.

I came up with the idea late one night where I envisioned people playing the game and then trying to look up hints on how to beat a level only to find no one had played the level they are on, in hopes that they would feel 'crazy'.

Ihis of course didn't have the effect I wanted, maybe a few people had a profound 'OMG THE LEVEL ARE DIFFERENT FO EACH PERSON' realization. But really, it was just a lot more work for me that made things two times more confusing for us when trying to fix the difficulty curve of level progression."

You can read the rest of the postmortem, which also describes McMillen's goal for the ending and how he stumbled on the idea of the radio frequency theme at the designer's development blog.

A bloody awesome trailer for Super Meat Boy (with some gameplay footage) was recently posted on IGN. Team Meat's upcoming WiiWare release should be out sometime in early 2010.

Note also that Edmund McMillen and William Good's Time Fcuk will be released on Newgrounds sometime later today. You can find a brand new trailer for the game in the extended.

[UPDATE: Time Fcuk is playable on Newgrounds now.]

WiiWare: WiiWare Summit - First Super Meat Boy Footage (GamerBytes) Continue reading

Cube Colossus is a lovingly polished shmup created by Fandrey and Azrael (who have recently formed a dev team together called Lucidrine). It tells the story of a girl's search for her twin sister, battling her way through hordes of killer Cubes.

Developed over the course of 8 months, it's a great piece of work. The ship is controlled via the mouse, with aiming automatically positioned (although small adjustments can be made using the WASD keys). It has all the makings of a classic space shooter - dozens of levels, tons of upgrades and a silly little story to go with it. If only the dialogue wasn't so broken, this would be a nigh on perfect shooter in my opinion.

Give it a go at Newgrounds, but just be aware - it could well eat a couple of hours of your life. I know it gobbled mine down. Continue reading

The objective in Ninjufo is to pilot a UFO craft around a maze and collect fifty crates with top secret information contained inside them. Shurikens can be used to destroy enemy ships, although this has to be done without them spotting you first as their shots are near impossible to dodge.

Some money is deducted from your haul whenever your ship is destroyed, but the penalty is hardly a concern unless you are planning to submit a good score online.

Play it on Newgrounds or Armorgames. Continue reading