FunEffect.com

Along with the above trailer showing the game in its final state, developers Press Play have announced that their WiiWare title Max and the Magic Marker, tipped as a Crayon Physics take on the platforming genre, will be released via WiiWare on January 22nd.

In what appears to be a twist on the norm, however, the game will be released in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, with no word on a US release date as of yet. There will, however, be an online demo to try via the Max official site sometime tomorrow - we'll let you know when that appears so you can try it out yourself.

The game will set you back 1000 Wii Points. Continue reading

Some people really dig genre pieces, works that stick to convention and don't really deviate from the norm. You experience them because you enjoy the tropes of the genre and the familiarity of it all. This game is a standard hop-and-bop platformer, but if you have a platformer fetish like I do you'll most likely squeeze some enjoyment from it. Obake takes elements from Mario and Kirby and mixes them in a not-too-radical fashion, but does it with a decent amount of polish and a fair amount of charm.

You play as the titular Obake (Japanese for 'thing that changes') and take him through a six-world romp. The aesthetic is slightly off-kilter retro, and should appeal to fans of the 16-bit era. In your normal ghost-like form you can only move and jump, but if you press the down arrow you can possess an enemy. When you do so you gain their mobility and attack patterns, each of varying strength. The game takes Kirby's absorption motif a step further by also giving you that enemy's health. This coupled with generally low difficulty makes the game fairly easy, but it's fun to mess around with the various forms and explore the levels. The six worlds go a long way as well, so if you're into this sort of thing there's a lot of content to be played.

Nothing revolutionary, but a nice way to kill a couple hours.

And because I like you guys so much, here's an extra game at no additional charge: http://mogera.jp/gameplay?gid=gm0000000345
You play an albino deer,tripping on some psychedelic, that throws rocks at police. Enjoy.

"Guide the spaceman through the castle and defeat the wizard" -- can't get any simpler than that. Do you need any more reason to blast your way through nine levels of old-school goodness? Didn't think so. Star Guard is a refined, minimalistic take on those 80s run-and-gun classics; like its predecessors, it focuses solely on fun and hits its mark (in the face with a laser beam, I might add.)

Developer Vacuum Flowers surgically applied Occam's razor to every aspect of design, and the high level of polish pays off. The pixel art and sound effects would feel at home on an Atari 2600, and would have been all the rage ten years before I was born. The game gives you the same verbs the first two NES Megaman titles had, and works quite well under these constraints. The enemy and level designs play off each other nicely, and blasting away baddies is...well, a blast. The only deviation from the norm is its difficulty. Not only do you get infinite lives, but when you respawn you turn invulnerable for a short period of time and can plow through enemies and traps. If you yearn for a challenge, though, just give Hard Mode a shot.

Nothing more needs to be said really. Have fun.

Three blogs I've noticed recently that may be worth your while:

My sometime partner Nathan Solomon has been blogging about games from a business perspective -- he has a background in retail, and thus provides a much different slant on things from the norm.

Richard "Magic" Garfield, with a number of friends, has a game-related blog including both tabletop game reviews and thought-pieces on design.

And at 89, Fred Pohl is blogging at The Way the Future Blogs, a play on the name of his book about the Futurians (The Way the Future Was). Coincidentally, today's Times has a piece reporting that Brooklyn Tech recently awarded him an honorary high school diplomacy -- Pohl dropped out back in the 30s.