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Stew: 5 Vitamini’s website describes it as “Tetris with physics.” That’s giving it a bit too much credit. The core mechanic of the game can be described as bashing floating, spinning blocks into one another. The closest visible resemblance to Tetris is that blocks fall from the top of the screen and land on the bottom. [...] Continue reading

[This is a guest article by Valter. If you’d like to contribute a guest article to TIGSource, go here.]

Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle is a parody of text-based adventure games. (Specifically, it’s a parody of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. -ed.) The premise is simple: You are standing in the center of a non-descript New England town. A phone booth is near you. What do you do? > _

The catch to this game is that the game ends after one command – every single command possible in the game will give you an “ending” (with a very small number of exceptions, which merely restart you automatically). A lot of time was given into writing endings for every bizarre thing you can think of! (You could think of it as taking the Scribblenauts approach to adventure gaming).

Finding endings can be a bit difficult, as certain “obvious” results like “use phone booth” do not work, whereas obscure entries such as “fry phone booth” have endings. Apart from that, though, it’s an excellent way to spend 10-20 if you’re bored. There are “over 200 endings”, as boasted by the authors, and they’re all comedic. The majority of the endings I found were capable of eliciting at least a dry chuckle, some were given a hearty chortle, and I must admit that a few led to some honest-to-goodness guffawing. Give it a shot! Continue reading

Titan Studios’ Fat Princess certainly has a hysterical premise. It’s a team-deathmatch game that features cartoonish visuals, tons of gore, multiple classes and upgrades. Did I mention the whole feeding the princess cake makes her enormous and hard to move? The game’s concept, visuals, and overall feel are instantly appealing, but Fat [...] Continue reading

Castle Crashers developer The Behemoth is showing off its latest Xbox Live Arcade project, BattleBlock Theatre, a game about "friendship, betrayal, and a whole truck load of cats." You can see all of that in this clip: cat overlords, some characters working together through platforming obstacles, and others just straight-up murdering each other.

The studio explains BattleBlock Theatre's premise: "Having shipwrecked on a mysterious island you find yourself both betrayed by your best friend Hatty and captured by the locals. All of this is happening while being forced into deadly performances. This however, is just the start of your problems."

The Behemoth plans to put up a new website "in the next few days" and reveal more about the story as BattleBlock Theatre's release approaches. You can watch another previously released clip of the game with commentary from the team explaining the customizable heads, special weapons, different modes, and more after the break.

Cateia Games' Shaman Odyssey is the latest tropical island-themed building/sim game where you're tasked with shepherding a tribe of villagers through various challenges and dangers on a quest to reach their "true home." While the game boasts some unique graphical tricks, the wholly unoriginal premise and lacklustre gameplay is a bit of a disappointment.

The game begins when the tribe's young Shaman (you, the player), is visited by an ancestral spirit who urges him to reunite the tribe - whose people have been scattered throughout many different islands - and lead them to a permanent and safe home.

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Matching the quirkiness of Muscle March, Namco Bandai produced this bizarre online commercial for the recently released macho WiiWare game. Along with transforming three children into three ripped and tanned beefcakes in banana hammocks, the company enlisted a salesman that's like a scary mix of Billy Mays and Richard Simmons (and just as insane as Olly on Precious Roy) to sell the game.

The weird advert does a great job selling Muscle March, though -- I was planning on skipping it after reading some awful impressions from other gamers who were initially beguiled by its premise of bodybuilders striking manly poses, but I might buy it anyway after hearing this salesman's pitch. After all, he's been around muscle-building since he was an infant; he knows his stuff!

Even after solving the mystery in Veronica Rivers: Portals to the Unknown, the daring rescue pilot doesn't have time to relax on a Japanese vacation. A vision disturbs the heroine's trip, and so she hops on a plane to Europe and takes on a brand new case to avoid a threatening disaster -- while also confronting a mysterious nemesis who's been haunting her. 

This is the premise behind Veronica Rivers: The Order Of Conspiracy, the second in the polished hidden-object game (HOG) series with adventure game-like elements. 

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