About Nick Santangelo

“Can it really be that easy?” is the question you’ll ask after completing Fenix Rage‘s first stage. It’s a stage with that most simplest of video game objectives: move the player-character from left to right and reach the end goal. Accomplishing as much takes only a few seconds, since there are no enemies present and the distance between start and finish could practically be measured between your thumb and forefinger. Still, developer Green Lava Studios managed to insert an optional side objective into the stage. It’s possible but not necessary to collect a cookie during this almost literal hop, skip and jump from beginning to end. You would have to go out of your way not to obtain the optional cookie in this first level, but it is optional all the same.

Collecting each level’s cookie and successfully reaching the end goal naturally becomes more challenging the deeper you get into the game. In fact, it was only a handful of stages later before I was dying multiple times in the pursuit of another tempting cookie. So it’s somewhere in the game’s opening Red Forest zone that you’ll get your answer to your question: no, Fenix Rage is most certainly not that easy.

Much has been said about the game’s meeting at the intersection of Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Meat Boy. And yes, Fenix is a diminutive blue creature that is not unlike Sega’s depiction of a hedgehog. He has a dash ability that gives him some of the speed for which Sonic is known, and successful navigation of the game’s 200+ levels — a few dozen of which I’ve completed — requires liberal use of it. That really doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the frequency at which you’ll be pulling the right trigger while simultaneously pressing the B button to perform a dash. As long as there is room to do so, it’s possible to dash (and jump) endlessly.

Some levels require you to abuse the maneuver in order to take linear horizontal routes to avoid certain death by touching electrical beams above and below you. Others have blocks of ice that can be melted due to the heat generated from the friction of moving at such rapid speeds. Others still send a giant, unstoppable enemy chasing after Fenix the moment you nudge him forward from the start point. At first you might think you’re dashing enough times to win this deadly race, but you’re not. Oh, you’re so not. If you’re not dashing seemingly as many times as is physically possible, you’re going to die.

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Almost two and a half years after its original PC release, puzzle-platformer Thomas Was Alone will make its way to Xbox One this November. Developer Mike Bithell made the announcement on Twitter today and later confirmed to Polygon that his game will release on PlayStation 4 and Wii U in addition to Xbox One during the same yet-to-be-revealed week next month.

Bithell wrote that he was “Rather excited to announce that Thomas Was Alone will be coming to PS4, WiiU and XB1 this November,” before noting his affinity for a certain geometric shape. “Rectangles are cool.”

His rectangles call-out was a nod to the Thomas‘ protagonist and a group of companions he meets over the course of the game. The titular Thomas is a self-aware artificial intelligence that sees the world around himself as a 2D space in which he is represented by a red rectangle. Each of Thomas’ friends has a unique shape and ability set of his or her own, and players must rely on all of their skills in order to overcome the game’s puzzles.

Developer Curve Studios will handle Thomas Was Alone‘s next-gen console port. Curve previously worked on the game’s PlayStation 3 and Vita ports, which released in April of 2013.

“One day a home console will come out and I won’t port my silly little game to it,” continued Bithell on Twitter. “But today is not that day.”

For more details on how the deal to bring Thomas to next-gen systems came about, check out the satirical video documenting the partnership between Bithell and Curve after the jump. The “#Mike Trailer” jokingly finds a correlation between next-gen polygon counts and Metacritic review scores, shows the team’s faux stresses and displays fake plans for an expensive outdoor banner advertisement bearing Bithell’s face near the site of the games industry’s annual Electronic Entertainment Expo.

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Canadian studio Frima’s couch co-op platformer Chariot will release on Xbox One October 1, and it won’t cost Xbox Live Gold members anything to download it, Frima and Microsoft have announced. While the ID@Xbox game won’t cost XBLG members anything, it will set non-Gold subscribers back $14.99.

Chariot is October’s Xbox One Games with Gold title and will replace Capy Games’ Super Time Force, which remains free for the next two days as September’s title. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 owners with Gold subscriptions will be able to get Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for free from October 1 through the 15th and Darksiders II from the 16th through the 31st.

A launch trailer for Chariot depicts the game’s hook: a princess and her fiancè guide the titular chariot through the game’s environments, all of which are set in “the royal catacombs.” Players will need to push, pull, ride and swing with the carriage, which is actually more of a coffin on wheels. Inside the chariot resides the ghost of the deceased king, and the goal is to locate a suitable burial location for the deceased. Click inside to catch the launch trailer.

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John Baez doesn’t want Asteroid Base’s money. It’s as if the three men who make up the studio are old friends of Baez’s, and on this day they just happen to be patrons of his business. Their money is no good here.

They are not old friends, though. Baez, president and co-founder of indie game studio The Behemoth, only first met the members of Asteroid Base during PAX Prime of 2013. He noticed their still-in-production game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime had picked up a few awards and had a certain individuality to it. Lovers has a way of causing onlookers to gravitate towards it that’s not entirely unlike the way the game’s pink Death Star has a penchant for attracting the attention of enemy spaceships.

In the game, a pair of benevolent astronauts pilot a neon spacecraft around the universe, wishing only to survive. But then something catches their eyes, something they can’t ignore. A group of evil robots known as “The Haters” have ensnared innocent bunnies and locked them away in jail. The astronauts refuse to stand idly by while innocent creatures suffer, so they show some initiative, scrambling around the bowels of their craft and tinkering away at control stations that unleash firepower of a magnitude that they can only hope The Haters are unable to repel. Despite the protagonists’ violent response, Asteroid Base sees the titular lovers as good Samaritans. The pair have somehow survived this long on their own out in the frightening yet awe-inspiring uncertainty that is space, even managing to thrive in it without any support from large, external entities. Now they want to help other space-faring beings like them do the same.

The Behemoth knows the feeling. Founded in 2003, the San Diego studio responsible for such hits as Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers chose to go it alone in another dangerous environment. The developer released its games sans publisher in the competitive console gaming space. The Behemoth found success, but it wasn’t easy doing it through self-funding — Baez mortgaged his house, and co-founder Tom Fulp kicked in some of his personal savings to help finance development in the early days. But they did it, and they were successful enough that they’re now in a position of strength.

A few years ago, Baez and Company used that strength to quietly start something called The Gold Egg Project. Gold Egg is a funding initiative meant to help other indies bring their games to market, but unlike a traditional publisher, The Behemoth doesn’t take any of its beneficiaries’ profits — it only wants to help them. Now The Behemoth is helping Asteroid Base, and Baez hopes the studio will one day pass it on.

Being indie

For almost as long as there has been game design there have been independent game designers. The term “indie,” while well-established today, is newer. It means something; it’s just that no one seems to be able to agree upon exactly what that something is. So it was for The Behemoth back in 2005 when the tenderfoot studio’s Alien Hominid was winning Independent Game Festival Awards for Innovation in Art, Technical Excellence and Audience Choice.

Baez recalls of that time that “there was a lot of controversy [as to] whether we were indie or not, solely because we were on a console. Other developers said, ‘You can’t be indie because you’re on a console.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, we’re indie because we funded it.’ Now that’s our definition of indie.”

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Capcom has announced that it will release Resident Evil Revelations 2 on Xbox One and Xbox 360 in early 2015.

At least, that’s when it will begin releasing …
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The next project from NeocoreGames, the studio responsible for The Amazing Adventures of Van Helsing, is a tower-defense game called Deathtrap. The developer announced that Deathtrap will offer gamers …
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Capy Games’ Below will be releasing on Xbox One at some point in 2015, Joystiq reports. ID@Xbox Director Chris Charla made the announcement at Gamescom yesterday during Microsoft’s media presentation.

Coinciding with the news, Capy unveiled a new trailer for the game it has described as a “roguelike-like.” The video, which you can catch after the jump, shows off some exploration of the enormous underground cave in which Below is set. It also shows the massive shadow of what is presumably a boss monster towering over the protagonist before fading out to black.

For more on Capy Games’ Below, check out XBLA Fans’ impressions of the game from PAX East earlier this year.

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The next game in the Toy Soldiers franchise is in development for Xbox One and is being published by Ubisoft instead of Microsoft, which published the previous games in …
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Resident Evil will shamble its way onto Xbox 360 and Xbox One in North America and Europe in early 2015, Capcom announced yesterday. Though the seminal survival-horror title was …
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It’s possible for a budget-conscious independent game developer to get its game on Xbox One for a bit more than $5,000 if the developer is willing to stick to the budget laid out by Happion Labs, whose founder described himself in a blog post as “one of the cheapest developers I know.”

In the post, Happion founder Jamie Fristrom said that releasing his first ID@Xbox game, Sixty Second Shooter Prime, set the studio back a grand total of $5,143. The most expensive two line items were ratings board certifications and Errors and Omissions (E&O) Insurance.

“Microsoft requires this; it’s in the contract,” Fristrom wrote. “And it’s not just any E&O Insurance – it has to cover IP and copyright violations, so the cheap E&O Insurance you can easily find online doesn’t qualify. I went through an insurance broker (Parker, Smith, and Feek) and found the cheapest insurance that would qualify.”

Ratings boards submissions are also required by all console holders, including Microsoft. In addition to $700 in localization costs, Fristrom dropped almost $2,000 getting his game rated by PEGI and USK. He elected not to release his game in Autralia and New Zealand because each country’s ratings board wanted approximately another $2,000 from him to rate Sixty Second Shooter Prime. In fact, Fristrom suggested that releasing in even fewer territories could potentially cut the full cost of landing on ID@Xbox back to $3,000 or less.

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