Student at @NorthwesternU. Internet and indie game connoiseur. PR Chair for @IotaSinfonia.
If you can't handle me at my best, you don't deserve me at my worst.
ReadKit, my favorite RSS/read later client for OS X, has been updated today to version 2.3, which brings a new icon, several bug fixes, and some new welcome features.
For me, the two most important additions are the improved sharing system and a global preference to group items by date or feed. The latter is available in Preferences > General, but there’s also a smart folder-specific setting that can override the general preference (so if you like to group a smart folder by feed instead of date, you can do that). Sharing is reminiscent of Reeder in that it supports services like Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinboard and it lets you assign custom keyboard shortcuts to each sharing service.
I’m a fan of the new sharing options, as they are faster to activate than drag & drop between sources (which was already supported). As the developers write:
ReadKit started out as a read later application for Instapaper, Pocket and Readability and it wasn’t so important to share articles between these services, despite the fact that it has worked with a simple drag-and-drop. Then RSS abilities has been added to the application, but the way of sharing remained unchanged. It’s time to improve this functionality, so this version introduces the new sharing menu, customizable sharing shortcuts and the ability to send articles into non-premium Instapaper accounts as well. Additional improvements and services are coming soon.
I tried using it for a week and then stopped. No way to train feeds or select only focused stories. It basically strips away the best parts of Newsblur. Not worth buying IMO
[Zach Gage is a New York-based game designer, artist and friend of SU&SD whose work recently saw a change in direction. After success in the App store with SpellTower and such high-profile experiments as a videogame that penalises failure by deleting files on your computer, he's started working with table games. Guts of Glory is his post-apocalyptic eating contest, and is arriving very, very soon. We got in touch to find out where the shift came from.]
Quinns: Can you explain how the New York University Game Centre came to commission Guts of Glory?
Zach Gage: Sure thing!
Actually I think they wanted me to make a weird artsy game. They commission a few people each year, and typically, one of those people is the type of person who sometimes makes really odd games. Robin Arnott and Terry Cavanagh filled this roll in years past. I think Charles was expecting something closer to Lose/Lose or Killing Spree from me, the card game came a bit out of left field.
I‘ve heard the moans and cries of a few, accusing Six Sided Sanctuary of looking like Minecraft, apparently, and just being another boring puzzle game with a cube. Bugger off and play the game before you start making judgements like that, because what you’ll find is something rather smart. Yes, this is a game in which you roll a cube around a mysterious set of floating islands, but it’s genuinely a little more exciting than that sounds.
This cube starts off hollow in every level and it’s your task to attach the panels lying on the ground on to one or more of its sides. These panels grant the cube an ability when being rolled upon, so in utilizing that ability you’ll overcome the challenge. The most exciting aspect of the game, in fact, is discovering the many different types of panels and what ability they grant, and the introduction of each of them is spread evenly across the 25 or so levels.
You’ll be flying in mid-air, floating on water, bouncing, sticking to vertical walls and speeding along at twice the pace, depending on what panels are contained within the level.
There’s also interactions to be found in the levels, like doors and switches, moving platforms and conveyor belts. When I first completely flipped gravity my jaw dropped. I’m not sure why, as it’s been done in many other games, but I guess my brain was just trying to understand what just happened and how this gravity inversion completely altered the puzzle mapped out in my head.
There’s other little touches in the game that stand out too, like the difference in sounds of the cube rolling on tufts of grass and the hard tarmac. The music is also excellent throughout and has the effect of making a slow-paced puzzle game seem much more exciting, especially when combined with the chirpy tilesets.
Expect to be both delighted and struggling to work out the solution, at least, most of the time.
“Allowing progress without having to get a headache was great driving force.”
You see, there’s something rather peculiar about Six Sided Sanctuary in the way that it orders its levels. If you’re a regular player of puzzle games then you may be thinking that 25 levels doesn’t sound that many, and it’s not, comparatively. Not really. But at first, I presumed the game would take a while as the first and second level took me about 10-15 minutes and many retries to solve and complete. So, naturally, I assumed the game would only get tougher from there on out. But soon after that I found I had completed four levels in the time it took me to do just the one previously.
It was great due to having gained such momentum and feeling that I was getting somewhere fast, but I was aware that the game’s length was continuously in flux, depending on how easy or difficult each of the puzzles were. And once you enter Overworld 2, you’ll notice that half the levels will take 20 minutes of brain-racking trial and error, whereas the other half will literally take 30 seconds and no thought at all.
One level that introduced the speed panels, had you simply attaching them to all sides and then zooming up a flight of stairs – it’s barely a puzzle and feels much more action-focused. Allowing progress without having to get a headache was great driving force. But the game doesn’t seem to have any kind of pattern and choosing the levels fells more like pot luck.
You get to choose your own path at times in the game’s overworlds, so sometimes you’re given a choice of two levels to take on, but you don’t have to do both of them to progress. So, you can probably get to the end of the game by skipping at least three or four levels if you wish. And like I said, the first couple of levels are tougher to work out than, I’d say, half of the levels following them.
When thinking about these levels much later in the game, I presumed that the first level must have just felt tougher because I wasn’t used to the game at all. It involves moving across a pond and the tops of thin pillars with wooden boards attached to the cube, with the danger being the one hollow side being rolled upon.
I knew I wasn’t very keen on the camera at first (and I’m still not), as it locks on to eight different points – the faces of the cube and the corners – whereas four would have actually been better due to causing less confusion when rotating the camera, which also alters the directional controls. But upon replaying the first few levels I found that they were genuinely harder to solve. I worry that people will be put off by them, presuming the game to get even harder after that, but it’s just a small incline before the slide down the hill on the other side.
Still, it’s a very strange way to order the levels.
My main disappointment with Six Sided Sanctuary dawned on me at its end. Though you have all of these different panels and get to play around with them briefly across all of the levels, hardly any of them are explored as deep as they have the potential to be. You could get some really cool puzzles out of these mechanics. Furthermore, there’s one level I played which combined a sticky panel and a bouncy one, which then opened my mind up to the possibilities of having several different types of panels in one level!
Considering that more levels are still being added to Six Sided Sanctuary, this could well come in the future, and I hope further exploration of the game’s mechanics is pursued. If so, I’d also hope that the same balance between challenging puzzles and more simple but fun levels met too. There’s a couple of bugs but nothing game-breaking or that won’t be fixed soon. Six Sided Sanctuary is certainly a strange one, and ultimately it doesn’t feel as if it’s finished with yet.
If a puzzle game lives or dies on how well it can keep the player challenged, but motivated enough to keep going even when they’re stumped, Six Sided Sanctuary is hanging on to the edge of a cliff. But that’s better than falling like so many other puzzle games tend to.
You can purchase Six Sided Sanctuary for Windows from the official website. You can also vote for it on Greenlight in hopes of seeing it on Steam.
To the cliffs! Seriously, I’ve been staring at cliffs for the past 10 minutes. Just cliffs after cliffs, all realized with muddy pixel art, mossy blobs of color and corrupted spaces. Oh my, Deios really is a 2D illusion too much for the eyes to handle. When you first open up the demo (mirror), you’re greeted with grimy pop art spoiled with glitches as a warbling yet sensual electronic synth plays over the top of the developer’s logo.
Barch Games. Damn, just give me everything you’re feeling right now.
Deios looks something like this in motion:
I can’t describe that. I can’t. Not with words. Maybe with dance. Nah.
Anyway, once the terminal log-in has passed with your pressing of Z, the game world glitches into form. Clouds move through water underneath, green and brown cliffs stretch out above, and there’s your tiny little character running around to your demands. Deios is a glitchventure, in as much as it’s beautiful glitch landscape art turned into a game, but also in that the demo loses sound and crashes after a battle – and as mush pointed out to me, that doesn’t seem out of place.
So far you won’t have a bloody clue what Deios is and how it plays, because we’ve been far too distracted by simply how it looks. Fear not, for I have answers. It’s a 2D action game in which you get to customize your gun, and even test it out in one screen. You’ll scroll through the options, choosing from various insane doo-dahs for different parts of your huge gun. Strap a sniper scope to a rocket launcher, or create a machine-shotgun, just because you can.
Once you’ve got a gun you’re happy with, you then move across more rocky vistas, a tiny speck with a loaded gun, and then you’ll come across the monstrosity; a philosopher. You’ll fight this philosopher because, apparently, “man can become corrupted by sickness”. Ideas tend to get in our heads and spreading them to others can make things happen. When you defeat him, the current demo build crashes, but apparently the game is mainly a repetition of choosing guns and shooting beasts up against these landscapes.
Strangely, the game isn’t as fluid as that may have made it sound. In between all of these separate but interlocking gameplay parts are loud noises and visual tears glitching across the screen. Words appear and ask questions about the nature of playing games. You’re preached at but it’s torn away from you before any of it sinks in. Terminal font in yellow on dark pink.
As it all comes together, Deios ends up being a tear across beauty and corruption, each co-existing and fighting for your attention. It’s both an action game and a snobby art game about life and philosophy, but also the resentment of both. There’s not many games like this, maybe a few, and I’ve never seen visuals matching this mood and sense of overbearing isolation against a harsh nature. Wow, just wow. I can’t wait for this to be finished.
Spotify has begun testing a new version of its Windows app, bringing its web interface to the desktop. Currently, the new app is only available to a small set of users, but it marks a shift towards a format used by rival streaming services like Rdio, with Spotify borrowing from its the tablet-friendly design of its iPad app to offer a consistent experience between the desktop and the browser.
An ancient pond
a frog jumps in
the splash of water
-Matsuo Bashō, Japanese poet (1644 -1694)
Humans have always lived singularly in the present moment; the internet has only accelerated the pace that we leap from one lily pad of existence to the next. And we’ve always tried to capture that experience and share it with others: in a poem, or a film, or even a pithy tweet. But nothing comes close to capturing our essential moments like the Animated GIF.
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