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Feel like wasting a few hours? Why not do it with a genetically engineered penguin rocking some sweet sneakers and plasma claws? Pizeltruss' game Ripple Dot Zero is just that. The game was released this last weekend and it's an amazing experience. It's very reminiscent of the classic Genesis titles, such as the previously mentioned Sonic the Hedgehog and Strider.

The game's protagonist is, as mentioned above, a genetically engineered penguin in really cool shoes. You start the game breaking out of a prison in a laboratory, and the game is filled with running and jumping around on spring pads. The Strider aspect of it comes with Ripple (the penguin) possessing a sweet pair of plasma claws that are as potent as nobody's business and have quite the respectable reach. Oh yeah, and the music is glorious. Ever so glorious.

Play Ripple Dot Zero here for free in your browser.

Proteus, the award winning indie game from developers Ed Key and David Kanaga, is the latest indie game snatched up by Sony for the Playstation Network and Playstation Vita. In a post from this morning on Sony's Playstation blog, Curve Studios' Rob Clarke announced the company's collaboration with Key to port the title to Sony platforms.

"We've already had Proteus up on the big screens here in the office, and it's looking like nothing the PlayStation has ever seen before," says Clarke, who serves as Curve's PR and Marketing Director. Clarke has promised that the Playstation version of the game will be an overhaul from the original PC version. A release date has not yet been set, but trust me when I say that I can't wait.

The sequel to Beyond Good & Evil has been off and on in development under Ubisoft for a long time. Fans of the cult-classic have been waiting eagerly for even the tiniest bit of news ever since its announcement years back, and it was even incorrectly thought that perhaps Beyond Good & Evil 2 would be at E3 2013. With the wait having been so long, Ubisoft has confirmed that the game is now in development for next generation platforms. Unfortunately, based on a recent interview with creator of Beyond Good & Evil Michel Ancel, it looks like next generation won't be including Wii U. Ancel says that, though it would be "possible," it would be "painful" to bring Beyond Good & Evil 2 to current platforms:

"I think [on current platforms] Beyond Good & Evil 2 was possible, but it'd be painful. It's always possible to do anything on any kind of console, but sometimes you need to spend your energy not on the optimizations or things like that." -- Michel Ancel

Head past the jump for the full statement.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the worst reviewed games of the entire year. After time spent in development hell, the title finally reached a retail release in February. The critical response was universally negative. After a fantastic demo and many "in-game" trailers, fans had a lot to look forward to; however, the product was a far cry from anything that was advertised.

Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, helped create the title. He is... less than ashamed about the PR tactics of Colonial Marines -- in fact, he encourages it. Mr. Pitchford has recently gone to Twitter, stating that a demo created while a work in progress is honest. A demo created after the work is done is dishonest. There's a little more to it, but that's basically the statement in a nutshell. Check out the tweet after the jump.

What Pitchford fails to realize is that the demo for Colonial Marines was completely different from the actual game. He has no respect for developers that had the project shoved upon them, and he has no mental regrets when he takes the credit. The screenshots and trailers of Colonial Marines were inaccurate, and the fact Randy is still denying that five months later is ridiculous.

Don't buy Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Dominic Guay, senior producer on Ubisoft's Watch Dogs, has revealed that the upcoming open world title has been in development since 2009. In an interview with Turkish site Merlin'In Kazani, Guay mentioned this detail by way of responding to the question of Watch Dogs being inspired by the television show "Person of Interest," which began airing in 2011.

"Actually we were many years into development when we heard of that show for the first time. Making a new IP like WATCH_DOGS is a long process and we started to craft our vision in early 2009. The game was already pretty much set in its direction at that time so similitudes were random or most probably based on having similar real-world inspirations [sic]."

Kevin Messman's new game Rotational is very much a gaming love letter to Terry Cavanagh's Hexagon. However, unlike Hexagon, Rotational is a 3D game. Your one and only goal is to rotate the sphere in the center so its grey tip never touches a cube. The cubes will slowly close in on you and you rotate your sphere so the tip goes through the one open side, which is boldly outlined. After you fail, the game shows you your progress in the game in a percentage, and you can press your space bar to instantly restart the game with no delay. The music for the game was composed by Andrew Gleeson (Melodisle), and it fits perfectly into the techno/trippy atmosphere.

Rotational can be downloaded here for absolutely no charge.

Silver Dollar Games is a developer with an insanely diverse catalog of games under their belt. They're known for producing decent games for XBLIG at a speed that would give any other developer whiplash, using any and all ideas their staff comes up with. I had that in mind when I picked up my controller to play One Finger Death Punch, expecting a mediocre game with about a half an hour of gameplay. The game did win Microsoft's Dream.Build.Play competition for 2012, but that did little to raise my expectations. However, once I hit the combat, all of my doubts were thrown out the window.

One Finger Death Punch uses only two buttons: X and B. X lets you attack left and B lets you attack right. You might be thinking that this is too simple to be any form of entertaining. However, the game somehow manages to give the player an almost deep gameplay experience with only two buttons. Enemies come from either side of the screen and you simply dispatch them as soon as they get close enough. Timing is everything, and attacking half a second too early or too late can leave you open for attack. The game throws in enemies with weapons you can commandeer, enemies who jump from one side to another, enemies with more health, and plenty more varieties. The game has 250 levels of epic music and stick figure carnage, and it is currently on Steam Greenlight. Hit the jump to see the trailer.

Pick up One Finger Death Punch on the XBLIG Marketplace for 80 Microsoft points and on Steam soon.

Ansh Patel's new game Woman is an interesting and educational experience. It's a Twine-built interactive fiction that lets you read through a conversation between two feminists, one from the West and one from the Arab world, as the make their way through a nameless city while meeting an abundance of characters that point out some key differences between the two cultures and how they view feminism and women in general.

You play a third, faceless entity who listens in on the conversation and makes decisions that cause the conversation to alter slightly at each choice. Woman touches on a variety of topics, including religion, education, appearance, and family while letting both sides share their views and opinions without trying to push one side as correct and superior over the other.

Woman can be played in your browser as the full experience or the more hasty chapter by chapter version.

Cellar Door Games' brand new rogue-like sidescrolling action game was released yesterday for Windows, with releases on more platforms coming soon. You play as one of an absurd amount of possible characters as you explore a procedurally generated castle and more areas as you progress, collecting gold and killing enemies as you work towards upgrading your characters enough to make it through all of the areas and beat the final boss. Upon death, you start the next run as the descendant of your choice, each with different traits and abilities. Don't fret, every upgrade you buy is permanent and gets passed down to all of your descendants. Hit the jump for the trailer!

Rogue Legacy is available on its website and other digital distribution platforms for $15.

Hideo Kojima's upcoming Metal Gear Solid V is lining up to introduce several new gameplay concepts for the series, not the least of which being a large open world. In an interview with Jeux Video Magazine, Kojima described his interest in next-gen ideas, like second screen connectivity and using the cloud to create persistent worlds. He also announced a feature wholly unique to the story-driven series; players will make narrative-altering choices throughout the story of MGSV, including whether certain characters live or die.

Metal Gear Solid V's plot, like its game world, will be open to the player. Missions will be episodic, and the player will largely be able to tackle them any way he or she wants. Making this more complex, however, is that the narrative is also designed to adapt around the player's choices. In some instances, these choices may center around the life or death of a character, which would deeply change the story of a player's game. Whatever changes may come up through this open play style, Kojima and his team are making sure none of them accidentally create a time paradox in the overarching plot for the series.

Big changes are coming to Metal Gear Solid as we know it. What do you want to see in the next chapter of Kojima's flagship series?

In honour of the iOS puzzle game Nihilumbra hitting its first birthday, its developers over at BeautiFun Games have made the game free from June 27 until July 4. If you haven't played Nihilumbra yet, now is the perfect time for it. You simply change the game's colour palette to alter the physics, and you can pick the game up now to play all the way through to the game's surprising ending. If playing puzzle games on mobile devices doesn't suit your fancy, you can feel free to wait a little while until the game is ported to PC.

Hit the jump for the PC trailer and info on its release!

Nihilumbra is available for free on your mobile device until July 4th.

The creators of the innovative ASCII browser game Candy Box have recently released their newest masterpiece: Lucky Peach. The game comes from the same vein: a browser based, ASCII, psuedo-action adventure game. The game is way more complicated than you'd think from your first glance, but it doesn't quite reach the level of hidden-sophistication that Candy Box does.

Lucky Peach is a game commissioned to commemorate The Travel Issue (issue 7) of the McSweeney's-published, print-only "journal of food and writing" Lucky Peach. It's a nice little action game that really feels like it could be a scrapped segment of Candy Box. You use your mouse to steer your cute little rowboat through the auto-scrolling bodies of water that share their names with various fast foods. You need to collect the familiar treats to gain weight, but be wary of the healthy foods, as you'll lose weight upon collecting those. You'll eventually reach a little island where you can play a series of minigames to earn ingredients for a delicious meal. Where's this all heading? Play the game and find out!

You can play Lucky Peach in your browser today!

When I think of video games today, I think one of the few great gems that remain in gaming are the communities that pop up around a particular game to celebrate it and the people who play it well. There are any number of them. Whether you are in the League of Legends or StarCraft camps; the fandom of Street Fighter, Tekken, or any number of fighting games; or taking part in gaming marathons about a particular series, there is some glimmer of something great hidden in these groups of people who come around a single event to celebrate the thing they are passionate about.

Recently, I happened across a community that, at first glance, seemed a bit strange and out of place. This community finds its home on the popular game streaming website, Twitch.TV, and celebrates all things The Binding of Isaac.

The Binding of Isaac is a rogue-like indie game that finds the player doing a randomly generated dungeon crawl as the protagonist Isaac. It was developed and released by independent game developers Edmund McMillian and Florian Himsl and has found its home in the hands of skilled and not-so-skilled players alike. The game’s difficulty and learn-by-playing methodology, its several hundred randomly generated power-up (or power-down) items that affect your characters abilities and appearance, and its strangely dark yet quirky religious tones may make it a turn-off to some people, but to others looking for a challenging game with replay value, The Binding of Isaac has spawned its own communities of fans and players.

More after the jump.

Pencil Test Studios, an indie developer featuring talent from titles such as Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood, launched a Kickstarter campaign a while back for an odd title called Armikrog. Continuing the style of The Neverhood, Armikrog would be a point-and-click adventure game animated entirely by hand using claymation. The game would be full of zany characters, hilarious dialogue, and mind-bending puzzles.

Well, I guess I should stop saying "would" and start saying "will", because Armikrog has reached its Kickstarter goal of $900,000. In fact, it even went above and beyond all the way up $974,578, reaching the stretch goal supporters had been clamoring for, a Wii U release!

So, it is with a happy heart that I can now say, Armikrog will be launching in July 2014 on PC, iOS, Linux, and Wii U. Who else is looking forward to this wacky adventure?

"The size of the world is impressive. There are many fantastic places to explore and great characters to meet. But what really excites us, and what we hope will excite you too, is that we can create an Oz that becomes a defining version, like we did with Alice. When people think of Alice, they now think of a bloody Alice with knife in-hand. We have that chance with Dorothy, to reinvent her and seer into history a version that can go beyond and live above the MGM or Disney film versions. This will be our Oz, our Dorothy, your Oz, your Dorothy." -- American McGee

Spicy Horse Games, a game studio spearheaded by Alice Madness Returns' American McGee, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their new game OZombie. OZombie is a game that hopes to reinvent Dorothy and the world of The Wizard of Oz in a new, much darker way. The game will tackle themes of conformity, employing zombies and their master, the Scarecrow, as a metaphor for conformist society. McGee says the world is an "impressive" size and should be full of intriguing locales to explore.

OZombie's crowdfunding goal is $950,000, and, at the time of writing, it has already reached over $86,000, so it's doing well. The campaign currently has three stretch goals. If the first is reached, at 6000 backers, the team will open the mysterious box from the game's Kickstarter trailer. If the second is reached, at 11,000 Backers, Chris Vrenna, at one point a drummer and keyboardist for Nine Inch Nails, will join the team to compose the soundtrack. The third goal has been thus far left ambiguous, labeled with, "Defined as the campaign progresses."

Head past the jump for more details as well as the Kickstarter campaign trailer, and if you're interested in OZombie, then head on over to the game's Kickstarter page and support it!