Oh, right. I thought it was the Japan evo. I haven’t been following it this year at all…
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Coming soon to Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android
Based on Colin Thiele’s iconic 1966 novella of the same name, Storm Boy is a single-player exploration game, peppered with playful vignettes inspired by the text.
Storm Boy lives with his father on the long strip of sand between the Coorong and the sea, near the mouth of the Murray River, in South Australia. He rescues a baby pelican whose parents have been killed by reckless beachgoers, nurses him back to health, and names him Mr Percival. As the pelican grows, Storm Boy and Mr Percival enjoy playing together through blue skies and storms, forging a friendship that will last forever.
This seems like a deep cut
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whoa
you’re right about a deep cut, you just drew memories of me catching the TV adaptation of this novel at my Ma’s house at age, like, three
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We watched that movie in primary school, I call every pelican I see Mr Percival as a result.
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Oh look Ziggurat 2:
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…why would you do this if you weren’t doing a touch interface? And on a wide display?
Always understand what you copy before you do so, folks.
The Switch is widescreen and touch-capable so I don’t really understand I guess?
What I’d really wish is for Tim to fix the actual Ziggurat, but we all know that’s not going to happen.
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Let me clarify: Ziggurat’s design is tightly informed by the limitations of the portrait, touch-only phone it lives on.
The touch interface is designed to be used with one thumb and achieve a reasonable motion-response scale. Play it on a tablet and it’ll feel off because the movement is differently matched to your finger; it’s analogous to a car with a too-large steering wheel. On the Switch, you’re not holding the device correctly to leave a thumb centered on the screen at all times, and you’ve got perfectly good thumbsticks begging to be used. Alternately, the game aims with the thumbsticks and now you’re wondering why you are frozen in place.
The design of the pyramid takes advantage of the portrait aspect ratio to emphasis high-angle arced shots, which fit nicely on the screen and bounce downwards. In widescreen, you can’t see up or down and you’re better off with a side-facing game, long and low. You can take advantage of horizontal distance, then, and play with obstructions versus close threats. None of the enemy patterns in the trailer seem to take advantage of this.
It’s not unusual to see clones miss basic elegances and still be fine. Heck, 2048 screws up an important corner edge strategy it took Threes team months to work through but it still was good enough to the point only designers remember Threes. But it matters as much as design matters for the sake of beauty in systems.
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I played Ziggurat just fine on the iPad.
Clones make me really sad
well here it is on a touch interface but still wide for some reason
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunnysidegames.towaga
play it today!!
I think the early iPhones were closer to 3:2 than 16:9
Anyhow, I agree that this kind of game probably works better with touch. I don’t think the Switch is a very comfortable device for touch-primary interfaces.
Ah right. But the game was played landscape rather than portrait? Or was the orientation adjustable?
This reminds me of that thing where Donovan rips off the melody from a Bob Dylan song but then when confronted about reveals that he thought it was just an old folk melody that had been done by everyone not something that Dylan wrote himself
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maybe we all need a refresher
also i played the phone version of that clone and it wasn’t great!
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Speaking of copying…
Also Dead Cells is officially released today, out of early access.
Dead Cells is great, and it’s one of relatively few roguelikes that doesn’t gatekeep the equipment unlocking between runs too much. The item sequence needed to unlock alternate routes is kind of weird though; it’s almost balanced as like a challenge mode that doesn’t announce itself as such, given all the weird early game detours involved. The boss of that route was originally the final boss and it shows because he’s about as difficult given the equipment you’ll have by then. I can’t say I loved that part. But it’s been fully worthwhile for at least several months of early access and they say there’s more coming, so 
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