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This is neat. Double Fine, the creators of Brutal Legend and, most recently, a swarm of lovable and unique downloadable titles like Iron Brigade and Costume Quest, is asking its fans via Kickstarter to donate a total of $400,000 towards the production of a brand new point-and-click adventure title that’ll be created by “a small team” and one of the adventure game genre’s most influential developers, Tim Schafer.

The fans have answered, too. In under ten hours the project has received well over half a million dollars in backing. And with over 30 more days to go still, you almost have to assume that Double Fine will be forced to use dollar bills as toilet paper to rid itself of all the extra cash it’s going to receive.

The project doesn’t have a real name yet. It also isn’t exactly slated to hit iOS — the initial pitch was for the development of a PC point-and-click “utilizing modern touch technology.” Double Fine says that if it raises more than what it’s asking for, as the project has, it might put the game on Mac or iOS.

This seems like a big deal for Double Fine: it’s a small, but notable studio that’s triumphantly shedding the typical publisher / loan shark model that it usually uses to make something that it has complete creative control over. But, this is also a studio that has been OK with funny funding deals. It let a dude pay for several PC ports in the past, and it’s apparently currently in talks with Minecraft creator Notch about funding Psychonauts 2.

So, when will you be able to play this game? It’ll be awhile. Provided everything goes as planned, it might appear on Steam as early as October 2012. However, backers will see the game as it’s being developed — this entire experience will be documented by 2 Player Productions and private videos will be released on an ongoing basis.

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Ignite is an indie arcade racer released on Steam last October, and developer Nemesys Games has sent word that a port to iOS is currently in progress. I haven’t tried Ignite myself just yet, but I’ve heard good things. It’s your typical stylish arcade racer, but has an interesting twist where you can earn points for pulling off fancy driving maneuvers, stunts, and destruction. Once you’ve earned 1000 points, you can use it immediately to gain an advantage in the race or you can save it until the end and get a time bonus instead.

Ignite features 3 different modes, 35 circuits across 7 locations, and a ton of different configurable cars to burn rubber with. Oh, also, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Let’s not forget that. There’s no clear release date for Ignite on iOS just yet, but the developers stated that the porting project just started in January and that the game is already up and running in a playable state. More videos and screens are said to be coming soon, but it sounds like it shouldn’t take too long to get the game on the App Store. We’re intrigued, and will definitely be checking out Ignite when it comes to iOS in the (hopefully) near future.

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The Corpse Party series of video games have been loitering around my “I really should play these some day” game list since I first heard about them a few years ago. The games have some crazy roots behind them, as the first title was made in RPG Maker, a point and click game studio that was responsible for countless terrible ultra-indie RPG games. My personal favorite of these RPG Maker games was Chef Boyardee’s Barkley, Shut Up & Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. (Yes, that’s a real game, watch the trailer. No really, watch it.) Anyway, Corpse Party has had two different remakes since then, the most recent of which landed as a downloadable title for the PSP in late 2010. A sequel arrived around a year later, and there have even been two manga adaptations. One was even published by Square Enix.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of Corpse Party, Joystiq’s JC Fletcher put together an awesome description of what the game is all about. In essence, it’s your typical 16 bit JRPG that jumps the rails in a big way. You quickly find yourself in a nightmare dimension where no one can see each other, doors don’t work, windows are blocked by human hair, and evidence of countless child murders are everywhere. (Making you wonder how this is getting by the App Store approval department, eh?) There’s a cast of characters who are subjected to the torture of this environment, and you sit by and watch what unfolds.

What interested me about this crazy game is that there’s tons of “bad endings,” like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I’ve always really liked games that divert from a linear roller coaster ride to letting you screw up, and then showing you the consequences. The PSP version is even constructed with selectable chapters to allow you to go back and explore all these different outcomes.

According to Andriasang, Corpse Party will be hitting the Japanese App Store this week for ¥2,200 which in US App Store pricing would be $29.99. No word yet on a localized English release, but I figure if the game will be available for iOS devices with Japanese text, an English adaptation can’t be that far off, since presumably the translation already exists from the PSP game.

Fingers crossed, anyway.

[Famitsu via Andriasang via Joystiq]

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Depending on how you look at it, my weekend was either a complete success or a disastrous waste. Asides from my daily ablutions, I’ve done nothing but sit on my derriere and play Capcom’s Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective [Free]. It’s true. I’m not ashamed.

I would be ashamed if this was a cheap rip-off stemming from some copycat’s attempt to cash in on a popular indie title somewhere but Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective isn’t that sort of game. If you had to liken it to a gender-unspecific trophy spouse, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective would be a 6′2″ Scandinavian model with a degree in rocket science and a part-time job as a professional comedian. You won’t be ashamed to be caught with this one.

The only problem here is that not everyone likes a talker. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective’s only real flaw (which is also, paradoxically enough, its strongest quality) is the fact that it is extremely heavy on the narrative. More than half of your time in the game will be spent reading. Sorry guys. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective doesn’t come with a voice pack either. If you’re the sort who thinks that actions are louder than words, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is probably not for you. (I still recommend giving it a whirl, though.) As for everyone else, why are you still here? Get the game already!

What? No? Fine. I see those raised eyebrows and I’ll raise you with a more thorough explanation. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the long-anticipated port of an adventure game Capcom developed for the Nintendo DS. The titular character in this eccentric little delight is, as you might have guessed already, sort of dead. Sissel is also sort of awesome for an amnesiac red-suited ghost with a bad haircut.

Unlike most of the recently deceased, he has to navigate between the Land of the Living and the Ghost World. Sissel can also traverse telephone lines, perform minor feats of telekinesis, communicate with certain living beings (we’ll get to that in a bit), and go back four minutes in time to avert untimely deaths. (Sadly, that’s only applicable for everyone but himself.)

Incidentally, you’ll find yourself using that last power a fair bit. The supporting cast is somewhat uniquely skilled at dying repeatedly. At least, one of them is.

Meet Lynne. She’s a somewhat bombastic little redhead of a detective, the sole witness to your murder and – according to the helpful desk lamp (yes, a literal desk lamp) you meet in the introductory sequence – the key to deciphering the circumstances behind your posthumous condition. Needless to say, you will spend a lot of time rescuing her only to watch her barrel headlong into yet another humorous tragedy.

Along the way, you will also meet the rest of the highly memorable crew. From an unbelievably adorable if loud-mouthed Pomeranian (To quote our very own Mr. Nicholson, “Just wait until you meet the dog, man!”) to a shotgun-wielding assassin (His name is Nearsighted Jeego. He never misses his target if they’re in range.) to a slow-witted prison guard who dances when distressed, every entity you encounter in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is, uh, unique, to say the least. The development team definitely went all the way with the character design here.

(For those of you curious about how well Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective survived the transition to the iOS, I’m happy to say it looks pixel-perfect. While I’ve never played the original, I’ve seen the videos and if the videos are any indication of how things were, well, Capcom did you proud.)

Humor-wise, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is about as off-kilter as the menagerie that populates it. Facepalm-inducing moments are in abundance. The actual plotline, on the other hand, is deeper than what the initial twenty minutes might implicate. How so? I can’t tell you. Games like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective are kinda like Fight Club. You don’t talk about Fight Club. You don’t talk about games like this either. At least, not in the context of the plotline, the actual dialogue and whatnot. Not unless you want to peel away some of the magic. The only thing you’re getting out of me on this front is the assurance that when the bleaker moments of the game hit, they will hit hard.

Of course, a good story’s not much without decent gameplay. Though marketed as an adventure game, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective feels more like a puzzler sequestered away in a visual novel. When you’re not otherwise thumbing through conversations, you’ll be in what the game calls ‘Trick Time’.

To make this a little easier to understand, we’re going to use an example here. Let’s say you’re inside a flag and you have to make your way across the room to get something. In order to accomplish this, you’re going to have press the ‘Ghost’ button, switch to the Ghost World, and then draw a line from the flag to, say, a pitcher of water. Sissel will then do the rest. Interacting with objects is just as easy. For example, if you’re inside a candle and the words ‘burn brighter’ are present on your side bar, all you need to do is switch to the Land of the Living and hit the ‘Trick’ button. Once again, Sissel will take it from there.

The puzzles themselves are a lot more complex and likely to leave you going, ‘Wait. So, how am I supposed to use two suits of armor, a set of curtains, a globe and a framed-up sword?’. To complicate matters even further, there is often a time limit associated with these puzzles. Luckily for you (and everyone else in the predicament), Sissel can rewind time as many times as he likes, something that makes Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective nicely balanced between the realms of ‘forgiving’ and ‘why would you do this to me?’.

While we’re on the topic, here’s my only other infinitesimally tiny issue with the game. It’s too linear. I know, I know. This isn’t some sprawling, open-world sandbox of an action-RPG. However, they’ve done such a superb job at developing the environments that I kind of want to spend some time away from the main storyline. Ahem. If you haven’t guessed it already, I think Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the bee’s knees and with the first two chapters available for free you should definitely give it a shot. Following that, you shouldn’t have too difficult a time parting with the cash to unlock the rest of the game.

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Kotaku is reporting that Crytek, the company behind the CryEngine technology and the Crysis series of visually high-end first-person shooters, is in advanced stages of a new social gaming network that they’re calling GFACE. Yes, GFACE. I’m as baffled as you about the name, “game+Facebook” maybe?

Anyway, what the service known as GFACE actually claims to do sounds pretty cool. It runs completely in the browser and lets you do all the sorts of social things you would expect from your Facebook, Google+ or Twitter – add friends, post about your interests, discover new people, and plenty more. You can also meet up with people online and enjoy media-type things together, sort of like how you can watch a movie with friends in an Xbox Live party.

And of course, you can partner up and play games together. But this is the surprising part – all the game’s are streamed from the cloud on GFACE’s end, similar to how the OnLive system works. There’s a drag and drop party creation system that Kotaku likens to Battlefield 3‘s Battlelog, and then everybody plugs into the game on GFACE’s servers from their individual locations.

The interesting bit is that the type of gameplay seems to scale depending on what device you’re using. Like the graphic above, someone can be playing a first-person shooter on their PC while other players are connected to the game via their mobile devices, but with secondary roles. The person on the iPad has a commander role from a top-down perspective and the person on the iPhone-lookalike is directing a support weapon.

It’s a pretty exciting prospect thinking about being able to play games with people online in this fashion, utilizing different devices and gameplay perspectives all in the same game. I need another social network like I need a hole in my head, but the other features of GFACE sound pretty interesting as well. That name, though. Yeesh.

You can see a video of GFACE in action at the original Kotaku article or the GFACE website. The UI is bananas, everything is so smooth and high-tech feeling. I’m actually eager to check it out. Right now GFACE is in closed beta, but whenever it finally launches it will be interesting to see if it’s able to make an impact in the fledgling streaming game market or the nearly-impossible-to-compete-in social network market.

[Via Kotaku]

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Sissel has a lot of problems, but the least of  them is that he’s dead. Well, not dead-dead, but dead. I’ll explain: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective [Free] is all about what Sissel has gained in the afterlife. Like a common ghoul, this guy can rattle mundane objects, activate levers and buttons, and possess stuff. He can also decidedly un-ghoulishly rewind time, which is a trick that comes in pretty handy; a lot of the people he knows tend to die, and he needs these people to help him with his biggest problem: memory loss.

Ghost Trick first saw a release on Nintendo DS around a year ago. This isn’t its debut on iOS, though. A couple of months after the DS release, Capcom dropped a Universal version of the game on the Japanese App Store. Now, the rest of the world is finally getting to see a version of this port tonight.

And it seems like it’s OK from a technical standpoint. In my modest amount of time with it, I haven’t seen any port-specific issues like stuttering or flickering. It controls pretty well, too, and caters to your finger just about as well as it did to the stylus.

There’s some stuff still bothering me. The assets aren’t as high of a resolution as I would like. Also, a good sixth of the screen is covered by a thick layer of UI that, it seems, is simply there to keep the pixel density high. It’s weird.

In case you missed out on Ghost Trick, it breaks down like this: Sissel is often charged with reversing people’s deaths and he has to use his powers to do so. Each death is like a puzzle, basically, that has you opening doors, spiritually oozing to adjacent objects, and otherwise setting up Rube Goldberg-ian scenarios that’ll change that person’s fate.

In most cases, you’re watching a death, infesting that person’s body in order to rewind time, and then actively trying to disrupt that sequence. The solutions to puzzles seem to be mired in weird video game logic, but the saving grace here is that there is a single and true solution to every puzzle. You just gotta find it, you know?

I’ve been having a blast so far, by the way. This is a pretty thoughtful, if not challenging game with some insane, but fun-to-discover solutions. And while the minutes of overly long exposition is starting to wear me out, I’m digging the characters and the humor. Just wait until you meet dog, man. Wait for it.

We’ll definitely continue on with Ghost Trick, and try to give you something much more definitive than this in the near future. This is a free release, though — the first two chapters, which take about 60 or 70 minutes to complete, are what you’ll get with a $0 download, so that should give you a good indication of what you’re getting into. Our gut says grab it. Here’s some more screens:

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Foursaken Media has made a name for themselves which such quality releases as Bug Heroes [Free], it’s spinoff Bug Heroes Quest [99¢], and the wacky arcade cooking game Mad Chef [99¢]. In fact, they have yet to make a game that I don’t like, and it looks like they aren’t interested in breaking that trend anytime soon as their newest upcoming game Sky Gnomes looks like yet another winner. Rather than go into too much detail about Sky Gnomes, check out the hands-on video below where the developer does an excellent job of explaining all the ins and outs of the gameplay:

Sky Gnomes looks like it’s going to be a ton of fun, and I’m really digging how you’ll be able to race against the ghosts of other players. Also, it’s a really attractive game to look at, something that doesn’t quite show through as well in the above video. Further down the line, Foursaken is also in the beginning stages of a sequel to their first iOS title N.Y. Zombies [99¢]. They’re aware of how overdone zombie games are in the App Store, but they also know that the original game has quite a following of fans, and they’re eager to put everything they’ve learned through their last several releases to work on the N.Y. Zombies sequel.

Sky Gnomes is just being wrapped up, so shouldn’t be too long of a wait, and beyond that keep your eyes out for the sequel to N.Y. Zombies to hit sometime in 2012.

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In April of 2009, the world was treated to Ow My Balls! [Free], the “Citizen Kane of iPhone gaming” according to our own Eli Hodapp. Ow My Balls! is a simple but powerful arcade game where you kick a hapless gentleman off of a rooftop and try to rack his, ahem, family jewels let’s say, against as many painful objects as possible before hitting the ground. Aiding you in this noble quest is the use of flatulence to keep you afloat and carry you towards some hard to reach objects in the environment (like unicorns), which will ultimately lead to higher scores.

So yeah, Ow My Balls! probably won’t be the next favorite past time of high society, but it’s an immensely fun and funny game for those who can appreciate its lowbrow humor. At last year’s Macworld I talked with Ow My Balls! developer Josh Michaels about a huge version 2.0 update to the game which went live the following month and expanded the game with Retina Display visuals and a whole roster of new characters, as well as dropping its price to free.

This year at Macworld 2012, I again met with Josh to check out the upcoming Ow My Balls! XL for iPad. The iPad version will include everything from its iPhone counterpart, as well as a number of new enhancements. There’s a brand new politician character to play, as well as other subtle nods to current events like the hippie Bobby Surreal “occupying” the starting rooftop in his tent. New swiping controls have also been added which are both simple to use and more effective, ensuring that even your grandmother could play this game (something I could sense was a concern on everybody’s mind).

Finally, there is some fresh new title screen music and some new character dialogue, both of which you can see in this hands-on video (FYI if you’re somewhere that’s not blaring fart sounds friendly, you might want to check your volume):

Unfortunately, despite reaching nearly 5 million users, Ow My Balls! wasn’t exactly a financial success. Josh’s other project, ironically, is the classy and beautiful Magic Window [99¢] app that brings amazing time-lapse scenery to your iOS device. It’s as gorgeous as Ow My Balls! is silly, and it’s currently the one putting the Cup O’ Noodles on the table. No, Ow My Balls! XL isn’t meant to make money, though it may offer some sort of in-app purchase as more of a donation type of thing. Instead, Josh draws satisfaction just from knowing he’s made people laugh with his work (and about an equal number of people angry, as the iTunes reviews have always been roughly equal parts 1 and 5 stars).

If everything goes according to plan, then Ow My Balls! XL should be launching on Valentines Day for free, and I can’t really think of a better gift for your loved one. Also, in the very near future the iPhone version will be getting updated with all the additional features found in the iPad version. Sadly, once that’s completed, that will likely be the last of game development for Josh as he focuses solely on Magic Window. Sometimes you gotta do what pays the bills, even if it means putting your farting, nuts-kicking game to rest.

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At last year’s Macworld, XMG Studio was showing off Cows vs Aliens [99¢], a game I thoroughly enjoyed when it came out and is still amongst my favorite games. This year, their big upcoming title will be a brand new licensed Ghostbusters game. It’s not really past the concept stage just yet, but the mock artwork and test animation videos I saw are looking pretty sweet.

Ghostbusters will have a heavy social component, as well as some augmented reality gameplay ideas. So, for example, you might wander into Starbucks and get alerted that there’s a ghost on the loose there, and you’ll need to find it using your device’s camera and wrestle it down into one of those fancy traps just like in the movies. Then, you can valiantly hold your device in the air and loudly declare “we came, we saw, we kicked its ass!!” as the entire cafe cheers you on. Or something like that, at least that’s how I’d imagine it going down.

Another upcoming project from XMG is a remake of their incredibly popular Drag Racer: Pro Tuner [Free] series. Drag Racer lets you get super involved with tricking out a vehicle with tons of customization options, from cosmetic stuff to performance improvements, and then you get to take your ride to the streets and compete against other players and their cars. The new version will feature completely redone visuals and a nice UI overhaul, which the team tells me is something they’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Finally, if there are any teenagers in your life, then they might get a kick out of the just released Totally Amp’d! [Free]. XMG has enlisted some actual established actors to create 10 episodes to play through, which let you do things like create your own music videos, record your own songs, and come up with your very own fashion designs for characters in the game. The production values are through the roof in Totally Amp’d!, and you can check out the first episode for free with the remaining episodes available as a $4.99 in-app purchase.

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