A demo was just released on the intertubes for Amanita Design's highly anticipated point n' click adventure game, Machinarium. It's a 30mb download which you can grab below.

What is there else to say really? Go download it! And don't forget that the full game releases on October 16th, which you can grab at a number of sites, including AD's official page or Direct2Drive's site where you can get it for 5 bucks off the regular price. So yeah, I'm excited. Are you excited? I'm sure we're all excited.

Download Machinarium

Lose/Lose is a game created by Zach Gage. In it, your supposed to kill aliens by shooting them. Simple premise right? But there's a twist put on this, every alien is randomly generated and made according to a file located somewhere on your computer. When you destroy that alien, the file it was made from gets permanently deleted from your hard drive.

According to the creator, Lose/Lose is supposed to question the act of killing in a video game. The main question it raises is "Do we hold the value of virtual items over real physical beings?" The aliens never attack you, so should you attack them or not? Normally you would say "it's a video game, of course I'm going to kill them!", but this time the consequences of your data being deleted are tacked on, so you're left with the option to think about what to do. This ultimately boils down to what's more important to you, the alien's lives or your data? Obviously no one's going to give a shit about the aliens, and this brings about a flaw with the game.

So is this an effective way to even raise this question? Sure, it would suck to have files on my computer be deleted permanently, but of course I'm going to care more for the files on my computer over some alien in a video game that I don't care for in the least bit. The circumstances would be different if some bad guy was holding a gun to someone's head, while he dangled my PC above a crater of lava and asked me to choose between the two. Technology undoubtedly plays an excruciatingly important role in our world, but will our technology become more important then the people who inhabit our world? Some would say it already has, but there's always room for things to get worse.

Anyone willing to take the risk and try out Lose/Lose?

Play Lose/Lose

*note - if you look at this header and dismiss the rest of this post then you are a retard

Cactus put up some teaser footage for his upcoming game Life/Death/Island earlier today. It appears to be an open world game(with screen progression) where you pretty much just have to survive! Animals, zombies, whatever gets in your way, just fucking blast them! All wrapped up in Atari 2600 styled graphics that Cactus has come to use a lot on his games(fuck year Shotgun Ninja). Not to mention the song used in the trailer is awesome. Obviously it won't be a part of the actual game, but Cactus always has awesome music for his games anyway, so it's not much of a big deal.

Honestly, there's not much to write about here, but it's Jonatan "motherfucking Cactus" Sodmersbosrhoegj. As with all of his previous releases, I'm sure I'll love Life/Death/Island. Oh yeah, Air Pirates still needs to be released... so we might not see LDI for a while. If you haven't heard of Air Pirates, peep the trailer below!

SNK showed off the shmup reiteration of their King of Fighters fighting series during Japan's JAMMA AM show. Thankfully, we now have two different videos from the show with some random guy playing through the game. The first video the game is being played through with Athena Asamiya(who doesn't love being a flying girl in a shmup?) and the second video features Kyo Kusanagi.

And what to say about the videos? I don't really know. Skystage doesn't seem to be anything spectacular. Still looks like it will be a fun vertical shmup though. I'm mainly wondering who would be playing this game. Would die-hard King of Fighters fans give this a try? Or will it appeal more to the shmup fanatic? It usually seems to me like Fighting and STG fans go hand in hand. You love one then you love the other. Either way, I hope the XBLA release of Skystage makes its way stateside. If it doesn't, then just have your Japanese XBL accounts ready.

Time Fukc was finally released a little while ago. If you're not familiar with it, it's a product of the Power of Three competition over at Newgrounds. The whole point of the competition was for people to form a group of three and create a game. Edmund McMillen(Super Meat Boy, Twin Hobo Rocket, Gish), William Good, and Justin Karpel formed their 3-man team and made Time Fkcu. It's a puzzle platformer that has you shifting the stage's perspective with inversion while trying to reach the portal in each level. While this concept is nothing new, it's coupled with a very odd story where yourself from 20 minutes in the future forces you into a box because your existence depends on it. Despite the person forcing you to do these things is yourself, you can be quite the insulting and manipulative prick.

Unfortunately, there are some bugs that need to be worked out, as many people are reporting issues with the game. I myself couldn't progress further after stage 5 or so because once I completed it, the game would just display a blank white screen and there's nothing I could do to prevent it. Even so, it's a worthy effort to check out, especially if your a fan of Edmund McMillen since his quirkiness definitely shines through in Time Fkcu.

There's also a map editor available, and a search function so you can play through other people's user submitted levels. Despite the game only being three hours old or so, there are quite a number of user-created levels you can wade through. Currently, the only problem I see with the map editor is that you need a Newgrounds account to use it... and I don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon.

Play Time Fcuk

Also worthy to note; quite a few indie game trailers were released today. The first off is a trailer for Super Meat Boy, which I'm sure needs no introduction here at Destructoid. Team Meat(Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, John McEntee) released a new trailer for their upcoming WiiWare title which shows off some of the gameplay. Thoroughly loved the original, so I'm really looking forward to Team Meat's(mainly Edmunds!) debut on the Wii.



Next up is a new trailer for PB Winterbottom, which is another title many people here at Dtoid are looking forward to(mainly Reverend Anthony and Ashley Davis). This particular trailer gives you some info on Winterbottom, as well as some gameplay footage. Been following this one for an eternity, can't wait for it's XBLA release!



Last, but certainly not least, is this criminally short teaser for Infinite Ammo's upcoming(but still in very early stages) Marian. For those not in the know, Infinite Ammo is a game studio headed by Alec Holowka, which some of you might know him as 1/2 of the Bit-Blot team(along with Derek Yu) responsible for Aquaria. Marian might also strike familiarity with you from some beautiful concept art that was shown to the public earlier in the year(which you can view below).

It's been quite a while since we've heard anything about this game. Alec today said that Marian will be very difficult and expensive to create, but it's a project he cares about more than any other other he has ever worked on, and is quite adamant on seeing through to it's completion for the world to experience. I gotta say, i admire the man's passion. If you'd like to help him out, you can donate to his studio. Any bit can help here folks, but a donation of ten dollars or more will get your name on a "Friends of Marian" list on the credits of the final game.

Marian is best described in one of Play magazines "Girls of Gaming" issues: “Marian is a beautifully carved marionette who rips her strings from the grasp of ‘The Narrator’ and becomes her own master. Caught in the dream world between life and death, she uses her own puppet handle as a weapon and replaces her limbs with a variety of tools in her quest to discover her true identity – and maybe even true love.”

Sounds like the makings of a great game. Keep your eye on the Infinte Ammo blog so you don't miss out on any info about Marian!

For a while now, Attract Mode has been an awesome blog to visit and catch up on the latest artistic happenings concerning the video game world. The owner of the site, Adam Robezzoli, has been kicking around the idea of a "video game culture shop" since 2005, and his dream has finally come to fruition earlier yesterday with the opening of the Attract Mode Videogame Culture Shop.

The shop has quite a few things to offer, including two shirts. One of them bearing a design by one of my favorite artists, James Harvey, and the other with the site mascot Broglin, which was designed by none other than Anna Anthropy(might be better known to some as Auntie Pixelante). You can also find some chiptune albums for sale from artists like Anamanaguchi, YMCK, and Leeni. There's also these bitching art prints by the superbrothers, which are a tad expensive, but if I had the money then I would gladly plop it down for at least one of them. Would look awesome hanging in your gaming room.



My absolute favorite thing at the shop? It has to be the cactus and auntie pixelante button packs. I'm not much of a button person, but if you know anything about me than you know I love me some indie gaming. Cactus is by far one of my favorite indie developers, and seeing this button pack bear the characters of his Psychosomnium game(one of my favorites of his) has got me really excited to see what other indie developers will have goods bearing their games for sale at Attract Mode. Maybe some messhof or Konjak related goods? Ah, the possibilities are endless! Be sure to check out the shop and cop a t-shirt or something, I'm still teetering on the idea of purchasing one of those Dot Matrix Revolution prints...

Attract Mode Videogame Culture Shop