Happy New Year!  Sorry that I haven't been posting much at all in the past couple of months.  The holiday was quite busy and so was work.  I've had a number of articles "locked in the chamber" but just haven't been around to polish them up and pull the trigger.

Things are actually slower right now (kind of a good thing!) but I'm trying to make finishing up these articles a priority for the new year.  So here's my first one, a list of games on various platforms that have gotten my attention over the past couple years...

There are two trends in game design/mechanics/genres that are really bugging the heck out of me right now: deck building card games, mostly clones of Dominion with a new theme and mild mechanic changes, and tower defense video games, which just copy each other and flood the iTunes app store.

Really need to apoligize for the lack of posts.  The new job turned out to be a lot of work (what new job isn't), the weather was nice, and TIFF only just wrapped up last week.  But now it's September, time to put our heads down and get back to being productive, right?

Well, not with this post, not just yet. :) I'll do some development-related posts in the future (I have about 3-4 in draft mode, just need to clean 'em up) but today I just wanted to point you towards some indie games that I've been following the development on.  They're not out yet unfortunately, but most have a lot of juicy screen shots and videos for you to enjoy in the mean time. (And yes, I was inspired by Mashable's article)

Monaco

As the Monaco website says, this game promises to be an interesting mix of "Pac-Man meets Hitman", although given the "heist" background story in the game, I prefer Pac-Man meets Ocean's 11.  You run around each level, avoiding the security cameras, hacking computers, distracting guards and picking locks, with your team of up to 4 buddies, attempting to steal something of value.

Monaco has a lot of 8-bit charm obviously, but it has science smarts too: all of the level previews use steganography to encode the actual data for the level right into the image!  Read the blog post on Facebook, it can do a much better job of explaining it than I can, plus it has more pretty pictures.