Bruce's Blog

Just finished a great little game available from Steam called "The Maw". The game is a modern Platformer with disgustingly cute aliens. The two aliens escape from a prison together and form a friendship centering on the one alien helping the other alien eat everything on the planet. While the characters, the animation style and the style of mayhem might seem a bit childish I can assure you its highly entertaining and very unpredictable.

Not a single word is spoken throughout the game yet there is plenty of story. Emotions are conveyed through the style of animation quite well and I couldn't help but like the characters. The graphics are cartoony but really well done and the music is fantastic and helps keep the mood. Overall very well worth the $8.99 I spent for it and I'll probably pick up the $4 - 6 worth of optional content available in the coming weeks.

Twisted Pixel Games, the indie publisher who made the game, has posted a decent trailer on Youtube:

For those of us who are into less popular forms of music and artists a great new resource has been created. The Pandora website hosts a flash/web browser based application. It promises to help you locate other artists you'd like by creating online radio stations based on what qualities the music by your specified artist has.

For instance if you pick "Nightwish" it populates an online radio station with similar music and for the most part gets it right. You can vote on which suggestions you like or ask it why it made particular suggestions. For instance on the "Nightwish" station it picked a band called "10 Years" as one of the suggestions. Its justification is that "based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features hard rock roots, mild rhythmic syncopation, meandering melodic phrasing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and a vocal-centric aesthetic."

And the best thing about it is its entirely written in Flash which means it will work on any platform that has a flash player without needing software to be installed on the host system. The application works smoothly and will even spawn itself in a seperate small window and stay playing as long as you have your web browser open on any page.