Muse will be in SF for GDC for a quick stay from March 10-13th. We’ll be attending classes, reconnecting with friends, and looking for potential partners & new opportunities. If you’d like to get in touch with us during our stay, just drop us an email:

hello [at] musegames [dot] com

Thanks to everybody who joined the ranks of our Facebook Fans. Without further ado, the winner is……Katie Saban!

It was great to see so many people reaching out. You guys are great and we will be in touch soon with more info about our upcoming games.

Don’t forget: we’re having a developer get-together this Wednesday from 6-9 PM at our office in Soho. If you’re in NYC, come out and say hello.

It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally hosting a Unity Devs get together - this Wed from 6-9pm in our spacious offices in downtown Manhattan. Come shoot the shit with our team and all the other NYC Unity folk! p.s. play games, drink beer, eat pizza - our treat!

The Boing Boing games page just turned me onto Captain Forever, an awesome way to kill some time and entertain your dreams of becoming the next Buck Rogers. It’s everything you want in a flash game: easy to learn, tough to master, with addictive gameplay, and a unique sense of style.

First, the aesthetic is great. The whole interface is 80’s style DOS-command line retro. Gameplay is over a 2D plane (funny how space is flat in the future), and the instruction manual appears in block text ALL CAPS. You start with a bang — literally — as your ship is blown to smithereens, leaving only the command module intact. A helpful, WALL-E style junkbot flies itself over and then disintegrates, allowing you to cannibalize the modules of that ship to rebuild your own. Armed with a mix of girders, thrusters, engines, and a pulsing metallic heart, you begin your journey through the lawless realm of space.

The “build your own ship” function is the major draw. The first few enemies you run into are pushovers; it’s easy to blow them up and assimilate their components, Borg-style. But before too long, you are facing some tough decisions. The game’s flying physics require close attention. If your layout of thrusters and weight is unbalanced, then you won’t be able to fly straight, let alone fight. Thankfully, it’s easy to re-spec on the fly, just by clicking on a piece and using drag-and-drop to move it around. It doesn’t take long for enemies to start coming at you in waves, which makes quick modifications essential.

Before long, you move up from the entry-level Green enemies to the tougher Yellow and Red varieties. Not only are their girders and weapons tougher than yours, but their combat-focused design adds an extra layer of difficulty. And it’s here where ship design for your own rig becomes especially important. Just building a generic rocket ship is not going to cut it against these guys. You’ll face armadillo ships that can turn quickly and bring their guns to bear with frightening speed, or really nasty buggers loaded with guns that fire in 8 directions at once. And that’s when you wonder…what does it take to become Captain Forever?

Thankfully, even if your ship should be destroyed, all is not lost. The game keeps a running record of your best spec, and when you get blown up, it takes you to a separate screen with a picture of your saved layout and options to share via Facebook, Twitter, and email. There are other nice touches too. If you have a webcam, you can take a picture of your own face to make a mash-up Top Gun style fighter pilot helmet, which appears in the background as a ghostly overlay. The sound is perfect, too: a collection of blips, bloops, and garbled robot voices that make your trip to the future seem like a pleasant stroll down memory lane. If you have $20 burning a hole in your pocket you can also register for the full version, which unlocks a lot more content. Go check out Captain Forever — tell us what you think in the comments!

Dear Fans:

We’ve got a great deal for you. Become our Friend on Facebook, and get a chance to win a copy of Guns of Icarus!

How to Play: Become our fan starting NOW until February 28. On March 1 we will announce the winner. All new friends will be eligible.

Don’t forget to tell your friends!

The early 1990’s were the Golden Age of Sierra Adventure Games, which featured a bunch of addictive, kid-friendly adventure titles like So You Want to be a Hero? and Space Quest III. These games featured cheesy protaganists and plenty of self-deprecating humor. So when Manhunter: New York came along, the sudden turn towards a dark tone and bleak atmosphere was shocking.


Manhunter: New York was set in the unimaginable post-apocalyptic future of the year 2004. An alien race called The Orbs had occupied New York City two years before and turned it into an impenetrable fortress. The Orb’s domination of the city was total — all inter-human contact was strictly forbidden. To make matters worse, your nameless protaganist was one of the stooges for the alien oppressors. As the eponymous Manhunter, it was your job to track down and arrest human criminals on behalf of the Orbs.

The most memorable thing about this game was the overwhelming sense claustrophobia and gloom. These days, a game released by a major studio set in post-apocalyptic Manhattan would probably embrace the open-world genre, giving you freedom to roam about freely and find all kinds of hidden goodies, side quests, and easter eggs. Manhunter took the completely opposite approach. The story development was absolutely linear. You visited locations in a certain order, and could not move to the next location until you had met a specific objective. It sounds rigid, and it was. But it also perfectly created the feeling of being a prisoner in your own world, a slave with no choice but to obey your master without question. The Orb’s control (at least at first) was total, and you could do nothing but obey the order to go from one crumbling, desolate area to another. Along the way you saw corpses, clues, and hints towards a greater mystery beneath the surface.

Listen to your friend Billy Zane, he's a cool dude, he's trying to help you

I had mixed feelings about the end (SPOILER ALERT)! In the course of the game, your investigations bring you to find a human criminal killing other human. It turns out there is a Resistance against the Orbs, and your target is killing members of the resistance. When you take him out, you become the Leader of the Anti-Orb movement; and by the end of the game you drove the invaders from New York. It felt somehow jarring to have a happy ending after the game had opened with such a bleak atmosphere. But it was good for the franchise to end on a high-note: the sequel Manhunter: San Francisco saw you going cross-country a few years later to end Orb domination of that city.

Graphically, Manhunter: New York just doesn’t hold up to the test of time. And come to think out, the gameplay mechanics weren’t all that great either. But the game did created an unusual and richly-visualized setting, in an alien-dominated New York City, which I have fond memories of exploring to this day.

This edition of Games We Loved is contributed by our friend and gaming junkie Alexander Liss

Because you should be!

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This edition of Games We’re Playing is contributed by our friend and fellow gaming junkie Alexander Liss

I just finished my first playthrough of Demon’s Souls, a third person action RPG from From Software, and I’m moving into New Game+. I’d boldy say it’s the best game on the PS3 to date, and perhaps even one of the greatest RPG’s of all time. Trying to describe how good this game is is like drinking from a fire hose.


Demon’s Souls is the most realistic RPG I’ve ever played. What does it mean for a fantasy RPG to be realistic? A couple of things. First, Demon’s Souls immerses you completely in a hopeless, despairing world on the knife-edge of total destruction. As you start to play, you immediately realize the odds are stacked against you — heavily. Enemies attack in groups. Levels are designed to lure you into ambushes. Traps lie in wait that can kill you instantly if you’re not careful. And even when you do find allies, the NPC’s you rescue are not a cheerful lot. They can lose hope and go mad, or commit suicide and be resurrected as demons that you must fight. The game’s commitment to creating a sense of dread and danger is total.

The realism gets stronger with the elegant combat system — which is handled, like the entire game, in real-time without even a pause button. In addition to Health and Magic, you also have a status bar for Stamina. Stamina is required for all physical actions more taxing than walking — in other words, blocking, attacking, sprinting, and dodging. With the addition of the stamina bar, your strategic considerations increase exponentially. Mashing on the attack button too quickly will leave your stamina depleted and make you a sitting duck. Blocking an attack from a strong enemy will drain a significant amount of stamina or even break your guard and leave you vulnerable to attack. The strategic trade-off you have to account for with Stamina is a masterpiece of game design.

So you are probably asking — what’s the draw? Well, when you finally hit that breakthrough and clear the first level, you will feel a rush of satisfaction that few other games can provide. You have touched death itself — and emerged victorious. The level design is difficult, but never feels cheap. Once you clear that first level, things start to CLICK, and you realize how to play and succeed at this game. And that’s when you realize you are entering into a richer and more rewarding adventure than most games can even dream of providing.

Then there is the multiplayer. No matter how bleak the odds in Demon’s Souls — you are never alone. The first thing you see are messages and visual echoes. Messages are short phrases left by other players, things like “Behind you!” or “Use ranged weapons on the next enemy.” The context of these messages isn’t always clear, but in the right situation they can be a life saver.

There are also, around you at all times, the visual echoes of what other players in your world are doing at that very moment. I call them White Phantoms. They only last for a few seconds, and blink in and out at random. But it gives you an odd feeling of comfort and solidarity with your invisible fellows. You also see Bloodstains — a recording of the last 10 seconds of what a character was doing before they died. Touch a bloodstain and you will get a tip of what foes lie in wait around that next corner, or if a pit trap looms ahead.

Then there is co-op. You start the game in Soul form, but if you defeat a boss, you get your body back. When in body form, other players in soul form can offer a blue eye stone for you to summon them for co-op. Players can’t communicate directly in the game, but can exchange emotes like a bow or a cheer. Summoning a phantom to your game makes the perilous boss fights a great deal more manageable. If you destroy a boss while helping as a Blue Phantom, you get your body back and return to your world. Then you can summon more blue phantoms to help you in a virtuous cycle.

Finally, there is player versus player. When in body form, other players in soul form can invade your world as a Black Phantom. If they kill you, the Black Phantom get its body back, and you are robbed of yours. Computer-controlled enemies will ignore Black Phantoms, which gives the invader a great advantage if they choose to take a sneaky approach. However, to balance out this advantage, the host can summon up to 2 blue phantoms to help, so the odds can quickly stack up against the invader. And the penalty for being killed as a Black Phantom is the loss of a soul level, so the invader must weight their chances carefully.

There are numerous other gameplay mechanics I haven’t even touched upon — I would recommend you check out one of the many glowing professional reviews of this game, written here, and here. If you have a chance to play Demon Soul’s I highly recommend you do so. It’s one of the most innovative console games to come out in a long time.