Jonathan Mak's one man show Everyday Shooter is now available to PC gamers via Steam. Like the PlayStation 3 version, it's a mere $9.99 USD—actually $8.99 in its debut week on Valve's digital distribution platform—a bargain for such a fabulous little, Independent Game Festival award winning experience like this. Also exciting? A revamped Steam web site that makes it easier to peruse the ever increasing catalog. Hooray!
Everyday Shooter [Steam Games]
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What obsessions plague our top independent game designers today? What theories keep them up at night? What possibilities blow their minds, challenge their presumptions and make them sound like a bunch of philosophical hippies after two bottles of ice wine and carton of black bean hummus?
Kellee Santiago (fl0w), Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter) and Pekko Koskinen (LudoCraft) told us of their obsessions during our first session of GDC's Independent Games Summit. And these simple ideas that make their minds spin forced us rethink games a bit as well.
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1:30 PM on Mon Feb 18 2008
By Mark Wilson
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I've made fun of NPR more than my fair share, but Heather Chaplin recently did an interesting piece regarding the "games that got away." About 7 minutes of radio gives credit to three incredible games we've seen this year: Portal, Everyday Shooter, and Desktop Tower Defense.
It's worth listening to just to hear Jonathan Mak call Everyday Shooter a "celebration of geometric sexuality." And, of course, I don't know that any Kotaku readers have overlooked any of these three games—but in case you have, yeah, it's time to check them out. I just wish that the radio piece said a little less about GLaDOS, since her evolution of character is one of the most fascinating and surprising (yet gloriously inevitable) elements of Portal. Still, hopefully well-written stories like this on NPR help these games sink into the mainstream consciousness as much as they have our own.
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Everyday Shooter — that PSN release that you'll hopefully all be downloading a couple of weeks from now — had a presence at the show, with its creator, Canadian Jonathan Mak, on hand to give people a go at the game. Since the title isn't getting a Japanese release just yet, Mak was previewing the game from a laptop, and offering the use of earphones so that you could take in the game as it was meant to be played, meaning in a space where you can actually hear the music (not easy when you're located right next to Capcom's bombastic booth).
As has been written elsewhere, the game is an absolute blast, but surprising to me was the variety of gameplay that each level introduces. From Geometry Wars-like waves of enemies you move on to hard-to-kill and quickly-spreading insectoids to a level that Mak says was inspired by the Ghibli film Porco Rosso (you need to shoot down red airplanes that continually circle you).
It sounds like Mak is in a good place right now, with the release of the game coming up, and plans are already on the way for a new, undisclosed project. While I was at the booth, a writer for Japanese game bible Famitsu walked by, and he was so entranced that he pretty much promised on the spot that he would feature the game in an upcoming column.
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I am, to put it lightly, a huge fan of Jonathan Mark's Everyday Shooter. It's the sort of simple approach to gaming that both seems to get casual gaming and still provide the sort of experience that a hardcore gamer can enjoy.
So I was thrilled when I heard that the game was headed to the Playstation Network. After playing through the game on my debug Playstation 3 I was even more thrilled, the translation was sublime.
Now I hear that Sony is in talks with Mak to sign him on for a multi-game deal. I think it could be a major coup for the PSN, specifically the indie/casual side of things, if they can make things work out. Mark brings to the gaming scene a sense of fun that seems at times to be getting pushed to the side, so it's nice to see it pop its head up on a major platform.
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