2D GAME OVERVIEW
Taking a look at platformers in general, most of them are based on fairly odd premises, with mushroom-hopping plumbers rescuing princesses, anthropomorphized animals on missions to save fantasy worlds, and the occasional gravity-flipping sci-fi tale. But even amongst these, Dustforce stands out as being built upon a strange foundation, namely that of sweeping up dust and debris.

2D GAME VERSUS FEATURE
In the early days of the industry, video games were comprised of a small number of core gameplay mechanics, and the introduction of a single new mechanic – even a small one – could mean the creation of an entirely new genre. For instance, the core mechanic behind Pong was to bounce a ball back and forth between two paddles. By changing the orientation of the gameplay and putting a row of bricks across the top of the screen, the game becomes Breakout. Allow the bricks to move back and forth and shoot at the player while the player shoots back, and the game becomes Space Invaders. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it shows how a few relatively minor tweaks in the formula allowed for the creation of a number of distinct games, each falling into their own genre.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
At the start of VVVVVV, Captain Viridian and his five V-named shipmates suddenly encounter some sort of interference that places the ship in peril. The crew heads for the teleporter to get away… but something goes wrong and everyone is sent to a different location. The player controls Viridian as he explores the world to find his crew and return them safely back aboard the vessel.

The player has very limited controls. He can move left and right, and he can flip gravity. There is no jumping on platforms, no climbing ladders, no shooting guns, no collecting upgrades, and no gaining new abilities; there is only movement and gravity. As simple as these mechanics may sound, the entire game is built around this limited control scheme, and each of its challenges centers on using them in various creative ways.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Oozi: Earth Adventure is a 4-part series of platformers for the Xbox Live Indie Games channel. The game stars a character named Oozi who has crash-landed his spaceship on Earth after running out of fuel during a delivery. Unfortunately, the resulting crash not only stranded him on an enemy-filled planet, but his ship and clothes have mysteriously disappeared, leaving him in only his underwear. However, in the lighthearted tone of the game, Oozi dismisses this by stating that apparently these sorts of things just happen on this planet.

DEVELOPER INTERVIEW
And now for a slight change of pace… Our latest 10 Questions interview is text-based rather than video-based, and is splayed out below for your comprehensible delectation. This time around, we spend some internet time with Jonathan Lavigne, the head of indie developer Tribute Games, the studio behind Wizorb. The format may be different, but the questions are the same. Prepare yourself for insights into the developer’s 2D gaming influences, development process, and other sundry facts.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
There aren’t many developers who can claim to have been inspired to make a game based on the size of their wives (at least not many who have survived to tell the tale), but that’s precisely what developer David Johnston did. As he watched his pregnant wife grow bigger and bigger, he began to think of her growth in video game terms… How would you deal with a platforming world if you played a character who couldn’t stop growing? That question is answered with Growing Pains.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Brick breaking became its own genre with the 1976 arcade release of Breakout, created in the earliest days of what would eventually become known as the video game industry. As with all great successes of the day, the game went on to be cloned and copied and iterated upon many times over. Years later, a game based upon this formula – called Arkanoid – surpassed the original by adding new types of bricks, variable brick formations, and powerup capsules.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Escape Goat is a puzzle-platformer that stars an unlikely hero – namely a purple goat who has been imprisoned for the crime of witchcraft – and his unlikelier companion, a mouse that can run up walls. The duo must use their heads, literally and figuratively, to make their way through dozens of challenging single-screen dungeons on a quest to rescue a batch of fluffy sheep and escape the clutches of their captors.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
The title Dead Pixels: An 8-Bit Zombie Sim borders on the artful in terms of its descriptiveness of the core gameplay. The game features an 8-bit art style with character sprites reminiscent of the 8-bit Mega Man games. The main character faces off against hordes of the undead in a street-by-street battle to safety. But unlike a straightforward action game, you must manage your supplies, acquire money, and purchase upgrades if you hope to survive.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Celestial Mechanica takes place in a distant future where mankind’s endless warring and poor stewardship of the earth actually caused the planet to destabilize and break apart. Fortunately for humanity, a race of technologically advanced beings swept in at the last second and restored the planet. The celestial beings set up shop in a floating fortress called Mechanica and continued to watch over the earth to prevent its previous fate from recurring. 100 years have passed since that time, and no one has seen a Mechanian since they saved the earth. But of course, all of that is about to change.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
The ninja has been a cornerstone of video gaming since the early days of the industry. What better basis for a game than a masked character trained in the martial arts, swordsmanship, stealth, and the art of deception? These characteristics lend themselves to straightforward action games, 1-on-1 fighters, stealth-based games, and many more. As such, the variety in ninja-based games is tremendous, ranging from the likes of the shuriken tossing Shinobi, high flying Legend of Kage, magic using Ninja Spirit, grapple swinging Ninja Five-O, stealth killing Tenchu, and too many others to count. (ed note: screenshots below are a mix of the PC and Xbox 360 versions.)

DEVELOPER INTERVIEW
In the 15th episode of our 10 Questions series, we spend some time with several key members of D-Pad Studio, the developer behind Owlboy. If you're a fan of beautiful sprite art, clever action-adventure gameplay, and charming characters, then Owlboy needs to be on your radar.

In this interview, we speak with Jo-Remi Madsen, Simon Stafsnes Andersen, and Henrik Stafsnes Andersen. The developers discuss some of their favorite 2D games, their creative influences, what goes into making a good game, and why it's important to pay attention to the learning curve. The team also discusses their development workflow (or lack thereof), the creation of the Owlboy art style, and the dangers of taking a bus to a party in the middle of nowhere.

Check out the video below, which features loads of gameplay footage and artwork.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
The primary goal in Climb to the Top of the Castle! is evident by its name. A knight must climb to the top of a castle – a really, really tall castle – to rescue a princess who has been kidnapped by an evil warlock and his mechanical army. From start to finish, the game is presented as a humorous tale, with purposeful overuse and misuse of medieval language, quips from the knight throughout the journey, and silly cutscenes.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Chester is a game that is at once both simple and complex in design. On the one hand, it is a pure projectile-based platformer. It has no grand sweeping narrative, no light and dark mechanic, no time travel, and no gravity flipping. It is not a window into the human condition, nor is it a commentary on the difficulty of old-school classics, and its tone is far from dark and moody. It is simply a platformer.

DEVELOPER INTERVIEW
For the 14th episode of our 10 Questions series, we have a very special guest… a man who has been working in the industry for over 20 years. He worked on several games in the StarFox series; he founded his own studio, Q-Games, which is responsible for the PixelJunk series; and he even helped Shigeru Miyamoto learn to speak English!

That man is Dylan Cuthbert.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Blocks That Matter falls into what has now become a rather broad genre classification; namely, the puzzle-platformer category. Blocks That Matter shares this label with such disparate titles as Braid, Max and the Magic Marker, and Wyv and Keep, while having practically nothing in common with any of them.

The game begins when a pair of game developers is suddenly abducted and taken to a cabin in the woods. The men are named Alexey and Markus, which is a reference to Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, both of which are block-based games.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
SpeedRunner HD is a conversion of the Flash-based game SpeedRunner from DoubleDutch Games. The original title was a hit, garnering millions of plays in just the first month after release. The game has been updated with an HD presentation for the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, allowing you to sit in front of your video wall with a controller in hand as you run, jump, double jump, slide, grapple, and wall jump your way through each of the time-based levels.

DEVELOPER INTERVIEW
For the 13th episode of our 10 Questions series, we spend some time with Patrick Derosby, the one-man team behind Merge the Memory Bit Studios and the ninja action-platformer Mute Crimson.

Patrick discusses how Mute Crimson was influenced by such titles as Ninja Gaiden, Super Meat Boy, and N+, and what kinds of elements he feels go into designing a good action game. Patrick also speaks on his level design process, how he settled on the game’s limited color palette and pixellated art style, and how playtesting helped him to balance the game's overall difficulty. And he gives us a heads-up about the next project he has in the pipeline. The video below shows lots of new gameplay, as well as strategies for grabbing some of the hidden collectibles that are spread throughout the game.

UPCOMING 2D GAME OVERVIEW
Owlboy is a game that seems to have tumbled out of a time warp that opened on September 4, 1995, sending its 16-bit design hurtling forward to the present day. The game’s chunky sprite art, charismatic NPC’s, and charmingly animated enemies would be very much at home in an 8 megabit cartridge. Even the title screen screams 16-bit, with the lead character sitting in the foreground as the wind blows around him and he stares across the floating islands of his home village, with a hint of danger in the distance as sky pirates descend from the dark clouds. About the only thing that betrays the game’s modern design is the soundtrack, which definitely would not have been possible on the systems of old.