Category: News

So proud to share this news with you. Western Australian Indie games company STIRFIRE will release their game on STEAM tomorrow. We interviewed Garth Pendergast a while ago when Freedom Fall first came out.

PRESS RELEASE

Freedom Fall Levels Up for Steam Release
Bigger, More Beautiful, More Steam

Perth, January 9, 2014 — Freedom Fall, the delightfully diabolical down-scrolling indie platformer, hits Steam on January 10 with all new content and features.

It’s a fast-paced action game wrapped around a surprisingly layered tale of guilt and innocence, colourful taunts, twisted humour, a princess and a rogue, deadly contraptions and swooping dragons.

The Steam release delivers two new levels (taking the total to 14), updated animations for slicker hand-drawn action, smarter camera movement, achievements to earn, added trading cards, badges and emoticons to collect, and now you can pit your best runs against your friends on the new Freedom Fall leaderboards.

The two new levels in the game are The Garden and The Undersea Lair. The Garden is set early in the game, while The Undersea Lair is a super hard level unlocked after completing the game.

Freedom Fall Artist, Writer and Designer Lisa Rye says, “We wanted to do something special for Steam. I’m most excited to see how players react to the two new levels, but I’m also really glad I had this chance to go through and give the whole game another level of visual polish to get it closer to how I picture it in my head. You never quite have time for everything you want to get into your game, so something like this is a great thank you for everyone who voted for us on Steam, as well as the team.”

Freedom Fall was developed in Perth, Australia, and won the 2013 West Australian Screen Award for Best Videogame, and reached the final round of the Australia-wide Game Developer Awards in two categories: Best Game and Design.

It will be available on Steam January 10 for US$6.49, and will be US$9.99 after the launch sale ends. For more information, art assets or interview opportunities with Lisa Rye please contact us.

Reviewed by Krista McKeeth

(BACK OF THE BACK OF BEYOND Come and join the Party!

Through her short stories “No Pets Allowed”, “Get Me to The Worldcon on Time” , “My Sweet 286” and “Party”, Edwina Harvey introduced her readers to a world where flatmates discover the difficulties of raising young dragons in small suburban apartments, where “flying” to a science fiction convention takes on a whole new meaning, and where “the next door neighbours” on an Australian rural backblock are out of this world, but the parties are legendary.
Now collected here for the first time, these stories are interwoven with seven new tales set in the same universe.

Come and be introduced to a rural Australian landscape you never knew existed somewhere out in the back of the back of beyond.

If you had to describe this book in one word, it would be “quirky.”  The stories are short and at times made me do a double take and say to myself “what just happened?”  They are ordered in a way that makes the collection seem to be continuous narrative with character development and progression along the way.

From the very first story of trying to understand how two flatmates were capable of raising a dragon in such a small space, to the idea of traveling by air and going through a drive-in fast food restaurant to order food without landing, this collection is unique.

Each separate chapter, or story has an element of the weird, some reality and a bit of the supernatural. From a snake that tries to mate with (or eat?) a power cord, to a dragon farm, unicorns and aliens, this book really does have a variety of characters.

I am sure that many of us love the idea of moving to secluded farmland and unplugging from the outside world for awhile; cherishing the moments we do get to share with family and friends, meeting new ones and in this unusual case, getting to know an alien creature and their love for Coca Cola. Edwina Harvey provides it all.

Although I am still trying to gather all my thoughts on these stories, it is definitely a book that I will remember for years to come. Taking place in the “outback” of Australia, it is a humorous and quirky read. If you’re looking for something a little outside of the box, you should pick this one up!

 Peggy Bright Books (December 8, 2013)

Reviewed by Jamie Marriage

The latest novel in the decades-long Discworld series is a beast of a truly different species. While having many familiar characters, the story is one of seemingly random complexity and guile.

Set, of course, on a disc of a world balancing on the back of four giant elephants who ride on the back of a star turtle, Raising Steam is situated across a vast landscape with an almost equally vast cast of characters.

The invention of the steam engine has caused great intrigue and possibility across the Discworld. Heads of government and merchants alike speak of the possibilities and risk, every sentient species dreams of the chance to ride on the magnificent Iron Girder, and a sub-sect of dwarf culture is out to stop the future at the cost of a fragile peace with the rest of the world.

Raising Steam is the third of the Moist Von Lipwig sub-series. Once again tired of success, this time after completely reforming the banking system in the earlier novel Making Money, Moist is first pressured, and then drawn, into the promise of the steam engine. Lord Vetinari, benevolent tyrant of the largest city on the Disc, insists on pushing the new railway as far as it can go for diplomatic reasons. And Harry King, also known as King of the Golden River (for various reasons), is seeking to be remembered for something more than the person responsible for creating a functional sanitation industry.

What could easily be considered his most complex novel to date, Raising Steam is a tale of rapidly shifting tides. Perspective seldom remains the same for more than a few paragraphs, often encouraging back-tracking to try and discover links that only become obvious later in the story. Dialogue is rarely not funny and is often quite thought provoking; encouraging readers to consider the nature of change and sentient behaviour.

Chaotic to the extreme, but with the undertone of order so characteristic of Pratchett’s work, and with plenty of references to earlier novels throwing in for good measure, Raising Steam is engaging and unstoppable. The greatest challenge is trying to put it down once you start.