More love from GameTunnel

Yesterday GameTunnel.com announced their top 10 games of the year and New Star Soccer 4 came in at number 6! This is an improvement on NSS3 in 2006 which scraped in at number 10. Naturally I am extremely pleased, especially when you look at some of the other titles in the list; Multiwinia, Everyday Shooter, World of Goo... Check out the full list here:

http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=705

Of the other titles I have only purchased Everyday Shooter myself and a cracking game it is too. On the surface it is a simple shooter but what really caught my attention were the guitar licks that play out as you shoot your way through the levels. I've always been a massive My Bloody Valentine fan and love bands like Sigur Ros and Broken Social Scene, so hearing these phazy, drawn-out guitar loops made it an instant purchase for me.

Other than that I have only had a chance to play the demos of Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble, which is um, interesting, and World of Goo which I'm sure I will pick up at some point on the Wii. There are plenty of games on my wanted list at the moment; Braid, Portal, Fallout 3, GTA IV... I just don't seem to find the time to play anything and when I do I keep thinking that I should be working on NSS4 or the new project. I guess the truth of the matter is that I get more enjoyment from making games than actually playing them. And with that, I'm off back to work!

New Star Soccer 4 - Christmas Competition!

New Star Games are giving away 10 license keys as a special Christmas gift for 10 lucky people. If you want to enter simply send an email to admin@newstarsoccer.com with the answer to this question:

What was the first ever game released by me, Simon Read?*

*All the possible titles are listed on www.newstargames.com. Which was the first?

Entries must be in by 1pm GMT on the 24th of December 2008. Include your player name in the emailand 10 winners will be chosen at random on Christmas Eve and will get their code on that day. 

If you already have a license you can still enter and give the key to a friend if you win.

Good luck!

Momentum

New Star Soccer 4 continues to gather pace as we see its first appearance in a UK magazine. MicroMart reviewed it last week awarding it 8/10 although I have yet to get hold of a copy. It should also be appearing on the MacWorld cover disc which is out this week in the UK. There will hopefully be reviews in the football magazine FourFourTwo as well as PC Gamer in the coming weeks, so I'm looking forward to those. Mac sales have definitely picked up which I'm attributing to the fact that the game is now listed in Apple.com's game section, so all in all I'm feeling very positive going into the new year. There are no Ferrari's on the horizon but as long as I can survive the dreaded "credit crunch" then I'll be very satisfied. 

I have spent the last few days revamping www.newstargames.com which I felt didn't have the warm welcoming feeling of the site from the NSS3 era. Hopefully I've addressed that now, going for a simpler pastel style with lots of whitespace and colourful game buttons. It's amazing how many skills you pick up in areas that you don't expect to when you just get your hands dirty and work towards an ideal. Designing websites is not something that I have ever been very interested in but when you're an indie developer you need to have a large hat rack to keep the costs down. Marketting is another area in which I have no expertise whatsoever and in fact find it a bit depressing but it's a necessary evil if I want my business to succeed. I have designed some advert banners that I hope will soon be appearing on various gaming sites, so look out for those. Speaking of advertising I decided to start hosting ads on my forum (and possibly the main site). I am loathe to do this but it does actually generate a few dollars a day and goes towards the hosting costs.

In terms of development I am gathering all the suggestions for NSS4 and whilst most of the bugs have now been squashed there will be a few more updates in early 2009. The more weighty requests will have to wait until NSS5 which is in the pipeline but it's not going to happen anytime soon obviously. I'd like to break away from releasing my NSS games right alongside FIFA, Pro-Evo and FM. It's simply too much competition for a minow like NSS and the only reason it has happened in the past is purely down to unlucky timing. As for future projects, I have started working on a new game in my spare time, not football related, but part of the New Star series. I won't tell you the sport as yet so you can post your guesses on the forum, but I'm very excited about the progress I've made so far considering that I'm only putting in a couple of hours here and there. It'll be a 2D game but will utilise lots of code from NSS4 (primarily the casino and relationship sections) and it will have a much more streamlined lifestyle element to it. Once I stop updating NSS4 I'll be able to ramp up development on the new project and I'm aiming to have it finished by May. 

New Star Soccer 4 Scoops Prestigious Award!

Yes, I'm proud to say that NSS4 has won the GameTunnel.com Sports Game Of The Year 2008 award.  I was a little worried that the game had come out too late to be entered but thankfully it was considered and (he shoots, he scores!) it's number one. This is a very pleasing award as I consider GameTunnel to be the best indie game review site out there and their opinions are always well measured and generally spot on. (Of course, I would say that but it's true!) Even more pleasing is that NSS4 has achieved the same award as NSS3 did in 2005. Was it really that long ago?! At least you can't argue that the New Star Soccer series only offer incremental updates every year unlike some football games I could mention... Ahem. GameTunnel will be putting up a full review on December 20th I think, so I look forward to reading that, but you can read their opinion on the top 5 sports games of 2008 here: 

http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=724

They will be announcing the winners of the other categories; puzzle, action, strategy etc over the run up to the new year so keep an eye on those, and you never know, NSS4 might just squeeze into the top 10 games of the year like NSS3 did. I shall wait with baited breath!

New updates for New Star Soccer 3 and Sensational Soccer on the way

I'm currently working on a system to convert the NSS4 database into NSS3 data. This will mean NSS3 and Sensational Soccer players will be able to update their games and start a career with the 2008-09 club data. There will also be a little bug fix in NSS3 that caused problems for a few players during the transfer window. Hopefully this will all be ready by next week.

In the meantime, make sure you check out the Sensational Soccer webgame. This is the full version of Sensational Soccer and it's free to play whenever you are near Internet Explorer! In theory it should work in other browsers but I can't get it working on my Vista machines. Please let me know if you have any success via the forum.

Of course, I'm still working on NSS4 and will have an update soon which fixes a few league issues, notably the Spanish league. There will also be a good handful of fixes and improvements.

Sensational start

New Star Soccer 4 started extremely well, exceeding the first day sales of NSS3 within a few hours. Unfortunately things couldn't stay quite so positive for long and after a couple of weeks sales dipped back down to normal levels. However, we have yet to see any magazine reviews and have had only 1 web review so far, so very few people who weren't on the mailing list actually know about the game yet. NSS3 sales peaked when we had 2 or 3 magazine reviews in the same month, so hopefully we still have that to look forward to. The first web review NSS4 (that I know of) appeared today on unigamesity.com and gave us a favourable 3.5 out of 5. No too bad considering Football Manager 2009 got 4 out of 5! You can read the review here. 

So my mind is focused on getting the news out there that NSS4 exists and aside from reviews I hope that the game will feature on magazine cover discs. Macworld are the first to confirm that the game will feature on their January edition (out in mid-December) and hopefully that will be the first of many. NSS4 is currently being translated by some avid fans (apply here) and will hopefully be localised in 16 languages. That should gain us some international interest when they go live. Getting on download sites such as Download.com is another priority although these are not as important as they used to be (and the service of that particular site leaves a lot to be desired). I will also need to advertise on some gaming sites but until I actually receive some money from the game sales advertising funds are low (make that non-existant).

The New Star Socccer 4 Goal Of The Month competition will get underway this month, so make sure you are saving those replays. I will announce more details on this soon but as always there will be prizes for the top goal of the month.

Finally, I decided that a good way to get traffic on the New Star website would be to make Sensational Soccer a free web game. This is Windows only and may only be compatible with Internet Explorer at the moment, but you can check it out here. I'd forgotten just how much fun the game was!