Last year, indie developer Owlchemy Lab’s Smuggle Truck was a part of the Boston Indie Showcase, and I had a blast playing it. Which was why I was pleased to see them back on the show floor this year with a new game for mobile devices, titled Jack Lumber.

There’s a bit of a tragic story behind Jack Lumber- your character, Jack, lost his grandmother at a young age when she was viciously slaughtered by a falling tree. Now, using your supernatural powers, you’re out to avenge your granny’s death by destroying as many trees as you can, armed with your axe and your trusty sidekick Buck the Beaver always by your side.

Jack Lumber is an action arcade game with familiar mechanics, but it’s a lot of fun to play. Flying bits of lumber zip across your screen, and using your finger, your mission is to chop up as many as you can using one fluid motion. The faster you destroy as many logs of wood as you can, the more points you’ll score. Some trees need to be chopped horizontally and vertically, so you’ll soon be frantically dragging your finger across the screen in crazy patterns trying to annihilate the lumber and avenge Jack’s poor grandma. Due to the mechanics of the game, it works best on a touchscreen, but I’d love to see this game someday ported to the Kinect.

Jack Lumber will be released sometime this summer for mobile devices. In the meantime, watch the latest teaser video after the jump.

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One of my goals this year for PAX East was to play every single game featured in the Boston Indie Showcase, a hand-picked collection of excellent mobile games created by independent developers. After checking out all the other games featured in the showcase, I was excited to see what Not Without You had in store for me on the show floor.

Out of all the games in the Boston Indie Showcase, most of which were very puzzle-heavy, Not Without You was definitely the most challenging of them all.

The blue furry creatures of Not Without You need your help escaping from the lab, which would be easy peasy, if the creatures didn’t move in tandem with one another. Using the environment and obstacles placed in your way, your task is to arrange these creatures in the right formation to lead them out of the lab doors in as few moves as possible.

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In 2010, Jerry Holkins, aka Tycho, posted chapters for what he hoped would become the third installment of Penny Arcade’s steampunk RPG game series, but then much to the dismay of fans, not much else was heard of about the game.

Cut to 2012 and not only does the game have a developer, indie devs Zeboyd games, but it should be released sometime this summer. I got a chance to sit in on the panel where the game’s creators, plus Holkins himself, discussed how the game resurfaced and came to be.

What is obviously different right from the start in On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 is the SNES-style art and graphics. The previous two games looked a bit more like one of Mike Krahulik’s comics, but this third game is less comic, more Final Fantasy. The battle system and dialogue boxes are reminiscent of all my favorite RPGs growing up, but combined with the snarky, sometimes foul dialogue always present in the Penny Arcade games, it’s more like an R-rated version of Dragon Warrior.

During the Q&A portion of the panel, fans asked a lot about the other apparent difference in On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, which is the absence of a customizable protagonist. In this third installment, players take on a party of Gabriel, Tycho, and Ann. The developers mentioned that they may wrap up the story of the previous protagonist, but you won’t be able to play as him. However, there will be enemies in tiny hats, and tiny hats make everything funnier, so it all balances out.

On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 will be available this summer on PC, Mac, Xbox, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android.

The floor this year at PAX East included a section indie developers dubbed the Indie Megabooth- 16 independent developers showing off twenty of the latest and greatest indie games on all sorts of platforms. One of those titles was Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, the follow up to PSN title Tales from Space: About a Blob, now available for the Playstation Vita. I decided to pick up the title to play during my free time at PAX East, and I’m really glad I did.

Much like the Katamari games, Mutant Blobs Attack  requires you to eat everything in sight to proceed through the level, as long as it’s not bigger than you. But, while Katamari is a 3rd person perspective three dimensional game, Mutant Blobs Attack is a 2D sidescrolling platformer, more like Loco Roco.  As a blob, you’ll also gain powerups to allow you to fly, float, and magnetize yourself to walls.

The game utilizes the Vita’s controls without overdoing it and becoming cumbersome to play. You control the blob throughout the levels using the analog stick, but there are also a few random levels that require you to tilt the Vita around like a ball maze to try to move the blob to the goal. The back touchscreen don’t come into play at all, but the front is used to manipulate the environment to proceed.

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Lawnmower Challenge, another selection for this year’s Boston Indie Showcase at PAX East, has done something interesting: it’s taken a chore that most consider a sweaty nuisance, and turned it into a mind-bending puzzle game.

In Lawnmower Challenge, your quest is simple: mow all the grass. However, these aren’t your average suburban lawns. There are locked gates that can only be unlocked with a key, unmowable sections that need planting, and gates that can only be opened from a certain direction. These all would be simple obstacles to overcome if you weren’t going for a perfect score, as your steps are counted and the fewer you take, the more stars you’ll earn.

Don’t let the simple controls and cute graphics fool you; it’ll take considerable planning to complete each level at three stars.

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Imagine being turned into a jumping bean by an evil wizard, and on top of all that having your girlfriend kidnapped. Worst day ever, right? That’s what our hero, Emilio, is faced with in Bean’s Quest, a bouncing 16-bit platformer included in the Boston Indie Showcase, which will be shown off this weekend at PAX East.

Using the touchscreen controls of your favorite iOS device, you control Emilio as he bounds, bounces, and boings his way through each level, collecting diamonds as well as his missing pet axolotls along the way. Emilio never stops jumping, so all you have to do is move him left or right, but simple controls don’t make this game a breeze.

The difficulty in Bean’s Quest lies not in completing each level, but completing each level under the required number of bounces to obtain a perfect rating. If you’re going for all the diamonds and axolotls as well, it gets even more difficult. I found myself repeating levels over and over to try to get a better score and collect all the goodies, and with 150 levels to traverse, replay level for Bean’s Quest is pretty high.

Bean’s Quest also features an original soundtrack, as well as Game Center integration.

The game is available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It’s on sale right now, so jump on over to the iTunes Store and pick it up for $1.99, or check it out on the show floor this weekend at PAX.

The full version of little logic puzzler Girls Like Robots is not released quite yet, but I got a chance to check it out before it hits the show floor at PAX East this weekend.

The gameplay of Girls Like Robots is simple: make all the square people happy. Each level is a grid, with different amounts of spaces to place your square shaped friends in the right arrangement so that everyone plays nice. There’s the girls, who love being surrounded by robots. The nerds love being surrounded by girls, not other nerds. Girls won’t mind being around nerds if there’s some pie present, but the robots HATE pies.

It all sounds really cute and whimsical, but quickly you’ll realize that this little puzzle game is, well, a puzzler. It’s hard! Just like in real life, you can’t make everyone happy, and you won’t be able to in Girls Like Robots either. Depending on which squares you’re working with, you’ll have to decide which arrangement will maximize points and keep anyone from getting too angry with one another.

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This year’s Boston Indie Showcase, the impressive list of independent games featured at PAX East in April, is a bit different than in years past- because the games are all mobile based, we’ll all be able to play most of them before the show even happens. Pretty cool, right? Here’s the first of the Boston Indie Showcase that I’ve tried out for myself, a word game that goes beyond Scrabble and Boggle.

SpellTower is like Words with Friends meets word searches, and will appeal to anyone who loves any kind of word puzzles. It’s a pretty simple concept: create words using the letters you’re given. In Tower Mode, you’ll only get 100 letters, but as much time as possible to rack up as many points as you can. In Puzzle Mode, a row is added for each word you make. Rush Mode is timed, meaning the quicker you create words, the longer you’ll survive. Words can be created diagonally, backwards, and even overlap, so you can really get creative in how you form words and clear the board.

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One of the really unique things about the Penny Arcade Expo is the show’s dedication to showcasing independent games and their creators. While you can wait in crazy long lines for the bigger titles on the show floor, playing the indie games can be really rewarding. You’ll get more time to play each game, and usually you’ll get to talk to the game’s creators.

I try hard each year I attend PAX East to play every single one of the games featured in the Boston Indie Showcase, but this year will be a little different. Because for 2012, the six games chosen to be showcased are all mobile! Which means, not only can I play them before PAX, but so can all of you!

Four of the games featured are for iOS, two are for Android, and one is for Windows Mobile. I’ll be playing all of them before PAX East, which takes place in Boston, MA in early April, and reviewing them for you here at The Flickcast, but if you’d like to learn more about each game right now, you can check out the descriptions here.

For a taste of what the Boston Indie Showcase was like in the past, check out our coverage from PAX East 2011.

In the past 20 years, Kevin Sorbo has become a pretty prominent name in the geek community, spanning over a few different subgenres. Of course, he got on the map by playing Hercules for 5 years straight, and then captaining the space ship in Andromeda for another 5 years.

Since then, he’s been drifting in and out of the comedy and geek genre with films like Meet the Spartans and FDR American Badass!. Now he’s getting a little more play in a film that may not take itself seriously enough. It’s called Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury, and its cynical tone puts films like Tropic Thunder and Machete to shame. Here’s the premise:

A Vietnam Veteran Sal Bando (Sorbo), tortured by his past as a Poolboy, returns home to Van Nuys, California, and a country he doesn’t recognize, in which it seems only Mexicans run pool-cleaning companies. Bando sets off on a brutal mission to reclaim his “rightful” vocation and enact revenge on the man (Trejo) who killed his wife and son.

Not only will fans get cult hero Sorbo in the lead, but Machete himself, Danny Trejo drops in as the film’s main villain. You can also check out a few other special cameos in the trailer after the jump. Poolboy hits DVD and VOD right now, where those are sold.

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It’s been said that if you screw up once, it’s a mistake, but if you do it three times it’s a style.

Don’t get me wrong, Submarine is a good film with a strong voice, but that’s not to say it’s not without pros and cons.  With a unique tone, interesting characters, and distinctive editing, director Richard Ayoade obviously had a strong vision for this film from the beginning.  The only problem was with the main character, Oliver Tate, who was written as such an offbeat character that there were times at which he was hard to relate to.

Submarine is a film full of feature film newcomers.  Ayoade makes his narrative feature debut as writer/director, a departure from his career as a TV actor and director.  Both of the young actors, as well, come fresh to the big screen.  Craig Roberts, playing Oliver Tate, takes on his first feature lead in this film (he has since starred in Jane Eyre), and Yasmin Paige, coming only from small parts in obscure films, gives a surprisingly beautiful performance as his love interest, Jordana Bevan.

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We don’t feature enough Indie films around here so to remedy that, I’ve got one for you today that looks especially interesting. It’s called Bellflower and before you snicker and turn away because of the title, you really should watch the trailer.

Here’s some info about the film from the official synopsis:

Best friends Woodrow and Aiden spend all of their free time building Mad Max-inspired flamethrowers and muscle cars in preparation for a global apocalypse. But when Woodrow meets a charismatic young woman and falls hard in love, he and Aiden quickly integrate into a new group of friends, setting off on a journey of love and hate, betrayal, infidelity and extreme violence more devastating and fiery than any of their apocalyptic fantasies.

Written and directed by Evan Glodell, the film features Jessie Wiseman, Tyler Dawson, Rebekah Brandes, Vincent Grashaw and Evan Glodell. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, August 5th.

Check out the trailer to this very interesting film after the jump. You won’t be sorry you did.

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