The best news I’ve heard in quite some time: Eskil Steenberg’s abstract painterly MMO Love is prepping a beta release possibly “just a matter of days” away, and has let loose a test client to gauge performance on various machines. While the client tantalizingly won’t let you connect to a server, it is the first opportunity to see the game running, finally, on your own hardware.

At the same time, Steenberg’s just released a batch of new screenshots that show, for the first time (so far as I’ve seen), the procedurally generated characters that will populate its world. More of those below the fold. (more…)

Less than a week away from announcing their first game, a little introduction to Hello Games: you may have spotted — especially if you were on the GDC Austin show floor — Hello’s recent appearance in Edge Magazine, where they talked about their decision to leave gainful employment elsewhere to set up shop for themselves and prepare their debut PC-, 360- and PS3-bound title.

If so, you may also have spotted (though only in print) the accompanying concept sketches by Hello artist Grant Duncan, which was basically all I needed to see to realize that the team was laser-targeting my one true heart (particularly with the cube-head at top) with whatever they had in store.

The dev team at Hello is made up of (from L to R) creative director David Ream (formerly of Kuju, where he helped expand the Geometry Wars universe with Galaxies), managing director Sean Murray (former Criterion tech lead on Burnout 3 and Black), artist Duncan (formerly artist on Sega/Sumo’s Virtua Tennis 3 and Sega Superstars Tennis), and programmer Ryan Doyle (also of Kuju, where he was lead programmer on the aforementioned Galaxies), and while none of the art sketches give too much away on the group’s debut game, it does give a distinct (and ultra-sweet) flavor of the direction they’re heading.

Below the fold then, four pages from Duncan’s sketchbook to let you get to know Hello. After you’ve taken it in, visit Hello’s website to read more (see esp.: this post, in which each of the team have been morphed into collectible diorama characters of their respective top games). (more…)

OFFWORLD GALLERY: WHEN INDIES INVADE AUSTIN

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9.21.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Now basically fully recovered from the week of Indie Insanity that took place during and after this year’s debut GDC Austin Indie Games Summit, I present (below the fold) a longer look inside the Summit with photos courtesy official Offworld photographer Rebekah Saltsman.

As I somewhat made mention of during this year’s main GDC, the Indie Summit is quickly becoming an essential part of the convention, perhaps less so for the material covered (which is still nearly always incisive and inspiring), but for the opportunity to meet the people behind the games, and to experience the deep sense of community that’s taken root and strengthened over the past several years.

In any industry, even outside games, it’s hard to find a quarter so uncompetitive, so supportive, and so bound by a sense of collective creative drive under the quite literal strains of basic survival without otherwise gainful employment, and it’s hard to come away without feeling like it’s something that the world could use more of.

So, all that said, behind the fold you’ll find photos of the people behind nearly all the Indie Summit talks, with more available directly from Saltsman’s official Flickr stream — though none un/fortunately, from our Saturday trip to Austin’s Eagle Peak firing range, where Cortex Command creator Dan Tabar led an expedition to give what must have looked like the motliest of indoor-kid crews their first-ish non-digital/simulated rounds on a variety of handguns and assault rifles. Maybe we’ll save that one for another day. (more…)

As teased earlier in the week, LucasArts has just revealed Lucidity, its latest game due for Xbox Live Arcade and PC release on October 7th. Developed by the team behind the recent original Monkey Island remake, the game sees players going inside the imagination of main star Sofi, who (as is instantly clear via the video above) must be protected, Lemmings style, by dropping randomly generated puzzle pieces on the path in front of her.

Below the fold: a gallery of high-res screens of Sofi’s fantastically drawn dreamscapes.

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You’ve had enough with the words and the photos already and you want to see DeathSpank — Hothead’s action RPG/adventure from Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert now officially announced for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 — in glorious motion, and glorious it is.

And below the fold, a full high-res gallery of the currently released DeathSpank screenshots, for your added enjoyment.

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PAX’S DARK CARNIVAL: SCREENSHOTS OF THE LATEST LEFT 4 DEAD 2 CAMPAIGN

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9.4.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Below the fold: a high-res look at the Dark Carnival, the latest Left 4 Dead 2 campaign being shown off at the ongoing Penny Arcade Expo, most notable (if not for its Pennywise-perfect Zombie Clowns) for the unveiling of The Jockey, a new grotesquely hunched Boss infected Valve says “lets you attack lone Survivors and wrestle control of their movement away from them-into fire, off ledges, or straight into the middle of a zombie horde.”

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OFFWORLD GALLERY: THE GAMES FACTORY, HOW MARIO, TETRIS, SONIC, PONG WERE MADE

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8.13.2009

Brandon Boyer

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I’ve already highlighted some of the excellent photography in the latest issue of France’s games/fashion mag Amusement, but this one’s even more special: a series of photographs from the magazine’s Made of Myth feature, in which photographer Marc Da Cunha Lopes (“aisakie“) shows us the factory work behind the most iconic games of the past few decades: the smelting of Sonic‘s rings, the chiseling of the 1-Up mushroom, and the rubber-pressed rebounding blocks of Arkanoid.

Below the fold, then, the full high-res gallery, with special permission from Amusement. (more…)

COMIC-CON’S SWAMP FEVER: NEW SCREENSHOTS, VIDEO OF THE LEFT 4 DEAD 2 BAYOU

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7.22.2009

Brandon Boyer

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What’s more wicked than the fact that new Left 4 Dead 2 star Rochelle showed up wearing a pink Depeche Mode T-shirt? Not much, but the rest of the screenshots and video (courtesy 1up) below and behind the jump come quite close.

Valve is showing off the Swamp Fever episode on the floor of Comic-Con, including a newly unveiled boss monster, The Spitter (seen over there to the right, and I mean, ok, yeah, I guess — I think the fact that she’s still stuck in dirty pink heels somehow gives me the willies more than her gaping bloody maw), who, they say, “has an area attack that can split up Survivors or flush them out of their hiding spots.”

Other things to be gleaned from the new footage? Infected hiding below the surface of the swamp-water are going to be a newly terrifying challenge, and the fact that that flamethrower — if the 1up crew’s performance is any guideline — is going to have to be wielded very, very sparingly and carefully.

Two more videos and five hi-res screenshots await after the jump.

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OFFWORLD GALLERY: MATISSE MEETS MEGATON IN JAMES BARNETT’S ‘FAUXVISM’ LANDSCAPES

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6.23.2009

Mike Nowak

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Scottsdale, AZ artist James Barnett, formerly known as El Rey, has invented the term ‘fauxvism’ for his newly-posted series of landscape paintings capturing the videogame vistas of Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life and Team Fortress, all in the style of early-20th-century Matisse and Derain-led art movement Fauvism.

He has graciously provided us with a handful of higher resolution images that we’ve included below, with further explanation from Barnett himself. (more…)

Shh, let’s not talk. Just click through for Sony’s first unveiling of twelve gorgeous high resolution shots of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus followup The Last Guardian. (more…)