CHRONOMETER, DARWINIA+, AND INTROVERSION’S OTHERWISE ‘DISASTROUS’ 2008
Continuing in that spirit of full disclosure that they kicked off with the bare-all website for upcoming Xbox Live Arcade dual-pack Darwinia+, Introversion programmer Chris Delay is currently undergoing a minorly gut-wrenching look back at the studio’s ‘disastrous’ 2008 “in three increasingly depressing parts.”
The first part kicked off with a sweet spot — at least for readers and fans of the developer, anyway — with the first concept image (above) of the company’s unannounced game that was being developed for UK network Channel 4. Called Chronometer, and based, said Delay, on a long time Introversion idea, it was due to become the company’s most ambitious game.
But that optimism is short lived: Delay makes casual and foreboding reference to signing a deal with Pinnacle for a DS version of their thermonuclear war game Defcon, a deal we all now know has since gone under. He goes on to describe the contentious relationship forming with Microsoft at the time, stating in no uncertain terms: “we believe Microsoft were absolutely correct in the calls they made, and we were wrong. But at the time, oh my god they were pissing us off.”
You can read part one in its entirety here, and part two’s just recently been published, which describes Delay falling further away from his true pet project — Subversion — only to be met with anything but fanfare when they’d first revealed their multiplayer Darwinia sequel Multiwinia to the press.
2008 in Hindsight, Part 1 of 3 [Introversion, part 2]
Previously:
- Full disclosure: Introversion publish confidential Darwinia+ docs …
- Ragdoll Metaphysics: Introversion on Mathematical Cities, Gaming …
- Speak about destruction: Introversion hope for 2009 release of DS …
- What's he building in there: Introversion's Subversion – Offworld
- Introversion playing with fire with unbeatable DEFCON AI – Offworld
See more posts about: Darwinia, Introversion, Offworld Originals
KING OF KONG JR: WIEBE TAKES DK JR CROWN AHEAD OF E3 DK CHALLENGE
If you’ve seen Seth Gordon’s unforgettable documentary King of Kong (and if you haven’t, close your browser now and stream it via Netflix), you’ll know just what’s at stake here.
Ahead of his upcoming attempt to officially claim the Donkey Kong crown at this year’s E3, Twin Galaxies has just announced that documentary star Steve Wiebe has warmed up by claiming a world record score on its sequel, Donkey Kong Jr, with 1,139,800 points.
The score not only puts him ahead of Ike Hall, who took the DK Jr crown last year, but also of Billy Mitchell himself — Wiebe’s rival in the film — who still holds the contentious first-place record in DK proper and set the original DK Jr record in 1983.
Wiebe’s DK rematch will take place on June 2nd at E3 in Los Angeles, and will be broadcast live via G4.
Steve Wiebe Takes Donkey Kong Junior World Record With Score of 1,139,800 [Twin Galaxies]
See more posts about: Arcade, Offworld Originals
KNIGHT FOLDS: CRZISME’S CASTLE CRASHERS PAPERCRAFT
Your Monday morning craft challenge: frustrated with not being able to find papercrafter Lesqua’s original model sheets for their set of Castle Crashers knights (showcased on The Behemoth’s blog), deviantartist crzisme created his own, available in all four knightly flavors.
I poked around and sure enough did find Lesqua’s original models, sans printable instructions, and a treasure trove of other designs including Dragon Quest‘s Mimic monsters above, via deviantart. Lesqua does have downloadable instructions for other Pokemon, Elebits and Animal Crossing crafts available here, though.
crzisme’s Castle Crashers Papercraft [deviantart, via technabob]
Previously:
- How Castle Crashers was almost a Muttpop/Lucha Libre game – Offworld
- More details on Castle Crashers dev's cutely chaotic Game #3 …
- Bitey bat bit: Anna the Red's Castle Crashers bento – Offworld
- There will be jewels: Castle Crasher devs tease new game – Offworld
- Pimp sneakers: pepperedcat's Bomberman/Castle Crashers kicks …
- You will know it by the piles of dead: building Behemoth's …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
GIMME INDIE GAME: THE ALLURING LANGUAGE OF COSMIND’S GLUM BUSTER
In setting out to write this, I spent too much time thinking about which screenshots to use — whether I should keep the earliest grabs, move forward through the various worlds, whether I’d be spoiling anything in doing so — but in the end it hardly matters, because there’s almost no part of Glum Buster‘s essence you can properly capture in static shots.
What you can get a sense of, I suppose, is its curiously drawn world: rough-sketched solid colors, but intricately detailed and made up of tiny shards and fragments of pixels, and colored just a shade on the side of wrong — recognizable but also recognizably alien.
When Glum Buster was first released — it’s been some months now, after a four year gestation period, a typical labor of love story from its otherwise gainfully/full-time industry employed creator, Justin ‘CosMind’ Leingang — a lot was made of its surreality, its near-inexplicableness.
But I think that somewhat misses the point: at heart, Glum Buster is really quite traditionally structured and controlled. It’s a platforming game that also lets you fly, it’s a game that relies on colored switches to turn on and off like-colored blocks, it’s mechanics you’ve been playing with for the past two decades, only in this game, they’re spoken through a different language. As with games like Eric Chahi’s vector-classic Another World/Out of this World, it’s familiarity set in entirely unfamiliar territory, with no guiding exposition (apart from some very basic initial keyboard guides).
Luckily, Glum Buster‘s language is made up with so few syllables that it makes trying to communicate with the game a reward of its own. Your on-screen character essentially has two actions: a left-mouse-click red firing button, and a right-mouse-click more general purpose blue attracting button. With just those two buttons, you essentially have everything you need to solve every problem that the game throws at you, even when the creatures and layouts and puzzles come at you speaking in their foreign tongue.
Even one of the game’s most basic, repeated interactions is never fully explained to you, but all it takes is one frustrated volley of rapid-fire clicks for it to suddenly sound a chime and make you realize that you were actually much closer than you thought. That’s the way Leingang repeatedly chooses to allow you to explore and affect his world: never speaking, always quietly grinning, knowing that you’re right on the verge of stumbling perfectly into the solution.
Leingang’s been fairly adamant about keeping the game’s mysteries to himself: that’s why even in December, after it’d won the 2008 Austin GDC’s Indie Games Festival showcase, I still had essentially nothing to go on.
To tip that scale just slightly, I’ve embedded a video below the fold that will step you through the first five or so minutes of the game, but I actually recommend you don’t watch the video until you’ve played at least as much yourself — the blind experience and the consistent sense of wonder is one of Glum Buster‘s greatest strengths, and one of the best reasons that playing through the game is one of the highest tick-boxes on this year’s indie-games to-do list.
As a final aside: Leingang’s trying a new revenue model for the game, and, rather than asking for simple donations, is setting aside a sliding percentage of the game’s financial in-take to charity: the more you give, the more he gives away, and there can’t be a much better incentive to support him for this than that.
Glum Buster home [CosMind]
See more posts about: Gimme Indie Game, Offworld Originals
TOUCH ME I’M SLICK (AND FREE): AREA/CODE’S DROP7 LITE
Hopefully, if you’re a regular and iPhone owning reader of Offworld, you will have already downloaded area/code’s phenomenal iPhone puzzle game Drop7, especially with the recent price drop and release of its Facebook-integrating social update.
If you haven’t, and I’m not sure exactly what it is you’re waiting for, a quick recap — the game is the portable version of the studio’s original promotional web game Chain Factor, and works like this:
Numbered discs fall into a 7×7 playfield, and are cleared away if a disc is in a row or column containing that many discs. For instance, in the image above right, the 6s are disappearing because they’re in a row of 6 discs, as well as the 3, as it’s in a 3-high column. The trick? Interspersed with the numbered discs are blank grey discs. In order to clear those, you’ve got to clear adjacent numbered discs twice to “break through” the grey (as is happening under the 3) and reveal the number beneath.
Not fully convinced that it’s seemingly effortlessly one of the most original and addictive puzzle games of the past several years? You’re in luck: a free Lite version of the game has just hit the App Store, and — even better — it’s an essential download even for those that already have the full version.
Rather than simply doing a timed or crippled version of the full game for its demo release, area/code have created a unique ‘Countdown’ mode which has you playing for a high score with a total of 100 discs.
Give the Lite version of the game a go, let us know your high scores via the comments below (my first run’s a tepid 66,574), and soon enough you’ll fully understand the near inescapable and entirely shameful kiss of death represented in that picture to the left (what are you supposed to do in those situations [other than not get yourself into them]?).
Drop7 home [area/code, full version App Store link, Lite version App Store link]
Previously:
See more posts about: area/code, Drop7, Offworld Originals, Touch Me I'm Slick
O–VER1.1–O: NOBY NOBY BOY GETS TUESDAY UPDATE, INCLUDES, UH, ‘FART BOY’
Now this is more like it: though the video included with Keita Takahashi’s last missive to the official PlayStation Blog didn’t show much of what to expect from the four-player addition to Noby Noby Boy, the latest official Namco video has that and much more.
The update, which according to the official site is set to go live April 28th, will bring a number of changes to the game, including new hairstyles for BOY’s house (!), new music (as promised), a new “thinking pose of the bird” (that detects your online status), and.. well, the aptly named “fart boy.” I’m presuming that’s what’s happening at 0:25-0:29ish of the video above.
This reconstructed image shows off all the new updates: ‘fart boy’ at lower left, house-hair in the middle, and a list of new instruments at lower-right, including congas, guitars, and marimbas.
o–o home [Namco]
Previously:
- Dream come true: Noby Noby Boy video grants BOY his musical wish …
- I was just dreaming: multiplayer, maracas coming to Noby Noby Boy …
- It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
- Keita Takahashi bringing Noby Noby Boy to the iPhone – Offworld
- Only on Offworld: your first look at Panic's Noby Noby Boy T …
- Happy Holidays from Offworld (feat. Keita Takahashi) – Offworld
See more posts about: Noby Noby Boy, Offworld Originals
HUNTER CLASH: DOARAT’S MONSTER HUNTER PORTABLE 2ND G SHIRT
One last look this morning at a wonderful-thing-we-can’t-really-have: Capcom’s venerable Monster Hunter series may have never hit the West as it did in the East, but there it’s managed to spawn its own subculture of inspired design.
Case in point, design group Doarat‘s retro-clash promotional T-shirt for the third iteration of Capcom’s PSP version, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (coming to the U.S. as Monster Hunter Freedom Unite in June), as spotted on Yahoo Japan’s auction site.
My favorite, though, remains the ‘Melaleu’ Felyne & crosspaws shirt at right, only spotted up for bid once, and now long out of print at places like CDJapan.
Monster Hunter home [Capcom]
Previously:
See more posts about: Fashion, Monster Hunter, Offworld Originals
TILT ON, MY SELECTOR: DUBSTEP LINE-RIDING IN DIFFERENTCLOTH’S LILT LINE
Developer Gordon ‘differentcloth‘ Midwood covers all bases and describes his debut iPhone game lilt line as a “retro rhythm racing beat ’em up action game with a dubstep flavour.”
I can only add a touch of context and place it somewhere between the Game Boy Advance’s bit Generations game Dotstream and a neon-razor take on the ubiquitous genre of cave/helicopter web-games.
Created in collaboration with London dubstep duo 16bit — and looking precisely like the kind of retro-future game laser-targeted to the Offworld audience — lilt line will include ten levels, each based on a unique 16bit song.
Differentcloth says the game was submitted to Apple nearly a week ago, and should be coming very soon to an App Store near you, and as Midwood mentions in the comments below, the “turn-based flight simulation digital pet rhythm racing action” game is now available on the App Store.
liltline home [differentcloth, App Store link, 16bit MySpace, via Renaud Bédard]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
BOBBLE HEAD: OKKLE’S INCREDIBLE BUBBLE BOBBLE CUSTOM TOY
I knew I shouldn’t have waited too long: earlier in the weekend I spotted this pitch-perfect custom via Vinylpulse, in which UK artist Okkle took one of my favorite toys released this year — Peskimo’s Monster Burp — and turned it into a tribute to Taito’s Bubble Bobble with little Bub blowing a massive Beluga-bubble.
After hemming and hawing all weekend about whether to drop the £85 on it, I check again this morning and it is, of course, long gone. But we can still gawp at its craftsmanship, I suppose, and the good news is that it’s not too late to get the Peskimo original and attempt the conversion yourself.
Okkles Custom Monster Burp Bubblun of Bubble Bobble [Vinyl Pulse]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Toys
KILLING JOKE: CACTUS SHOWS OFF HIS LATEST WORKS IN PROGRESS
As mentioned before, a sneak peek at Petri Purho’s desktop background during this year’s Indie Games Summit showed the picture at right of head-spinningly prolific indie dev Cactus, and considering his last work in progress update covered some eight games — none of which were at all related to front-burner larger projects like Brain-Damaged Toon Underworld and compilation game Mondo Nation or those seen in his last WIP trailer video — the photo suddenly feels slightly less parodic.
It’s heartening to see, then, that at least one of those games from the last round has carried through to a month and a half later, as Cactus shows off three sets of images from the games he’s currently turning his attention to.
None of the games are yet named, but between the three — which cover themes as wide ranging as the only vaguely misogynistic looking “game about killing each other” and the “game about killing airplanes” (the one seen last month as well) — it’s the dream-haze galactic geometry of the third “game about killing everything you love” that’s got me the most intrigued.
Whether any of the three eventually see the light of day is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime, you’ve got your work cut out for you finishing all of his prior games, if you haven’t already — start with the Cactus Arcade compilation for the fastest path into his special blend of inspired madness.
Screens from upcoming games [Cactus Squid blog, Cactus’ home site]
Previously:
See more posts about: Cactus, Offworld Originals
