JAMES KOCHALKA’S MONSTER MII: FROZOG & TRAZZLE’S MISUNDERSTANDING EDITION
[James Kochalka‘s Monster Mii is a regular Offworld feature, with a new Mii monster (or two!) each time for you to download to your Wii. Once there, they’ll give you creepy stares from the sidelines of your Wii Sports, lap you rudely during your Wii Fit jogs, and in general liven up your Plaza and gaming day.]
Our latest edition of Monster Mii brings double the monster, double the Mii, with Mario Kart-loving Frozog and [his? her?] hard of hearing companion Trazzle coming in full, live color from their Frogger-esque bayou home.
To bring them home to your Wii, enter the Check Mii Out Channel’s Posting Plaza, click ‘Popular,’ then the ‘Search’ button at bottom. After that, hit the arrows at top right and enter in the following codes:
Frozog: 0370-5897-5394
Trazzle: 5121-3443-7371
Previously:
James Kochalka's Monster Mii: Dorgie's Little Ol' Accident Edition …
James Kochalka's Monster Mii: Zex's Sexy X-mas edition
James Kochalka's Monster Mii – Kzorx
[James Kochalka‘s daily diary strips, which run at AmericanElf.com, have just entered their tenth year and been collected in three print volumes. He is also the author of more books and comics than you can count on both hands, including some that are excellent for children, and others not so much. All are excellent. James also plays rock and roll and Game Boy rock as James Kochalka Superstar, and recently exhibited artwork at Giant Robot’s GR2 gallery.]
See more posts about: James Kochalka, Monster Mii, Offworld Originals
EBOY MEETS GOOGLE MAPS MEETS AWESOME: RYAN ALLEN’S GOON CITY
Where can you see the Team Fortress 2 Heavy duke it out next to Devo and Achewood’s rabbit ambulance, around the corner from City 17’s Citadel and a strider, and just blocks away from a neighborhood being attacked Rampage style and a statuary tribute to Leeroy Jenkins?
Only in Ryan Allen’s Goon City (which thanks, Anon, for noting is actually a community undertaking by the Something Awful forum goons [hence the name (and the now understandable mix in pixel-stylings)]).
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A SLAPSTICK NOBY DAY CELEBRATION
It’s a matter of hours now, for the statesiders, at least, until Keita Takahashi’s Noby Noby Boy hits the PlayStation Network. We should have more exciting Noby related news later this afternoon, but for now, celebrate with Namco’s expertly timed slapstick comedy.
Previously:
It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
Ask a stupid question: Takahashi finally ‘explains’ Noby Noby Boy – Offworld
Happy Holidays from Offworld (feat. Keita Takahashi) – OffworldNoby Noby Eve: a longer look at Noby's digital playground – Offworld
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GET PHYSICAL WITH NEW SUPER MEAT BOY CINEMATIC TRAILER, PAPERCRAFT TOY
In ongoing de-luxe WiiWare Super Meat Boy news: creator Edmund McMillen writes in to notify us that a new live-action promo video has just gone live for your perusal. He explains:
Created by a good friend of mine James Id, the teaser is a huge throw back to those early 90s animated MTV video bumpers, Liquid Television and NES video game commercials. Meat Boy screams early 90s nostalgia, so i thought it would be perfect to do a teaser in the same vein.
And it is! On top of that, pop-culture-papercraft-mega-site CubeCraft is also celebrating the upcoming release with a roll-your-own Meat Boy Cubee that I’m promptly adding to my stacks of to-do folding just as soon as I get this printer up and running again.
Super Meat boy!: Meaty News! [Edmund McMillen]
Previously:
Edmund McMillen's Meat Boy getting revamped for Wii, PC – Offworld
Savory new details of Edmund McMillen's Meat Boy – Offworld
Super Meat Boy gets musical, and Nintendo gets forward – Offworld
Edmund McMillen gives us No Quarter – Offworld
Getting crafty with Foldskool and Cubecraft – Offworld
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THE CONSOLE WARS JUST GOT NICE
In other cockle-warming developments, IGN forum user ‘beundertaker’ celebrates the end of the console wars with this set of Valentine’s lovely comics showing all competing consoles just getting along. My favorite is above: the sickly red-ringed Xbox 360 getting a little chicken soup for the soul from his friend Wii and PS3.
The console war is officially over [IGN boards, via TinyCartridge]
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NEW MR. DRILLER COMING TO DSIWARE/WIIWARE
Also included in the update from yesterday’s Weekly Famitsu, which revealed that a downloadable DS Katamari Damacy block game would be released in March, was news that another cult Namco hit was on its way to both current Nintendo downloadable services.
The magazine brought news that both Mr. Driller World, a new WiiWare game with 24 new stages, and the frighteningly named SekuttohamureruHoriHoriAction Mr. Driller, a new DSiWare exclusive version of the game with a 17-stage mission mode, time attack mode, and Dristone mode, will be released next week on February 24th and 25th, respectively.
The Driller series, which is by all rights actually quite fantastic, has never caught on in the west as much as it has in Japan, but with good reason: the U.S. has been chronically deprived of all of the advances the franchise took throughout the early ’00s, from the Game Boy Advance’s Mr. Driller G and its first stirrings of story behind the madness, to Mr. Driller A, with a morphing virtual pet fed by the blocks you drilled, to all of the various plays on the standard arcade drilling seen in its Japan-only theme-park styled GameCube version, Mr. Driller: Drill Land.
Even Namco’s first opportunity to introduce just the Dristone mode to the U.S. (which, instead of continually counting down your oxygen level, drains it on a per-drill basis, for a vastly more strategic and less arcade-like game) was unceremoniously stripped from DS title Drill Spirits in order to have it ready for the hardware launch (the later European and Japanese releases retained it).
Instead, the first the U.S. had seen of Driller since the DS launch was the Xbox Live Arcade version, Mr. Driller Online, which, while retaining some of the excellent multiplayer race modes first introduced in the import-only Game Boy Advance versions, was crippled by buggy network code, with a patch that fixed the online play coming too late to avoid further sullying the Driller brand.
But there’s still hope that Namco might be ready to fix its prior mistakes: copyright/linkedin super-snoop blog superannuation recently noted that the publisher recently filed a trademark for Mr. Driller W, which would seemingly line up nicely with the WiiWare release, and will hopefully start to course-correct its reception in the west.
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NGMOCO: ROLANDO SEQUEL COMING, TOUCH PETS DOGS ANNOUNCED
Having sated the core gamer demographic with the tilt-enabled Qix-meets-Trauma Center Dr. Awesome, the laser-line dual-analog shooter Dropship, physics stacker Topple, and, of course, strategic roller Rolando, publisher ngmoco is taking a much more casual bent with its next slate of games.
But first, a quick diversion: via its Twitter feed we learn that in addition to a free level-pack update to Rolando (which has also finally seen the addition of a free Lite version [App Store link]), Hand Circus is hard at work with a proper sequel to the game.
But back to the casuals: in addition to the previously covered Topple sequel and letter-battler Word Fu (from Cambridge studio Demiurge, who previously have played supportive roles in the development of games like Mass Effect and BioShock), ngmoco has announced Touch Pets Dogs, a virtual pet sim from Stumptown Game Machine.
Disappointingly, while Touch Pets is already being brushed off as “just” a Nintendogs clone (as Rolando was with Loco Roco), it’s well worth pointing out that Stumptown head Andrew Stern was well ahead of the pack as one of the designers behind PF.Magic’s original Petz series: specifically, the 1995 release of Dogz and Catz (a franchise now in the hands of Ubisoft).
Stern was also the man behind 2005’s groundbreaking interactive story Façade — which saw players take a third-wheel dinner-date role in the midst of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’-level marital tension. As it turns out, the AI development for Façade is a key part of what Stern is expanding upon for Touch Pets, as he explained to Gamasutra in an excellent recent interview, and promises to make interactions with the pets richer than competing pet sims, certainly those already on the iPhone.
That, in addition to its integrated social scene (players can meet with friend’s dogs, and the game generates a story-like “Dog Feed”) makes this, however casually aimed, another of my most anticipated iPhone titles.
Previously:
Touch me I'm slick: ngmoco/Hand Circus's Rolando – Offworld
ngmoco shows off iPhone's Dr. Awesome, Dropship – Offworld
Ngmoco promise Word-Fu, more Topple by mid-February – Offworld
Rolando gets papered – Offworld
HandCircus preparing more Rolando for the iPhone, Lite version …
Ready for their closeup: Mikko Walamies’ Rolando art – Offworld
See more posts about: Hand Circus, Offworld Originals, Rolando
GET THE DIABLO III SHIRT THAT MAKES THE HARDCORE WEEP
If you weren’t following the absolute scandal earlier last year, here’s the précis: Blizzard officially announce Diablo III, one of the longest awaited sequels in PC history, and the internet does explode. Blizzard then drop the first images, and thereupon unleash the deafening whoosh of a few million gamers collectively sucking breath through their teeth, because: the game known best for its monochromatic catacombs and hell-fire lit pentagrams is full of colors, rainbows even.
Petitions are signed and fans determine the rainbows can’t even scientifically exist as they do, god dammit.
And behind it all, Blizzard just laughed, countering with new screenshots of unicorns shitting deadly Love Spree attacks, and distributing internal team logo shirts (via MTV) that bleed sunshine and lollipops.
So, now that you’re caught up, naturally, you want one, and NerdyShirts abides with a reproduction version of those self-same shirts for a low, low price, so you, too, can show the world just how your hardcore heart behaves.
Diablo III T-shirt [NerdyShirts]
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KATAMARI DAMACY COMING TO DSI AS… A BLOCK PUZZLE GAME?
Need another reason to pick up a freshly-announced DSi? Here’s what we know via the grey market underground of early-breaking news from Japan’s Weekly Famitsu magazine: on March 25th, the DSi’s downloadable game service DSiWare will see the addition of a new 500 Point ($5) puzzle game from Namco Bandai based on everybody’s favorite Katamari Damacy.
Instead of the stylus-rolling game everyone thought they wanted, though, Korogashi Puzzle Katamari Damacy will be a block puzzle game where players will make “sets” of the same “things” you’ve rolled up into stars a million times before, which then are, as best I can tell, ejected out into a black hole. (As 1UP smartly points out, the game appears to be a re-skinned version of Namco’s underdog puzzler Pac-Attack.)
The only other tidbit Famitsu has let slip for now is that the ending theme will be “performed” by Yamaha’s Vocaloid2 speech synthesis singing “star” Hatsune Miku made famous by endless versions of popular songs spread on Japan’s version of YouTube, NicoNicoDouga (hear her version of Portal‘s ‘Still Alive’).
We’ll have more on the game later this week or early next, as more above-the-level information hits the Japanese press sites.
Previously:
Katamari rolls onto iPhone – Offworld
iPhone Katamari gets Exquisite addition – Offworld
Autonomous Katamari-Roomba clean sweeps in 71 minutes – Offworld
It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
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CALL OF DUTY CREATORS INFINITY WARD LAUNCH THEIR TWITTER SUGGESTION BOX
Last week we brought news that Call of Duty creators Infinity Ward were working with Cursebird programmer Richard ‘Fantastic‘ Henry to bring.. well, something games related to Twitter. Grand notions started to run through our heads, hoping for something on the level with friend of Offworld Tom Armitage’s brilliant Left 4 Dead Twitter-bots.
Well, the project has officially launched, and it’s… well, not quite what we were expecting, but a good lesson on crowd-sourcing, I suppose. The #mw2 project is a way for Call of Duty designers — currently at work on Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to the best selling CoD4 [aka the first FPS that’s ever really, really sucked me in to multiplayer action with brilliant lite-RPG underpinnings] — to talk with the community about what they’d like to see in the new game.
At heart it’s a simple suggestion box that could’ve served its purpose on any stock forum, but it’s smartest twist is in letting the #mw2 community give a thumbs up or down to any individual suggestion, and then rank the best commenters on its own leaderboard, where you can then link back to their original tweets.
So it might not be any sort of real-world extension of the game as we’d originally hoped, but still a good effort for bringing developers and their audience closer together in this new “games are services” landscape.
#mw2 project [Infinity Ward]
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