‘DETAILED’ IS A STRETCH: MORE ON THE LEFT 4 DEAD DLC
I’d forgotten I was looking forward to watching GameTrailers TV for the first details of the recently announced DLC for Valve’s Left 4 Dead, and it’s good thing I didn’t wait up. Shacknews points to the episode online where, after an extended look at GTAIV‘s own upcoming DLC, the L4D announcement boils down to, essentially, a sentence fragment: “Dead Air and Death Toll maps for multiplayer, survive as long as you can ‘across 12 maps’ in the Survival mode.”
Whether that means record-keeping and global ranking in Survival, and whether that means new maps or across a selection of the current locations is still Left 2 Be Announced.
Left 4 Dead DLC details [GameTrailers TV, via Shacknews, Left 4 Dead home]
Previously:
Why Left 4 Dead has the best tutorial ever… and why you never …
Left 4 Love: Alexandria Neonakis' latest valentines – Offworld
Ragdoll Metaphysics: Left 4 Dead, The Thinking Man's Braindead …
Left 4 Dead: Savage beyond belief – Offworld
Surly Hate Machine: Dance to everything Left 4 Dead's Francis can …
Left 4 Dead: the twits don't stand a chance – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
APPLE CLASSIC OREGON TRAIL COMING TO IPHONE
As they did with the iPhone version of Digital Chocolate’s Tower Bloxx, games site IGN has posted the first screenshots showing that classic Apple II game The Oregon Trail will be making its way to the iPhone in coming months.
No additional details have yet been provided, but judging by the screens it’s clear that it will be an updated version of Gameloft’s mobile phone remake. The Gameloft game site includes an emulated version of the mobile port (the last link of the ‘about the game’ section), where you can get a taste of the game’s lush Euro comic style, injected humor, and its hunting minigame, which will obviously be updated to reflect the phone’s touch screen.
The Oregon Trail Screenshots, Wallpapers and Pics [IGN, Gameloft mobile game site]
Previously:
Virtual Apple ][: Browser embedded game design lessons – Offworld
Interview with creators of Oregon Trail – Boing Boing
You Have Died of Dysentery t-shirt from Oregon Trail – Boing Boing
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
AVOID MISSING: THE PONG MUSEUM OPENS ITS VIRTUAL DOORS
Recently opened to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ralph Baer’s first TV-displayable version of the game that would come to be known as Pong (or is it the 42nd? Let’s just call it 40-ish), the Pong Museum has curated a staggering amount of information on the game in its myriad earliest forms (including scans of each of the consoles themselves, even).
Even better, though, is the video Baer sent in to the site of he and hardware tech Bill Harrison playing some of the first ever rounds of multiplayer videogames, showing a surprisingly organic looking game compared to the strict vectors of the later versions (this version had a separate knob for fakeout curveballs).
The site’s webshop even includes a DIY build-your-own-Pong-kit, which, unfortunately, appears to be PAL only for now, though they do ship to the US.
pongmuseum.com – and the ball was square… [Pong Museum, via Coudal]
Previously:
BAFTA to honor Pong/Atari head Nolan Bushnell – Offworld
Gaijin Games taking the Wii on a Bit.Trip – Offworld
Beat connection: Gaijin send us on a second video Bit.Trip – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, pong
OURS IS NOT TO QUESTION WHY: PAUL ROBERTSON’S CAKEDOGG AND PRESENTCAT
Submitted without commentary: Cakedogg and Presentcat (spot all her games presents for a special prize!), from ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006‘ and ‘Kings of Power 4 Billion %‘ creator Paul Robertson. For the non-epileptics in the house, the party version.
Cakedogg and Presentcat [Paul Robertson]
Previously:
Paul Robertson pumps pixels for energy drink – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Paul Robertson
CAPCOM UNLEASHING MORE UNDEAD HORDES WITH DEAD RISING 2
That viral video that made the rounds late last week that seemed to point to a new entry in Capcom’s Dead Rising series turned out to be right on the money: Capcom has just sent word that Vancouver studio Blue Castle (they of 2K’s arcade baseball series The Bigs) are currently at work on a new PS3, Xbox 360, and PC version of the zombie survival game.
Details are still scarce, but Capcom says the game is set years after the original game, with the zombie virus spreading to (
), the DR equivalent of the glittering world of Vegas (though it’ll also, happily, be taking us back to
).
The original Dead Rising was perhaps the most faithful recreation of Romero’s conception of the shambling hordes, if a brutally unforgiving one, with its much maligned sparse save-point and underlying forced restart structure that undercut its sandbox appeal for many. It’s something the upcoming Wii remake is making an effort to fix, and something that, hopefully, we’ll see in this sequel.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
LISTEN, TOO: ANOTHER PICOPICT YMCK NES MEGA-MIX
As with the last, while I can’t embed it here, do yourself the favor of heading over to Tiny Cartridge for the second in their series of ripped theme tunes from Skip’s DSiWare downloadable PicoPict.
As with the happy hardcore of YMCK‘s Bowser-battle theme, this one’s a remix of a number of classic NES themes that shifts seamlessly from Super Mario‘s world 1-1 to the square-wave purr of Excitebike‘s engines to a Legend of Zelda overworld mix nearly the same half-note off as Konjak’s below.
And with that, I actually am off to buy the game.
PiCOPiCT’s “Ending” (Credits) song by YMCK. [Tiny Cartridge]
Previously:
Listen: YMCK's Bowser-busting hardcore Mario remix – Offworld
DSi getting more downloadable Art Style, Tetris Attack – Offworld
See more posts about: Listen, Music, Offworld Originals
THE MEME IN MOTION: SPACESICK’S IT’S A DIG, DIG, DIG, DIG DUG
What’s the next logical progression following the retro-game cover meme Olly Moss has inadvertently spread across the net? Title sequences, obviously, and Moss-cohort Mitch ‘Spacesick’ Ansara (who already has been in the spotlight in recent months for his brilliant ‘I Can Read Movies‘ series) is taking the first steps in that direction with an in-progress Bass-ian animated cinematic sequence for Namco’s Dig Dug as reinterpreted through the lens of 1958 (and the blog post title more blatantly giving away the source of its inspiration).
Coincidentally, Ansara’s latest I Can Read Movies cover? The best film games culture has birthed to date: Seth Gordon’s King of Kong.
It’s a Dig, Dig, Dig, Dig Dug [spacesick]
Previously:
Olly Moss's Penguin-inspired Videogame Classics covers – Offworld
Olly Moss brings a touch of class to Black Mesa – Offworld
Olly Moss's Man With The Golden Gear – Offworld
And then there were four: Olly Moss takes on Silent Hill – Offworld
Moss creates a monster: Something Awful takes on retro-classic …
Moss gets modern: GTA‘s most wanted America – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
LISTEN: KONJAK’S LEGEND OF PRINCESS SOUNDTRACK
This morning’s essential download: Joakim ‘Konjak‘ Sandberg has put together a free download for his recently recommended fantastic Zelda-as-sidescroller indie game Legend of Princess, which is as parodic as the game itself for staying just one-half-note off its source material but remaining instantly recognizable.
Side note: the file sharing service used is riddled with misleading links — the actual download link is all the way at bottom hiding tinily beneath the ‘File URL’ textbox.
Previously:
Gimme Indie Game: Konjak's Legend of Princess – Offworld
Listen: 2D Boy's free World of Goo soundtrack – Offworld
Listen: Pause offers free indie game soundtrack downloads – Offworld
Henry Hatsworth: The Pompous Adventurer's Theme Tunes – Offworld
See more posts about: Listen, Music, Offworld Originals
WEEKEND WATCHING: NETFLIX ON 360 EDITION
For this week’s Weekend Watching, I wanna know: what the hell are all of you people watching all the time on Netflix? Semi-related to the post below, though privacy issues stymie, I’d be thrilled if the Xbox 360’s NXE dashboard gave me at least a bit of a hint as to what lies beneath those alluringly sealed-off red boxes on my friends list, or even a data feed that gave me recommendations based on my friends’ preferences.
It was the NXE itself that sold me on finally subscribing to the service (more honestly, in tricking me into never canceling my trial account), but since then I’ve been at a constant loss to find anything truly amazing that I hadn’t already seen, and have instead relented to picking through every b-list movie I’d been meaning to watch for ages, and finally getting through that “Thirty-Rocks” show I keep hearing so much about.
So, in the spirit of CrownDozen’s recent blog post digging up some of Netflix’s hidden gems, Microsoft’s announcement that there’s now over a million of you on the service, and the launch of the brilliant new instantwatcher.com service that’s about a quadrillion times easier to browse than Netflix’s own site, I put it to all of you to find us all something good to watch on our Xbox 360 this weekend.
My quickie recommendation list looks a lot like CrownDozen’s (and probably the playlist of any given film-school geek): anything by David Lynch or the Coen Bros, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Persepolis, typography porn docu Helvetica, comic/outsider art nerd docus Crumb and In the Realms of the Unreal (don’t miss the latter!), effortlessly charming spelling bee doc Spellbound, the unanimously loved Man on Wire, and Errol Morris’s oddball Fast Cheap & Out of Control.
What else are we missing?
Netflix + XboxLive [CrownDozen, InstantWatcher]
Previously:
Weekend watching: Look Around You makes its U.S. debut – Offworld
Weekend watching: Rex Crowle's Grip Wrench – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Weekend Watching, Xbox 360
POCKETGAMER’S PLEA TO IMPROVE APPLE’S APP STORE
PocketGamer.biz, the industry-focused side of the always excellent UK handheld/mobile game news site has just published a very well-reasoned opinion piece on what Apple can do to improve the App Store experience both on PC and the iPhone itself.
The ideas presented — from better integration of Lite/demo versions, ala Xbox Live Arcade, to better recommendation tools as employed by Netflix and Amazon — are all fantastic, and while some are being solved by third party tools (LivingSocial’s iPhone section lets Facebook users share and rate their most-used apps, and I’m a frequent reader of Pinch Media’s new and updated app RSS feeds), we all hope Apple goes to greater lengths to learn the lessons of its competitors over the coming months and years.
Says opinion author Stuart Dredge on filtering, for instance:
The more games that are available, the more pearls there are to find. But how to find them? An essential part of any app store is decent search and filtering tools, enabling you to find the good stuff quickly and easily. And this is one area where the App Store currently falls down a bit.
As a gamer, there are two key criteria I want to use to filter the games on an app store. First, I want to know what’s new – what’s really new, as opposed to what old games have just been patched.
An option to quickly scan all the games that have been released today, this week, this month or even since the last time I logged on (if that’s tracked) would be invaluable.
Anything Dredge missed from a consumer or developer standpoint? We’d all love to hear your opinions via the comments below.
Opinion: The perfect mobile app store [PocketGamer.biz]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
