COVERING THE COVERS
Only six days into the new year and we’ve got a handful of nice projects launching: first Today’s Free Game, which could quickly make itself quite useful, and now, Simon Parkin’s laser-focused Box Art, a new Tumblr blog that does daily just what you think it will:
Box art is a dying art and I think we’ll be all the poorer for its inevitable demise, even if the reduction of humanity’s bulk of packaging can only be a good thing in wider terms. This site then is a place to celebrate the most interesting box art of games past and present from across the world.
The glory days of the likes of Roger Dean‘s Psygnosis covers
are surely all but buried (a legacy I’m sure Parkin will get to in good time), but maybe in some small way Box Art will re-invigorate the practice.
Bonus points, too, for Parkin’s choice in favicons: the eagle-eyed will notice that it’s a detail from my favorite box art of all time, the original PlayStation’s fantastically bizarre Jounetsu Nekketsu Athletes (an art-piece I’d like to believe I had a small part in championing, if only because the first google image result I found for it used my same original filename).
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GAIJIN GAMES TAKING THE WII ON A BIT.TRIP
Several weeks back this suitably ridiculous viral video made the rounds, along with speculation that it related to an announcement for a forthcoming Wii exclusive, and it seems Nintendo Power (via a spy-cam shot supplied to GoNintendo) has prematurely solved the riddle.
Upstart developer Gaijin Games, it turns out, has been quietly at work on the WiiWare’s answer to Q-Games’s PixelJunk series (or Skip/Nintendo’s own ArtStyle/bit Generations franchise): a set of six games under the “Bit.Trip” label, starting with Beat, a retro-futurist rhythm-based Pong-alike that you can catch a momentary glimpse of during the flickering montage above, or via Gaijin’s official CommanderVideo site.
Beat‘s twist, the magazine revealed, is its evolution based on how well you play: get yourself on a winning streak and the game responds with increasingly complex synced up color and sound, but falter and it returns to its original monochrome form.
The series is due for a release later this year, published by traditionally niche RPG house Aksys, and is a very welcome surprise for 2009’s WiiWare outlook.
Where’s the Cat? [Gaijin Games]
See more posts about: Bit.Trip, Gaijin, Offworld Originals
MOTHER 3 TRANSLATORS START EARTHBOUND CENTRAL BLOG
I’m not entirely sure how many more dedicated Earthbound fansites the internet can handle before collapsing under its own weight, but the latest, Earthbound Central, comes direct from Mother 3 fan-translation lead Tomato, and promises a “daily blog supplement” to Starmen.net, as close to a fearless leader for the game’s hyper-dedicated community as it gets.
That said, any development that brings more Western legitimacy to the series is, of course, much appreciated.
Earthbound Central [via Starmen.Net forums]
Previously:
Harvey James's Mother 3 fan art vanguard – Offworld
Tomato releases Earthbound Zero 'easy patch' – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
SUPER MARIO IN REAL LIFE
From the Kasou Taishou team that brought you Matrix Ping Pong — I’m still trying to work out the Obama subtext.
第81回仮装大賞準優勝作品【スーパーマリオ】 [YouTube, via Waxy]
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INFINITE AMMO TEASES THEIR MARIAN-ETTE
Blame my spotty feedreading on the days surrounding New Year’s Eve, but I quite shamefully missed Infinite Ammo’s teaser for their official debut game, Marian, until last night. As previously mentioned, Ammo is a team with a stellar reputation, having been responsible for both Gamma 3D’s layer-hopping Paper Moon and their part in Bit Blot’s Aquaria.
They haven’t revealed much, bar a description lifted from Play magazine’s pictorial blurb which describes its protagonist as a re-animated puppet who’s “caught in the dream world between life and death,” and “uses her own puppet handle as a weapon and replaces her limbs with a variety of tools.”
But Katie De Sousa‘s striking Audrey Kawasaki-esque concept art says as much as Ammo needs to for now — they’re well on their stated goal of “making one of the most beautiful 2D games.”
Announcing: Marian [Infinite Ammo]
Previously:
Bringing Gamma home to you – Offworld
Bit Blot's Aquaria hits Steam – Offworld
See more posts about: Infinite Ammo, Offworld Originals
THE OFFWORLD GUIDE TO THE 2009 INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL
The Independent Games Festival has become a bedrock institution for the games industry, especially within the past few years.
Apart from being a celebration of inspired and auteur design — design with passion — it’s also become a fast-ticket to getting noticed by console makers eager to bring the best of the fresh talent exclusively to their download services.
Braid, World of Goo, Darwinia, Everyday Shooter, Crayon Physics, Audiosurf — all truly became names of their own following IGF successes. In the spirit of looking forward, then, and because Offworld’s initial mention of the 2009 winners amounted to little more than a rote list of names, I’ve taken the time to sit down with all of this year’s finalists and try to contextualize each entry (bar those cases where my hardware unfortunately failed me).
Inside you’ll find as many video demos as I could muster, links and mentions to those games currently available to try for yourself, and an independent summary of each of the 22 finalists this year. As with our Offworld 20 best games list, any comments can be left via this page below.
See more posts about: IGF, Offworld Originals
NAMCO RIGHTLY REVIVING PLAYSTATION’S KLONOA
Some of the finest Wii news I’ve received since.. well, since the Bit.Trip announcement earlier this morning: Namco has confirmed they’ll be bringing the hi-def remake of the original PlayStation platformer (shown above) to North America this year.
One of Namco’s more obscure properties, the series has since branched into additional platformer sequels for PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, and, most obscurely, Bandai’s original WonderSwan (my personal favorite of the franchise, and the most overtly puzzley), as well as an overhead RPG and, curiously, an altogether-skippable PlayStation beach-volleyball game.
The series has never fully got its due in the West, quite likely for its achingly saccharine overtones (particularly its admittedly piercing baby-talk dialogue, which has since been replaced in the Wii version), but beneath that sugar coat laid some of the smartest puzzles and challenging tests of dexterity of the PlayStation era, and was famed for its horrifying end-game cinematic that would shatter even the stoniest heart (and prove that strong men also cry).
Namco says the updated Wii version will have undetailed “new secrets” and option motion control — we’re just hoping the company has the good sense not to do this to a decade old cult classic.
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MEGA MAN VS… EVERYBODY AT ONCE
Rockman 2 Neta, a one-off indie hack from Japan pitting Mega Man against his greatest challenge yet. Auntie Pixelante explains:
instead of having each robot wait for megaman alone in a room, why doesn’t doctor wily just have them all jump him at once?
rockman 2 neta is a game built around exactly that design joke… and it is possible to win: that’s part of the joke.
And above, the entirely improbable seizure-inducing victory.
rockman 2 neta [auntie pixelante]
See more posts about: Meta, Offworld Originals
ATTRACT MODE’S ATTRACTIVE BLOG
I last mentioned ‘videogame culture shop’ Attract Mode on Offworld’s launch when I pointed to (and apparently ‘leaked’ — sorry, fellows!) an early T-shirt design from artist Harvey James. At the time, the launch of Attract Mode’s own site was still in the unforeseeable distance, but I’ve just got word today that the group’s new blog has appeared.
While the actual shop and further designs have yet to be revealed, the group’s initial blog posts are pleasingly left-field, celebrating the awesome pixels of the Flying Pizza Kitty as well as the art-grotesque paintings of Japanese artist Masao, and giving me good hope for the types of artwork they’ll be curating in the future.
I’ll say here as I did when it was first revealed, though, unless they make a print available of Harvey’s Game Girl pin-up in addition to the wearable, there is no justice in the universe.
[Attract Mode – Videogame Culture Shop]
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FIDGET’S SCI-FI REDEFINING GAMES LIST
Very much enjoyed Tom Chick’s latest list for Sci-Fi Network’s games blog Fidgit that, appropriately, focused on the 10 games that redefined science fiction — videogaming’s, as Chick put it, “Gattica, Dark City, Clockwork Orange, and Wall-E.” Pleasingly, the list contains a number of undersung classics that are always well overdue for a revisit from Eric Chahi’s Out of this World/Another World (which got a high-def anniversary re-release just a few years back) to Belgian developer Appeal’s fantastic Outcast — and saves an unexpected twist for its number one.
10 videogames that redefine science fiction [Fidgit]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
