IPHONE COOKING WITH SPACE DEADBEEF
Just slightly embarrassed to appear to have been a little behind the curve on this and just now noticing the new incredibly named iPhone shooter Space Deadbeef (surely a flubbed translation of ‘dead meat’?). As Meat Bun adeptly point out, the game is from Polyphony Digital programmer Yuji Yasuhara, and carries that same ultra clean Gran Turismo look into sidescroller shooting.
But more importantly, Yasuhara was also behind Polyphony’s PlayStation shooter Omega Boost, and one look at that game in motion, compared with one of Deadbeef itself should be enough to convince you that its lineage is pretty clear.
Best of all, Yasuhara’s added it to the App Store for free, and it’s honestly one of the best attempts at an iPhone shooter yet, knocking off all of the tilt- or virtual-d-pad nonsense for a tap and swipe lock-on mechanic that, with practice, becomes a graceful little finger ballet amongst the bullet hell. And, even if nothing else, it’s fully convinced me that a 3D Rez could absolutely work on the device with the same interface.
Space Deadbeef [iTunes link, via both Meat Bun and Infovore, almost simultaneously]
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NINTENDO MAKES RIGHT: U.S. CLUB OFFERS GAME&WATCH DS, OTHER HANDSOMENESS
The earlier jealousy fades as Nintendo quietly (and perhaps prematurely) launches its stateside Club Nintendo campaign. As with Japan, the Club lets you earn points by entering the registration code found in Wii and DS games, which can then be put toward real actual prizes.
For its inaugural year, Nintendo is offering a grand prize of the exclusive DS Game & Watch Collection, which includes faithfully remade original LCD games Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House. It’s quite obviously the pick of the litter, but I can also see die-hard Nintendo enthusiasts enjoying their first opportunity to own a deck of hanafuda cards — the trade Nintendo was originally in before entering the world of games.
And, even moreso, the Mario hat DS game rack is quite nice, and those three game-card and stylus wallets, especially in the stately Club Nintendo black, are very, very handsome. Back of the envelope calculations from around the forums says the 800 points it costs you for the DS Collection equates to registering some 16 first-party Wii games or 27 DS games, though there are also opportunities to earn more points via online surveys.
The site’s still struggling to keep up with all this attention, and login problems abound, but you can at least have a closer look at the prizes while the backend sorts itself out.
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BIT BLOT’S AQUARIA HITS STEAM
Though we’ll have to wait just a touch longer for the improvements Mac users recently received, Bit Blot and Valve have made it that much easier to experience their underwater adventure game Aquaria with its release on Steam. Unlike the standard PC version, this one includes new Steam achievements, and, as is Valve’s wont, is offered at a debut discount until the end of the year.
You can see an HD trailer of the game here, and watch a sleep deprived and delirious Alec Holowka (now of Infinite Ammo, creator of Gamma 3D game Paper Moon) put together said trailer via Bit Blot’s site.
Aquaria [Steam]
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THE DYNAMIC FLUIDS OF CHRONIC LOGIC’S GISH
David Rosen returns again with his Design Tour looks at indie games, this time with Chronic Logic’s PC platformer Gish and how its indirect controls (finding momentum to get into the air, rather than explicitly jumping) can be initially offputting, but eventually let you move like “a tar-ball ninja.”
Previously:
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PROPOSE WITH YOUR DS WITH MULTIPLE:OPTION’S MIDDLEWARE
While I’m not at all opposed to the sentiment, there’s something intrinsically a bit lazy about relying on middleware to create a marriage proposal, isn’t there? But surely this’ll make at least a few couples quite happy: Multiple:Option’s software lets you input your proposal message and spits back out a DS rom featuring a simple match-up puzzle game that ends with the reveal once they’ve won.
“Whether it’s a marriage proposal or just a simple confession of love, Easy Proposal Maker lets you concentrate on what’s important – your relationship!” says the dev, and at very least I can’t think of a more wholesome excuse to get your hands on a flashcart.
Easy Proposal Maker featuring The Search Master [Multiple:Option, via Tiny Cartridge]
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DANIEL PEMBERTON’S LITTLE BIG MUSIC HITS ITUNES
As expected, Daniel Pemberton’s Little Big Music album — collecting the 18 tracks he composed for LittleBigPlanet — has indeed gone live on iTunes (take special note: iTunes Plus, actually, to the happy cheers of DRM foes everywhere).
You can hear ‘Horny Old Man,’ one of the seven ‘b-side rarities’ on the collection that didn’t make it onto the final release of the game in the preview he gave Offworld last week.
You can also get a preview of ‘The Orb of Dreamers,’ absolutely the hit of the album, via this YouTube preview of the game’s opening cinematic. With this going in one headphone ear, all I need now is my own personal Stephen Fry to coo paternally in the other to enhance my reality by about a thousand percent.
Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra [iTunes link]
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PLAYSTATION NETWORK GETTING BESIEGED BY SPACE INVADERS EXTREME
A nice follow-on from the last entry: Siliconera has noted that the ratings-board trawlers have dug up confirmation that Space Invaders Extreme, the forthcoming console version of the DS/PSP arcade techno-remix, will be coming to the PlayStation Network as well as Xbox Live Arcade.
As we noted before, not only does the game come with a bonus port of the original arcade game, but a version of Llamasoft’s Xbox 360 music visualizer Nuon, though it’s likely that’ll remain a console exclusive, unless Minter’s been very, very quietly working on porting the code to Sony’s vastly different architecture.
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THE XBOX LIVE AVATAR EXTRACTOR
As I mentioned last week, while there’s a tradeoff on the sliding scale of Miis to Xbox Live Avatars to Home’s too-real characters where Microsoft may have struck the smartest balance (despite my Mii being far more recognizably Me), what they’re doing even more correctly is letting them loose in the wild.
The snowglobe may have been a fun if schmaltzy addition to letting them populate games themselves, but now your Avatars spread more virally with Free Your Avatar, a simple but effective jpg exporter that lets you make Facebook/MySpace pictures and iPhone and desktop wallpapers out of your You.
Even with the limited selection of backgrounds and poses (something Rock Band does awesomely), compared to the arcane fan-made hacks necessary to extract your Mii from the Wii’s iron grip (as we have found out in bringing you Monster Mii) it’s a huge step in the right direction.
Free Your Avatar [Xbox.com]
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MAERLEON CEDRAEON SUBMERGES WITH ELECTROPLANKTON
One of the most common misunderstandings — and sources of post-release backlash — about Toshio Iwai’s early DS software Electroplankton was that it wasn’t designed to be a portable music creation tool.
Instead, Iwai was essentially giving players a portable music interaction tool — shrinking down the larger gallery installations he’d done over the years and making them more accessible both in their distribution as commercial software, and by giving the plankton themselves happy-face anthropomorphic charm.
While that did put off some, who quickly found their best laid sounds succumbing to the whims of the easily-bored plankton, it didn’t put off Merleon Cedraeon, who writes he was “suddenly motivated to create a new type of music that I had never before attempted” on discovering the software.
His “Submersive” album is an ongoing work all based around Electroplankton, and his newest song, Neptune, can be heard via that album’s webpage. Like the others, it’s an ambient mix of a number of the plankton you can interact with, and a good representation of both of what the software and Cedraeon are capable of. Also recommended is ElectricMan, which mixes his plankton style with the DS’s bootup sound for a more rollicking electro-track.
Submersive [f3music, via disquiet. Thanks Gus!]
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SPIKE TV’S GAME AWARDS WERE A BIT BRüTAL
Last night’s Spike TV Video Game Awards went off, well, not exactly without a hitch, but Jack Black managed at very least to not cause any major havoc with his flamethrower. In general, the awards themselves brought a keen list of winners (something I say with the caveat that I was one of several judges) from Media Molecule’s well-deserved studio of the year to Left 4 Dead‘s best multiplayer and World of Goo‘s audience-awarded best indie game.
Will Wright’s ‘little god in a virtual world’ acceptance speech, too, was nice to see broadcast nationally, even if corned up (to Wright’s awkward, “oh!”) with a silver-painted bikini-clad girl in angel wings descending on a wire-swing to deliver the statue itself.
That about summed up the rest of the awards ceremony itself, and brings me nicely to the point… (more…)
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