A NEW LOOK AT THATGAMECOMPANY’S FLOWER
Sony has released new footage of one of my most anticipated 2009 downloads: longtime favorite Thatgamecompany’s PS3 downloadable Flower, a followup to their earlier fl0w, and similarly serene PC demo Cloud. I couldn’t be happier to see the PS3’s supercomputer core being harnessed purely for the purpose of rendering fluttering petals and waves of knee high grass, and making something as intangible as wind a ‘playable character.’
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FALLOUT 3’S COLD WAR
Bethesda has handed IGN the first extended details on the first downloadable content for Fallout 3, due January, which will see players working their way through a military simulation of the liberation of Anchorage from communist Chinese invaders.
From what I can gather from the frustratingly no-follow-ups interview, it sounds like the simulation will take a more strategic turn, including “interactive Strike Teams” (still unsure whether this interaction will extend beyond the “stick close to me, give me some room” rules that currently apply to the main quest’s partners). I’m similarly unsure exactly how to suspend my disbelief in bringing new weapons from inside a simulation back into FO3‘s real world, but I suppose it could be as simple as a storage locker next to the computer.
The interview also touches at minor hints at the two following DLC packs, including a wink I’m interpreting to mean that Pittsburgh has gone all-ghoul.
Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage Unveiled [IGN]
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THE CAT’S CRADLE BALANCE OF STREET FIGHTER II
Designer David Sirlin had a thin tight rope to walk in remaking and rebalancing aspects of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo for its XBLA and PSN debut, and it’s fascinating to listen to him delve into the minutae of those decisions, revealing just how precariously and artfully constructed the game is, especially when he slings jargon like:
Their complaints led me to try the fairly extreme measures of letting his jab torpedo destroy fireballs — wow! — with his Hundred-Hand Slap being lower damage and lower priority, and his deadly Ochio Throw no longer being repeatable and only retaining half its dizzy power.
If you’re still the type that still struggles to appreciate the game as much more than a ratatat of flailing button mashing, I recommend watching this 2004 championship video to its end. Even if you can’t fully appreciate the complexity (the storyline gist goes: it sure looked like the girl was going to get the guy, but with just the thinnest sliver of life meter left he delivers a stunning comeback), the reaction of the crowd is enough to clue you in that something earth shattering has just happened.
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix Postmortem [1UP.com]
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GOING DEEP ON MUSIC WITH HARMONIX
Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos has some very smart reflections on the birth and evolution of music gaming in this recent chat with Wired, talking about the work and non-work of music creation software — which the company was founded to create — versus their music performance software as we know it today.
He also expounds on how familiarity with the music helps guide you as a player, and the risks in broadening its catalog from Guitar Hero‘s cherry-picked ‘best of the history of rock’ catalog to Rock Band‘s more all-encompassing selections that attempt to foster music discovery rather than just appreciation, and, implicitly, makes you understand why the company is at the fore of the music gaming genre.
Game|Life Video: The Man Behind Rock Band [Wired]
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ONLY ON OFFWORLD: A SNEAK PEEK AT DANIEL PEMBERTON’S LITTLEBIGMUSIC
It’s no secret that LittleBigPlanet has one of the outright hippest soundtracks in recent memory, coolhunting its way through the basically heart-melting naiveté of The Go! Team’s ‘Get It Together’ and the fractured pounding rhythm of Battles’ ‘Atlas’ (which I’d like to go ahead and declare our gaming generation’s version of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott’s Looney Tunes staple ‘Powerhouse’).
So it was with great excitement that I woke up to an email from Daniel Pemberton (of the Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra) with news that Little Big Music, his own collection of 18 tracks composed for the game, was nearly due for an iTunes release. Most notably, Pemberton is the man behind ‘The Orb of Dreamers,’ the warmly angelic dusty-vinyl ambient track that marks your entry into the game.
Even better, Pemberton has partnered with Offworld to give you the first listen to the album with ‘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, but may be used in the future as the Planet evolves and expands.
Somewhat akin to Montreal DJ Kid Koala, the song’s a romping bout of ragtime/big band turntablism, and my favorite on the album outside of ‘Dreamers’. Without further ado, then, here’s that track, which you can also download directly here:
[mejsaudio src=”http://venuspatrol.com/ofiles/05%20Horny%20Old%20Man.mp3″]
‘Little Big Music: Musical Oddities From And Inspired By LittleBigPlanet’ is due to appear on iTunes by December 15th (we’ll link you to it again when it goes live), and you can hear more from Daniel on his debut album TVPOPMUZIK, which includes some tracks later reworked for the game as well as ‘Pip Pop Plop,’ the theme song for the first season of Offworld favorite British comedy Peep Show.
See more posts about: Daniel Pemberton, Listen, Little Big Music, Offworld Originals
OFFWORLD GOES TO HELL
As John noted earlier, today marks the 15th anniversary of the release of Doom, which we’re celebrating in turn by hanging the Phobos drapes. Celebrate yourself with a build of Chocolate Doom, a day spent wiled away with the Xbox Live Arcade version, a run through the Flash version we noted earlier, and by leaving your reverent remembrances in the comments below.
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OFFWORLD ON BBTV: AWESOME EDITION
Clearly still struggling through Infinite-Jest-esque urges to purchase beauty-enhancing video phone masks and the anxiety of talking to yourself while staring into a tiny, lit, terrifying Hal 9000 eye-hole, I’ve made my official non-gnome deathknight debut on BBtv.
In it I recap what we’ve been doing on the site (most notably, the debut of Monster Mii), recommend Dr. Awesome, the first game that’s felt to me like a proper ‘iPhone game,’ versus a game that’s merely been made for the iPhone, and let you know what’s happening on the site in the coming weeks.
Bonus points for recognizing any of the ephemera in the background, and, as usual, a direct download link so you can blow it up full screen and shoot suction darts at my scruffy mug.
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SONY RESPONDS TO SACKBOOK CLOSURE
As we’ve been following closely, fan-made LittleBigPlanet social networking site Sackbook was recently shut down just days after it kicked off at the behest of Sony’s legal team. Today, in the midst of a roundup of various community concerns (including the ongoing moderation guideline debacle), Sony assured everyone that it had only proper privacy concerns in mind:
An impressive community fansite popped up last week and we were all impressed, but we’ve been in discussions with the site owner and requested the site be suspended. Chris, the site owner, was happy to work with us on this. Our intent is to be able to offer everyone the choice of whether their shared data is visible or not in order to protect everyone’s privacy, and while Sackbook was doing nothing wrong in the way it presented information and had no access to any personal data, we believe this additional option is important.
Good news, then, and happy to see everyone as impressively impressed as I was, and looking forward to its relaunch in the near future.
“SACK IT TO ME”…Weekly Answers to the LBP Community’s Questions (12/9) [PlayStation.Blog]
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GARAGEGAMES SETS INSTANTACTION FREE
InstantAction is somewhat the runt of the online games litter, and a bit unjustly — like the Unity player, IA’s plugin lets you play 3D games through the browser, and, better yet, the company has just done away with its pay-for options and opened up the entire site for free play.
Why should you care? Along with Stubbs the Zombie/Hail to the Chimp developer Wideload’s decent puzzle game Cyclomite, InstantAction’s main draw is third person shooter Fallen Empire: Legions, which, if you squint, you might call a not-too-distant cousin to PC cult shooter Tribes. That’s no accident — InstantAction’s branch on the family tree is just a few short leaps away from Tribes developer Dynamix, by way of IA’s parent company GarageGames.
InstantAction also has a number of games on the way: “Ace of Aces (aerial dogfighting), Lore: Aftermath (big time mech action), and BLUR (arcade racing),” which they’re giving people who’d already paid for game passes early access to as a token of appreciation.
Goodbye ActionPasses; Hello Freedom [Instant Action]
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STEVEN SPIELBERG GETS GAMES
What’s Steven Spielberg know about games? Quite a happy lot, it turns out: Tom Chick has just published a new interview with the filmmaker turned gamemaker for Yahoo, where he waxes on the staying power of his first collaboration with EA, Boom Blox (still a family favorite it turns out), and notes that it was his idea to include the “peanut gallery” of animal observers to cheer the player on (something we’ve touched on here before).
Spielberg then turns his attention to storytelling and says:
You know the thing that doesn’t work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels. That’s where there hasn’t been a synergy between storytelling and gaming. They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it’s under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative. And I think more has to be done in that arena.
That, as we also pointed to before when Jordan Mechner similarly discussed letting each medium do the job of the medium, is a very salient point and obviously something we very much agree with.
Chick has posted the full unedited exchange via the Quarter to Three forums, my favorite part being the implied ubiquity of games when Spielberg says “of course” he’s played Half-Life.
Steven Spielberg – Celebrity Byte [Yahoo! Games]
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