8-BIT JESUS, THE NES THEMED CHIPTUNE HOLIDAY ALBUM
If you Blip Festers haven’t come home all burnt out on square waves, the wonderfully named Doctor Octoroc has uploaded a 9-track preview of his unfinished (how many more can he come up with?) Christmas chip-tune album, each song done in the style of a different NES game from ‘Little Drummer Nemo’ to ‘The Legend of Noel’ to ‘Super Jingle Bros.’
Try as I might, I can’t come up with any suggestions for the second half (due by the new year, at the latest) better than one commenter’s wish for “a Metroid title music inspired ‘Silent Night.'”
8-Bit Jesus: New Christmas Chip-tune Album [Doctor Octoroc, via Infinite Lives]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
WE’RE BORN ALONE, WE HARVEST ALONE, WE DIE ALONE
I was set on not thinking much of this cheerily morbid little video based on description alone, but some mix of the Byrne and the hammered-home message about the thankless plight and futility in the games we play (and, by proxy, the life we live) won me over pretty quickly.
As Resigned’s ‘Sir Cucumber’ puts it:
I’ve never believed in much, but in my youth I held a private article of faith that in the extra mode of Balloon Fight if I just kept going a little bit longer, if I just held on, something good would happen. It had to. Or else what was the point?
A small part of me still wants to believe this, but I know better now.
Balloon Trip: An Existential Journey [Resigned Gamer, via Free Pixel]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
EDMUND MCMILLEN GIVES US NO QUARTER
Indie designer Edmund McMillen, the mind behind 2004’s excellent tar-ball platformer Gish, has just shown off No Quarter, his next game coming in early 2009.
McMillen describes No Quarter as an “album” of retro inspired mashup games, with a tracklist (as seen above) which so far includes:
1.”gun” (Mario + N + Wolfenstein)
2.Trivium (Tetris + Physics)
3.”epic flail” (Missile Command + Rampage)
4.Hext (Scrabble + Hex board)
5.”tree” (Art game + Sim)
6.Odyssey (Lunar Lander + Awesome )
Since it was announced before Offworld launched, I’ll also note that McMillen has just self-released a similarly album-like retrospective of his games and comics called This is a Cry For Help, which includes versions of web games like Meat Boy, Tri-achnid, Aether and Coil, as well as unreleased bonus material from commercial games like Gish and Blast Miner.
A full contents list can be seen here, with a trailer here on YouTube. His work has a tendency toward the dark (sensitive gamers warned), but is always thoughtfully tempered, smartly done and comes highly recommended.
No Quarter [Cryptic Sea]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
DOTTER DOTTER’S 3D PIXELCRAFT
More retro inspiration: there’s something about how the shading softens the hard pixel lines in Tibori Design‘s Dotter Dotter series that makes me almost lust for either a next-gen game done up with the renderer or — fire up your 3D printers — figure playsets of each. Nintendo’s already essentially done the latter nearly spot on with their Super Mario Bros. dioramas, so it’s up to somebody now to do the former.
Dotter Dotter [via 4 color rebellion]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
EVERYTHING IS PIXELATED: SCRIBBLENAUTS CATALOGS THE NATURAL WORLD
Developer 5th Cell quickly established themselves at the vanguard of realizing the DS’s potential with their 2007 platformer Drawn To Life (and it’s Spongebob-licensed followup), which gave players the ability to draw and customize nearly all of the game’s assets — its main character, weapons, enemies, the world itself. That was followed on by the more traditional Lock’s Quest, a Tower Defense clone that, even if more traditional, was at least smartly timed with the boom of the genre across all platforms.
Now, IGN has revealed their latest game, Scribblenauts, with a premise so audacious it’ll be nearly impossible to follow on with execution that won’t end up falling short for someone. In it, you guide Maxwell on a quest to collect Starites by writing in the name of an object to help solve a puzzle with, and — as the IGN interview repeatedly italicizes — that object could be anything. As in the trailer above, a Starite stuck in a tree can be reached via ladder, knocked down with a football, or, of course, by conjuring a beaver to saw through the trunk.
As creative director Jeremiah Slaczka explains, the studio’s essentially been mapping out a spreadsheet of “everything” for months and firing off quick-drawn assets for each, along with how their properties affect each other (fire burns wood, doughnut attracts cop). It doesn’t sound entirely far off of the create-anything emergent possibilities of LittleBigPlanet, with the important caveat that the player designs the scenario as well as the means for solution in that game, where here the challenge will be working our way through 5th Cell’s mindset.
Whether they can succeed will remain a gaping chasm of an open question until more of the game comes to light over the coming months, but for now it’s hard not to stay just a little entranced by the magic of its possibility.
World Debut: Scribblenauts [IGN]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
DENKI RE-EMERGE WITH XBLA BOARDGAME MASHUP QUARREL
Scotland developer Denki has a pedigree that belies the attention its received: studio head Gary Penn was formerly of DMA Design (who you now know as Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar North) and has had design roles in games like Body Harvest (which you could argue was a prototype for how GTA would eventually function in 3D) and, more recently, Crackdown.
Denki, for itself, has been behind some of the best cult hits of the Game Boy Color/Advance generation from the very smart puzzle game Denki Blocks to Go! Go! Beckham!, a wholly unlikely and wickedly good GBA title that brought the soccer star cutely into a pastel Mario/Yoshi’s Island-esque world which he conquered with trademark footwork (see: this YouTube video).
Now, after a diversion onto set-top box game venture which hasn’t panned out technologically, Scottish games mag Square Go has got the first look at Denki’s new Xbox Live Arcade venture, Quarrel: Word War One. Square says the game plays out like “Scrabble x Risk x Countdown” (the last of which necessitated a google: I’d substitute Boggle, perhaps, for the Americans), where word games blossom out to territory control, which appears to feature Denki’s by now recognizably primary-colored aesthetics and might just turn out to be a surprisingly good development.
World Exclusive: Quarrel – Hands On [Square-Go]
See more posts about: Denki, Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
BETTER LEFT UNSAID: SCRAPS FROM LEFT 4 DEAD’S CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
We’ve already looked at length at what Left 4 Dead is subtly teaching the player in its opening cinematic, and over at the game’s official blog, they’ve recently posted a detailed look of their own at the four month process of shaping its intricacies.
Most intriguingly, the earliest videos hint at a budding last-guy-on-earth romance between Zoey and Francis, which sounds just about as off-putting as they said it ultimately was, and the post shows the challenges of cutting down unintended comedy and making characters less vulnerable than they wanted them to be:
Through playtesting, we also found that the initial sections of the hunter sequence were lingering a bit too long, allowing viewers to wonder whether Louis would himself become infected. In later edits, this part of the intro would be edited more tightly and shot with more close-ups in order to remove any lulls in which the viewers would be tempted to ponder the fate of Louis themselves. You also notice that the hunter no longer gets away from the survivors but instead falls from the building and sets off the car alarm, providing a plausible cause for the Survivors setting off the alarm.
The Moviemaking Process: Left 4 Dead’s Intro Movie
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
LITTLEBIGSUPERNOVA IN MOTION
Following on our earlier post via Dengeki Online, Q Entertainment has officially announced that Lumines Supernova‘s U.S. release will also get the exclusive LittleBigPlanet skin. They’ve alsosent us the video above, showing off a newly remixed down-tempo LBP track, which we’ll admit fits the Lumines mood moreso than the Go! Team track we suggested earlier.
The company says that the PS3 release, which comes after the game has been ported to PS2, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, PC and mobiles, will also feature other exclusive new features, including a “dig down” mode that has you clearing an already-full playfield, and a sequencer mode that lets you “create your own background music using the sound loops provided in the ‘Sound Bank’ – drums, bass, synthesizer 1, synthesizer 2 and effects.”
As before, no strict release date has been set, but again has been slated for a ‘winter 2008/2009’ release.
Lumines Supernova [PlayStation, Q’s official Lumines site]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
THE MUNNY SHOT: EARTHWORM JIM EDITION
Recently spotted in vinyl toy maker Kid Robot’s preview of upcoming additions to its gallery, a custom version of its signature Munny figure reworked in the image of Earthworm Jim. The custom was done, as eagle eyes will have spotted, by Andrew ‘Creatures In My Head‘ Bell, who you may also recognize from his Dot Overdose t-shirt which debuted at this year’s ComicCon.
It’s a very nicely done custom, though I am curious how he does his trademark head-whip from inside the helmet.
More Munny Sneak Peeks [Kid Robot, via theBBPS]
See more posts about: munny, Offworld Originals
GIMME INDIE GAME: RESCUE: THE BEAGLES
Originally created in June for a TIG Source competition based on procedurally generated content, indie developer 16×16’s winning entry, Rescue: the Beagles, has finished subsequent tweaking and been released as an official final version. As you might expect from the name, your humanitarian mission in the game is to hop between three layers of terrain picking up hurt and otherwise wandering beagle pups before they’re carted away to an animal testing facility.
This sounds easier than it is: the deceptively complex game requires more multitasking ability than you might expect, and relies heavily on split second decisions on which layer to jump to next as its randomly generated peaks and valleys come together and diverge.
The game is almost Spelunker-level strict (see: this awesome Japanese video for more on that) on how far you can fall to the next layer down, and any dog that manages to pass you by is an instant lose, but stick with it long enough and you’ll manage to work yourself into a very satisfying rhythm.
Rescue: the Beagles [16×16, via IndieGames]
See more posts about: 16x16, Gimme Indie Game, Offworld Originals
