WEAPON OF CHOICE, THE GAME THAT CRASH-LANDED FROM 1992
While there hasn’t been nearly enough time since the New Xbox Experience update landed to fully dig into all of the new community games it has also brought with it, one game has jumped out ahead of the pack both in terms of sales (it’s currently, according to the new dashboard’s sorting options, the most popular community title) and in wider recognition over the past few days.
That game is Weapon of Choice, which seems to exemplify precisely what Microsoft’s community games campaign was set up to do: giving passionate one-person teams their platform for indie success. Industry news site Gamasutra talked with that one person, Nathan Fouts (who recently gave up his position at Resistance: Fall of Man creator Insomniac to form his startup, Mommy’s Best Games) where he admitted that his game wasn’t up to snuff to be accepted into the Xbox Live Arcade program proper, but perfectly fit the community game mantra.
Weapon of Choice is, at heart, a game you’ve played before — again and again and again, especially if you had your roots in early computer games — a bombastic and testosterone-drenched side-scrolling shooter with a ludicrous sci-fi storyline, blaring guitar riffs and multiple-screen-filling bosses. It’s so filled with the vitality of a singular vision, though — Fouts pulled in help with music and scriptwriting, but otherwise took the reins on all its art, programming and sound effects — that it’s hard to escape its auteur, throwback charm.
That’s not to say that it hasn’t brought anything new to the table: apart from handling as fluidly as a 16-bit shooter should on modern hardware, Fouts packed a few very smart gameplay aces up his sleeve. The first is ‘death brushing,’ a ubiquitous ‘bullet-time’ trick that zooms in on and slows down the action when you’re very near death (as you will be, often — Choice‘s screens are chaotic with over and undersized alien enemies all squelching and squeezing various fluids and particles from themselves at any given moment), allowing you to make narrow and stylish escapes.
For those moments where death brushing hadn’t worked out as well as you’d hoped, once you’ve died the game calls up a ‘vengeance missile,’ which, before you’ve called your next character into play, gives you a one shot first-person-bullseye-targeted chance to eliminate whatever it was that’d brought you down before.
Finally, the game gives you the chance to rescue that downed character that you’ve just replaced by slinging them — or other downed operatives you’ve find on the field — over your shoulder and carrying them to end-of-level safety, bringing about tough choices about who you decide to leave behind. It’s not until you’ve depleted your stock of rescued characters that the game is truly over.
It’s no surprise that, according to the interview with Fouts, his recently rediscovered teenage game design sketches share an uncanny similarity to game he’s just created: Weapon of Choice is that game that the disaffected youth of the Psygnosis/Factor 5/Epic MegaGames/Apogee shareware era had always dreamed of making, and all the more glorious for it.
Weapon of Choice [Mommy’s Best Games, YouTube trailer]
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ATLUS BRINGING TRACKMANIA DS STATESIDE
Today’s award for Most Unlikely Publisher goes to RPG stalwarts Atlus, who have just announced they’ll be bringing Firebrand Games’ Trackmania DS to the U.S. in March of 2009, and even for ‘just-slightly’ casual fans of racing games, this should be happy news.
It’s no mistake that the franchise has one of the largest and most dedicated audiences in the genre: the series excels at joyfully purist arcade design mixed with puzzle and stunt elements and a fully-featured track editor, all of which, European reviews have very happily reported, have perfectly made their way to the portable version. Essentially, if you have any nostalgia for racing classics like Stunts and Racing Destruction Set, or, quite simply, like to move things quickly around a track and make awesome jumps and loop-de-loops, this is the game you want.
Try the free Steam version, Trackmania Nations Forever, for a taste of what the fuss is about.
Trackmania DS [Atlus]
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CELEBRATE HALF-LIFE ANNIVERSARY FOR LESS THAN A DOLLAR
As if on cue, seconds after posting the previous entry, word arrives that Valve have dropped Half-Life‘s price on Steam to 98 cents in celebration of the 1998 release:
Launched 10 years ago today, Half-Life was greeted with overwhelming review scores (Metacritic of 96%), earned over 50 Game of the Year Awards, and birthed a franchise with over 20 million units sold to date. The special 10 year anniversary price is available via Steam until 12:01 pm PST on November 21.
Half-Life [Valve]
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SCOTT THOMPSON (BARELY) PASSES A PORTAL CHALLENGE
We’re always thrilled to see our cross-cultural interests fortuitously converge, so forgive us this latest Kids In The Hall MySpace tour video, in which Scott Thompson proves himself about as adept at handling Portal‘s Companion Cube as he was at taking care of his Sony Aibo — that is to say (if you haven’t watched the Kids’ ‘Same Guys, New Dresses’ DVD), not at all.
Scott in a horrible mood flees to the back of the tour bus. [via Kotaku]
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A QUICK TOAST TO THE DEATH OF BLUEPRINT
EA Blueprint was my favorite division of the publishing giant that I was never fully sure existed, and, according to a new expose on Variety’s games blog Cut Scene, never officially did and now surely will not. What I did know, or had gathered piecemeal from various sources was that it involved producers Neil Young (whose work had quite rightly given me the outright creeps in college when I’d beta tested his Majestic, many moons before we’d all properly learn the acronym ARG) and Alan Yu.
I did know that it had had within its scope the creation of cross-platform games (beyond console ports: most excitingly, a dip into social games, as it did by extending last year’s Wii trivia game Smarty Pants to Facebook), and the ability to bring Stephen Spielberg into the building and walk out with the Wii’s Boom Blox, an almost entirely unlikely game to come from such a major Hollywood producer.
Blox, which Variety posits will now be getting a sequel, had an energy and a fundamental delight in core mechanics — you do, after all, do little more than explore play possibilities inside a very simple block-and-ball physics engine, just for the pleasure of watching things topple and explode — that could easily have come from a passionate indie.
I knew there was a worrying pall in the air nearly a year ago when I’d heard whispers that both Young and Yu were planning an exit from the company, but it wasn’t until only very recently that we’d find out why, when they founded the iFund-backed iPhone startup ngmoco, which, even just two games so far in, shows more promise at understanding what makes gaming on the platform unique than most others.
Knowing what we know now from the Variety article at the start of this year, I might have been worried for EA having “shuttered” what felt like its most exciting prospect, but with newly announced projects like Kyle Gray’s DS puzzle/platformer Henry Hatsworth and the ‘wonder-triplet-powers, unite!’ EA Partners deal that will bring together No More Heroes and Killer 7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, and, peripherally, Rez, Lumines and Meteos developer Q Entertainment, my worries have been almost fully abated.
Electronic Arts shuts down Blueprint, making Boom Blox 2 [Variety]
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF RHYTHM
Why do we like UK games journo Simon ‘chewingpixels‘ Parkin? First, and most obviously, because he’s taken the time to prepare this exhaustive timeline charting the evolving course of rhythm games, and second, though it doesn’t appear in the timeline, he has correctly called out 1987 Famicom Disk System game Otocky (from Electroplankton /Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai) as one of the true groundbreakers (as well as included some uber-obscurities like PlayStation 2 title Dog of Bay). He explains, though, on Otocky‘s absence, as well as notable others:
I’ve limited the list to rhythm-action games in the strictest sense, that is, games in which you time inputs to match prerecorded music. So there’s no Rez, ElectroPlankton or WiiMusic, titles in which a player’s inputs do create musical outputs, but not necessarily in a scored or timed framework.
We have to go back and check again to see if they break the rules, but we might have a few additions — Agetec’s recent DS title Rhythm ‘n Notes springs quickly to mind, as well as Wonderswan Color game Rhyme Rider Kerorican and the forthcoming Major Minor’s Majestic March (both from Parappa creator NanaOn-Sha) , as well as at least one other original PlayStation obscurity which is escaping us at the moment.
chewing pixels » The Rhythm-Action Timeline
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A FRESH LOOK AT BLACK MESA’S HALF-LIFE REMAKE
On the 10th anniversary of the release of Valve’s original Half Life, mod team Black Mesa Modification has released a slew of new work in progress screenshots of their detailed remake of the game in the current Orange Box engine, which, if the mod ever sees the day, will easily lead to our third or fourth playthrough. Says the team:
2008 has been a very eventful year for us. Making a 12+ hour game is a monumental task, but we’re still powering ahead with development and making great progress. Our programmers have been hard at work overhauling and expanding the AI, and lots of our NPCs have been brought to life by our talented voice actors. Levels and chapters continue to be worked on and fine tuned, with large sections strung together and playable.
[…]
Last but not least, the team worked very hard to get a trailer out along with all the other media. But as we’ve always done when faced with the choice, we decided to take a few extra days to polish it to a mirror shine before releasing it to the community. Be sure and look for that in the days ahead!
A celebration of the last decade! [Black Mesa Modifications]
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INTROVERSION PLAYING WITH FIRE WITH UNBEATABLE DEFCON AI
Apparently having learned nothing from Hollywood history, indie developers Introversion have put out a public call for AI students to create an unbeatable computer opponent who can mutually assure total destruction in their serenely-terrifying 2006 real-time wargame DEFCON.
The fab-four have been working with The Imperial College Department of Computing and API creator Robin Baumgarten (interviewed here on the subject) to push the development of DEFCON AI in academic study, and Baumgarten has made the that API publicly available inviting everyone to, as Introversion put it (to our horror), “write the most efficient killing machine.”
DEFCON [Introversion Software]
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OTHELLO GETS PUZZLE QUEST TREATMENT WITH NEOPETS PUZZLE ADVENTURE
Readers over a certain age will be forgiven a healthy dose of skepticism in accepting that a game featuring Neopets — the plush animal franchise which includes a digital version of each toy to interact with online (which anyone with an acquaintance under that certain age will likely be familiar with) — might be the next to occupy an inordinate amount of their time.
But anyone that’s lost a chunk of their life to Puzzle Quest, the 2007 RPG/puzzle game that’s touched as many people through word of mouth as it has platforms that will take it (the count currently stands at PC, PS2, PSP, PS3, Wii, Xbox Live Arcade, and mobile phones) will also understand that developer Infinite Interactive has an uncanny ability to tap into that lizard brain sector of the human psyche and keep it dead-locked for hours at a time.
And so it will likely go with Neopets Puzzle Adventure, an online demo of which Capcom has just released. Like Puzzle Quest‘s embedding of an essential ‘Bejeweled‘ match-three core inside a complex RPG framework, Puzzle Adventure does the same with the classic game of Othello.
What you don’t get in the demo version is the taste of the new game’s true complexity: like Puzzle Quest’s spells, Adventure will require you to capture and train ‘petpets’ and find items that throw curveballs into the otherwise straightforward Reversi design, but what you will get, (or at least, I did) is the first thrill of an absolutely crushing victory you’ve had against an AI controlled Othello opponent in as long as you can remember.
Capcom plans to bring the online playable game to DS and PC in late November.
Neopets Puzzle Adventure demo [Capcom]
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DISCRIMINATING NINTENDO PRIZES FOR JAPAN’S DISCRIMINATING TASTES
Right, sorry Nintendo fans, it’s time to get jealous: Nintendo of Japan has just announced this year’s prizes for Platinum and Gold members of its Club Nintendo service, which lets players trade in points earned from buying Wii and DS games.
This year’s Nintenderati will be able to choose from a gold-plated Mario Kart wheel, a life-sized puffy polyester Mario hat, and the slightly more subdued desk calendar set, none of which, the internet has decided (and we wholly agree) are quite as outright desirable as last year’s classic reproduction Super Nintendo controller for the Wii, or (my personal favorite), the laser-etched personalized Wii-mote battery cover adorned with the grinning visage of your Mii.
There’s still hope, though, earlier this year Nintendo of America announced that it would be bringing Club Nintendo to the States, and, unlike Europe’s version — which sees a paucity of prizes distributed to a handful of people while the rest have to vie for desktop pictures and icons — will be, according to a recent interview with MTV, “weighted more toward physical goods.”
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