AN ESSENTIAL ADDITION TO YOUR WASTELAND SURVIVAL GUIDE
By now you might already know the terrain like the back of your hand, but Planet Fallout’s recently launched user edited Capital Wasteland Google map is digging even further into the minutiae packed into every crevice of Fallout 3’s DC metro area, with growing guides to all of the special weapons, Enclave outposts, and easter eggs Bethesda have snuck in.
Fallout 3 Capital Wasteland Map [Planet Fallout]
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DEVELOPMENT CONTINUES ON ODDWORLD’S MOST PROMISING PROJECT
Fantastic news coming out of a recent round of developments at Oddworld Inhabitants: as Brash Entertainment folds and former COO Larry Shapiro becomes president of Oddworld, leaving former president and co-founder Lorne Lanning to focus solely on creative tasks, other co-founder Sherry McKenna has told UK news site GamesIndustry.biz that its long-quiet game/CG film project Citizen Siege is still in development, though now without former animation partner Vanguard, headed by John ‘Shrek’ Williams.
Why the excitement? Following on the relatively more tame environmental politics ever present in the series of Oddworld games, Citizen Siege — first hinted at in 2004 and later announced in 2006 at UK festival GameCity in what (it’s thankfully becoming easier to forget) was a significantly darker political period — was sounding like Oddworld’s most alluringly savage but ultimately hopeful work to date, spanning, Lanning said at the time, “martial law and the diminishment of civil liberties,” and later adding:
1984’s a little dark, whereas this is really about the power of the human spirit and the potential of the individual. Anyone familiar with our previous work knows that that’s always a strong underlying tone in the worlds that we create. This will be no different–it’s just in a more relevant world. It’s really a story about an everyman, a very common man who becomes something he never could have dreamed of through first unfortunate circumstances and then taking off the blinders to the world that he really lives in.
It’s still not clear what form the property will eventually take, the Siege universe was said as recently as last year to cover at least one game, Wage Wars, on top of its video properties, but add to that the re-emergence of the Oddworld franchise itself, and all that remains is for Microsoft to help bring Oddworld Stranger, quite possibly the last great Xbox title, to the Xbox 360’s Originals digital download program, and we’d have a holy trinity from one of the consistently smartest developers working in games today.
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BIT BLOT BRING INDIE-HIT AQUARIA TO MACS
Mac gamers may have finally gotten their big break: indie developer Bit Blot has announced that its debut adventure game, Aquaria, has made the jump to the platform nearly a year after the release of the PC original. For those that may have already forgotten, the game took home the grand prize at the 2007 Independent Games Festival, a well deserved award, as Bit Blot put together one of indie gaming’s most ambitious works that year — a sprawling, gesture-controlled underwater adventure that felt warmly familiar to fans of Metroid‘s incrementally revealed worlds.
What’s more, Bit Blot says the Mac version isn’t just a simple port:
Aquaria for Mac includes nearly a year of work in new features, bug fixes and improvements – bringing the version number up from 1.0.3 to a big shiny 1.1.0. With new and beautiful wide screen support; a new world map system complete with progress recording, location names, user-created markers and beacons, user-friendly improvements to the cooking system, changes to make puzzles more intuitive, additional graphics, auto updates, a built-in help system – and more! Even some of the music tracks got a bit of polish.
They add that while all of the new features and updates will eventually be coming to the PC version, they’re not in a great rush to release a patch as “a small gift to our patient Mac fans who have waited many months.”
Aquaria 1.1.0 for Mac Released! [Bit Blot]
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ONLY ON OFFWORLD: POLYTRON & KOKOROMI’S ANAGLYPHIC SUPER HYPERCUBE
Montreal collective Kokoromi‘s GAMMA games and music events are quickly becoming the top neo-future salons for art/game curation (last year’s event saw the release of Jason Rohrer’s low-res memento mori Passage, which quickly circulated as one of the most thought provoking games of the year), and it’s easy to understand why they’ve made 3D the subject of this year’s show: Kokoromi co-founder Phil Fish has spent the majority of the past few years playing with that dimension as one of the minds behind the forthcoming indie platformer Fez.
If you haven’t yet been exposed to Fez, a quick recap. Starting off as an otherwise innocently and nostalgically charming low-res 2D pixel platformer, Fez‘s central conceit revolves (no pun intended) around giving the player control of an otherwise hidden axis that fwoom‘s the world into the third dimension, re-aligning the position of 2D element and letting you venture deeper into its levels. It’s a difficult mechanic to put properly into words, but one that is genuinely jaw-dropping the first time it’s performed, and utilized to a more logical and involving extent than seen in the Wii’s similarly dimensionally screwy Super Paper Mario.
For this year’s GAMMA, then, the collective invited the indie developer community to get just as playful with the third dimension, only, in true retro-futurist Kokoromi style, limited developers to using only red/blue stereoscopy and explore, as they put it, “alternative depth and location cues” and the “ability to hide information in separate viewing channels.”
Kokoromi themselves — consisting of programmer Damien Di Fede, Fish, creative director and researcher Heather Kelley (who you might remember from her “magical pet adventure and stealthy primer on female sexual pleasure,” Lapis, and digital media theorist Cindy Poremba — together with Polytron programmer Renaud Bédard, set out to up their own 3D ante and have created, Offworld can exclusively reveal ahead of the event, super HYPERCUBE.
Kelley explains, “The gameplay of super HYPERCUBE is kind of like that “human Tetris” event on those Japanese game shows… but with cubes. You have a cluster of procedurally generated cubes right in front of you, and your goal is to quickly line it up to fit through the hole in the wall that’s moving toward you, by rotating the cluster with the controller.”
“To see the hole in the wall on the other side of the cluster (and thus figure out what direction to rotate the cube to line it up) you have to lean,” Kelley continues, “The better you play, the bigger the cluster gets, and so the further you need to lean in order to see the wall behind.” Simple enough, but — and here’s where their true innovation comes into play — to implement that leaning, Polytron’s Bédard took a cue from Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Lee’s famous Wii-mote head tracking concept, and hacked together a pair of stereoscope glasses that lets players literally lean to navigate their way around the space.
The short videos we’ve seen of the experience appear just the tiniest bit magical — the combination of anaglyph 3D with movement-based perspective, on top of the game’s slickly minimalist style reminiscent of nothing so much as early PlayStation puzzler Intelligent Qube perfectly fits that Kokoromi retro future vision. It’s not hard to imagine the 70’s early game pioneers predicting that this would be the shape of games to come.
The ‘super’ version of super HYPERCUBE will be playable one night only at tonight’s event, but, Kelley says, a version simply called HYPERCUBE which uses the Xbox 360 controller to lean will be released after the show, as will the games from its other selected developers, including Infinite Ammo’s Paper Moon, Lee Byron and Joannie Wu’s Fireflies, Tim Winsky and Johanna Arcand’s AltiToad, Jim McGinley’s The Depths To Which I Sink, and Antony Blackett, Corie Geerders, and James Everett’s BlottoBrace.
GAMMA 3D takes place tonight at 9pm EST, at Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT).
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DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS GALLERY TOYS GET REFLECTIVE
As the venerable Dragon Quest RPG series continues its ongoing revival via Nintendo DS remakes (most recently with the release of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen), Square Enix has announced new HD figures in its ”Dragon Quest: Monsters Gallery” toy series. Running on the order of $50-70 for a 9 piece blind-box case due for release at the end of the year, consider the gauntlet thrown in resisting the charm of the above King Slime reflecting pond.
[photo via Hobbystock, which is just about completely covered in other wildly probably-not-work-safe toy photos]
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TOMATO RELEASES EARTHBOUND ZERO ‘EASY PATCH’
In a wrap-up post of all the various goings-on that have been going on following the release of the fan translation to Nintendo cult-hit GameBoy Advance RPG Mother 3 (known in the West as Earthbound), pseudonymous project lead ‘Tomato’ has noted the release of his new patch for the notoriously difficult NES original, Earthbound Zero, which makes the game a bit more friendly to newcomers and the more casually curious by doubling experience and money from each fight.
For the uninitiated: Earthbound Zero is considered by retro collectors one of the original Nintendo’s holy grails — an officially translated but never released debut title in the series that would go on to achieve what can only be described as essentially-rabid cult success when it made its Western debut with Mother 2 as Earthbound on the SNES.
After whetting players’ appetites with Earthbound, Nintendo has repeatedly and some-might-say-sadistically teased the West by steadfastly withholding further releases, including both the GBA Mother 3 sequel, a remade Mother 1+2 GBA package, and, as it was later discovered, that original NES release which never saw the light of day (more on that can be found at Lost Level’s lengthy breakdown of its eventual discovery and release).
Until the day Nintendo pulls back the lid on a “ah, sorry, we were just teasing” Virtual Console/DS blowout, Tomato’s new patch is probably the best way to get a feel for just why the cutely subversive series has garnered that cult status.
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GIMME INDIE GAME: DANIEL BENMERGUI’S I WISH I WERE THE MOON
Daniel Benmergui’s I wish I were the Moon is likely the only explicitly Italo Calvino-inspired game you’ll play all year, and, even in its prototype form, is cutely innovative to boot. Benmergui created the game to show at Tokyo Game Show’s Sense of Wonder Night — one of the first summits to show off independent games and those seeking to do something new (and was the place where the void-painting game The Unfinished Swan first appeared before its preview video swept the blogs).
Even as quickfire and seemingly simple as the game is, I wish I were the Moon‘s photo-mechanic — unjustly overlooked outside of a handful of games like Pokemon Snap, Fatal Frame, and PC Engine/PlayStation oddity Gekisha Boy — brings a welcome change of pace, and tells a lovely and/or heartbreaking story at the same time.
Ludomancy » I wish I were the Moon
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CAPCOM STIRRING UP MONSTER HUNTER PORK RAMEN
If you’re still kicking yourself over missing the chance to pick up a Mega Man E-Tank sports drink, be forewarned that late November will bring more Capcom culinary delight with the release of Umai’s Monster Hunter Tonkotsu Ramen. Be brave enough to purchase a case of the stuff and import house NCS will also throw in a canvas shopping bag, though nowhere is it assured the stuff wasn’t concocted by rambunctious chef-hatted Felynes.
[Monster Hunter Tonkotsu Ramen – Import Preorder]
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TONIGHT I’M GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1899.
You might’ve had an easy guess given the current political happenings who would win Rock Band’s presidential contest, but you’d be dead wrong, and, thanks to “Shane,” gloriously so.
Presidential Winner [Rock Band]
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BLINK AND YOU’LL MISS IT
By the time you’ve read this description, you will have already rescued the princess.
[‘fast mario‘ via Waxy]
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