DUOFORM OPENS GAMES FASHION LABEL SUPERCOMBO
Added to the list of outfits churning out games related clothing you wouldn’t instinctively want to cover with a sweater vest when venturing out into public (which currently includes America’s Meat Bun, the UK’s Way of the Rodent Shop, and Japan’s King of Games) comes UK label Supercombo.
Supercombo is run by the Duoform Network’s Pete Harrison, who also oversees the more directly art/design related Funkrush fashion label (including some fantastic stuff from vinyl toy/designers Tado, Jon Burgerman, Squink and DGPH), and currently includes such wares as this Trifarce tee, and this One Night Only tee, which — it must be said — bears more than a small resemblance to Meat Bun’s own Fight Night design.
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CRAYON PHYSICS DELUXE OPENS PRE-ORDERS
If you’ve kept even half an ear open to the indie games community over the past year, Kloonigames’ Crayon Physics should already be a somewhat familiar name. Developer Petri Purho’s elegantly concepted and deceptively complex game was the winner not only of the Grand Prize Award at the 2008 Independent Games Festival, but also the recent recipient of the Offworld Award for Most Screamingly Obvious Game Still Not Announced For The DS (a void publisher Majesco has smartly moved to fill with similar forthcoming title Marker Man Adventures, which, I will hazard to guess, is an enhanced handheld port of HatsForMyPencil’s Marker World).
Despite unfulfilled platform preferences, it shouldn’t pass your attention that Purho’s full version of the PC game, Crayon Physics Deluxe, has just gone up for pre-order at his newly unveiled website, promising a full 70 levels in the eventual release, as well as a full level editor, ‘and more.’ There’s currently no firm release date, but those that pre-order the game will be given access to the beta version when it becomes available.
If all of this is news to you, have a look at his original proof of concept demo still available at his site, where Purho has been challenging himself to post a new game developed in under a week every month for nearly two years.
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BEDROOM, ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?: DEAD KENNEDYS EDITION
Though I’m sure there’s no way I’ll be able to nail Jello Biafra’s tight-throated warble, there still beats a sliver of my idealistic 15 year old heart that was born ready to snarl my way through Rock Band’s just-released Dead Kennedys pack (“California Über Alles,” “Holiday in Cambodia,” and “Police Truck”), which will surely be the game’s most-bleeped release to date.
Other releases this week include a Mission of Burma pack (“That’s When I Reach For My Revolver,” “Mica,” and “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate”), the Century Media Girls of Metal Pack 01 (“Closer” and “Swamped” by Lacuna Coil, and “Forever” by In This Moment) and Crooked X’s “Gone.”
Rock Band: Various Tracks [Rock Band]
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THREE DOG’S WASTELAND TOP 40
It was bound to happen sooner or later, but law blog Legal Geekery appears to have got to it first: hidden in amongst (honestly pretty fascinating) posts on public urination and how sexual harassment law might actually shake out in TV’s The Office is this full Galaxy News Radio playlist and lyrics from Fallout 3, one of this year’s top obsessions.
Once you’ve spent tens of hours creeping through metro tunnels and history museum wings exploding Super Mutant skulls with a single dead-eye shot of your Lincoln’s Repeater as these songs echo gaily off the brick, and even if you’ve sworn to yourself that you’re taking a bit of a break because god dammit there’s work to be done, it’s hard to even read these words without getting nic-fit type twitches to jump straight back into the Wasteland.
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EXPOSE THE WII’S HIDDEN MII-TRANSFER MENU.
Unbeknownst to most, Nintendo has snuck undocumented functionality into the Wii’s Mii Channel which is filed under curiousity for now, but will likely come in more handy further into 2009 as the company begins to tie its Wii and DSi together more tightly in the West.
First intended for pedometer-enhanced Personal Trainer: Walking (which, along with Math and Cooking, is confirmed for eventual U.S. release), pressing A, then B, then 1, and then holding 2 on your Wii Remote while in the Mii Channel will bring up a new menu item to connect to a DS and transfer Miis to more portable form, and, as seen in the video, kit them out (as we’ve all been waiting to do) in smart jumpers and workout clothes.
[[Personal Trainer Walking] First Look & DS-Wii Connection, via Tiny Cartridge]
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PORTAL TEAM TELLS TALE OF GLADOS’S BIRTH
Though by now the cake is a cliche, and we know every bar of Still Alive frontwards and back from repeat Rock Band playthroughs, the release of the standalone version of Portal on Xbox Live Arcade has given us delightful deja vu of just what was so exceptional about the game to begin with.
Helpfully, industry news site Gamasutra has reprinted its 2007 original postmortem from the development team themselves, giving us a behind the scenes look at how GlaDOS, one of the sharpest-written villains in the history of games, got her voice, courtesy some playful synthesized hacking from Valve writer Erik Wolpaw:
A week after the meeting, Erik came back with some sample dialog he’d recorded using a text-to-speech program. It was a series of announcements that played over the newly-christened “relaxation vault” that appears in Portal’s first room.
Everyone on the team liked the funny, sinister tone of the writing, and so Erik continued to write and record announcements for other chambers, while still searching for the story proper.
At some point, however, it became apparent that these announcements were providing playtesters with the incentive to keep playing that we’d been looking for all along.
Better yet, in the sterile, empty test chamber environment, players were actually becoming attached to the alternately soothing and menacing computer guide. We’d found the narrative voice of Portal.
[…]
Our hope was that by the end of the Portal, players would know GLaDOS better than any boss monster in the history of gaming. Though we knew at some point the player would have to meet and destroy her, we thought it would be even more satisfying if players got a chance to cause her some emotional pain along the way.
Thinking With Portals: Creating Valve’s New IP [Gamasutra]
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LLAMASOFT TAMING PC PORT OF SPACE GIRAFFE
Easily the most — let’s say misunderstood — game currently available on Xbox Live, Space Giraffe has also proved one of the most divisive, garnering both a dogpile of negative reviews on its release and later high praise and a cheeky comparison to James Joyce’s Ulysses by no less than Braid creator Jon Blow. (It also is the first and happy recipient of the Offworld Award for Video Games’ Best Use of Number Stations, for its fantastic opening menu.)
Though creator Jeff Minter — the very definition of cult figure across Europe for his decades of psychadelia and ungulato-philia inspired games — publicly cried foul as sales figures stagnated, Llamasoft developer Giles has announced that work is nearly wrapped on the PC version of the game, adding that it’s now been slightly retooled for those who found the original’s rainbow drips just a bit overwhelming. Says Giles of the contents of the new version:
Space Giraffe exactly as you seen it on the 360 PLUS an “expansion pack” with 100 NEW levels that “no one else has seen before”, some of them could be a bit more “vanilla” for those that found the SG original graphics maybe a bit “too blasting for their own taste” we wish this time to really manage to pleasure more and less psychedelic users :)
Meanwhile, for those of us who do like our games as eye-searingly hallucinogenic as possible, the ‘softies have also quietly announced that an updated version of their Xbox 360 music visualizer Nuon will be used for the forthcoming Xbox Live Arcade port of Taito’s fantastically re-imagined Space Invaders Extreme, which we have high hopes of being a true marriage in psychotropic heaven.
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SONY JAPAN THROWS PSP PLAYERS AN AD-HOC PARTY
With Thursday’s update to the PlayStation Network Stores, Sony has landed a major milestone in integrating its PSP and PS3 hardware — though currently in Japan only. Alongside its local Metal Gear Solid 4 demo and “Rare Week 1” LittleBigPlanet in-game T-shirt, the “Adhoc Party for PSP ϐVerison” is a free download which wirelessly links PSPs to a host PS3 and brings the majority of the PSP’s local-only multiplayer games properly online for the first time.
NeoGAF forum users have been scouring Japan’s message boards for compatibility lists, and are reporting that games like Phantasy Star Portable, Street Fighter Zero 3, Tekken Dark Resurrection and Final Fantasy Tactics have all made the online leap.
More importantly, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G — consistently both Capcom and the PSP’s top selling title in Japan — has made the jump, coming just as Capcom makes its some-might-call-it-a-defection to the Wii for the third console volume of the Monster Hunter series. With online chat (a necessity for Hunter’s party-based tactical action) added to all games via the PS3s Bluetooth headsets, the update issure to breathe new life into that and a number of other since-neglected PSP games.
The catch? Apart from needing a Japanese PSN account to download the software (easily done with a little clever hacking about), Ad-Hoc Party requires both built-in wifi and a wired PS3 connection, so owners of the original 20 gig PS3 model, and anyone currently outside an ethernet cable’s reach of the nearest router are out of luck. Otherwise, U.S. and EU versions of PSP games have already been confirmed as working, so consult the demonstration video above and let us know how it’s working for you in the comments below.
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2D BOY’S WORLD OF GOO: THE COMMUNITY UPDATES
Like Valve’s instant-classic Portal, 2D Boy’s brilliant WiiWare/PC debut World of Goo wrapped what might otherwise be simple tests of physical derring-do into one of this year’s smartest and most subversive storylines — every bit as blackly comedic as the tar-balls themselves. But, also as with Portal, its carefully crafted structure somewhat dampens its replayability, retreading levels without that narrative grip.
And, short of forthcoming expansions from 2D Boy themselves, so it is that it’s the community to the rescue: on top of an open-source level editor currently in development, a group of enterprising Dutch have created an unofficial community site for Goo players.
Upping the ante on 2D Boy’s own automatically updated leaderboard site, uploading your PC/Mac/Linux save file to the community site not only stacks you against the competition, but lets players get a glimpse of your whole history with the game. Even better, the site automatically keeps a preview image updated of the top ten towers from the Tower of Goo meta-game, letting you marvel at the true engineering prowess at work.
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MEDIA MOLECULE SET UP THE LITTLEBIGWORKSHOP.
Apparently not content to have created one of the most charmingly transparent and inspiringly participatory games in recent memory, Sony and Media Molecule have revealed the LittleBigWorkshop, bringing social networking to the LBP community.
The Workshop includes the ‘workshop’ itself, which, it turns out, is a showcase for uploaded YouTube videos of player creations (or more commonly at the moment, inexplicably unrelated Legend of Zelda and Metal Gear Solid 4 videos), a photo collection ‘inspiration room’ (including duly inspiring photos of dolphins blowing bubble rings), and a Flash-based blueprint creator to flesh out ideas for future levels.
This on top of the requisite forums and profile pages with player Facebook and MySpace links, but, presumably, the workshop is just the first phase, with tighter PS3/web integration due as the LittleBigPlatform evolves — the site promises more tools and profile features are on their way.
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