MYTHORA MYTHS: CHAOSEDGE GOES HANDS ON WITH A LANGDELL/EDGE GAME
The on-going Langdell/Edge Games/Mobigame/IGDA story is one I haven’t been keeping up with here as much lately, if only because doing so is a full-time job in itself.
Luckily, the ChaosEdge blog has taken up the task, most recently with their first hands on with Mythora, the game recently offered for sale via Edge Games’ website as proof of its legitimate ongoing publishing operations.
You’d think simply receiving the game might have put some of the suspicious issues to rest, but instead, the Mythora post sprawls on and ruthlessly punctures even more holes in Langdell’s rapidly deflating narrative, arriving, as it does, on an off-the-shelf Memorex CDR, with installer/auto-run files created about a week ago, despite being “published” in 2004.
See more of the ongoing case-against sleuthing at ChaosEdge.
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I WAS JUST DREAMING: LUCASARTS UNVEILS XBLA/PC PUZZLE PLATFORMER LUCIDITY
As teased earlier in the week, LucasArts has just revealed Lucidity, its latest game due for Xbox Live Arcade and PC release on October 7th. Developed by the team behind the recent original Monkey Island remake, the game sees players going inside the imagination of main star Sofi, who (as is instantly clear via the video above) must be protected, Lemmings style, by dropping randomly generated puzzle pieces on the path in front of her.
Below the fold: a gallery of high-res screens of Sofi’s fantastically drawn dreamscapes.
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LISTEN: 8BITPEOPLES RELEASES BLIPFEST 2008 2XCD, ANNOUNCE BP2K9 DATES
My gut’s quite certain that, looking back some years on, 2009 will be the year chiptunes broke as big as they’re probably ever going to break, thanks in no small part to the 8-bit Weezer album, the newly announced Beatles cover album, and the various other projects on the side.
Though it’s still quite hard to keep abreast of all of the developments in the chipscene without dedicating yourself to it entirely, 2 Player Productions and 8bitpeoples’ just-released two-disc compilation album bringing together 32 live acts from BlipFest 2008 is probably the best catalog of all the current top acts in their native setting — surrounded by an adoring crowd (as you’ve seen from the frequent BlipFest videos featured here).
For the long time listeners, your favorite artists will probably remain your favorite artists (my choices for compilation toppers: Unicorn Dream Attack, Minusbaby, Nordloef and Anamanaguchi), but for newcomers, there’s a lot to discover here: find the double album at the 8bitpeoples store.
At the same time, festival organizers have announced the first information about the next Blip Festival, which will be coming to Brooklyn’s Bell House on December 17th through the 19th.
No acts have yet been revealed for the latest Fest, but tickets are due to go on sale next Monday the 28th, so expect much more specifics by then.
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THE OFFWORLD GUIDE TO THE 2009 AUSTIN GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE
With GDC Austin coming to down next Tuesday to Friday, now seems as good a time as any to do a quick guide to what you should see, and why, if you still haven’t registered (with the early registration discount still running through today), you probably should.
1.) The debut of AGDC’s Indie and iPhone Game Summits.
This year marks the Austin debut of the two Summits that have always brought some of the most dedicated crowds at the main GDC (many of the Indie Summit sessions this year playing to at-capacity audiences), and — though I might be a bit biased as one of the Indie Summit’s advisors — the lineup here turned out quite good.
Yours truly will actually be speaking this year early Tuesday morning at 10 for a “New Indie Hotness” session that’ll highlight (goes the description) “games and experiments that enchant or confound” — that is, a number of the games you’ll probably be familiar with from Offworld coverage, including some live demos of a few that haven’t been played in front of an audience before.
But you shouldn’t (and won’t, probably) come just for that: the Indie Summit also includes the makers of the Bit.Trip games, World of Goo, Splosion Man, A Kingdom for Keflings, Fantastic Contraption, Minotaur China Shop, And Yet It Moves, Aquaria and Marian, Bunni, Canabalt, and Penny Arcade Adventures, and you honestly can’t do too much better than that. See the full lineup and schedule at GDC’s official Indie Summit page.
On the iPhone side, most notably, Tiger Style Games will be presenting an hour long look at the making of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (running alongside my own session — even I can’t help you choose there), with other talks by the makers of Reflexion, Booyah Society, Enigmo, FaceFighter, Words/Chess With Friends and World War Robot, and handfuls more, seen at its own Summit schedule page.
2.) The keynotes and main lineup.
Doing a full breakdown of the main conference sessions is almost too arduous to consider, but the keynotes will include Frank Pearce and J. Allen Brack talking about the Universe of World of Warcraft, Crazy Planets/Pet Society dev PlayFish’s Sebastien de Halleux talking social games, Sony Online’s John Smedley talking about free to play MMOs, with sessions including the writers behind Left 4 Dead, Mirror’s Edge, Infamous, Fallout 3… check the full session lineup or the full speaker lineup to see everyone that’s coming.
3.) The parties, game movies at The Alamo
And then also there’s the real reason you’re all coming: the drunken hob-knobbing, which this year will most notably be taking place at IGDA Austin’s 128-bit party (with ‘Gangsta-Style Rock Band‘ [?!]) — GDC’s got the full list of after-hour parties here .
Also new for 2009, AMODA and local-treasure theater chain Alamo Drafthouse will be hosting two nights of game movies: Tuesday at 10:15 pm they’ll be screening the previously-blogged German TV special that brought together Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford, and Thursday at 10:20 pm they’ll be showing the documentary TILT: the Battle to Save Pinball. Both of these are open to the public, so even if you aren’t making it to the conference proper, you should come say hello there, and drink beer and eat excellent food.
I’ll be doing my damndest throughout the four days to bring you as much coverage of the conference as I can — look for that all throughout next week.
Official GDC Austin site [Think Services]
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ONE SHOT: 3D TETRIS
Not the Virtual Boy kind, but the Mr. Pitt’s obsession kind. It’s fully playable and works, actually, mostly, though tracking vertical alignment while consistently keeping your eyes crossed ups the ante considerably. [via Coudal]
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ONE SHOT: THE ALIEN ORIGINS OF AMANITA’S MACHINARIUM
A collection of concept art sketches recently published by Pixels at an Exhibition shows artist Adolf Lachman tapping Giger for a character in Jakub ‘Amanita‘ Dvorský’s rusted steampunk adventure Machinarium.
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THE 4 THINGS GAMERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT APPLE’S ROCK ‘N’ ROLL KEYNOTE
Though today’s Apple ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ themed keynote was meant to address a number of improvements on its musical fronts — from DVD-menu-like interactive album art now available in iTunes, to the new models of video/camera-added traditional iPods — the company still had a number of games-related announcements up the sleeves of the newly returned Steve Jobs (event images borrowed from GDGT’s excellent live coverage):
1.) Apple is finally making improvements to the iPhone/App Store experience with ‘top grossing’ lists, PC-based App arranging
The new version 9 iTunes and iPhone OS 3.1, now available — alongside the updated iTunes store experience — bring with them a number of new ways to sort and catalog your iPhone Apps, chief amongst them (for me, anyway, finally a way to organize your iPhone without arranging them via fiddly on-device drag and drop (the bane of my multi-multi-full-page existence).
But while the current version of iTunes 9 seems to be missing sub-categories for apps (there’s no way to access the action/puzzle/etc. sections on your PC — presumably this will be fixed soon), you can see a new top 25+ assortment of the top paid apps by gross, rather than by unit sales.
That sounds like a fine distinction, but what it means is better visibility for games and apps that don’t succumb to the 99-cent siren song, which traditionally have been drowned out by higher unit sales for low-priced apps — the hope being that as time goes on this will allow better, premium apps to fight against the tide (especially when Apple allows us to view this list in some form other than App Store-wide).
2.) Apple has begun to use Genius recommendations for apps
Apple’s turned on ‘Genius’ recommendations for apps, as they’ve experimented with for a year-ish now on the music side of iTunes, available as a new list in the on-device App Store. Quick tests show that its algorithms will need some finessing over the coming months — app preferences not being quite as tightly linked to genre/artist similarity as naturally as music preferences.
While recommendations based on Lucky Frame’s beautifully illustrated sequencer Mujik turned up a decent amount of similar music apps, apps like Booyah Society or Skyvoyager — free apps, or apps that saw hundreds of thousands of downloads over free weekends — lead to essentially non-sequiter applications simply because they, too, have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times for free. Game recommendations don’t so much lead to similar games, as much as games that might float in similar impulse-buy price ranges.
3.) Apple’s not joking around about its approach to the iPhone/iPod Touch as a true handheld games contender
See, for instance, this honestly entirely mis-leading bar chart comparing available games on all platforms, which, over the next year, may not seem quite as misleading as the PSP Minis and similar indie DSiWare initiatives start to blossom for Sony and Nintendo. Comparisons that neither the DS nor the PSP had an “App Store” or an “iPod” were obviously similarly off the mark, trademark names withstanding.
But Apple’s ensuring that all models across the range are up to the competitive task, adding OpenGL ES 2.0 compatibility to speed up 3D games for its iPod Touch line (bringing it up to par with the iPhone 3GS), and dropping the entry-level price for its 8-gig Touch by $50 to $199, where it hopes to sit better alongside the $169 DSi and the $249 PSP Go.
And all this leads to:
4.) Major publishers continue to see the App Store as a viable platform
The games represented at today’s keynote by and large weren’t the scrappy-indies-that-could: apart from Tap Tap Revolution devs Tapulous, who showed off their latest music game Riddim Ribbon (above, which sees you racing/balancing along that titular ribbon in order to keep your music playing), the invited stage guests were all big-business.
Mobile giant Gameloft showed off their new single/multiplayer first person shooter N.O.V.A., above, while Ubisoft and EA were on hand to show off Assassin’s Creed and Madden ’10 (the latter of which is currently live).
See Lisa’s summary over at Boing Boing Gadgets for more less-games-related tech-talk on what Apple had in store.
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LISTEN: ANAMANAGUCHI, MINUSBABY, GOTO80 APPEARING ON BEATLES CHIPTUNE COVER COMPILATION
Yet another 09/09/09 surprise, this time the Beatles-half of the blowout day that surprisingly has nothing to do with monophonic reissues or Rock Band: 8-Bit Operators, the same group that brought you the eponymous 2007 Kraftwerk chiptune cover album have just announced WANNA HLD YR HANDHELD, a new 20-track compilation covering the best of the Beatles.
The Operators say the full release will include tracks from 8-Bit Weapon w/ ComputeHer, Bacalao, Anamanaguchi, Bud Melvin, Burnkit 2600, Depreciation Guild, Glomag, Herbert Weixelbaum, Neotericz w/ Naku, Bubblyfish, Poke-1,170, Shrimps w Robert J Smith, gwEm & Counter Reset, goto80, Receptors, Psilodump, Cheap Dinosaurs, Saskrotch, Minusbaby, Rabato and Aonami.
For 09/09/09, a preview release of nine streaming tracks has arrived at the new HLD YR HANDHELD MySpace page, with a full Minusbaby-designed site to follow at the Operators’ page on 10/09/09, in celebration of John Lennon’s birthday.
It’s Bacalao and 8-Bit Weapon/ComputeHer that dominate the streamable tracks so far: pay special attention to the former’s deep-thumping/square-wave tweeting Blackbird and the latter’s Eleanor Rigby — you’ve never heard a speech-synthesizer sound quite so plaintive.
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I GET YOUR FEZ: POLYTRON SHOW 2 YEARS OF FEZ-RELATED FAILS
And sticking around Montreal for just a second: inspired by the anonymously-run bug/comment/build error blog I Get Your Fail, Polytron have just published this showcase of 26 images highlighting some of the worst fails in Fez history.
Well, they’re not all bad: the worst of the bunch are interspersed with some legitimately wicked new looks at the inside of Gomez’s trixellated world, and even some of the worst end up being some of the best, see like for instance my new electroclash-error desktop wallpaper here.
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THE SOUL STILL BURNS: SENILE/RED SPOT ANNOUNCE DREAMCAST RACER RUSH RUSH RALLY RACING
And the other dejected-Dreamcast-lover’s 09/09/09 news: developer Senile Team and publisher Red Spot Games have announced the latest unofficial new game for the console with Rush Rush Rally Racing, an “old school 2D racing game” to be released in October via eBay, Amazon, and direct from Red Spot (though the page is apparently under siege by would-be pre-orders at the moment).
Senile says the game will feature a single player grand prix mode, three multi-player modes with 19 different tracks, the requisite (and how long has it been since you’ve typed these words) VMU, rumble pack and VGA support, as well as an online high score table for those that can still manage to get their consoles connected.
See Senile’s official site for more information, and visit Red Spot’s page for pre-orders.
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