HEY SAN FRANCISCO: I’M COMING TO YOUR TOWN
A quick housekeeping note: in just an hour or so here I’ll be on vacation through the end of the month, leaving Austin for the night-time wiles of San Francisco*. Steven, Lisa and Rob from over Gadgets‘ way will be keeping the site buoyed with the occasional post, as you will have already noticed, and I’ll inevitably be popping in and out throughout next week if I stumble on something too amazing to not share.
For any Bay Area readers (games industry or no), I’m always happy to hear any suggestions for things to see and/or do throughout the week: send me a note at brandon@offworld.com or @brandonnn on twitter, should the need arise!
I know for sure a few of us will be seeing Anamanaguchi et al. at the upcoming 8bitSF show on the 30th — I’ll do a proper post later in the week as a reminder for anyone interested (as you should be).
Otherwise, play nice while I’m gone.
[* night-time wiles here represented by Chiho Aoshima’s City Glow]
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RETRO EFFECT: A DAY IN THE STUDIO WITH THE MAKERS OF METROID
The North Austin office-park studios of Metroid Prime creators Retro — should you be one of the few to make it past its reception area — are a warehouse-sized web-work of narrow labyrinthine hallways, intersections temporarily roped off to ward against your catching any glimpses of current-project concept art.
Take that alongside first-hand tales of the original founders’ predilection for near military-grade security systems, and it’s not hard — if you’re actively forcing the metaphor — to picture yourself inside the very game that put them on the map, and entertain the notion, at least privately, that maybe later, with the aid of some hard-won knowledge, you’ll be able to loop back and gain access to those previously out of reach areas.
A peculiar mix of brushed steel and magenta-painted drywall, the hallways are lined with ephemera of the studios past decade of output: promotional Prime posters autographed in silver by the overseas internal team with which Retro partnered, but it’s not until you hit the complex’s cafeteria wall that the studio’s true love for the franchise that fell in their lap becomes clear. There, you’ll find a wall-sized rendering of the dread Metroid itself, just above the water-cooler refills, displayed in pixels made of hand-painted NES cartridges.
The story of Retro is the story of Metroid — though that’s not how its story began — the two are now and forever fused. With the upcoming release of Metroid Prime Trilogy, all three of the GameCube and Wii Prime games collected on a single disc, what you’re really receiving is a glimpse at a nearly a full decade of the company where I’m standing. (more…)
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GET THIS: THE SUPERLATIVE SOLO ACT OF ROCK BAND: UNPLUGGED
Harmonix — and, by extension, developers Backbone — had a difficult balancing act to achieve in creating Unplugged, their downsized PlayStation Portable exclusive version of Rock Band.
For the newcomers that have only found the studio’s output only via its most recent games, they had to carefully re-dress the experience of their foundational Amplitude and Frequency games in Rock Band‘s rock/gothic/punk clothes, and had to ensure that that re-dress didn’t also alienate the long-time supporters — the ones, you could say, who were there for the early dive-bar gigs and bought the hand-screened, car-trunk T-shirts.
As a card carrying member of the latter category, then, I can say with some happy surprise that they’ve succeeded with at least that much: though its four-lane compression (corresponding to Rock Band‘s traditional bass/drums/vox/guitar breakdown) might be the next step down from Freq‘s eight to Amp‘s six, returning to that twitchy lane-switching familiarity was entirely welcome after the nearly six year interim since Amp first hit the shelves. (more…)
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GET THIS: THE RETRO-MODERNIZING MASTERY OF CHAIR’S SHADOW COMPLEX
It’s essentially impossible to enter into a conversation about Shadow Complex — the just-released Xbox Live Arcade game from Epic subsidiary Chair Entertainment — without conjuring either or both two earlier classic franchises, Nintendo’s Metroid series, or Konami’s PlayStation re-invention Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and, for once, it’s not simply lazy comparison, so much as overt, love-letter homage.
And because of it, you have to admit to (or, I will, anyway) at least a small amount of cultural bias — that the game’s surprise debut at Microsoft’s E3 conference brought with it at least a tinge of underlying skepticism, a nagging back brain thought that, “so, the Americans think they can do ‘metroid-vania’, now, do they? Right, good luck with that.”
As it turns out, our luck was the last thing Chair needed: Shadow Complex is, put simply, perhaps the best reinvention of the exploratory sub-genre since Nintendo and Konami’s own subsequent episodes, and certainly the best console iteration to sit next to their more diminutive Game Boy Advance refinements. (more…)
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THE ALBION CALL: LIONHEAD ANNOUNCE FABLE III, EPISODIC FABLE II RE-RELEASE
After a week’s worth of opaque teasing on the nature of revolutionaries, Lionhead have officially announced Fable III at the ongoing GamesCom convention, a game it says will put the player in the role of a revolutionary leader taking “very different paths to power, bringing about prosperity and poverty, peace and sometimes anarchy to their people”, due for release in late 2010.
Lionhead says the game will begin “five decades after the events of the last chapter, and you play as the child of your hero from Fable II. As you rule your kingdom as king or queen, you will be called upon to make choices and sacrifices that will test your morality and can affect your entire kingdom. Themes of heroism, leadership and consequence are taken to a grand scale as you fight to unite a divided people.”
In the meantime, and to ensure that there are enough child heroes populating the world by then, the studio has also announced the re-release of Fable II as an episodic downloadable series, bolstered by the Xbox 360’s new full-game digital download channel, Games on Demand.
The launch will begin September 29th, with the first episode being dangled for free, where players can complete the early-childhood section of the game, then choose to either purchase and download the next of five separate installments, or get the entire game at once. The episodes will also be compatible with players deciding to later purchase the game at retail, and with the previously released add-on content.
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SHADOW PLAY: KONAMI/HUDSON ANNOUNCE WII LIGHT-BENDER THE TOWER OF SHADOW
Hudson’s Wii platformer Shadow Tower has been quietly kicking around behind the scenes since it was first revealed in early August in Japan’s Famitsu magazine, but at the ongoing GamesCom conference it was finally announced for the West via new publisher Konami, now known as The Tower of Shadow, due for Wii release in 2010.
The most remarkable thing about it isn’t so much its gorgeous Ico-like design or the ingenuity of its mechanics, so much as its abject similarity to the Shadow Physics demo Steve Swink and Scott Anderson showed off in March at the Game Developer Conference’s Experimental Gameplay session:
The timeframe here is obviously far too tight to expect foul play at work, so I’m filing this one under that “all the monkeys in the world learn to wash their sweet potatoes at once” phenomena, and wholly expect both games to achieve entirely separate ends.
Konami’s press release struggles bravely to introduce exactly how its own light-manipulations will work, telling us that:
Gravity, for instance, does not apply in normal ways. Instead, when the source of light in a stage is parallel to the ground, the shadow is pulled towards the light. Similarly, if the angle of the light changes, so the gravity also shifts as the shadow is extended or reduced.
Which makes me feel the same way I did watching Julius Sumner Miller’s wild-haired physics demonstrations (you know who I mean, see this YouTube) as an elementary school tyke: “I’m almost totally with you.”
The press release also tells us that, rather than attempting to both control light and your character simultaneously, as with Shadow Physics, your manipulator here is a “winged sylph known as a ‘Spangle'” — which I’m fairly sure will equate to the Wii pointer — who can “manipulate physical items that the shadow boy cannot.”
Here’s to looking forward, then, to seeing more of both games, actually — the more experiments to go around the better.
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I GO OUT ROLLING: SONY ANNOUNCE PSP DOWNLOADABLE LOCOROCO MIDNIGHT CARNIVAL
Somewhat obscured in yesterday’s Slim/minis shuffle: the announcement of a new, exclusively downloadable PSP follow-up to Sony’s internal cult action game LocoRoco, Midnight Carnival, which will add new nighttime levels, minigames, and bonus stages to the mix, along with an apparent new ‘boing’ move featured above, and newly socialized play with competitive leaderboards.
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GET CAMPY: SUPER STARDUST DEVS REVEAL PS3 ZOMBIE SHOOTER DEAD NATION
As seemingly everyone trips over themselves to add their voice to the undead mix, Housemarque, the team behind the excellent PS3/PSP dual-stick space shooter Super Stardust HD, bring that same formula down to urban nightmare size with the online/local co-op grindhouse shooter Dead Nation.
The most potentially interesting detail about the PSN downloadable is the one only vaguely hinted at in the video above and on the game’s UK PlayStation entry, which notes that the game will be tracking daily zombie kills, and that all the countries in the world will be competing in what appears to be a metagame to “reduce the zombie virus”, which we’ll hopefully hear much more about soon.
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