THE WAR-DRIVER’S DELIGHT: WIFI TREASURE HUNTING IN ASPYR’S TREASURE WORLD
The most important thing you need to know about Treasure World — the just-released DS game from developer Aspyr — is that it, and by it I mean the actual DS cart that you snap in and execute — is not the game, it is the tool. The game is out there, and by out there I mean the actual away-from-the-internet world, with your DS just the conduit that makes the magic happen.
The second most important thing you need to know is that it is essentially a little bit of magic — which may come as less of a surprise when you remember that it’s the brainchild of Justin Leingang, developer of the recently covered and similarly magical Glum Buster — and one of the best prestidigitations we’ve seen someone conjure for the handheld, or any handheld, to date.
Here’s the storybook premise: a Star Sweep — he’s the beardy one whose facial hair not coincidentally is teased into the shape of a star — crash-lands onto Earth alongside his robo-sidekick the Wish Finder. In order to get the necessary fuel to re-power Halley, his starship, he needs you to help him collect star dust. In return, he’ll trade you some of his vast collection of some 2500+ treasures, 20 star-dust-currency-units at a time.
How do you collect star-dust? By setting the Wish Finder to hunt for treasure by taking your DS out into the wild, where it can scan stars — stars here meaning the thousands of now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals that canvas and cloud every major metropolitan city. The DS catalogs every signal it runs across, and will, at times, also find its own special Treasure locked away in that star, above and beyond the ones you can purchase from the Hunter.
That’s the technical explanation: the practical one is where you flip your DS to scan and set out by car/bike/bus and hear it ping and clink like a slot machine jackpot as it wildly grabs signals out of the thin air around you, the Wish Finder’s telescope swinging madly from new star to new star, unlocked treasure chests suddenly flinging open for a split second before moving on to the next. (more…)
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OBSOLESCENCE TEST: ROLANDO [NOT] LEAVING THE APP STORE ALONGSIDE JULY 1ST SEQUEL LAUNCH
[UPDATE: ngmoco have reversed course on the decision, which, as suspected, was simply intended as a short term experiment:
We did not intend to deprive you of the ability to re-download or update our games. Rather, we had wanted to learn how well Rolando 2 would do at launch without the competition generated by its predecessor. The App Store is an entirely new animal, and we’re always learning what it takes to deliver what you want.
]
The most interesting development of the past weekend: in a post on the Touch Arcade forums, ngmoco very quietly announced that with the July 1st release of Rolando 2 (that’s this Wednesday), the original Rolando will be wiped from the App Store, as ngmoco recently did, even more quietly, with the original Topple (something I didn’t realize until putting together the top 15 game list).
This has, of course, raised a bit of ire with a few sites who justifiably note that part of the App Store’s appeal (as with any digital distribution outlet) is its never-ending/long-tail shelf life. The flip-side of that coin too, though, is one of the Great Gaming Fears of an All Digital Distribution Future: that with no physical copy to packrat away, once the bit-stream is turned off, so goes all your purchases — that, in whatever long, distant future where Valve’s Steam dies, along with it goes all our copies of Portal.
I suspect the chain of events here is considerably less dire, and I presume ngmoco are using this 3.0/Plus+ launch shift to test a theoretical model for the future: when a sequel is released, the publisher can create artificial scarcity and thus artificial demand to wring one last bump from the App Store’s traditional steadily decreasing downramp of sales.
At that point they launch the new game, which sits undistracted by other search query results, and — just as sales of the sequel start to similarly taper — they relaunch the original in a quasi-Greatest Hits line, now with new Plus+’s social features/achievements, and hope to gain a new bump from fans of the sequel who weren’t around for the first.
It’ll be an interesting development to watch, but, in the meantime, consider this your warning that, yes, you’ve only got a day and a half or two to get on the boat for Rolando, and, as always, it’s recommended that you do.
Previously:
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TWEET (#2388111474)
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TWEET (#2388036652)
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ONE SHOT: A PEEK BEYOND THE PEAK OF SUPERBROTHERS’ ALPINIST
…something… lies beyond the summit of Craig D. Adams’ Kurosawa-inspired in-progress work Alpinist (which is mountain-high on my most anticipated list), as shown at Toronto’s recent Hand Eye Society event.
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot, Superbrothers
LITTLEBIGWATCH: A SACKTUE FOR INDEPENDENCE DAY
Did you expect LittleBigPlanet to celebrate 4th of July weekend any other way? Available as a free download July 2nd in all territories, complete with “glowing flames of fabric” on her torch of enlightenment.
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ONE SHOT: LEFT 4 DEAD, TEAM FORTRESS, ‘NAUT-I-CIZED
NeoGAF user turk128 keeps the Scribblenauts viral train chuggin’ along with ‘naut-i-cized tributes to Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and, should you page through the thread, many, many, many more. [via TinyCartridge]
Previously:
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SEED MEETS SPORE: THATGAMECOMPANY’S FLOWER, VIA MAXIS’ GALACTIC ADVENTURES
YouTube user ‘Arodoraa‘ plants a bit of thatgamecompany’s flower all over Maxis’s design-your-own-quest expansion Spore: Galactic Adventures…
… a fitting crossover from the same person who also got their Pikmin in my Half Life 2. [via, logically, former Boom Blox and now thatgamecompany producer Robin Hunicke]
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THE PLUS ONE: ROLANDO 2 SHOWS ITS SOCIAL SIDE
And one last Rolando 2 update to close out the week, but here, creator Simon Oliver takes us not simply on a tour of its worlds, but rather on how ngmoco’s Xbox Live-ish Plus+ service will be utilized. As it turns out, even a platformer is as ripe for challenges and leaderboards as a competitive FPS or tower defense game.
And: earlier in the week, ngmoco posted this update of one of the game’s most smartly integrated features (from the perspective of the iPhone as a uniquely converged device), in which NinjaTune’s Mr. Scruff — who provided the beats for the original Rolando, as well — here gets his own dedicated character and ‘Music Shack’, which serves not just as a soundtrack jukebox, but which takes you directly to the song’s iTunes entry to purchase with a double-click.
And lastly: the newly unveiled avatar creator might seem a superfluous ‘gimme’ addition to the website, but it again very smartly doubles as an iPhone wallpaper generator, a personalized icon creator for your Plus+ profile, and comes housed in a ‘hot or not’ style open competition for users to vote each up or down (though poor Locke here is currently suffering in the polls underneath snaggletoothed Obama-landos and more than a few disfigured Jackson tributes). Even if its brand of colorful platforming doesn’t quite strike your personal fancy, you have to admit that they’ve got their social engagement down to a science more than nearly everyone in the App Store.
Previously:
See more posts about: Hand Circus, Offworld Originals, Rolando
ONE SHOT: BUILDING FEZ ONE BLOCK AT A TIME
Another week, another #fezfriday: this time, the building blocks in their trixellated form, which would probably make a wicked T-shirt of their own.
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot, Polytron
