In other Hudson revival news, the company has just announced its fall lineup for the iPhone, which is most important for the announcement of Military Madness: Neo Nectaris, a version of its classic hex-based strategy game, following details of their forthcoming PS3/Xbox 360/Wii remake in the same franchise.
Whereas its console counterpart will cover ground from the original, the iPhone game is based on a mobile reworking of the 1994 PC Engine CD-Rom followup, albeit, says Hudson, with “with updated visuals, re-imagined cutscenes, and full touch screen gameplay” — though without, apparently, any of the original/console’s 2-player modes.
The rest of Hudson’s lineup includes Aqua Forest 2, a sequel to its original liquid physics puzzler, World RPS, a simple but honestly quite interesting sounding rock, paper, scissors that sees players competing with each other world-wide, and Knights of the Phantom Castle, an action RPG/strategy game based on a new Hudson IP (that will likely call for its own post in the future).
After anonymously teasing a series of images via its new explorethevoid.com site (and going so rapidfire that I can hardly keep up with the last), Bit.Trip creators Gaijin Games have announced the latest in the WiiWare series with Void.
As you can see via the new video above, Void is less blatantly rhythm based than Beat and Core before it, and this time seems to draw more inspiration from the dark/light bullet-hell interplay of, say, Ikaruga.
Your mission this time, as best as I can tell, is to grow and maintain your void by continually collecting black pixels, each one adding, Katamari-style, to your girth, putting you in greater risk of colliding with the white, which appear to deflate you near instantly.
Gaijin says their latest entry will include local four player co-op, and, mercifully, mid-level checkpoints, and will see chiptune maker Nullsleep pulling guest star duties in this episode. The game is due for WiiWare release this fall, and will be on display at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo for first public consumption.
Bit.Trip Void [Gaijin Games]
But in less queasy Guitar Hero news, design studio Pentagram has just published a nice post-mortem on their work extending the franchise’s visual ident to its Band and DJ followups.
The changes necessitated creating the new proprietary font above, which go look and see how gracefully they’ve modified it to cut a clean peaked and valleyed line between the words on all three brands.
When the Saints go Marching, presumably. Artist unknown, via Amy Seimetz’s MySpace, via Alex Litel.
I spent this weekend playing Super Metroid, start to finish. I thought the ending was a bit weak, but I loved the puzzles with foam and the grenades.
Psyche! Metroid doesn’t have foam and grenades. But you knew that. What does have foam and grenades is Shadow Complex, which is basically Metroid in 2.5D with some nice water effects, courtesy of the Unreal Engine. But you knew that too, probably cos you spent the past weekends playing it as well.
I should stress that I’m not saying Shadow Complex is just 2.5D Metroid to belittle it. Metroid is a member of that very small cadre of games which are damn near perfect, and finding a smart, innovative way to update it is a substantial game design accomplishment. I may not quite have bought into Shadow Complex‘s fiction, and I may have had issues with some of its platforming, but shooting people was bloody satisfying, the sense of exploration and mastery was well conveyed and the bosses were sensibly designed. First game this year I’ve dedicated a weekend to, start to finish.
Finishing it – or rather, ‘finishing’ it (I’m a long way off finding all the keycards, let alone tracking all the bullion and every upgrade) – made me want to go back to Metroid. To talk about how emotional just a corner of the map makes me. To rave about the brilliance of the sound design. To preach about the strength of games whose environments form one interlinked whole, rather than a random scattering of different zones. To my enormous surprise, however, I’m not going to talk about any of those things. (more…)
I’m still frankly undecided if Bear on a Wire — available now on the App Store [iTunes link] — rises above fantastically illustrated novelty to truly compelling gaming (made up of a mix of Trials HD-ish tilt controls and Tony Hawk-like button-combo stunts), but there’s kind of no denying that it’ll end up going down as one of the year’s best iPhone trailers, and probably also the year’s second best bear/vehicle mashup game.
Also very worthy of note: the project’s a collaboration with artist Trevor ‘VanBeater‘ Van Meter of TVM Studio, who you might also know from his CrappyCat character — recently brought to vinyl by Jamungo — and who I now fully realize needs to be doing a lot more work in games. [via yewknee]
First off, Kaoru Ogura, who ran off with some guy in the middle of the project. Yes, you, you bastard. Don’t show up at the office without showering after having sex 6 times the previous night. Next, Tatsuya Ōhashi. Yes, you, you bastard. Don’t give me your flippant shit — coming in late on the day we ship the ROM like nothing’s amiss. You can give me all the porn you want; I’m not forgetting that one. All that fucking weight you put on. No wonder you paid out 18,000 yen and still got nothing but a kiss out of it. Kenji Takano, Namco debugger. You are a part-timer; don’t dick around with the project planner. And finally, Kiyoharu Gotō, the biggest thorn to my side in this project. Yes, you, you bastard. Once I get a time machine, I’m sending you back to the Edo period. Go do your riddles over there.
And you thought Hot Coffee was racy: Longtime Japan gaming obscurity aficionado Kevin Gifford brings us a translation of the dirty underbelly hidden messages in cutie Famicom adventure game Erika to Satoru no Yumebouken.
The message, says Gifford, takes “waiting half an hour after the game’s ending and then inputting all sorts of button combinations on both controllers at the right time” to reveal. See it unfold in real-time here at YouTube.
Gifford’s got even more background and other messages via his Magweasel blog.
It’s less than a week and a half away from the U.S. launch of 5th Cell’s crazily anticipated “conjure anything” DS puzzle game Scribblenauts, and Super Punch celebrated with an all-month art contest, where, you ask me, illustrator Gerald de Dios completely dominated.
You’ve already taken a long look through the first images of Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert’s new action RPG/adventure DeathSpank, but he’s squirreled away one of his favorites to reveal via his own GrumpyGamer blog, in which DeathSpank “[makes] his way up these really high mountains with snow on the peaks called The Really High Mountains with Snow on the Peaks.”
The faded stencil-painted technique leads me to believe it’s not an official Invader invader, but I think I appreciate it more for appearing centuries-old. [via MBF]
