What with all the vacation and GDC Austin goings on the past several weeks, it’s been far too long since I last made mention of the upcoming Indiecade festival/conference coming to Los Angeles (Culver City, really) October 1st through 4th.
What that means is that while the time’s growing close, there’s still plenty of it to consider coming down, as I will be, to see what’s frankly an impressive lineup of guests and exhibited games for this year’s festival.
Indiecade’s doing a slow-strip reveal of exactly who and what will be on display for the long-weekend happenings, but for my first post on the goings-on and why I’ve decided this could be unmissable, here’s what we know for sure:
Friday will see a full day of conference sessions, including Greg Wohlwend and Mike Boxleiter of Intuition (behind games like Fig. 8 and Protonaut, I Wish I Were The Moon and Today I Die‘s Dan Benmergui, former MIT media studies program director Henry Jenkins on “expression and game literacy”, and, best of all, a conversation between Katamari Damacy‘s Keita Takahashi and flOw/Flower creator Jenova Chen, moderated by new thatgamecompany dev Robin Hunicke.
There’s a good chance you’ve already seen this by now, as it’s been making the tear-stained rounds for the past couple days, and I’ve only held off in posting it because I still can’t quite put my finger on why it’s as depressing as it is (can you?).
I don’t have much personal emotional stock in Cobain’s death — as tragic as it was — and the co-opting of dead entertainers for advertising, promotional, and otherwise ‘estate-of’ toe-curling purposes has its own long and storied history.
I suppose it’s just that Cobain himself never got to reach/steadfastly rose above the point of self-parody that makes MJ and EP so ripe for posthumous caricature, and it’s probably got a lot to do with how clearly lovingly the ‘Unplugged’ sessions avatar was created straight down to the last thread of his Jeremiah the Innocent T-shirt (and it seems worth noting here that even Daniel Johnston’s own tortured struggles are now yours to purchase in vinyl toy and fanny-pack form, though at least Johnston has lived to give what stamp of approval he can).
Either way, this is an image-control warning shot for all future performers. Read the fine print before you consent.
Despite Hudson’s claims that the character stars in one of its “most widely requested platformers”, ‘Bonk’ still remains (unfortunately) not exactly the most household of franchise names. Although he did make side-quests from his native home on the ill-fated TurboGrafx-16 to the Super NES, GameBoy, and later an import-only (and minorly excellent) revival on GameCube and PS2, he’s still played the sixth-or-seventh prehistoric fiddle to Nintendo and Sega’s more iconic figures.
But after the Virtual Console re-releases of his earliest adventures, the company’s giving him a new push with Brink of Extinction, a new downloadable adventure for WiiWare, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live Arcade due in Spring of 2010.
Sporting a much more cohesive look than the last aforementioned paper-cut and textured revival, the company says the new version will include online co-op play in its story mode, and will see his traditional meat-eaten powerups take him into one of eight different yet-undetailed forms (though I’m guessing the West still isn’t quite ready for his effete kiss-blowing transformation from the import version of Bonk 2 [see 1:45 or so of this YouTube]).
Hit the jump for a better look into his new lovingly recreated world. (more…)
The biggest late night bombshell that could be the most excellent news of the week: creator Derek Yu has simultaneously announced that his long-in-development procedurally generated 8-bit platformer Spelunky has officially hit its 1.0 milestone for PC, and is now freely downloadable from its new home at spelunkyworld.com.
But that’s not the bombshell bit: that would be the greyed out icon for an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade version of the game, which Yu (and his newly established studio moniker Mossmouth) has confirmed will be arriving in 2010, adding:
It’s going to be much more than a straight port of the PC game – I’m planning on stuffing it with new graphics, audio, and other features for XBLA users. With all the other great independent games on XBLA or coming to it, I’m hopeful that Spelunky will feel right at home there. I think it’s a cool platform and I’m excited about what I’ll be able to do to make the game special.
If you haven’t played the game since I last mentioned it here in December, you’ll be surprised to see just how much its evolved, just how much more rich and complex it is, and — even through it’s as punishing (if not more) than it ever was — it’s still one of the most vital indie developments of the past five years.
A quick run-down to re-cap the flurry of colorful announcements from Nintendo this morning: the company will launching new models of the DSi this month — adding pink and Japan’s launch color white to the existing blue and black models — and launching a new black Wii remote/MotionPlus and separate Nunchuk accessory this holiday season.
They’ve also announced that their updated fitness app Wii Fit Plus will be released October 4th at a lower price point of $19.99, for users that already own the Balance Board accessory.
Finally, the company says the Internet Channel — a downloadable version of Opera that lets users browse the web via their Wii — has just dropped its price from the usual 500 Points ($5) to free, and that all users that purchased the browser will be credited the 500 Points to be used on a Virtual Console NES game of their choice. The new, free browser has also been upgraded to support the latest version of Flash.
A quick personal note: ten days and god knows how many hilltops mounted later, I’m officially back on Offworld duty after my San Francisco jaunt, and ready to bring you back up to speed on all the developments that took place in my absence. I’m not even going to pretend that I’m caught up on the tens and tens of thousands of RSS posts accumulated over the past several days, and I’m also resisting the temptation of that “Mark all as read” button, because who knows what magic might lie somewhere in the noisy mix of endlessly re-blogged items that have propagated through the press.
So, three things, the first of which is that today may end up being a day of older news that I think deserves to be re-noted, where tomorrow we should be basically back on track.
And finally, specifically for you SF readers: Steph, Tiff and I took a few post-burger/pre-show hours on Sunday to start picking away at the first layers of local Alternate Reality epic The Jejune Institute, which, if you haven’t yet experienced, like, do not pass go, etc. and carve out two or three hours as soon as possible to take part in its induction ceremony.
Under penalty of I don’t even know what, I won’t delve in to what you will find once you get there, but will only say that turning up to its 580 California St, Suite #1607 offices will start you on a journey that you will not regret.
The most bittersweet news that dropped during my recent SF getaway (and has gone too long unmentioned here on the site) was an announcement that Spore developer Maxis had laid off over 20 members of its staff — most notably, technology lead Chris Hecker, responsible for heading up the game’s complex solutions for reliably animating an infinite variety of user-generated creatures (via a tool, as I talked about in my 2006 Edge Magazine feature on the game, appropriately called SPASM).
Hecker’s clearly not bitter, as he cheerily blogged that his post-launch efforts had “generated lots of goodwill but no revenue, which tends to be a problem when you’re expensive and the economy is down”, and it may turn out to be a fruitful misfortune, with Hecker also revealing that he’s now turned all his attention to the pursuit of the indie, starting with SpyParty.
Described as an “asymmetric multiplayer espionage game about subtle behavior and deception”, and actually first revealed at this year’s GDC Experimental Gameplay Sessions that I’m now and forever kicking myself for missing, SpyParty intends to do precisely what more games need to do: forgo games as big budget thrill-rides and focus instead on the richness of subtle interaction.
Here’s the quick gist, scrobbled together from the various GDC reports: one player plays as a spy, who needs to accomplish a series of espionagical tasks amongst a field of AI controlled party-goers (say, planting wires/bugs on ambassadors). Another player plays as a sniper, who needs to single- and take out the spy as quickly as possible, with only the tiny ‘tells’ of a real human acting suspiciously to guide them — a game using the cool/international intrigue 60s type spy as its inspiration, over the stunt-jumpin’, big exploding 90s-00s style Bond we’ve been handed more recently.
You can follow Hecker’s new indie course via his SpyParty blog, and look forward to more concrete information coming soon.
The last trailer for Grapple Buggy — the sophomore Xbox Live game from Weapon of Choice creator Nathan Fouts — goes beyond the debut trailer’s mechanical preview to give you a better idea of the branching energy-crisis storyline lying somewhere underneath, and the cutely low-budget voice-acted conflicting relationship between human pilot Nova Commander Javeya and her alien sidekick Drozo.
The game is still hovering somewhere between either Xbox Live Indies and Arcade proper, though there’s a good amount of time between now and its newly pushed back 2010 release date to get the channel straight.
And the other fantastic news of the week (the impact of which was spoiled only slightly by paltry scraps leaked from the pages of the latest issue of Edge): Elite developer Frontier has announced Winter of the Melodias, a new sequel to its WiiWare debut game LostWinds.
Frontier says the game will continue to star tiny adventurer Toku and his wind-spirit guardian Enril, this time on a journey to investigate the disappearance of Toku’s mother Magdi, this time aided by a new spirit that will give the two the power to change the seasons between summer and winter.
That new ability, the studio adds, will see “frozen Winter ponds and waterfalls become deep, teeming Summer pools and chambers in which to dive and unlock secrets,” and that “enemies can be frozen or doused, and the very air itself used to form snowballs or moisture-laden clouds,” while a new ‘cyclone’ ability can be used to “transport Toku, smash powerful enemies and even drill through the rocks of the Mistralis’ diverse, richly interactive Chilling Peaks and Melodia City areas.”
The original LostWinds — one of Offworld’s top 20 games of 2008 — remains one of the best games WiiWare has to offer since the service first launched: a gorgeous and gentle puzzle/platformer that expertly exploited how the Wii Remote and Nunchuk could be used in tandem for mechanics exclusive to its platform.
Hit the jump for more screenshots and concept art from the new sequel.