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.
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.
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.
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.
A little mid-afternoon demoscene work with Shaping Reality, a NES demo created by 8bitpeoples regulars Nullsleep, Random, No Carrier and Enso for July’s LCP compo.
I honestly thought my emulator was on the fritz until I found the accompanying YouTube at top: you can break your own emulator with the .nes ROM here. [via Enso]
[UPDATE: Apologies to musician Random for leaving him off the original list of collaborators!]
From the same devs, unsurprisingly, that brought you the Steve Jobs parodying Korg DS-10 Plus game announcement: handheld synthesizer creators AQI have just announced Elvis Presley & KORG DS-10 Audition, a new competition in celebration of the 55th anniversary of Presley’s debut that’s asking DS-10 composers to create their best techno remix of Elvis hits.
Fantastically unlikely as it is, it’s all on the level with the Presley estate, and winners of the competition will see their track officially promoted and sold on iTunes and released on a special CD in Japan.
Full contest details are available at the official site, and users outside Japan will be submitting their entries via the newly established ElvisAudition YouTube channel, so watch that for further developments ahead of the October 20th cut-off date.
Musical/lyrical/visual incongruity’s got to be the oldest trick in the horror movie maker’s handbook, and with good reason, it seems: it works awesomely, even in Left 4 Dead. The startled witch bit is terrifying. [via Alice]
The new PS3 system will focus on delivering games and other entertainment content, and users will not be able to install other Operating Systems to the new PS3 system.
Translation: no more installing Linux on your PS3. I can’t honestly say I’d seen the feature gain much traction over the past few years, but for those that were holding out for a price drop specifically for it, your best bet is grabbing one of the remaining standard 80GB models at their newly dropped price.
After months of strong rumors, Sony has officially announced its new model PlayStation 3: the 120GB Slim, to be released in just two weeks time on September 1st, at a pricepoint of $299. Starting tomorrow, current standard 80GB PlayStation 3s will see their price dropped from $399 to $299, and the 160GB models will fall to $399. The price move puts the Slim model on par with the standard 60GB Xbox 360, and $100 less than the 120GB ‘Elite’ model 360.
2.) Sony announced, ‘Minis’, a new PSP downloadable game series
As mentioned to UK outlet Develop in mid-July, Sony has officially announced a new line of exclusively digital-distributed game series to be known as ‘minis’, with a strict 100 meg size limit, and a 99 cent to $9.99 price structure, clearly targeting the iPhone’s App Store market.
That goes for its game titles themselves, too, many of which have been directly lifted from the App Store, including Tetris, tower defense game Fieldrunners, Mountain Sheep’s shooter Minigore, and Gameloft’s Hero of Sparta, all as spotted by the official UK PlayStation blog.
The blog says Sony announced 15 games will be available at its October 1st launch, with a total of some 50 available by the end of the year.
3.) Sony announced a new PSP Digital Reader, starting with Marvel, IDW comic books
Also launching for the PSP this December, a new Digital Reader app, which will let users purchase, download and read — “page by page or frame by frame” — a series of comic books coming from partners like Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four), IDW (Transformers, Star Trek), iVerse (Archie), and a wider range of “titles from indie and local publishers.”
Cryptically, Sony also added that, according to the PlayStation Blog, “the Digital Reader isn’t just comics, though — more on that at a later date.”
If you missed EA’s live-stream of this morning’s GamesCom conference, you missed Double Fine head Tim Schafer showing off my favorite new detail of Brütal Legend‘s combat: a double-team attack that can be pulled off with any number of partners in the game, but specifically the first, where lead character Eddie had his female cohort mount his shoulders, concert audience style, and used his lifted lighter to ignite her flame attack.
But still, what you do get is the trailer above, with little slices of wooly mammoth, beast riding, and mosh-pit-protected brilliance, along with bits of its online multiplayer, which is demonstrated at greater length (and with 100% more rhythm-game attacks), below:
And, the capper: Double Fine has also announced that a demo for the game will be released via PSN and Xbox Live next month, with a slice of gameplay to tide you over for the following month until its October 13th release.
