And the second of DJ Malloc’s Criterion-inspired Paradigm collection, an alternate wolves-of-the-battlefield (or are they war pigs?) take on Call of Duty 4. See also, especially: Diablo, and The Longest Journey.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
Continuing the ongoing Criterion-inspired love affair with good game cover design, ‘DJ Malloc’ presents a series of ‘Paradigm’ covers, including this BioShock piece that rightly puts the focus on the true stars of the game.
See more posts about: BioShock, Offworld Originals, One Shot
Just released by Kokoromi’s Heather Kelley and Polytron programmer Renaud Bédard: Stimergy, the product of a recent Bivouac Urbain 36 hour game jam. As you never would’ve guessed from the screen above, Stimergy is a game of ants played out in retro-future style, where your goal is to lay down traces of attracting and repellent pheromones to guide your colony to food, and away from antlion traps, and its bloom-lit tracers make it far more mesmerizing than you’d imagine.
Taking a cue from Petri Purho, Bédard’s also just published a time-lapse video of the development process, showing, again, that even under the 1.5 day pressures of completing a game, no one can resist the siren song of Facebook.
Read more about the development and Bédard’s postmortem, and download the game, via his blog The Instruction Limit. [via Heather]
See more posts about: Kokoromi, Offworld Originals
The last time (well, and the first time) we saw a developer leave gainful full-time employment via a game, it was Jarrad ‘Farbs‘ Woods with his entirely gleeful Super Mario resignation.
Ubisoft dev William David has just done the same with his Flash game Leaving, only with a wildly different take. The resignation in his resignation is drawn out in much more painful and frightened blind leaps, with more “reasonable” people forcing him to question every move, which — having made my own plunge from cubicle life to the Great Unknown years ago — hits home pretty hard. [via IndieGames]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
I like to prepare for every eventuality. I have plasters and safety pins stashed in my bag. I get the train before the one I need. I have assembled a small army of toys on whose loyalty I feel I can depend if inanimate objects come alive overnight and the war between organics and inerts begins in earnest. You never know.
I also have a plan for what I would do if a mysterious benefactor died and gave me a billion dollars on the proviso that I didn’t buy anything with it. I would rent a gigantic mansion – something with wings – and I’d hire a hundred brilliant, educated, curious, dedicated minions and I would set them to work researching.
Their first task would be the definitive map of all videogames. There have been attempts before, of course. The latest I saw was Eric Wall‘s, which while fueling lots of nitpicking and chest-beating from neglected non-North Americans, was a good run at an almost impossible problem. But my map wouldn’t just do publishers and developers: it would do people.
It would start with Roger L. Jackson. You might think you don’t know Roger, but you do. Right now, you might be enjoying him in the new Monkey Island chapters. Or perhaps you met him in MadWorld. Maybe you killed him in Hitman: Blood Money. Or flirted with him in Final Fantasy X-2. Or in Mass Effect, or Jade Empire, or Yakuza, or the criminally ignored EyeToy:Antigrav.
Or, if you’re an aficionado of mid-cycle PS2 Jap weirdness, then he’s already on your shelves thanks to Kuon, Bujingai, Dororo and Virtual-On Marz. I’d met him dozens of times without realising, but today was moved to look him up for the first time. Why? Because he’s the voice talent behind maybe my favourite gaming hero ever: Galleon‘s Captain Rhama. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One More Go
I’ve already highlighted some of the excellent photography in the latest issue of France’s games/fashion mag Amusement, but this one’s even more special: a series of photographs from the magazine’s Made of Myth feature, in which photographer Marc Da Cunha Lopes (“aisakie“) shows us the factory work behind the most iconic games of the past few decades: the smelting of Sonic‘s rings, the chiseling of the 1-Up mushroom, and the rubber-pressed rebounding blocks of Arkanoid.
Below the fold, then, the full high-res gallery, with special permission from Amusement. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Wide
We were as surprised as anyone in March to hear that Rockstar’s Beaterator — a music sequencer/tracker based on their original 2005 Flash/web experiment — was back on track for a 2009 release, and curious about Take Two being coy with the platform on which it would eventually land.
And now we know, as Take Two announce that — as it was always intended to be — the project is due for a release in September on the PSP (alongside a digital only release on the PlayStation Network), and drop off the video above.
The only question remaining is the actual mechanisms behind which we’ll be able to share our resulting music: trading custom save files? MP3 exports? But there’s hardly a month left until all will be officially revealed.
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And more Pong taken to the streets, part of Patrick Runte‘s photo series of physical arcade games, which, please don’t miss his Pac-Man, Space Invaders and pinball, as well. [via GSW]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot, pong
Though PopCap designer Jason Kapalka recently famously warned that a hexagon’s very shape itself turns off casual players with its “vibe of science, of dirty stuff, of war games,” Amsterdam’s W!Games aren’t letting that stand in their way for their just-announced PlayStation 3 exclusive downloadable game Greed Corp.
Part of that, obviously, is because Greed Corp is a war game, but one that, as is clear from the trailer above with its steampunk-ish self-ambulatory harvesters, is couched in lighter and less gritty territory than your usual tabletop conflict.
W! says the game — which plays off an environmental bent in which four territories are literally ruining the earth beneath their feet in an industrial revolution race for resources — will include both a single player campaign as well as options for 2-4 player local or online multiplayer games, will come with “multiple unlockables for a variety of challenges.” The game is due for release on the PlayStation Network in September.
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In a rare happy accident, Apple approved Tiger Style’s recently lauded debut iPhone game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [App Store link] well before anyone had expected, which had the unintended side effect of putting the game in players’ hands even before the studio had finished their promotional trailer.
That wait, at least, is now over, as above, which gives you the best showcase yet of the game’s fantastically illustrative style (provided in part by Austin’s own Amanda Williams) and playful mix of action mechanics over top its underlying adventure.
On the latter part, designer Randy Smith has just published a post-mortem of the project at Edge, where he explains of the game’s interweaving of narrative goals:
One of our test levels had a shot glass and liquor bottle on a lonely table, which generated more response than we anticipated. Who was drinking here all alone? What were they depressed about? This grew into a decision that the story shouldn’t be the spider’s but the environment’s, whose history would be revealed through set dressing…
This is a dead story, one you cannot change but only discover through exploration. Often in games, stepping into your character’s shoes leaves you wishing you had the interface for countless actions you’d take in real life. As a spider, your lack of interest and ability to affect the story is natural, and you fill the role your character would in real life: you leave the house covered in cobwebs.
See my earlier review for more on just how well that worked, but really, there’s almost no excuse to not simply take the plunge. You will not regret it.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [Tiger Style, App Store link]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Tiger Style
