Though the game is eventually due on WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade as well, at the PlayStation.Blog, Backbone designer Kyle Vincent Tunison details the forthcoming remake of Hudson’s original cult-hit TurboGrafx-16 hex-strategy game Military Madness, due at an as-yet unspecified date later this year.
Not to be confused with Nectaris: Military Madness (the original PlayStation remake [which included some 130+ maps]), Military Madness: Nectaris is a note-for-note rebuild of the 16-bit original — with the obvious graphical caveat and rebuilt AI — and will contain an additional ten maps designed specifically for its online/local multiplayer, with new upgradable vehicle and squads.
Above is the original trailer for the game: ignore the platform branding, the game is said to be identical for all three downloadable outlets, bar some multiplayer maps for the WiiWare version. For more background on the series and its 20 year history across a wide variety of platforms, see this dedicated fan site.
Valve has just announced the latest round of DLC set for the original Left 4 Dead with Crash Course, a new campaign due in September that will “bridge the gap between the end of the No Mercy campaign and the beginning of Death Toll” — with “new locations, new dialogue from the original cast, and an explosive finale.”
Valve says that while the campaign will work in both co-op and survival mode, “the primary goal of “Crash” is to deliver a complete Versus mode experience in just 30 minutes, resulting in a streamlined version of the game’s existing Versus campaigns,” and will include “a recharge timer for infected teammates… and item spawn behavior has changed for more balanced gameplay.”
The new campaign will be available as a free update for PC players, and will cost 560 Points for Xbox 360 users.
[UPDATE: I got this half right and half wrong — both images in conjunction were meant to signify that Puzzle — not Bubble — Bobble was headed to the App Store, the company has written in to say. I was most of the way there!]
Over at the company’s newly founded Facebook group, Taito have done a double-shot of teasing about its next iPhone steps following the release of Space Invaders: Infinity Gene, with the above image undeniably a message that one of the company’s signature games, Bubble Puzzle Bobble, is slated for an appearance on the device sooner than later.
The second image corroborates that, but adds a little more intrigue: though it’s dominated by Bobble‘s green dino Bub, the scattered bits at bottom seem to hint that other revivals are on their way, though the only one that juts out blatantly is the stork-legged star of their 8-bit import oddity Chack’n Pop at bottom right-ish and top-right.
That bottom left image, though, probably isn’t anything but the broken down component parts of what will eventually be the bubble-launcher in an inevitable tilt-enabled version of Puzzle Bobble — I think the only bit I’m drawing a blank on is that armor-suit, coin-pile and ladder at far-bottom-right.
And speaking of Braid, a neglected update from weekend news: after a German ratings board leak confirmed suspicion, IGN got confirmation that Hothead Games will be porting the game to the PlayStation 3, with no tentative release date yet given. The Vancouver studio behind Penny Arcade Adventures and Ron ‘Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion‘ Gilbert’s forthcoming DeathSpank is also, as you might recall, the same that brought Braid to the Mac.
At the same time, Braid creator Jon Blow has also confirmed and teased his next game, The Witness, described, as above, as “an exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island.” The Tao Te Ching-dropping game will be released, Blow says, “on multiple platforms — whatever makes sense in late 2011, when the game will hopefully be finished.”
The only other hints at what the game might entail come from an earlier help-wanted blog post by Blow, in which he sought a 3D modeler with indoor/outdoor environment skills (no monster/weapon experience required) to join his “small team [for] a puzzle-exploration game that is philosophical, and quiet, and is being made for reasons other than crass profit motive.”
“This game places a heavy emphasis on the way things look,” the post read, “and will be a refreshing project for those who value nuance.”
I suppose this might be a bit of a tease bringing it up this close to the deadline, but I’ve only just spotted Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy’s Mario AI Competition 2009, a contest in association with the IEEE, to build an algorithm capable of controlling Mario in a modified, endless, randomly generated Java version of Super Mario World.
Explain the coordinators:
One of the main purposes of this competition is to be able to compare different controller development methodologies against each other, both those based on learning techniques such as artificial evolution and those that are completely hand-coded. So we hope to get submissions based on evolutionary neural networks, genetic programming, fuzzy logic, temporal difference learning, human ingenuity, hybrids of the above, etc. The more the merrier! (And better for science.)
There’s two upcoming deadlines, August 18 and September 3, so it may be a bit more feasible to hit that second: check the official site for the full details and source code to enter yourself, and please, please let us know if and when you create something.
This isn’t the iPhone game recommendation I intended to write today. Weeks have gone by and I haven’t even been able to carve out time to adequately write at any considerable length on Rolando 2 or Space Invaders: Infinity Gene (both of which are, indeed, must-buy games), and here I find myself writing about the last thing I expected to overtake my weekend: NewToy’s Words With Friends.
There’s not much explanation you’ll need to understand the Words experience. It’s ultimate-Facebook-time-waster Scrabulous, on your iPhone. And it works. That’s all you really need to know: you can start multiple games with random players, or search for your friends across the network via your contact list (if you’ve ever played their earlier Chess with Friends, you’ll recognize the setup), get dropped into a new room with no more frills than your board, a chatroom, and occasionally the haunting google-eye notifier of your opponent checking in.
Granted, this isn’t the only way to get an iPhone word-fix: EA has its own version of Scrabble, and the Scrabulous devs themselves have their own mobile version of Lexulous, the post-cease-and-desist version of the game they brought back to Facebook. And indeed, both of those games use Facebook Connect to broaden your opponent-base, which Words With Friends does not.
But the key? Words With Friends — both the paid version, and its ad-supported free sibling — is lean, streamlined, and does nothing more than what it’s meant to do: give you a quick-burst next move in the minute and a half you have to fiddle with your iPhone in between life’s everything else. Push notifications are coming in an imminent update to make that compulsion even more inescapable.
When they announced the partnership — considering their pedigree — I mentioned that my hopes were high for an online turn-based strategy along the lines of a stylized portable Front Mission. After spending the weekend obsessively checking in with Words with Friends and experiencing just how solid their online infrastructure is, that hope has triple-scored.
[Feel free to start a new game with me there as ‘brand0nnn’ (with a zero)!]
