It comes recommended not only because creator Justin Smith quoted Offworld in his App Store product description, but because it’s actually a fair bit more playable on the device compared to its PC counterpart, with your car-control bits only a fingertip away, rather than a wildly flailing mouse-swipe away.
Case in point: out of the countless calamitous times I played the PC original, my first session on the iPhone was honestly the first time I’d reached level two. Bone up on the details of the game in its first writeup, then visit Smith’s page for more information on the new mobile version.
‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006’ and ‘Kings of Power 4 Billion %’ animator and Scribblenauts contributor Paul Robertson shows off his contribution to Udon’s art book tribute to Capcom’s classic supernatural fighter Darkstalkers. I always feel like a chump stretching and squishing his pixels, so be sure to view it at its native res for maximum impact.
As I mentioned back in March it’s both a gorgeously designed tribute to The Game Nintendo Won’t Let Us Have, and indispensable as a guidebook should be. The free version is actually fairly legible, save for some of the charts in the index: for the rest of you that need those yet still want to keep this transaction paper free, Fangamer’s also just released this hi-res $6 PDF version.
But really, there are few even professionally produced guidebooks on the market these days that warrant flipping through when you’re not absolutely in need of it: the Mother guide is an exception to that and probably needs to be held in the hand to be best appreciated.
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the franchise, Bethesda is offering The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall as a free download, the first game in the series that would set the first-person/open-world tone later popularized by Morrowind and Oblivion.
They’ve made no attempt to update the game for Vista/XP compatibility, which is actually for the best: the game requires DOSBox, which now runs on a variety of platforms. Skip (or at least only lightly refer to) the frightfully technical installation guide (pdf) they’ve included: frontends like D-Fend on the PC, and Boxer for the Mac are going to be your best friends here.
And the other revival of the morning: there was a lot of speculation in late 2007 and across 2008 as to what upstart studio Smith & Tinker (winners of one of my top 10 developer logos) were up to. Studio founder Jordan Weisman was the series creator of the original MechWarrior franchise at FASA, but had since moved on to found 42 Entertainment — creators of ARGs like Halo‘s now-renowned ‘ilovebees’ campaign.
The direction started to shape up a bit more when news hit that he’d reacquired a number of his early properties from Microsoft — MechWarrior and Shadowrun among them — but it wasn’t until today that the studio’s debut project was revealed: a current-gen reboot of MechWarrior, as seen in actually kind of unexpectedly wicked action above.
There’s currently no set publisher or release date, but Weisman gave IGN a number of good details as to what to expect from the game in an exhaustive interview, of note particularly for their ideas on a semi-persistent, Call of Duty 4-esque experience-based mode for its multiplayer.
Two stories of beloved cult hits getting overhauled for the now-gen this morning: the first, that Worms, Stunt GP, etc. creators Team17, as they quietly announced in late 2008, are due to turn their early-90s Gauntlet-esque Amiga shooter Alien Breed (above), into Alien Breed Evolved:
The studio are still quiet on platforms and details, but promise more information in the summer, and that its co-op game will be “an absolute blast.”
A quick note to relay Microsoft’s plans for the rest of Xbox Live Arcade’s summer: following next week’s debut of the re-made Secret of Monkey Island, July 22 will see the release of the 3D remade arcade original TMNT, Turtles in Time Re-shelled, which will then be followed by Capcom’s fighter Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
August 5th will then see the release of ‘Splosion Man, above, the 2D puzzle platformer from Twisted Pixel, the studio behind ace 3D PC/XBLA puzzle game The Maw, followed then by Trials HD, the console port of Red Lynx’s surprisingly engrossing heavily physics-laden motorbike puzzler, and finally, August 19th will be the launch date for Shadow Complex, the 2.5D Unreal Engine enabled ‘Metroidvania‘-esque platformer from Undertow devs Chair Entertainment first revealed at Microsoft’s E3 conference.
