We may actually honestly be nearing end-times when an Old Spice adver-game is suddenly a very serious contender for November and December’s web-gaming-best, but here we are, and Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World very easily could be.
The idea might come as less of a shock when you consider the all-star team at the heart of it: Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman along with his Capsule cohort Robin Arnott, artist Paul Veer & musician Jukio ‘Kozilek‘ Kallio — both behind the other Venus Patrol-exclusive game, Gun Godz — and artist Sven ‘ptoing‘ Ruthner, best known (or maybe should-be-best-known) for his work on 2008 action-tunneler Thrustburst.
Working with ad agency Wieden & Kennedy, the team were tasked with coming up with a new, full mini-game every week straight through to the Mayan apocalypse, the second (and stronger of both so far) of which has launched today. Shown at top, it’s a multi-tiered mine-cart action game that doesn’t fall that far from the tree Saltsman & Veer planted for their Hunger Games movie tie-in Girl on Fire, and continues the overall initiative’s reliance on a steady-stream of non-sequitur jokes.
It’s those “no idea turned down” jokes that seem to be giving the project its vitality — between handing retired basketball champ and game-star Mutombo an insane script for him to deadpan his way through (with shades of the way TV cult-classic Fishing With John played with its own narrator) and the punch-drunk exhaustion that must come from providing a new, polished design every five days, the games have the same raw enthusiasm as any from a typical game jam.
Three more ‘current event’-ish games will be released up to the December 17th deadline, a countdown to which you can watch via the vaguely terrifying computer-aided Mayan calendar carving live-cam happening behind the scenes: play the first two now to make sure you’re caught up on the non-storyline as it develops.
As they certainly aren’t busy enough handling not one but now two Glorkian Warrior games with comic artist James Kochalka, indie studio PixelJam have just announced that they’re on the verge of releasing three new games at once in mid-December — a self-bundled release that will also include downloadable versions of previously web-only titles.
At top is the first of the new games, Potatoman Seeks the Troof, which the studio will only say is a “short and intense platformer”, with the other, Bitku, pictured below (and quietly teased for weeks on the PixelJam tumblr): a web-app that “lets you create simple comics / stories expressions, based on a theme, with a limited amount of random assets” with a multiplayer add-on expected to come in the new year.
The bundle will also include a new 8-track LP from PixelJam co-founder Miles Tilmann, with a new visualizer for each track (and the ability to use any of those for your own music) — a very exciting prospect if you’ve been exposed to his musical past, as his 2003 “Over & Through” EP (still my favorite of his releases — try especially track 6!) below should attest to.
Finally, PixelJam says they’ll also be tossing in a downloadable version of their holiday-festive pinball game Snowball & the somewhat Canabalt/Hook Champ-esque mini-game Marathon of Doom, a challenge-mode version of their fan-favorite Dino Run series.
A brief housekeeping update & a quick tease to say that while the site went a bit dark over the holiday weekend, it was only in service of cooking up a few new things that I’ll be rolling out over the next couple days.
One of those I’ve already alluded to a bit around the site, which is actually something that a surprising amount of VP members have requested, and the other is something that no one will have known they wanted until it happened, which is something I hope kicks off a new semi-regular trend.
With any luck, the first will come tomorrow (entirely contingent on how long I can keep myself awake tonight to spit-polish the last bits), and the second is expected on Thursday: I genuinely hope you’ll think both were worth all the collective time & effort that went into them!
Well spotted by Tiny Cartridge is this album of remixes of all of the Wii U’s deepest cuts by Philadelphia musician DJ Cutman, who adds just enough bite to the honestly already fairly amazing selection of the new console’s ambient system audio, which I only wish I could separate out into both TV & GamePad channels.
If you enjoy the stream above and are Philadelphia-local, you might also be happy to learn that Cutman will be hosting “an evening of classic gaming” with “unique vendors and live music” this Saturday at the ‘Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art‘ — check Cutman’s site for ticketing and location information.
Just to put that last post in a little more artistic context, especially if her name seemed to ring a bell you couldn’t quite place, above is Laura Bifano’s deer duo, part of a similarly voxelated (?) series called ‘Menagerie’ that originally put her on the map (or, at least, the ‘Tumblr radar’).
My favorite illustration from one of my new favorite game/art sites is this Vaporeon, via Pokemon From Memory, a new undertaking from artist Laura Bifano, who by her own admission “hasn’t seen a Pokemon since [she was] 12”, and otherwise only relies on the descriptions sent in by request — basically, and awesomely, a 21st century version of 18th-19th century zoological illustrations from far-flung explorers.
In this particular case, the request came from Toronto indie dev Damian Sommer (he of the previously-featured Comics Vs Games submissionThe Yawhg), who supplied only that a Vaporeon has “a body sort of like a dog, except for its mermaid-like tail. It also has a short face, big black eyes and a raised spine. Its head has three fins on it, and around its collar is what I guess would best be described as a frill?” I’d say she basically nailed it.
The exciting new word game for meeting-phobic fidgets ! This would be a horrible bastard of an interface, but I’ve done enough R&D on this one in the field this year to know I could pull it off. Plus I like the idea of factoring in ‘drink leakage’ into the game engine.
[Every Friday on Venus Patrol, designer Dominique ‘Dom2D‘ Ferland presents TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back each Friday for the latest picks!]
Game designers don’t have time for any of that turkey stuff and those pesky Black Friday sales – they’ve got amazing games to make! We’ve got six brand new devlogs in the forums this week – among them the gorgeous tile-based strategy game Oberon’s Court, rocking epic dragons and volcanoes, The Burger Flipper, a point and click adventure game set in a fast food restaurant, and Droidnaught, a first-person dungeon crawler à la Eye of the Beholder, but set in a sci-fi world!
I love Chinooks SO MUCH I drew this after seeing some buzz the shard building the other day. I’m not sure this is an accurate reflection of how they operate though.
Will publish yet another version of the SuperFunThing project ‘Pocket Playground’ tomorrow – it is now a total mess and needs moving on from !
Designer Brad Muir — best known as the lead on Double Fine’s recent online action/defense game Iron Brigade (nee Trenched) — calls the game not just a tribute to Capcom’s Monster Hunter, but even more an homage to Ray Harryhausen — the classic stop-motion movie monster animator behind films like Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and the original Clash of the Titans.
The prototype — awesomely called a “Fynamation production” (in tribute to Harryhausen’s ‘Dynamation’ process), and given a second round of polish past the original Amnesia build — will allow players “choose from three character classes: the stout defensive Stalwart, the agile and versatile Waracle, or the drunkenly unhinged Beerzerker” to “do battle against the Gorgoth, a mythical two headed creature with an insatiable appetite for mankind.”
Head over to the Amnesia Fortnight page to claim your own Brazen copy, and vote on the rest of the contenders for this round of prototyping — the four leads of which I’ll include below the fold.
