This is about as brilliant as it comes: AQI producer and longtime Namco composer Nobuyoshi Sano appears before a virtual audience in pitch-perfect Jobs style (though the camera never shifts down to let us see whether he’s opted for the New Balance or Nikes) to announce Korg DS-10 Plus, a new version of their portable synthesizer.
The Plus version will come ~$10 cheaper, and — as summarized by Palm Sounds — will double the number of analog synths from two to four, will include eight drum synths, a total of 12 tracks, and will offer real-time editing when used with DSi.
AQI plan to release the new version on September 17th, with no word yet on a stateside release, though it’s always been one of the most eminently importable DS releases.
For what should have been one of LittleBigPlanet‘s less notable costume releases (in comparison, at least, to the Metal Gear, Ico/Shadow of the Colossus and 2000AD crossovers), Media Molecule are getting tens of comedic miles out of their just-released beardy Druid addition.
Above, the precise length of that self-same beard, which extends far beyond Molecule co-founder and creative director Mark Healey’s own, and even past Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, for what must surely be the longest beard ever.
A bunch of names I wasn’t quite expecting to come up against today: casual powerhouse Majesco has sent word that Serious Sam — the cult classic tongue-in-cheek PC shooter from Croatia’s Croteam — is currently being remade and will be re-released for Xbox Live Arcade (and, later, PC) this summer as Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD.
Development duty on the game is being done by Austin upstart Devolver Digital, which, it turns out, is the latest venture from former Gamecock heads Mike Wilson and Harry Miller.
If Serious Sam passed you by on its original 2001 release, chances are you also weren’t a reader of Old Man Murray, the long-favorite PC games blog run by Chet Faliszek (who you’ll be hearing more from on Offworld soon) and Erik Wolpaw — two names that should now be familiar to Valve fans as the reason Left 4 Dead and Portal are so well written and designed.
The site tirelesslychampioned the game on its original release, and made the rest of us aware that for as much as Sam was an uncomplicated, straightforward shooter, it was fantastically so, and featured what remains one of my favorite cheat modes in gaming history: the hippie mode that replaced blood splatter with a floral bouquet, and meaty gibs with hamburgers and fruit (above).
Majesco says the “run and gun, twitch FPS” will offer “BIG guns, TONS of enemies, 4-Player Online Co-Op and stunningly superfluous HD graphics” later this summer.
So, if you’ve been wondering why all the internet emergency lights were flashing this morning to notify you that EA and DICE’s free-to-play, microtransaction supported debut Battlefield Heroes had stealthily just gone live, and yet you still couldn’t find anything but a broken beta sign-up page, it’s because the battlefield-heroes.com and battlefieldheroes.com are apparently entirely disconnected.
So, yes, BattlefieldHeroesMinusTheDash is actually live, though not even the game’s twitter feed seems to be aware of it, and there is probably no better way you could spend the rest of your day than exploring its light-hearted (as above), entirely accessible brand of arcade shooting, as we finally return to the fields and see how it’s shaped up since early beta days.
More concept art retrospectives from BioShock 2 devs 2K, looking at the development of the sequel’s original Big Daddy — the model that all future Daddy’s (ie. the ones you fought in the first game) would be based on.
While I appreciate the less-monstrous utilitarian simplicity of the near-final version at bottom (doubly fitting since you yourself will be playing as this Daddy), I can’t get over that wicked titular aching slump of the first version at top left.
More curious developments in our latest Purho edition of What’s He Building In There (which I suppose really should be its own category), as the Crayon Physics creator extends the generative aspects of his last character prototype even further with these mathematically created and arranged pixel Invaders.
As a bonus double shot, a look at a tiny fraction of the 32,768 unique invaders that can be created in a 5×5 grid, courtesy Jared ‘Levitated‘ Tarbell, original author of the fractal invader code that Purho’s prototype is loosely based upon. [all via Petri himself]
And then this happened: none less than thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen notes that Toronto iPhone developer Ketara — whose mission statement contends they were founded as “an outlet for new, interesting ideas” — has just released Aquatica, a game that is nothing less than a direct copy of the original Flash implementation of Chen’s flOW, straight down to the peripheral sonar-like pings of its ascending/descending markers.
Chen told 1up that he had released the original Flash source to a number of people who emailed and asked for it, though Ketara have commented that “all the source code is completely, 100% written from scratch.”
But, at issue for Chen, apparently, is not necessarily one of code theft — telling 1up that an iPhone version was something he wanted to pursue himself, if its IP weren’t now tangled up with Sony — but rather the fact that Ketara make no mention of his or thatgamecompany’s name as at very least its inspiration:
I thought the creation of Aquatica is a very flattering thing because they mimic the game I created in the university and somewhat realized my dream for a flOw game on the iPhone. It could be a very sweet thing if they did this as a fan ware and put it out for free. But the fact they didn’t mention flOw at all and call it a ‘new, unique game completely in a class of its own’ is disappointing.
What’s wrong with adapting a general idea of one game to the iPhone? No one had done this before, and we wanted to play it with tilt controls. In general, most games within each class are practically the same, just different graphics.
While they’re not uniquely modeled, they are limited edition: FigurePrints says each three-print run — here starting with “Speedy, Clockwork Rocket Bot and and Stinker” — will never be run again after an allotted time, which this time ends on July 31st. As a bonus, ordering the pets gets you a 10 percent discount off your own custom FigurePrint character, as well.
Remember word in February that Kubrick/Be@rbrick makers Medicom were planning an unlikely crossover with a new Tetris model Be@r? Well, that was no joke, and so now behold, the world’s first designer Tetris toy, part of Medicom’s 18th series of collectibles.
Also apparently on its way in a few short weeks, this separate collector’s model, in association with Japan’s official Tetris portal, tetrisonline.jp. Keep an eye on eBay for them to start making their way through soon, alongside fellow series 18 Terminator, Spongebob, Stimpy (!), and hardcore-tattooed Tokidoki ‘bricks.
Oft-quoted industry analyst Michael Pachter, of Wedbush Morgan Securities, had something to say about E3’s announcements. All that games chatter was one thing, but Pachter thought the real news was all the other web media deals that Microsoft had made for the 360.
“The announcement that I thought was missed was the opening of the Xbox Live Dashboard interface to the internet,” Pachter told Gamasutra. “Later this year, Microsoft will allow members to access last.fm and to select music, to access Netflix and instantly watch films/TV shows, to access Facebook and interact with other friends, and to access Twitter and post/read tweets.”
Pachter argues that the gaming media entirely missed the significance of this announcement, which puts the 360 firmly in the same territory as Apple’s AppleTV, only with a library of awesome games. With so many 360s already installed around the world, MS have a good chance to become the default choice for web media on your TV. A colleague of mine – one of the big boys of the games media who definitely didn’t miss out on the significance of the this particular announcement – proclaimed that “Microsoft have won, and no one even said anything.”
My kneejerk reaction was to say that no, it’s not that this idea has been ignored – indeed it’s been bounced around for so long that I don’t think it really came as a surprise to anyone and, consequently, it didn’t get a great deal of coverage. But, far more importantly, this is gaming, and the platform which ends up having the best library of games will win. (more…)
