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BULBA-SORE: JUSTIN WHITE’S BUSTED UP POKéMON
Also spotted at Justin ‘jublin‘ White’s portfolio site via his ‘Game Over’ shirt: this series of ‘Busted Up Pokémon.’ Let’s face it, dress it however you’d like, but over the past decade our beloved pets have taken nothing short of a straight-up drubbing millions of times. White’s just showing the truth behind the mask. ‘Fainted’, indeed.
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See more posts about: Art, Offworld Originals, Pokemon
FREE ADVICE: DEV.MAG’S INDIE-FOCUSED ZERO BUDGET MARKETING GUIDE
South Africa’s Dev.Mag put together a genuinely quite decent beginner’s guide for indie devs looking to market themselves and their games on no budget. It hews pretty close to Kyle Gabler and Phil Fish’s talk from this year’s Indie Games Summit (and in fact double-links Offworld’s coverage of said talk), but also rounds up more good advice from Edmund McMillen, Zeno Clash‘s ACE Team, and Dejobaan’s Rohit Shenoy, amongst others (and is notable for the smouldering-est photo of Gabler I’ve ever seen). [via IndieGames]
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ONE SHOT: THE MENACING MUNDANITY OF SPOTTING AN APERTURE SCIENCE VAN
Apparently spotted on the road by Patrik ‘voxar‘ Sjöberg, this van innocuously marked with the logo of Aperture Laboratories — the Black Mesa rival where the events of Valve’s Portal take place — has to be nothing more than a fan tribute.. right? I mean, right? [via Tristan Mahr]
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See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot, Portal
T-SHIRT: THE MUSHROOM KINGDOM RETIREMENT VILLAGE
Justin ‘jublin‘ White imagines the place all the washed-up game stars go to wait around for death in his ‘Game Over’ shirt for Fuzzy Ink. [via Mike]
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See more posts about: Fashion, Offworld Originals
ONE SHOT: RICHARD PEREZ’S RETRO ZELDA TRIBUTE
As a work in progress, it’s maybe a bit unfair to prematurely post this, but even in its current state it’s looking wicked: above is, obviously, a retro-illustrated tribute to Legend of Zelda from one of my new favorite artists, Richard ‘Skinny Ships‘ Perez.
Perez is also behind this similarly awesome tribute to underappreciated Coppola movie The Conversation, and this tribute to, well, vampires, Lincoln, bears, VHS tapes, kittens, raccoons, zombies, etc. etc., which you’ve undoubtedly seen making the rounds before if you’ve taken a step anywhere near any given Tumblr. [via minusbaby]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
SEE KYLE PULVER/J.OTTO SEIBOLD’S JOTTOBOTS IN MASSIVE MOTION
Apologies for the quick-fire double-shot of Jottobots posts today, but I’ve only just discovered that Giant Robot has uploaded this Anamanaguchi-scored video of their GR2 opening night showing the latest artxgame being played against the gallery wall to an adoring crowd.
Despite the shakycam, for now it’s the best way to get a load of how the game actually plays, and I can only echo Attract Mode founder Adam Robezzoli’s video appearance and say that it is “awesome.”
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SONIC SICKNESS: GUITAR-CONTROLLER PLATFORMING IN PIECES’ FRET NICE
Unmentioned during or following E3 week is a game I suppose I shouldn’t let slide by any further. The reason was mainly down to the fact that for as long as I’ve known it — since its first days as an Indie Games Fest finalist — I still don’t exactly have a handle on just how it plays.
The long and the short is this: it’s Fret Nice, made by Swedish indie Pieces Interactive, and its claim to the 2008 IGF’s Design Award nominated fame is that it’s played entirely using one of the several handfuls of spare Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitars you’ve now got laying around your house.
Tecmo very, very quietly made the announcement that it’d picked up the game for distribution on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network at E3, and alongside it sent along the first batch of screenshots showing off its new photo-collaged look.
So, right, still, how does it play? The latest trailer above doesn’t show off much but the game’s wicked looking graphic design, so let’s go back a bit to Pieces’ original IGF trailer. I’m presuming it’s changed in the intervening nearly two years, but there it gets a little more clear: your strum bar seems to be an action button, the fret buttons used for — running? — and the star-power tilt controlling jumps.
Tecmo will surely be closing the knowledge gaps in the coming months until its projected 2010 release, which will also be just about the time the trailers’ vaguely Katamari-esque Vibrant Chordblasters theme finally gets unstuck from your head.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
OFFWORLD LAZYWEB REQUEST: CAN WE TRANSLATE THIS JAPANESE SPELUNKER PARODY? [UPDATE: YES WE CAN]
Several days back, the always wonderful Tiny Cartridge posted the above video, which I suppose requires just a hint of explaining.
The game is the NES’s Spelunker, which — though it mostly floundered in relative obscurity in the States (apart from Derek Yu’s recent half-tribute Spelunky) — almost inexplicably has risen to legendary status in Japan, primarily as a ‘shit game’ (kusoge) for its punishing 5-pixel-fall instant deaths. (So wide is its ironic acclaim that Irem has recently resurrected the game for a four-player high-res downloadable PS3 version, which may or may not be headed our way.)
So we have that now combined with another ubiquitous Japanese meme, Hatsune Miku, the fabricated starlet based on Yamaha’s Vocaloid singing speech synthesizer technology, mentioned earlier both for “her” appearance in the Katamari Damacy DS downloadable, and, more recently, the chiptune tribute album 8-BIT PROPHET.
In the video, which replaces the standard Spelunker sprite with one of Miku, she provides not only an entirely a cappella rendition of its soundtrack and effects, but is continually narrating the deep-cave exploring experience. Basically, it’s ten different kinds of adorable and in-jokey, and something we’d like to see rendered out in nice, clear English subtitles.
Can you help? Email me or leave a comment if you can, and we’ll get this gal re-uploaded on YouTube for the rest of the world to enjoy.
[UPDATE: I love it when a plan comes together — a thousand thanks to Julie Whitehead, who sends on not only a wicked translation, but amazing notes on the songbird origins of Hatsune Miku’s name itself. As suspected, the song’s even more tongue in cheek and cutely funny than I hoped for: I’ll try and work up a nice subtitled post as a weekend project and share the results ASAP.]
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GIMME INDIE GAME: THE DESTRUCTIVE/CONSTRUCTIVE CALAMITY OF FLASHBANG’S CRANE WARS
One of the most fascinating aspects of Crane Wars — the newly released game from Minotaur China Shop and Blush creators Flashbang — is that, for essentially the first time, we’ve been able to watch the development of the game from its very earliest conception straight through to completion.
That early prototype video and alpha trial were effective as very base technology: the physics were there, the crane worked well, the destruction was fun, but what they weren’t was a game, and it’s been just as fun watching the bits that made it such being layered on top til now.
What’s come out the other side, is, put plainly, the best game the team have done since Minotaur (we’ll rightfully chalk up Paper Moon‘s success to original creator Infinite Ammo): a game that’s just as beautifully and deliberately balanced between destruction as much as the construction at its core.
What Flashbang have done is take that original crane demo and lattice-build a rigid structure over top: now, your static crane oversees a site with a tic-tac-toe grid of possible foundations and three spawn points of new “floors”. Very much akin to one-button mobile favorite Tower Bloxx, your new goal is to stack those floors in any given arrangement until the spawn point lets loose a ‘roof’ — stack that roof on top and your ramshackle blockwork becomes a nice, beautiful, more invulnerable new skyscraper.
Why invulnerable? Because at the adjacent lot, a group of ruthless (and vaguely French) scabs are threatening your staunchly union-ized business with both hurled insults and, more often, hurled dumptrucks, barrels, and flaming blocks of skyscraper.
And so here lies in the destructive rewards, and the Wars of the title: for as much as you can gain ever increasingly combo-multiplied high scores from proper stacking, you can take the secondary path of ensuring the scabs never fully manage to keep their buildings intact by hurling your own rubble into their lot, with new combos for bringing down buildings and achievements for covering their spawn points.
Most importantly, Crane Wars is one of the ‘stickiest’ games the studio’s released in some time, as well: the grid system opens up a number of trial and error strategies that beg to be discovered — setting up a wall of defensive completed scrapers seems to be an initial best bet until you discover it also stifles your best throws, etc. — and the usual Blurst timer (here represented by a dwindling budget) is an ever present reminder that there were always precious shortcuts and efficiencies you could have taken this go-round.
With any luck, this’ll become the new web favorite it deserves to be: as I guessed several days ago, it’s the best indie development we’ll see all week (and the latest best instantly-hummable indie background score, courtesy Infinite Ammo’s Alec Holowka), and barring some outrageous upset, the bar’s set very high for game of the month.
Crane Wars [Flashbang]
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See more posts about: Blurst, Flashbang, Gimme Indie Game, Offworld Originals
