Very well spotted by the always reliable Tiny Cartridge: GemVenture, a homebrew NES game by Tom Livak that manages to capture basically all of the underlying spirit of Infinite Interactive’s PuzzleQuest shrunk down to 8-bit form.
There’s no quest, and no real sense of character beyond picking a class for its set of spells, but where I honestly thought I’d give the ROM a quick run and never think about it again, it honestly sucked me in for longer than I’d like to admit.
What it does differently, and perhaps smartly, for its size, is provide both spiked gems to inflict damage on your opponent and heart gems to heal yourself on the same playfield, which, combined with its move-timer, gives a much faster paced push and pull feel to the puzzle battles than the game that inspired it: a true one-more-go-er.
Though I played dumb the last time this was teased, now it can fully be told: following the success of their four-part debut, culture shop/gallery Giant Robot and Attract Mode have once again teamed up to debut their next artxgame — bringing fine artists and indie game devs together to create new original works — this Saturday, June 13th at LA’s GR2 gallery.
This time, the artist in question is J.otto Seibold, who — in addition to his recent run of gallery shows — is the longtime illustrator and author of children’s book classics like the Mr. Lunch series, Penguin Dreams, Olive the Other Reindeer (which would go on to become a holiday TV special produced by Simpsons creator Matt Groening and Drew Barrymore), and, most recently, vampire tale Vunce Upon a Time. You might also recognize him from his animations for They Might Be Giants’ Istanbul (Not Constantinople) video.
Seibold has been partnered with indie dev Kyle Pulver, best known for his 2007 indie game Bonesaw, and, with upstart studio Retro Affect, the previously featured IGF finalist Snapshot: a game that mixes the brilliant pastel aesthetics of Yoshi’s Island with a mechanic that lets you move elements in its landscape by taking and placing snapshots around the field.
Together, the two have created Jottobots: a classic 2D platforming shooter starring the titular laser-slinging, jetpack-equipped ‘bot pitted against a range of instantly recognizable Seibold-ian vector creatures — angry mushrooms, ambulatory daruma dolls — played out over the technicolor spray-painted landscapes that have been his most recent gallery-art focus.
Artxgame also note that the game — which, like their original four, is meant specifically to be played in the gallery space — is limited to a five minute experience with a combo-scoring system and high-score list so players can see their rank at the end of the night.
What’s surprising — or rather, maybe welcoming — about the early demo I’ve played is how well the elements are coming together. Pulver’s got a rock solid 2D shooter base running underneath that rumbles the entire world with each exploding enemy, and the jewels they leave behind sparkle with more luster than any jewel I’ve seen in a decade of reading Seibold’s books.
So, how do you play? The game will debut this Saturday, June 13th, at Giant Robot’s GR2 gallery, located on 2062 Sawtelle Blvd, Los Angeles, and will run through July 8th (though possibly, like GDC’s Game Over/Continue show, without the game: be sure to show up opening night to have a chance to play!).
Hit the jump for the postcard invite to the show, and let us know how you fare! (more…)
As if you weren’t sold already: following the teaser pic, the teaser vid and the Ico selection, Media Molecule show off the three Shadow of the Colossus costumes that are set for release on Thursday.
My favorite detail so far from the entire Team ICO lineup? That little bitty plush Wander, desperately (but cheerfully!) hanging off Colossus Quadratus above.
Team ICO Pack – Shadow of the Colossus [Media Molecule]
As if you needed another reason to subscribe to peerless UK games mag Edge, they drop a little “bet you wish you’d had one now, don’t you” bomb, this pixel poster from Gary ‘armyoftrolls‘ Lucken included with subscriber copies of issue 203, which is just basically rife with overt and covert games references from the past 30 years. Click the image for the big blown up version and let us know what you spot.
Recently released on Berlin’s B-Hack Records is Mister Beep‘s “Monophonic Generator” album. It’s a chiptune album containing, mostly, cover versions of various songs by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, amongst others, that is notable for being composed entirely on a Timex 2048. That one I had to look up.
The Timex 2048 was a cousin of sorts of the British favourite Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The system was mostly compatible with the “Speccy” and was most popular in Portugal and Poland, which accounts for its somewhat obscure nature. It’s also a computer that had a one channel “Beeper” for audio production. The entire album is 1-bit, which is trumped on the label site as “the first 1 bit album ever to be released on a netlabel!!!” I can’t confirm or deny that, but either way it is certainly rare.
Monophonic Generator [Mister Beep software page, 8bitcollective profile, via the excellent True Chip Till Death]
Stephen ‘espiox‘ Gibson dares to dream up retail packaging for Nintendo/Skip’s Art Style series of DSi downloadables, in the style of the Game Boy Advance’s Art Style predecessor, the bit Generations franchise [as shown here].
I only wish he’d taken that PictoBits art — which visually recalls the earliest cartridge art from Nintendo’s 8-bit Famicom [seen here] and broken it up into chunkier pixelated squares. [via Tiny Cartridge]
Continuing 2 Player Productions’ drip-feed of performances from the 2007 Blip Festival, they’ve just uploaded this Bit Shifter track, Rough Weather, that gets the crowd all down and dirty, including one conspicuously spotted audience member that you may recognize from another games website (see if you can find them!).
Remember Kodu? Microsoft’s new 21st century LOGO Steve Ballmer demonstrated during CES that the company hopes will help children learn game/programming logic by piecing together small works of their own on the Xbox 360?
Very much lost in last week’s news was this blog update from the team that says after all its years in development, they’re finally putting the final touches on the package for its release by the end of June.
It’s still not clear how the project will be integrated into the current Xbox 360 lineup, apart from the earlier promise that it’d appear as part of the Community Games initiative: whether that’s as a separate group entirely, or as a first-party Community Games release. It’s just as unclear whether sharing of created game will still be an integral part of the experience.
See more about Kodu at its Microsoft Research project page. [via IGN]
The legendary Abbey Road studio, recreated in plastic form for E3 to promote The Beatles: Rock Band, as photographed by Harmonix creative director Josh Randall.
