Also gone almost entirely noticed over the course of the E3 week: the fact that twisted indie platformer And Yet It Moves, from Vienna studio Broken Rules has been stealthily announced for a WiiWare release in Fall 2009, after only just made its way to Steam and other digital download services in early April. Above: a teaser trailer for its PC release.
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It’s been far too long since I last mentioned 5th Cell’s puzzler/adventure game Scribblenauts, where — as I mentioned last December — your goal is to collect ‘Starites’ by conjuring, well, essentially almost any object to help traverse the landscape, as seen in the game’s latest trailer above.
Over the past 7 months, 5th Cell has continued to up the ante on its gimme-an-object-any-object promise (enlisting artists like Pirate Baby Cabana Battle’s Paul Robertson to help quick-draw new additions), and how well does it work?
Well, from the show floor video above, pretty stunningly well, only failing out on the Nintendorks‘ fairly reasonable request for Obama, but managing to pit a jackalope, a stegosaurus, a kraken, God (and, anecdotally, Death [Death killed God!]), and Einstein against each other.
And, just in case you were wondering (I wasn’t, but I’m glad to know now), as apparently witnessed by ex-1UP/EGM writer Nick Suttner (who makes a cameo above): yes, Keyboard Cat is in the game.
UPDATE: Tiny Cartridge and Joystiq writer JC Fletcher updates with a picture of not just keyboard cat playing the Scribblenauts level off, but also feline cohort meme Longcat stretching into the sky.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Paul Robertson
Hideo Kojima’s biggest surprise for E3 wasn’t the potentially 4-player portable Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker or Raiden’s return for Metal Gear Solid Rising, but — newly unveiled at Konami’s late-Wednesday conference — the fact that he will be assuming production control for Lords of Shadow, the latest attempt at bringing Konami’s decades-old Castlevania franchise to life in full 3D.
In development for PS3 and Xbox 360 by Madrid studio Mercury Steam — the same team behind Clive Barker’s Jericho — Konami says Lords of Shadow is “one of its most ambitious and innovative titles to date”, with “a rich, open game world that traverses snowy mountain ranges, Gothic castles, and undead-strewn wastelands in a devastated Southern Europe during the Middle Ages,” and a star-studded voice lineup that will include Robert Carlyle, Natasha McElhone, Jason Isaacs, and, yes, as above, Patrick Stewart.
Whether those key words “open game world” are code for a game that will retain the later 2D Castlevanias signature slowly-unfolding back-tracking structure remains to be seen, but Kojima’s involvement, however executive and overarching, is surely meant to inspire confidence that this might be the 3D Castlevania done right, after a series of four earlier attempts across Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2 that, by most accounts, were not.
Hit the jump for a collection of high res screenshots. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
Fez co-creator Phil Fish unveils a new logo for ‘Infinitron Polypharma’, with the tagline “curing diseases as we invent them”, which can only mean one thing: work steadily continues on Power Pill, Polytron’s iPhone collaboration with Paper Moon creators Infinite Ammo.
See more posts about: Infinite Ammo, Offworld Originals, One Shot, Polytron
Another game that I only heard mentioned once during the entirety of E3 was Blitz Arcade‘s Invincible Tiger: The Legend Of Han Tao, a game that’d apparently escaped my attention for too long during Namco’s spring lead-up to the convention.
Blitz were on hand demoing the game on their special polarized-3D setup, but it’s not quite the game to do 3D justice: what it is is the apparent next-gen heir to the NES’s original simply titled Kung Fu, only with a fluidity that’s rare even for modern brawlers, and that perfect amount of hammy badly-printed HK kung fu film filter. [indirectly via Jean Snow]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
Media Molecule’s first look at the downsized PSP version of its LittleBigPlanet seems to confirm that, for now at least (Media Molecule have previously said they’re investigating the possibility), there won’t be cross-platform content sharing between it and its big PlayStation 3 sister, but there’s still hope, at least, for it to be able to talk with the company’s planned web-based portal and level browser.
Hit the jump for ten screenshots of the game (unfortunately delivered in fairly low resolution).
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I’m not playing it coy this time. The game I’ve gone back to this week has no truck with coy. It is Kurushi, the ‘Modern Times‘ of videogames. If you’re American you might know it as Intelligent Qube, which means you missed out on the oh-so-subtle ‘I krush u’ pun of the European title.
It will have crushed you, nonetheless. It’s a game that pits a tiny, fragile human against an implacable, advancing wall of giant, granite cubes. There is no winning, only surviving. There is no reward, only a fresh wall of furious, thundering monoliths. It is, in many respects, the most frightening game ever made.
Why go back to it? Because it remains one of the neatest strategy games ever conceived. Your job is to lay mines under the advancing wall to destroy the light grey blocks, while avoiding damaging any ‘forbidden’ black blocks. As the cubes roll forward, you detonate whatever mines you have laid under them. The only thing stacking the odds in your favour are the green blocks: hit one of these, and it will take out all the blocks around it.
That’s it. Destroy the grey blocks and get out of the path of the black ones. Failure comes either by being crushed, or by running out of ground to retreat along. You need excellent spatial skills and the ability to think three steps ahead, and you have to do it all fast.
It’s also one of the cleverest games ever conceived. I’m not entirely kidding with the ‘Modern Times’ reference. This is a game about how one apparently powerless person can take down the faceless system. It’s about our need to measure ourselves against machines, and machines against ourselves. And, if you ever make it all the way to the end, it’s about death. And not the St-Peter-meeting-you-at-the-gates-with-your-childhood-dog-and-a-mug-of-cocoa kind of death, either.
This week, though, I’ve been playing to lose. This week, I haven’t been the brave, battling human, the tiny spark of organic potential refusing to be ground in the gears of industrialised progress. This week, I have been the cubes. This week, I am become death. I am become rage. I am become unstoppable, howling fury, mashing the pathetic, scuttling bug of a human beneath my perfect planes and razored bevels. Because, this week, that tiny human hasn’t been man. He’s been a man. A very specific man. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One More Go
Somewhat lost in the E3 shuffle last week was much-under-reported confirmation that 4J Studios — the same developer that helped bring the excellent conversions of Rare’s Nintendo 64 platformers Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie to Xbox Live Arcade — would also be bringing spiritual GoldenEye 007 sequel Perfect Dark to Arcade this “winter.”
The sci-fi original IP to Bond’s GoldenEye, Perfect Dark was an underdog classic for the console, and marked by troubled development that saw a number of the original designers leave during the course of its development to start their own studios (Martin Hollis to Bonsai Barber developer Zoonami, and a number of others like David Doak to Free Radical, where they founded the TimeSplitters franchise). There definitely comes a shift at a certain point in the game where its taut and sober opening acts loosen to uneven comedy, but it’s still one of the finer first person shooters from the era.
The Xbox.com listing confirms that the game will be updated with online capabilities for its very densely packed multiplayer half — I’m certainly looking forward to returning to briefcase holding after all these years.
Hit the jump for more screenshots of the game in its new full-res HD skin. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
Hideo Kojima’s full sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3 will also follow the events of its PSP debut Portable Ops, again focused on Liquid Snake/Big Boss’s storyline up to the establishment of Outer Heaven (if I’m understanding Kojima’s labyrinthine storyline correctly): the location you infiltrated as Solid Snake in the NES original.
More interestingly, with Kojima promising to take full advantage of the PSP’s capabilities during Tuesday’s Sony press conference, four player simultaneous play seems all but assured, both with the lineup of four near-identical Snakes at the end, and the double-box gag at the end of the trailer.
You can see a double-set of boxed Love-Pack’d legs, too, in the screenshots included after the jump. (more…)
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In case you still haven’t made your way through video of yesterday’s Sony conference, video of one of its most pleasant surprises: United Front demoing their “race, create, share” game ModNation Racers, specifically their honestly quite impressive and intuitive paint-brush track editor.
I’ll be interested to see how the community really can exploit the system more than just cosmetically and create tracks that truly set themselves apart: Front hasn’t fully demonstrated verticality or suspended tracks, and my gut reaction is to wonder how varied they can ultimately otherwise be (though I have, just now, started mentally designing elaborate offroad shortcut side-tracks).
Two additional screenshots showing a bit more of their vinyl-toy-inspired customizable characters are embedded after the jump. (more…)
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