Nicalis’s other upcoming WiiWare game — its original Night Game, from Knytt creator Nifflas — continues to shape up with previously unseen new… is vehicles the right word? The video also shows off more of the game’s fantastic ambient score from Asthmatic Kitty’s Chris Schlarb. Nintendo has listed the game as a fall 2009 release.
Part of me wishes the game would procedurally generate new levels for me to roll through every day, no matter how aimless — gaming needs its own version of the bedtime story, and this seems as close as anything’s ever come to fitting the bill.
One of the many exclusive PlayStation Network downloadables not specifically called out by Sony in its Tuesday conference: Gravity Crash, a new shooter from UK dev Just Add Water that mashes Geometry Wars-esque retro-vector style with twitchy dual stick shooting, and, more importantly, includes a full level editor to let players create and share their own twisted neon worlds.
One of the most experimental concepts shown at E3 thus far, and yet another game quietly announced but not explicitly mentioned by Sony: a PSP followup to Jun Fujiki’s Echochome, the Escher-esque PS3/PSN downloadable in which wireframe artist models traversed impossible constructions using tricks of perspective to bridge gaps and open paths.
This time, as the name implies, the trick isn’t visual but temporal: like Braid and Yoshio Ishi’s Cursor*10 web games, players will have to — as seen above — use versions of previous rewound playthroughs to advance characters in later playthroughs.
Icarian: Kindred Spirits — the WiiWare debut from Madrid based studio Over The Top — certainly borrows more than a little (however coincidentally) from original WiiWare game LostWinds, but, given the trailer above, extends the idea of solely creating drafts with the WiiMote to more direct control of its broken Greek landscape.
Over The Top say the game concerns the search for the fallen Icarus by main character Nyx, who, like LostWinds‘ Toku, needs to be protected and guided on her journey, as you slowly gain the “powers that gods such as Zeus or Eolus will grant.”
At very least, it should tide over the throngs still holding out desperate hope for Nintendo to revive its Kid Icarus franchise. Find a few sharper screenshots below the jump. (more…)
As I wrapped up many of the Sony games not mentioned during their E3 press conference on Wednesday, today I’ll bring word of a number of DS and Wii games that went unmentioned by Nintendo, starting with the latest look at Nicalis’s overhaul of Pixel’s oft-mentioned and still gold-standard indie platformer Cave Story.
Despite appearances, and dashing hopes, that bit from 0:18-0:25 that looks like the first appearance of co-op multiplayer is, unfortunately, an AI-controlled plot point. Nintendo lists Cave Story as a summer 2009 game.
Hit the jump for a fantastic portrait of main character Quote.
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Also only noted in brief passing during Sony’s montage of upcoming PSP games: Invizimals, an augmented reality monster hunter/battler game from Barcelona studio Novarama that utilizes the PSP’s camera attachment to “hunt” invisible creatures and capture them via included augmented-reality cards.
The PSP camera originally debuted in Japan in 2006 and was released across Europe a year later as Go!Cam (the Go! brand obviously now widening with the latest model PSP), but still has yet to make its stateside appearance: the teasing of Invizimals is the strongest sign yet that it might finally arrive.
David Cage’s collective output at Quantic Dream has always been nothing if not massively ambitious: from the wide open world of his PC/Dreamcast debut Omikron to the multi-camera cinematic perspective and directly user-controlled actions of PC/Xbox 360’s Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, with both just undercut from being true masterworks by tiny details.
The jarring quick-time event sequences that undercut the latter will assuredly be returning to his PS3 exclusive latest detective thriller, Heavy Rain, but, from the trailer above, you can see how hard Quantic has worked to integrate them more tightly with the scene: notice the razor thin R1 floating just above the gun during that stand-off moment.
Either way, it’s still one of my most anticipated games for the console, and I’m very curious to continue to see how they’ll continue to walk that tightrope between player freedom and directed narrative.
Nintendo’s newest New Super Mario Bros takes the polygonal realism of the DS version and puts it in HD, and adds four player drop-in, drop-out play to the mix. New powerups, as above, include the propeller suit and the ice-ball firing penguin suit, and the game now banks on the same “co-opertition” aspect explored in Zelda: Four Swords.
Like that game, you can rely on the other players to help get you through a bind, but they can also undercut you in a mad dash to collect the most coins (by tossing you out of the way, or refusing to pop your Yoshi’s Island-esque bubble that you return to life in), with a multi-player ranking at the end of each level.
One game even I continually neglected to mention over the course of E3 — not for lack of interest, but simply from the constant torrent of incoming games — was Sin and Punishment 2, which, as you can see from the trailer above, is looking as fantastic and ephemerally pastel as it should.
The game is, of course, the sequel to the Nintendo 64 original that took some seven years to finally make its way to the states (under Nintendo’s Virtual Console banner), years spent working up a near-mythical level of cult acclaim.
That acclaim is in good part due to the track record of developer Treasure, who — for basically as long as you can remember — has been churning out some of the smartest and equally whimsical and hardcore shooter/action games from Bangai-O to Gunstar Heroes to cult-legend scribble dodgeball game Rakugaki Showtime to Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun.
The Wii S+P will bring the dual Wii-mote/Nunchuk controls the original was begging for, allowing you to control your character/slash foreground characters while simultaneously aiming and shooting at those in the back, and, by all on-the-floor accounts that’ve made their way to me, was shaping up extremely well ahead of its early 2010 release.
Hit the jump for some fantastic hi-res character art and illustrations. (more…)
1.) Sony unveiled their own new motion tracking system, aptly titled the PlayStation Motion Controller
Sony were up front about the rampant leaks in recent weeks, saying up front “we consider ourselves to be industry leaders, and press leaks are no exception,” but it still had a few surprises up its sleeve.
Primarily, the PlayStation Motion Controller, a ‘magic wand’ type add-on that utilizes the PlayStation 3’s camera to track 3D movement across one or two hands. Sony went through a bevy of demonstrated uses, making the controller act as first person shooter aiming device, writing utensil, two handed archery simulator, and real-time strategy unit selector, all with a legitimately impressive amount of finesse.
The company said it would be releasing more information about the device soon, in anticipation of an early 2010 launch.
2.) Sony are circling the wagons and re-emphasizing a lineup of third party exclusives
After losing Grand Theft Auto to competing consoles, first and foremost Sony announced that Rockstar North, the studio behind the GTA series, would be creating Agent, a story of global espionage and assassins set in the late 1970s that will be exclusive to PS3.
Sony also showed the first footage of Final Fantasy 14, a new online version in the series (the first since FF 11) that was announced as a game that would “launch exclusively” for the PS3.
Also shown: the first official trailer for The Last Guardian, the third game from Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda that leaked recently as Project Trico — the updated trailer showed a fantastic deal more detail than that early target video.
For the PSP, Hideo Kojima came on stage to reveal Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a game he said was set, too, in the late 70s, and would serve as the official sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3, and would take full advantage of the PSP’s capabilities. Kojima promised he was heavily involved in the game both as script writer and as executive producer, with much of the same original team as MGS4, and would not be a simple spinoff project.
Other PSP titles in its lineup coming in the near future: a new exclusive Resident Evil, LittleBigPlanet, SOCOM, Monster Hunter Freedom Unlimited, Motorstorm, Hannah Montana, Harry Potter and the exclusive Gran Turismo mentioned in the Qore leak.
3. Sony is placing greater emphasis on the PSP as a media device
Sony’s already widely leaked PSP Go will be launching on October 1st in America and Europe at a 249 dollar/euro price point, and alongside it will come a new PC media manager app called Media Go, meant to better sync photos, music and video between your PC and the PSP.
Also added to the new PSP model firmware this fall (as well as the PS3) will be an on-device port of its proprietary musical application SensMe, that, like iTunes’ ‘Genius’ functionality, will analyze your music with ’12 tone recognition’ and create new playlists based on your mood.
Adding to the PS3’s already sizable video library — which will now include new content partners Showtime, G4, E, HDNet, Starz, TNA, Magnolia Films, and new anime and sports channels — Sony announced that content delivery will be coming natively to the PSP this fall, as well.
4. Sony still strongly believes in the ‘play, create, share’ theme
To that end, they not only announced new partners for LittleBigPlanet like Disney — who will be adding Jack Sparrow, Cinderella and The Incredibles costumes — but they announced a new PlayStation 3 exclusive game from its internal San Diego studio and Vancouver’s United Front called ModNation Racers.
At heart a kart racing game along the lines of Mario’s own, the twist is — like LittleBigPlanet near-infinite customizability in both characters, cars, and tracks. United Front demonstrated the track building feature, which was as easy as painting tracks, terrain types, scenery like trees, mountains and villages, and powerups with a virtual PhotoShop brush applicator, and then instantly tested out the track with no loading or delay.
The game featured a superdeformed character design style similar to LittleBigPlanet‘s Sackboy, which the developer said was inspired by vinyl toy scene artists like Kidrobot and Tokidoki, and are therefore completely after my one true heart.
5. As I suspected, Sony are actively chasing more independent developers for PSP
How? By announcing a price drop for its PSP developer kits by some 80 percent to $1,500 in North America, and 1200 euros across Europe and PAL territories.
