Microsoft spent surprisingly little time talking about Xbox Live Arcade developments during its press conference yesterday — and left its Community Games section even further in the dust — but GamerBytes has uploaded the above sizzle reel showing a few of this year’s upcoming downloadables.
Though it’s marked as internally developed, Splosion Man is a new platformer from Twisted Pixel, the creators of excellent PC/XBLA action/puzzler The Maw, and you’ll also see, among other things, another look at the microtransaction supported avatar racer Joyride from Vancouver’s BigPark, a quick look at the dual analog sidescrolling shooter Shadow Complex from former Advent Rising devs and Undertow creators Chair, and RedLynx’s heavily physics-enabled motocross-y puzzle game Trials, now due for a console release.
Though I’m actually jonezin’ so much harder to re-watch the game’s animated intro that kicked off Microsoft’s E3 conference (especially the White Album era bits!), Harmonix has instead just released the first gameplay trailer for their Beatles: Rock Band.
The trailer gives you a look at the band through their various stylistic eras, as well as the first look at the mechanics of its harmonizing vocals — a technique Harmonix utilized in their earlier Karaoke Revolution games, but which are just now debuting in Rock Band via the Beatles.
The game will include 45 songs on disc, ten of which have just been announced — “I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “I Feel Fine,” “Taxman,” “Day Tripper,” Back In The USSR,” “I Am The Walrus,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Here Comes The Sun,” and “Get Back” — with full downloadable albums being delivered later, starting with the entire Abbey Road album, and an Xbox Live exclusive on the song “All You Need Is Love.”
As noted before, the game will be released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii on September 9th.
Just announced at Microsoft’s E3 conference as an Xbox 360 console exclusive, Left 4 Dead 2, a new chapter of the game that takes the struggle against the horde to the southern bayou, and will focus more strongly on melee weapons — chainsaws, axes, frying pans, and baseball bats — on top of its updated arsenal of guns.
The game, due to launch on Xbox 360 and PC on November 17th, will also include new boss zombies, new survivors (seen above), and “more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch.”
1.) Microsoft unveiled the 3D motion sensing and facial/voice recognizing “controller” project named Natal.
Microsoft promised the moon in its demo video for their Project Natal, carrying the tagline that it would “make ‘you’ the controller” and that, as the controller is the current “barrier separating game players from everyone else,” with Natal, “the only experience you need is life experience.”
As above, Microsoft demoed racing games, fighting games, and simple sports games using full body spatial recognition that let you hold up virtual steering wheels, duck, weave and deliver punches, and kick goals using nothing more than their physical actions.
But the company also took that a step further, promising full facial recognition — demonstrated by walking in front of your TV and having the Xbox 360 instantly log you in to your personal account — and object scanning, like holding up your own skateboard and having it instantly placed in a game. Microsoft added that the system could function just as well in a multiplayer environment.
For real world use, apart from a ringing endorsement by none less than Steven Spielberg, Microsoft called up Fable producer Peter Molyneux to demonstrate Lionhead’s project Milo — a virtual friend that they promised could carry on fluid conversations with full voice and emotion recognition, and demoed sleight of hand tricks like drawing on a piece of paper, holding it up to the Natal sensor, and having Milo “receive” that same paper in the virtual world, with additional recognition of what you’d drawn. (more…)
And so E3 coverage officially begins: first up, LucasArts has announced the revival of its classic adventure series Monkey Island with Tales of Monkey Island, a new five-part monthly episodic series for WiiWare and PC by the Telltale Games, the same studio of LucasArts vets behind both the Sam & Max revival and the Strongbad series games.
Following that, LucasArts will unveil The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, an internally developed remake of the original game that will add “updated high definition graphics, a re-mastered musical score, and full voiceover”, exclusive to PC and Xbox Live Arcade.
The Tales series is due to launch in “a few short weeks,” with the Special Edition due “later in the summer.”
Officially, Olly Moss was off the case on his original series of retro-book covers that helped kick off the long-running design craze, but, like a reluctant Solid Snake, he was called back into action and created these four for an upcoming Edge magazine article on evergreen games.
Says Moss: “You can’t say no to Edge.”
The instant winner of the four: his cover for Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4, which, in the context of the game (the plus-sign numbers counting toward your multiplayer kill-score) is much more grim than it would first appear.
I consider it a Very Lucky Day when I wake up to an email from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, who this time wrote to remind me that Noby‘s GIRL had finally made the last push to Mars.
And just when I was reaching for the reply button to remind him that I’d actually already done my tribute post to the occasion, I realized just what his enclosed above video actually was. Embarrassing admission: it kind of gave me goosebumps.
For the small handful of you that hadn’t yet heard, a quick recap: that low but growing squeeee you might’ve heard Saturday afternoon was the deflating balloon sound of one of Sony’s biggest E3 surprises — their new model PSP, the Go (and with it confirmation/video of portable LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear and Gran Turismo games) — being unceremoniously leaked early via their PS3 downloadable TV show Qore.
The full-body-wince irony is that ridiculous cloak and dagger dressing they chose for their Qore reveal — which likely was meant to be set live this Thursday, two days after this coming Tuesday’s E3 press conference.
But, with the lesson learned and the damage irreversible, Rob over at BBG rounds up the specs that set it apart from the standard PSP — 3.8″ display, 16GB of flash storage, a Memory Stick slot, and Bluetooth — and offers a smart look back at former Sony devices that show some of its industrial design roots.
The biggest change for the device, is of course not necessarily one of form factor but of content delivery: without a physical UMD slot, the Go represents Sony’s boldest push yet into digital realms, and thus will not replace but sit alongside (for now) the company’s PSP-3000, ensuring that retail (by which I mean the fierce sleeping giant GameStop) is not cut entirely out of the mix.
But! The most Offworld-ready tidbit of information out of the stilted conversation above — and offered almost entirely in passing — is Koller’s admission that there’ll be a renewed initiative to bring smaller (read: indie?) PSP offerings to the device as well. While Sony’s been doing a better job at re-releasing older UMD releases via digital means, there’s still only a very small handful of dedicated digital PSP releases on the PlayStation Network, and even then mostly downscaled handheld ports of PS3 originals (see: fl0w or Everyday Shooter).
This, then, apparently shows Sony hoping to step into somewhat the same arena as Nintendo — with its newly launched DSiWare — the ever-present iPhone, and whatever XNA-on-Zune handheld initiatives Microsoft might be announcing in a matter of hours, which it first revealed at GDC 2008 and which seems to have gone almost entirely forgotten since.
What you might not have expected from all the early footage of Flashbang’s next web-playable Blurst game, Crane Wars (and I certainly didn’t until this latest look): it’s much more a game of con-struction, with de-struction simply the goal of its newly shown-off titular competitive aspect.
And, for a game about, you know, just cranes and buildings, it’s shaping up to be as charming and light-hearted as we’ve all come to expect from the ‘bangs by now. The sudden appearance of a dumptruck tumbling through the air — thrown, it turns out, by the AI opponent to stymie your progress — is your first taste of that, which carries through right to the union/scab banter at the end, all underscored by the cheerful score by Infinite Ammo’s Alec Holowka.
All in all, it’s looking quite fun, and is expected to hit the service on July 1st.
Artist, designer and musician Neil ‘alinear‘ Voss offers the first peek at xgon, the upcoming iPhone “puzzler and music generator mashup” he says bears only a coincidental resemblance to Trism — now instantly one of my most anticipated apps.
