This is about all we know: an image surfaces on LittleBigPlanet Central‘s forums, purportedly from creator Media Molecule themselves. The studio confirms it to be official art. It is Ico with Sack-Yorda, it is beautiful, it is as muted and subtle as the original game itself, it is my new desktop. That’s about all we really need to know for now, isn’t it? [via VG247]
Put together for Tokyo’s most recent Pecha Kucha Night (which, as inspired GDC’s MicroTalks session this year, features a series of speakers given 20 seconds to narrate 20 auto-advancing slides), game developer Mark Cooke — most recently programmer on Konami’s Zombie Apocalypse, but whose resume stretches as far back as Grim Fandango — challenged himself to create 10 games in as many hours.
As you’ll see, not all managed to come in under the one-hour limit, and not all were necessarily successes, but he did manage a good dose of creativity for each, particularly the Shinjuku Shame ‘homeless staring FPS’ and the procedurally generated Surfing on Sine Waves.
Head over to the official Pecha Kucha Night page for another video of Cooke actually delivering the presentation to get a better sense of how well the games went over with the crowd, and for news that the Pecha Kucha organization will be working with Cooke to create an official iPhone app out of his Can You Say Pecha Kucha? rhythm game.
One of Valve’s most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they’re instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.
And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and “extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze,” and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow’s jarate-tossing champs today.
Earlier this week Tom Chick, editor of the Sci-Fi television channel’s videogame blog, Fidgit, was presented with something of a moral dilemma. Having posted his impressions of Sony’s exclusive PlayStation 3 title, inFamous, in two easy-to-digest posts, one outlining ten great things about the game and the other ten ‘poor’ features, Sony explained that his scheduled interview with the game’s development team would no longer be forthcoming.
According to the publisher the interview was “no longer appropriate” in the light of Chick’s coverage of the game. Chick’s dilemma? Whether to inform Fidgit’s readership of the Sony PR team’s apparent petulance, further antagonising its PR department, while reassuring the audience of the site’s continued impartiality in the face of mild threat. Or, alternatively, whether to bite his tongue as a way of protecting future interviews and exclusives with the publisher’s development teams (who, after all, had little to do with the snub) thus serving the readership’s interests by safeguarding the site’s continued relevance.
With convincing arguments on both sides it can’t have been an easy decision to make, especially because the repercussions of either choice are unclear. But this is exactly the sort of grey moral or professional choice that human beings are routinely called upon to make: a cat’s cradle of cause and effect with unpredictable outcomes and unfathomable implications. Life rarely presents black and white moral choices, even if our fables, parables and stories mainly deal in such extremities. (more…)
In contrast to Wolfenstein, which Carmack says was simply a “quickie project to satisfy my curiosity and test the iPhone waters,” Id has undertaken an “honest development effort” to make the port “a really good game on a platform that doesn’t have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power.”
The first version to be released will support WiFi multiplayer, with a later iPhone OS 3.x exclusive release that will also support bluetooth, but Carmack says latency issues keep the game from being playable online over 3G.
Most intriguingly, Carmack says that with the release and subsequent popularity of even very large iPhone apps, like the 700 meg-large Myst, he’s considering taking the platform even more seriously:
The fact that people are downloading Myst on the iPhone is heartening — I have ideas for leveraging our high end idTech-5 content creation pipeline for a future iPhone game, if people will go for a few hundred meg download.
Attn. would-be indie devs: World of Goo creators 2D Boy, as they gear up to develop their next game, have just released this simple open-source framework for rapid prototyping, a process which 2D Boy Kyle Gabler notably employed to create the original Tower of Goo at the Experimental Gameplay Project. The framework, they say, will:
1. Minimize the amount of code required to set up a new game
2. Provide all the basic facilities so as to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel (2D rendering, sound, input, persistence layer, and resource management)
While the 2D Boys won’t be providing any support beyond the two included sample games, they have set up a new forum to discuss development on the framework. Let us know if you make something incredible!
You will be forgiven for overlooking the release of Zoonami‘s WiiWare debut Bonsai Barber several weeks back — I might have too, if I didn’t know firsthand the pedigree of the studio behind it. Zoonami is, as it turns out, the studio founded by former Rare designer Martin Hollis, one of the foundational design team behind Nintendo 64 Bond shooter GoldenEye 007, who left in the midst of Perfect Dark development to strike out at his own studio.
In the intervening years, Zoonami had thus far only eked out a single game, DS/PSP minigame/Sudoku mashup Zendoku (which, much to its credit, is the only Sudoku game that’s actually managed to hold my attention for more than a round or two and is well worth investigating), with another two years passing until Barber‘s release.
Of course, there’s nothing that overtly ties Goldeneye and Bonsai together to say that fans of one would be instantly drawn to the other, except to say that both are, truly, exceptional games. (more…)
Speaking of studio visits, I might have entirely passed by this series of Sucker Punch video diaries describing the concept and development of just released PS3 exclusive action game inFamous if producer Paul Levering hadn’t recently sent them in.
Levering is, as you might recall, one of the producers behind the ongoing BlipFest DVD series and chiptunes documentary Reformat The Planet, and 2 Player Productions’ now-signature style manages to make beautiful shots out of even the simple talking-heads.
I spent longer than I’d like to admit trying to put together the ultimate Hudson Mohawke – Polkadot Blues YouTube sample that would prove just what I mean, but for now you’re going to just have to take my word and the image above.
Tiff sent me a heads up yesterday that tucked away in amongst the Flash navigation at Nintendo’s website for DS favorite Rhythm Heaven was an official iTunes visualizer, and though it continually crashed her Mac, it runs beautifully on my PC.
As I would come to find out, what it proves beyond reasonable doubt is that nearly every piece of music is exponentially better when accompanied by: effete frogs, erlenmeyer flask-shaking lab partners, thick-lipped Moai heads, guitar wielding ghosts, and dogs done up in rocket-mech suits, all throbbing and pulsing to the beat.
Let the Rhythm Heaven site come to a complete load and check the left nav for the link. [Hope you get yours working, Tiff!]
