There’s a lot of things Nintendo’s done right in this viral documentary for the upcoming Wii remake of its classic Punch-Out!! — not least the overstuffed King Hippo-dressed punching bag [belly button ‘x’ and all] and bike scene re-creation. But casting Isiah Whitlock, Jr., now forever known as The Wire‘s Clay ‘sheeeeit‘ Davis, as coach Doc? That’s the TKO.
Rome’s Il Creatore produces music using a Commodore 64, SIDStation, talk-box, and a vocoder. Owing to an early 80s italdisco and synthpop influence (the artist’s page cites Kraftwerk, Telex, and Rob Hubbard), it’s all very catchy stuff.
More lo-fi (faked) pixel videos can be found on his YouTube channel.
Not gonna lie: I was big gunning to feature Brütal Legend in an upcoming installment of Concept Album since this GDC session, and was quite disappointed to be beat to the punch by remorseless rapscallions ripping half-blurry mid-res versions of the art from the GDC-stored PowerPoint. Anyway, this one was the most brilliant bit, by the inimitable Scott C., who has his own Action Comic here.
Tonight, I snuck across the border. As the hour reached vodka-rocks-o’clock, I went under cover of a hotmail.ca and freshly created Canadian Xbox Live account (meet the mild-mannered, balding middle-aged ‘powerpi11‘) to spend a quiet night in seeing what Microsoft and Endemol had in store for their Xbox 360 massively multiplayer real-prize game show initiative, ‘Primetime’.
Here’s the premise, for those that haven’t seen the TV version (as I hadn’t!): a titular ‘one’ is chosen from the viewing audience (players have a higher chance of getting chosen, apparently, by doing well at the game playing along at home) to go up against a ‘mob’ of 100 other players — though I’m less clear on how this is doled out, as there seemed to have been at least 10,000 players connected, and I always seemed to be in the mob (sharded, presumably?).
Then begins the trivia questions: topics in the opening night ranged from who first reached a million followers on Twitter (A: you know this) to what members of an audience were doing to make Morrissey abruptly shut down a recent performance (A: eating meat).
If a player answers correctly, they move on to the next round, and any mob member that chooses incorrectly is taken out of the prize running, but still continues to play. And here’s the crux: the more mob members taken out, the higher the one’s prize winnings rise on a tiered structure — 160, 300, 600, 800, 1200, 2000, 3000+ Microsoft Points, which begins to quickly add up to an un-sniff-worthy amount of Xbox Live Arcade money for a free, online game (that above range roughly equates to between $3-50+).
After a certain number of rounds, the player’s asked each time — in true fomulaic gambler’s dilemma game-show tradition — if they want to take the Points they’ve earned so far, or continue on. If a player continues and loses, that amount of Points is distributed to the mob members remaining. On average, that amounted to somewhere between 80-160 points ($1.50-3 per player). At left above — the ‘one’ deciding whether to take their 3000/$50 of Points, or try to eliminate even more of the 23 remaining mob.
So what did I learn from my hour and 15 minutes of play, before being ingloriously booted from the proceedings for not actually having an Xbox Live Gold account (was that about to be my chance to be the one?):
* Just that slightest amount of interaction instantly turned an activity I’d rarely consider taking part in passively to one that legitimately and repeatedly made my heart fractionally tighten. Suddenly, the thrill of game/reality TV that inexplicably seems to captivate howevermany millions of viewers cut through me like a hot knife.
Even with absolutely nothing at stake (no prizes are being awarded during the beta), I played for 80 minutes, non-stop, dead simply in some semi-sad anticipation that I might be the next ‘one.’
With ‘commercial breaks’ lasting some 20-30 seconds — never nearly enough for kitchen or bathroom runs — that is a captive audience, and that is a Tivo-era marketer’s dream come true (ads shown in the beta: manga.com, UFC [above], and, natch, Microsoft/MSN).
* I am unstoppably quick on the answer-button draw (sorry, rza145), and even when you’ve been disqualified from the prize running, the sub-competition of playing against your small group of four other local or Xbox Live users for point (not cashable Point) prowess is stimulating enough to keep the controller in hand.
* Like any true corn-fed American, I know next to nothing about Canada. Not even, embarrassingly enough, when pressed, what ‘Nova Scotia’ means (I’m sorry), or that Vancouver’s nickname is ‘Hollywood North’ (why?), or what a Tim Hortons ‘timbit’ is (also: what is a Tim Horton). But, if nothing else, what this showed was the lengths Microsoft is willing to go to to custom tailor its questions.
* At least 5 people out of 100 in Canada think that either Marilyn Manson or Marilyn Monroe died recently (A: Marilyn Chambers).
* At least 1 person out of 100 in Canada thinks you can get a temporary tummy tuck or a nipple ring in a box of Cracker Jack (A: tattoo).
* I would very much like to live in a world where network TV shows broadcast billboard ads for indie games like Metanet’s N+ (the Toronto developer presumably chosen here representin’ the Great White North?).
Will I play again? Are you joking: come May 12th, I’ll be donning that ‘powerpi11’ skin an hour ahead of time, just to see if I can again make it through the digital RCMP’s mindful watch (whose uniforms, I now and forevermore will remember after tonight, also go by the nickname ‘Red Serge.’)
Remember that off-hand bit about Media Molecule’s plans to team up with UK comics legend 2000 AD for official LittleBigPlanet downloadable content? That appears to be happening sooner than later. [via MM]
As followers of the Twitter account and my semi-exasperated Facebook friends will already be well aware, I’ve spent the better part of the week taking part in a cross-blog challenge with ngmoco and developer Rough Cookie‘s upcoming tower defense game Star Defense.
The task was one of simple survival: we were given an early build of the game with a single planet and asked to last as many rounds as we could, which, in my case, started in the low 20s and built to a bedtime-last-night high of 49, which, it turns out, fell far less than half short of PocketGamer Tracy Erickson‘s minorly-staggering winning 132 rounds.
But, public embarrassment aside (I blame my lightly smashed-up screen [which I’m holding out on fixing/replacing until June’s alleged 3.0 model (you’d really better not hold out on me, Apple)]), what the challenge has done is both familiarize me with Star‘s setup, and, I have to admit, almost entirely win me over.
Like Tom mentioned earlier in talking about Plants Vs. Zombies, I’m not the most fanatical tower defense player: I wasn’t one of the forward-thinkers who called Desktop Tower Defense their top game of 2007 (c’mon, it was a dead heat between Phase, Earth Defense Force 2017, and Raw Danger), and the last TD game that really grabbed my attention at all (PvZ aside) was Studio Eres’ gorgeously abstract Immortal Defense — watch its demo trailer and the appeal is clear.
That’s nothing against the Fieldrunners and the Elemental Monster TDs, per se, it’s more about the heart of the mechanics themselves, which derive a large part of their underlying tension from the essential ‘waiting game’ of setting your positions and sitting idly by to see the effect they’ll have, and finding out 10 or 15 waves later that you’d been thinking wrong since the beginning. I’m not a fan of lost time.
And that’s something that Star Defense — or rather, the one level I’ve played — seems to have minimized. I’ve completely forgotten now where I’ve heard this, but Nokia designer Scott Foe — the main man behind the N-gage’s excellent flagship mobile/PC crossover game Reset Generation — said somewhere that one of the ways they’d got past the inescapable lag inherent in a multiplayer game running over slow mobile networks was to design the playfield to be larger than the mobile screen itself, which they then ported directly to the PC, even though a standard monitor could have easily displayed it whole.
The reason? In that 7+ seconds between every player’s turn, users would constantly scroll around the playfield looking for their next move and exploitable opportunity, which meant zero seconds of staring at a static screen.
So, here’s another mea culpa: all the times I’d expressed some skepticism about Star Defense‘s spherical — and thus 70% obscured at any moment — playfields, it turns out I was thinking wrong here, too, and one of the game’s strengths is that once you’ve placed your initial barriers that can ably destroy any earlier weaker waves, you’re then completely free to scout out the rest of the planet for deeper strategies.
Add to that a button that — and maybe I’ve just overlooked this in every other TD game? — forgoes the auto-timer and immediately sends out the next wave of enemies, and Star Defense is the first game of its type I’ve played that actively avoids any of that dead time that’s got under my skin, and one in which I’m never not directly interacting with its world [as a side note, this is something Plants Vs. Zombies does very smartly, too, by requiring you to click on randomly popped up bits of sunshine].
Star Defense should be landing on the App Store quite soon, and, with some several hours already happily put into Groundhog Day repeating just 1/7th of its galaxy, could easily be the game that has finally taught me to stop worrying and love the tower.
There was a certain amount of understandable skepticism when Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka announced that his new games company, Prope, had moved on to create a game that took all of the reductivist complaints about the Wii and its controls — that it’d reduced gaming to wild flailing — and reduced it even further.
His Let’s Tap asks players instead to not even hold the controller, instead placing it on a box (included with the game) and rap their hands against it, which, in a sense, isn’t as crazy as it sounds, as it flips the rhythm-gaming staple of costly peripherals on its head.
And, as it turns out, it may have been a step in just the right direction, with no less than Edge magazine giving the collection of five games very high marks, and above is the just released trailer for the Tap Runner segment of the game, which is due for U.S. release this Summer.
In a parallel universe, all the rampant Konami-Coded sites would have been viral prelude to this: Konami has just made the surprise announcement of a new WiiWare version of its venerable Contra series — the very game that made the Konami Code famous — due to be released in Japan next Tuesday, and, surely, the Western world not long after.
Konami offers few details other than saying the game will maintain its run/jump/shoot ‘guerrilla tactic’ core, which you can see in style — along with at least one larger-than-full-screen boss, via the developer’s newly opened site.
In other new overseas surprise announcement: after creating Namco’s original Offworld favorite action/puzzler Mr. Driller and moving on to Sony to work on that company’s own excellent Ape Escape series, director Yasuhito Nagaoka has been reunited with Driller designer Kaori Shinozaki for Qruton, a new puzzle game coming in June for both PSP and the PS3.
Beneath its cute-goth exterior lies an interesting take on number puzzling, with grouped digits rolling forward (or, with fours, back to one) and marked to explode if they lie next to similar digits, with a minorly brain-bending entire-screen combo viewable in the trailer above.
Sony’s been less consistent with bringing PlayStation Network exclusives to all territories, or at least in a consistently timed manner, so it’ll be a waiting game to see if Qruton makes the jump to the U.S. and UK stores.
