Maxis art director Ocean Quigley shows off this prototype for a post-SimCity 4 game eventually cancelled, then known as Simsville. Quigley explains the process, known as “impostering”, would have allowed for a freely moving camera around the city and much more detailed models than previously utilized, as the process renders out complex 3D objects as simple sprites.
And, of course, gives the game that wonderfully soft-shaded illustrative style.
Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours do digital hardcore with a backdrop of glitched out pixel lovelies at the previously previewed Pulsewave show at NYC’s The Tank. Vimeo uploader Gideon captured most of the night’s performance, including several of the open-mic performers — see also: 8BK-ok’s 8-bit Rocky Horror show, and also: JDDJ3J’s MySpace, where he’s got the best low-bit version of Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi I’ve ever heard.
In its ongoing drip-feed of BioShock 2 details, 2K has let loose the first details of the game’s multiplayer campaign. For such a deliberately single-starring narrative experience as the original game was, multiplayer might have seemed an odd choice, but developer Unreal co-developer Digital Extremes are promising something entirely uniquely modeled to capitalize on the game’s fiction — thankfully not simply giving us a Big Daddy Arena.
2K says the multiplayer segment of the game will work in parallel with the single player experience that will be set “during the fall of Rapture,” prior to ‘Jack’s arrival in the first game, with users taking the role of test subjects for the then-experimental bio-enhancing Plasmids.
There, players will explore pre-wreckage environments seen in the first game like Kashmir Restaurant and Mercury Suites, and, taking a page from Call of Duty 4‘s multiplayer playbook, they’ll earn experience points that will grant access to better weapons, Plasmids and Tonics to be recombined to fit your style of play.
BioShock 2 is due for release in October for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.
This weekend, I will mostly be playing Popcap’s excellent new Plants vs Zombies.
That’s not what I’m planning to play. What I’m planning is: ploughing on through the excellent Chronicles of Riddick; having just acquired a Wii after all this time, I’m hoping to dive back into Metroid Prime 3 and the sublime Super Mario Galaxy; and checking out Tale of Tales’ The Path, now that a Mac port is available (as previously reported on Offworld).
Things won’t go according to plan, though: the siren song of zombies, clamouring for brains, will lure me back to my garden.
It’s hard not to have escaped the casual-games juggernaut that is Popcap, following the success of their previous titles, such as Bejeweled, Zuma, and Peggle. Plants Vs Zombies continues their tradition of making finely crafted, perfectly balanced, and maddeningly addictive games.
Plants Vs Zombies is Popcap’s take on Tower Defence. I am not the greatest fan of Tower Defence games – even the delightful Fieldrunners. They’re fiddly, require a great deal of information to be processed at once, and demand increasingly precise interactions as the playing field fills with tiny turrets. For something that is supposedly strategic, they seem to descend into motor-control tests all too quickly.
Popcap take all that and throw it away, reducing the genre to a skeleton: defending a house against zombie attackers, with limited resources and limited space on your lawn. No building mazes of little turrets here; there are up to five “rows’ for enemies to walk down and you to build on. The play-field clears after every level. There’s only one resource — sunlight — and it has to be gathered by hand. The various plants at your disposal are, like all the game’s graphics, large, clear, and beautifully drawn. There’s no “upgrading” of turrets; each plant has a unique function to perform, and all have strengths and weaknesses, which usually come down to balancing power against the cost to build and the time it takes before you can build another.
New plants and capabilities are added very slowly – one per level at most. You’re never overwhelmed with choice. Even once your repertoire of plants is bulging, the game keeps that in check by limiting you to taking six different types of seeds to battle. And then, just when you think you’ve got the whole thing sussed… it throws night levels into the mix, where there’s no sunlight to restock your supplies, but where fungi come into their own (as they don’t have any need for sunlight). There’s a lot more depth to Plants Vs Zombies than you might expect from a casual game, but that depth is meted out slowly and carefully. It has to be, given how useful the help screen is:
Popcap are well-known for their attention to their craft; Plants Vs Zombies has been in the pipeline for quite a while, but it’s clearly not been released until it’s absolutely ready, and the Popcap attention to detail shows. Plants Vs Zombies is really, really good. Like all Tower Defence games, it can get repetitive, but it’s not designed for long periods of play. It’s much better suited to frequent short bursts, and the charming character design and inventive array of zombies ensures that it’s never long after a play-session before you’re double-clicking on it again.
Plants Vs Zombies is available now for PC and Mac as direct download from Popcap, as well as on Steam and other services; it’s currently only $9.99 on Steam, which is a steal. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be stumping up the second the hour-long free trial is up. And then not playing very much else. Whatever you choose to play, have a fun weekend, Offworlders; what’s in your gaming future for the next two days?
Above, a preview of the title screen and first song from Alex Mauer’s second Vegavox album, his third LP to be released on an actual NES cart. Mauer’s been previously mentioned for his musical work both on the NES ROM flier for April’s Pulsewave show and the PlayPower organization’s work on a cheap 8-bit computer for developing worlds.
So it’s been some weeks since Tale of Tales’ Red-Riding-Hood-via-coming-of-age-horror game The Path first hit the digital marketplace, and I haven’t said a word about it since my IGF roundup, based on a build from a year earlier.
That’s not an intentional snub, it’s simply logistics, with my main PC now so horribly outdated it suffers under the weight of a Plants Vs. Zombies or a Today I Die, let alone anything taxingly 3D.
But those days might now be behind me, as Tale of Tales has just announced that The Pathhas just been released for the Mac — which hopefully will keep the MacBook happy — and alongside it, they’ve released their lengthiest and most ‘traditional’ trailer to date, which gives you just about everything you need to see to understand why it’s quickly become such a critical darling.
In a move entirely coincidental with my tip of the hat to Rich Grillotti earlier in the morning, Adult Swim has released its latest web game, Pizza City, which so happens to have been created by Grillotti and PixelJam partner Miles Tilmann.
The game’s the Atari 2600 version of Grand Theft Auto we never got, if the game had necessarily been limited to GTA‘s delivery side missions and been stripped of all its violence (minus, that is, that toward clowns and mimes), but with all its hidden bonuses sprinkled around its open world.
If it seems at first glance that its pace and expansion are too time consuming for quick-shot web play, that’s because they are: though it’s not immediately apparent (it wasn’t to me, anyway), pressing ‘S’ inside the pizza shop will save your progress, meaning I can (and will) come back to grind my way to those better cars teased just outside your starting point.
LittleBigPlanet creativity seems to be on the rise lately: following yesterday’s electro-mega-mix, PSN user ‘Hymanator‘ has done up Eric Chahi’s classic Another World/Out of This World in style, with the full intro sequence, shadow-beast, cage-breaking sequence and all.
Hymanator (where he’s got more Robocop, Back to the Future tribute vids) [Synthasite, thanks Malcolm]
After ESPN’s recently discovered (and since removed) hack created a firestorm of blog attention, one new site is doing its duty to catalog the rest of the uses around the internet of hidden Konami Code easter eggs.
The best/worst use? jQuery’s hack leads you to a hidden site with a fully playable YouTube-linked version of Keyboard Hero, which is amazing until you realize it’s actually almost fully un-playable.
