The results are in and the winner’s been chosen: thanks to everyone who entered our quickie Rolando haiku contest over the weekend, and with the results tallied, game creator Simon Oliver has chosen ‘annakjohns’ entry, which goes a little something like this:
Noble Rolandos!
With tiny accessories,
Navigate my heart!
Says Oliver, “It reminds me a little of Father Abraham and the Smurfs with a zen twist!”
Anna — you’ll have your code in short order, and keep watching for more Rolando news sooner than later.
There comes a time and a place when we feel the need to give a little affection to our handhelds. But while glass plated touchscreens and rounded hardware corners are a little tough to love, the hand-made plush consoles of French crafter Marine Beloir are made for embracing.
But beyond the soft hardware, Marine’s plush works are quirky, adorable, and deserved of attention, regardless of whether or not Zombie Cat actually actually sneaks a debut mutant appearance into House of the Dead: Overkill.
In other long-forgotten retro-tech/programming tidbits, Space Giraffe and Gridrunner developer Jeff Minter (whose Xbox 360 visualizer Neon will be included as part of Wednesday’s Space Invaders Extreme release) has a quick fun tale of stumbling across this CESIL workbook at a recent boot sale, best for this nearly unbelievable memory:
Those who’ve read the History of Llamasoft will remember me being rude about a language called CESIL they tried to teach us in sixth form, where you had to write down your code onto sheets of squared paper and then send them off somewhere where someone would type in exactly what you wrote and try to run it, and if you’d made any errors you’d get your ?SYNTAX ERROR in the post a week later. Not exactly the most interactive introduction to programming.
Though I was unabashed in professing my love for Steph Thirion’s iPhone debut, Eliss, there’s no getting around the fact that our relationship (and the one she had with most others) was — to put it frankly — an abusive one.
As Thirion would go on to tell me at GDC, and has now explained fully via his new blog, a startlingly small number of people made it even halfway through the game, and a micro-percentage managed to finish it (and then, in one case, not for some 40 odd hours for its 20 ‘short’ levels).
After a period of post-conference reflection, then, he’s settled on a way to ease players in a bit more gently, and in the process, added a quarter more levels to the game. He explains:
On the original group of sectors, there was a serious jump after sector 2. Too many new things were introduced on sector 3, there was no time to get prepared for them. To fill up that missing space, four new sectors were added in between those. None of these sectors brings anything truly new compared to version 1.0, but they allow a better pacing. I also moved quite a few sectors around, to make a more logical difficulty progression, and did some tweaking in specific sectors. In the process I also added a little bonus, sector 14, which is a new thing. Also, the suns’ appearance has been modified to be spotted earlier, making the much dreaded sector 10 (which has been moved to sector 20 by the way) easier to beat.
Progress on your original game has for the most part been saved and adjusted for but in general, says Thirion, the game is “better balanced, less jumpy, more user friendly,” and therefore comes even more universally recommended than it did at last mention.
As a bonus, Thirion’s written a lovely letter to his audience here, which doubles as an illuminating look at a creator struggling with the “Fairy of Reason.”
The 1.1 update for Eliss is currently live on the App Store, or can be purchased, now at a reduced price, via this iTunes link.
There was always a certain — but gentle — cloud that hung over the announcement that Infinite Ammo and Adam Saltsman‘s multi-planar fruit collecting platformer Paper Moonwould be brought to Flashbang’s online portal Blurst.
Not one of quality, mind — as players had already been able to get their hands on the game after its Gamma 3D debut — but one of how properly a platformer would fit into the Blurst framework, which relies on three to five minutequick burst arcade play and generally is targeted toward high score competition and achievements.
The subsequent announcement that the game would come with a timer, I will admit, struck a little pang of fear, as I’m not generally one for having my exploration curbed by arbitrary time limits (it’s a cardinal sin up far in the ranks alongside auto-scrolling levels). But, it turns out, that fear was entirely misplaced, and, freshly released at the tail end of last week, Paper Moon is a fantastic addition to the service.
How do you morph a short platformer into a necessarily replayable experience then? The answer is branches: a few handfuls of varied paths that can be taken at several points in the game and require repeat performances to see, and a combo-meter collection system that amplifies your score as you gain the experience to better judge how best to maximize your time in an unbroken line throughout its world.
And it is a game you’ll want to play again back to back, not least because you likely won’t finish it on your first or second or even third go, and even if you do, the tantalizingly missed paths on your map screen will beckon you immediately back through.
If there are any frustrations with the game, it’s only in losing the original’s stereoscopic hook and having to rely on shading to re-orient your next potential leap with the proper paper plane (a few test-run pops also help), but again, repeat plays acclimate you to the process and reduce that end-level/nearly-out-of-time stress.
But what we gained in losing the red-blue shift and going full monochrome, and what’s underscored by Infinite Ammo co-founder Alec Holowka’s new score, is a game that’s roughly and wonderfully the stylistic equivalent of an early silent movie: an easily consumable little tale of derring-do and intrigue that’s essentially peerless in the indie scene today.
Detail of a print ad for Sony’s PSP from Andy ‘komadesign‘ Miller, co-creator (with Jeffrey Bowman) of fantastic looking UK art-zine The Wizard’s Hat, and illustrator of Chronicle/Yellow Bird’s forthcoming charity project, the Indie Rock Coloring Book (!), featuring “mazes, connect-the-dot games, and coloring pages” for Broken Social Scene, MGMT, the Shins, Devendra Banhart, Rilo Kiley, the National, and many more.
Following Adamatomic’s own, Cave Story creator Pixel gets a belated birthday wish from Nigoro, creator of Rose & Camellia, the best game about noble-lady inter-familial slap-happy catfighting ever created. [via Nicalis]
Over at the LostLevels forum — a haven for all things both retro and long forgotten (and subsequently re-surfaced) — Frank Cifaldi’s found early record of a CD-ROM attachment for the NES in development from UK outfit Codemasters.
The article says an adapter would have let you connect your NES to any audio CD player to load included games off the disc — much the same as any early computer cassette drive — presumably in an effort to both circumvent and compete against high-cost first-party cartridge manufacturing.
One CD containing two or three games will be the same price as one traditional cartridge game, and one three-five meg game will cost less than a comparable cartridge game. Camerica currently plans to have six CD’s available in July when the unit is released-three CD’s with two games each on them, and three CD’s, each with a three-five meg game on them.
Camerica distributed a number of similarly unlicensed Codemasters products during the NES’s lifespan, including a number of 4-in-1 game carts, but the CD-ROM attachment, obviously, was an idea shelved for unknown reasons.
The idea would resurface in Nintendo’s willingness to partner with Sony for a CD-ROM attachment for the SNES, which would, of course — as you can hear recounted in exhaustive detail via this excellent recent Edge magazine article — then dissolve into Sony’s branching off to create the PlayStation.
[Credit for the picture above goes to the entirely unrelated but too-appropriate NES PC.]
Having missed the opportunity last week by a few hours to warn Offworld that Montreal collective Kokoromi was going to be giving its first public show of their previously revealed game superHYPERCUBE — headtracker and all — I’m doing due diligence to not let this one slip by.
Kicking off May 14th with a night of chiptunes and 8-bit projections at Montreal’s École Bourget with local artists Noia and Matt Fuzz, Kokoromi members Heather Kelley and Cindy Poremba will be at the Montreal Biennale May 15-16th collaborating on a new game in the form of “love letters – deeply personal direct communication to our objects of affection.”
Kelley and Poremba say the event, Live Game Code: Love Letters, will “demonstrate and illustrate our own attempts to make a playful software system,” and will include “laboratory assistants in the Porous Lab [creating] visualizations and audio interpretations of the game code, exposing the normally private game development process for public observation.”
The assistants will be plotting, for example, “lines of code written per hour.. number and type of crashes… or cups of coffee consumed and minutes spent on Facebook.”
Both events will be held at École Bourget at 1230 rue de la Montagne, and are open to the public: see their accompanying Facebook event pages for more information on the whens and wheres, or via Kokoromi themselves.
