Though the PlayStation Network itself is frustratingly down for maintenance at the moment, leaving me unable to get a good sense of GIRL’s progress over the past few days, the 1.1 update for Keita Takahashi’s Noby Noby Boymentioned yesterday is indeed live and accessible.
The most striking difference on starting the newly updated game is the musical one: on exiting your (newly coiffed) house, a new vocal track directly brings back those warm nostalgic Katamari feelings, but then (on further fiddling with controller options), you realize that you’ve got open access to 29 new music tracks, which I’ve highlighted below:
An eclectic mix to be sure, from the classical stylings of acoustic guitar to the primal melodies of the kalimba. But my current favorite? The cello, which at long last grants your wish to stretch and swallow anthropomorphic sharks to the soothing dulcet tones of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes, you can do this:
With the veil now lifting on the games revealed at Capcom’s blowout ‘Captivate 09’ event last week comes the first full trailer of their previously mentionedDead Rising sequel, every bit as tongue-in-cheek parodic as it is horrifying (very much in the vein of Romero’s legacy).
The trailer doesn’t get into much of the underlying gameplay other than returning to the panoply of usable objects that will aid in staving off the undead hordes, but with some of the most creative chainsaw work I’ve seen in ages, I suppose that’s not to its detriment.
With an original early 2006 release and subsequent IGF 2007 nomination for innovation in design (an award that would go to Jon Mak’s Everyday Shooter), Nabi Software’s turn-based ragdoll block/ball fighter Toribash should be a familiar name to anyone keeping half an eye on the indie scene.
I’ll admit, I’ve let my attention lapse over the following years, but as it turns out, progress has been steady at turning the game even further into the cutely stark rock-em, sock-em display of brutality it’s had as its singular focus since the start.
And now, Nabi developer Gerald Tock writes in with this latest video above, showing off the latest improvements being made to the forthcoming WiiWare version of the game (newly announced in January), including full fight scene editing and smoother flow all around.
You can still download the game for free at its official home, and, even more intriguingly, investigate the third party mod/hack scene, which has been churning out tweaks like this fantastic Toribash skate mod below.
Like James ‘presstube/insertsilence’ Paterson, the Flash creations Patrick Smith has been creating over the past five plus years as ‘Vectorpark‘ haven’t quite penetrated the games industry’s consciousness as much as they should have, and maybe fair enough: his earliest creations like Levers and especially later updates like FeedTheHead were as much interactive toys as anything (the line’s blurrier with Park, which initially bears an uncanny thematic resemblance to Amanita‘s later Samorost).
But that’s fully changed with Windosill, Smith’s latest creation, where each single screen has a single goal to progress to the next: namely, finding a single pink cube via simple point/click/drag interactions which will unlock the right-hand door of each diorama.
But even still, it’s not necessarily the rules of the game that are the draw as much as the successively more involved exploration that takes place in each area to get to that block, all a culmination of (and with overt throwbacks to) objects of Smith’s earlier output.
And that exploration wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding were it not for Smith’s ability to somehow have teased out (with the aid, I can only conclude, of some dark, black magic) easily the greatest sense of physicality Flash (still, remember, an essentially 2D toolkit) has ever produced. Everything has such a well defined heft and tension, everything responds to your prodding with just the right amount of ‘squishiness’, that even its most surreal concoctions feel fantastically alive.
The free demo version of the game will get you roundabout halfway through, and, it should be said up front, it’s absolutely worth the $3 pittance Smith asks to continue on to the end, as there’s one single screen — and it kills me to not splash it all over the page here — that so perfectly both bends the rules of the game up to that point and typifies that magically-alive hyper-reality that it’s worth the admission alone.
Director Erik Tillmans (whose resume also includes animation work on films like Kung Fu Panda, Enchanted and Team America) sends in this video he created for The Black Comets‘ “One Thousand Stars.”
Continuing in that spirit of full disclosure that they kicked off with the bare-all website for upcoming Xbox Live Arcade dual-pack Darwinia+, Introversion programmer Chris Delay is currently undergoing a minorly gut-wrenching look back at the studio’s ‘disastrous’ 2008 “in three increasingly depressing parts.”
The first part kicked off with a sweet spot — at least for readers and fans of the developer, anyway — with the first concept image (above) of the company’s unannounced game that was being developed for UK network Channel 4. Called Chronometer, and based, said Delay, on a long time Introversion idea, it was due to become the company’s most ambitious game.
But that optimism is short lived: Delay makes casual and foreboding reference to signing a deal with Pinnacle for a DS version of their thermonuclear war game Defcon, a deal we all now know has since gone under. He goes on to describe the contentious relationship forming with Microsoft at the time, stating in no uncertain terms: “we believe Microsoft were absolutely correct in the calls they made, and we were wrong. But at the time, oh my god they were pissing us off.”
If you’ve seen Seth Gordon’s unforgettable documentary King of Kong (and if you haven’t, close your browser now and stream it via Netflix), you’ll know just what’s at stake here.
Ahead of his upcoming attempt to officially claim the Donkey Kong crown at this year’s E3, Twin Galaxies has just announced that documentary star Steve Wiebe has warmed up by claiming a world record score on its sequel, Donkey Kong Jr, with 1,139,800 points.
The score not only puts him ahead of Ike Hall, who took the DK Jr crown last year, but also of Billy Mitchell himself — Wiebe’s rival in the film — who still holds the contentious first-place record in DK proper and set the original DK Jr record in 1983.
Wiebe’s DK rematch will take place on June 2nd at E3 in Los Angeles, and will be broadcast live via G4.
Your Monday morning craft challenge: frustrated with not being able to find papercrafter Lesqua’s original model sheets for their set of Castle Crashers knights (showcased on The Behemoth’s blog), deviantartist crzisme created his own, available in all four knightly flavors.
I poked around and sure enough did find Lesqua’s original models, sans printable instructions, and a treasure trove of other designs including Dragon Quest‘s Mimic monsters above, via deviantart. Lesqua does have downloadable instructions for other Pokemon, Elebits and Animal Crossing crafts available here, though.
crzisme’s Castle Crashers Papercraft [deviantart, via technabob]
In setting out to write this, I spent too much time thinking about which screenshots to use — whether I should keep the earliest grabs, move forward through the various worlds, whether I’d be spoiling anything in doing so — but in the end it hardly matters, because there’s almost no part of Glum Buster‘s essence you can properly capture in static shots.
What you can get a sense of, I suppose, is its curiously drawn world: rough-sketched solid colors, but intricately detailed and made up of tiny shards and fragments of pixels, and colored just a shade on the side of wrong — recognizable but also recognizably alien.
When Glum Buster was first released — it’s been some months now, after a four year gestation period, a typical labor of love story from its otherwise gainfully/full-time industry employed creator, Justin ‘CosMind’ Leingang — a lot was made of its surreality, its near-inexplicableness.
But I think that somewhat misses the point: at heart, Glum Buster is really quite traditionally structured and controlled. It’s a platforming game that also lets you fly, it’s a game that relies on colored switches to turn on and off like-colored blocks, it’s mechanics you’ve been playing with for the past two decades, only in this game, they’re spoken through a different language. As with games like Eric Chahi’s vector-classic Another World/Out of this World, it’s familiarity set in entirely unfamiliar territory, with no guiding exposition (apart from some very basic initial keyboard guides).
Luckily, Glum Buster‘s language is made up with so few syllables that it makes trying to communicate with the game a reward of its own. Your on-screen character essentially has two actions: a left-mouse-click red firing button, and a right-mouse-click more general purpose blue attracting button. With just those two buttons, you essentially have everything you need to solve every problem that the game throws at you, even when the creatures and layouts and puzzles come at you speaking in their foreign tongue.
Even one of the game’s most basic, repeated interactions is never fully explained to you, but all it takes is one frustrated volley of rapid-fire clicks for it to suddenly sound a chime and make you realize that you were actually much closer than you thought. That’s the way Leingang repeatedly chooses to allow you to explore and affect his world: never speaking, always quietly grinning, knowing that you’re right on the verge of stumbling perfectly into the solution.
Leingang’s been fairly adamant about keeping the game’s mysteries to himself: that’s why even in December, after it’d won the 2008 Austin GDC’s Indie Games Festival showcase, I still had essentially nothing to go on.
To tip that scale just slightly, I’ve embedded a video below the fold that will step you through the first five or so minutes of the game, but I actually recommend you don’t watch the video until you’ve played at least as much yourself — the blind experience and the consistent sense of wonder is one of Glum Buster‘s greatest strengths, and one of the best reasons that playing through the game is one of the highest tick-boxes on this year’s indie-games to-do list.
As a final aside: Leingang’s trying a new revenue model for the game, and, rather than asking for simple donations, is setting aside a sliding percentage of the game’s financial in-take to charity: the more you give, the more he gives away, and there can’t be a much better incentive to support him for this than that.
If you haven’t, and I’m not sure exactly what it is you’re waiting for, a quick recap — the game is the portable version of the studio’s original promotional web game Chain Factor, and works like this:
Numbered discs fall into a 7×7 playfield, and are cleared away if a disc is in a row or column containing that many discs. For instance, in the image above right, the 6s are disappearing because they’re in a row of 6 discs, as well as the 3, as it’s in a 3-high column. The trick? Interspersed with the numbered discs are blank grey discs. In order to clear those, you’ve got to clear adjacent numbered discs twice to “break through” the grey (as is happening under the 3) and reveal the number beneath.
Not fully convinced that it’s seemingly effortlessly one of the most original and addictive puzzle games of the past several years? You’re in luck: a free Lite version of the game has just hit the App Store, and — even better — it’s an essential download even for those that already have the full version.
Rather than simply doing a timed or crippled version of the full game for its demo release, area/code have created a unique ‘Countdown’ mode which has you playing for a high score with a total of 100 discs.
Give the Lite version of the game a go, let us know your high scores via the comments below (my first run’s a tepid 66,574), and soon enough you’ll fully understand the near inescapable and entirely shameful kiss of death represented in that picture to the left (what are you supposed to do in those situations [other than not get yourself into them]?).
