The week’s best LittleBigMachinima, via Media Molecule themselves: Seakitten Collective’s LittleBigRevenge, which asks “what would happen if a diplomatic mistake causes [sackboys] to take revenge on humanity? A Belgian couple finds out right in their living room…”
Stick with it to the end for the thrilling Colossal conclusion.
Cosmic Nitro [iTunes link] wears both its influences and its premise on its sleeve. As you can tell by the video above, putting it any other way than “it’s survival mode Missile Command x insanity” would be doing it a disservice.
The game’s the latest from Phil Hassey, creator of IGF Mobile innovation award winner Galcon, and, despite appearances, its greatest weakness might be that it’s too easy: I managed to survive the three minutes of even its 9th maxed-out level at first touch.
Though it sorely lacks any connectivity — even a simple online leaderboard would give subsequent runthroughs of its levels more purpose, and its ‘apocalypse mode’ (which counts the timer up rather than down) begs for worldwide ranking — it’s probably the best take I’ve played of the arcade classic on the device, and is easily today’s best 99 cent distraction.
Adding to the insanity of Xkeeper’s original drag and drop Super Mario Bros hack, the FCEUX emulator includes a second LUA script that turns Super Mario Bros. 3 into the DS game Nintendo never made.
The hack disables direct control of Mario completely, and only allows you to manipulate him (and protect him from the rest of the world) via mouse-drawn lines ala the DS’s Kirby Canvas Curse and Atari’s The Chase. Admittedly still a bit rough around the edges, but still incredible to see the depth of remixing possible running directly from the original game.
There is essentially no part of Francis’s writeup that doesn’t qualify as a massive spoiler, so avert your gaze entirely from the included link if you haven’t seen BioShock all the way through.
I wrote this post – a rant I’ve bored many friends with about how BioShock should have ended – on the 10th of October 2008, but never got round to taking shots for it. Then on February 10th, I got to see what 2K Marin are doing for BioShock 2. And annoyingly, some of it overlaps with what I suggest here.
That meant a) I couldn’t post this, since this would look like me leaking the details I was under a non-disclosure agreement to keep secret, and b) by the time I could post this, those details would have been announced and it would seem woefully unoriginal. I’m posting it anyway.
Let’s be completely honest: it’s obviously not going to win any design awards, but Shane Brouwer’s Daft Punk: The Game — in which the band attempts to recover all its samples stolen by rival electro-duo Justice — is still a decent way to kill 10 minutes of your day, if only because doing the head-jump combos is every bit as satisfying as Super Mario‘s Koopa shell chains.
Spotted via Gawker, Bill O’Reilly and his Peabody Polk award winning crew at Inside Edition report on the emerging world of Nintendo, at a time when the Mario name meant Puzo more than plumber.
As a bonus, a look behind the scenes at Game Counselor HQ, and another teasing glance at that gold-covered ‘Zelda Tips and Tactics’ booklet that used to sing its (too expensive for a pre-teen) siren song to me from every. single. issue. of Nintendo Power.
Science fiction has a habit of becoming reality a lot faster than we imagine. One of my favourite books, The Shape Of Further Things by Brian Aldiss, is a series of rambling, random essays written at the end of the Sixties. In it he suggested that one day we’d all be connected by an all-encompassing information network called “The Big Hookup” and we’ll be able to access it with remote devices that we all carry around with us independently. Crazy talk, Brian, really. That technology is centuries away.
Last year, at GDC 2008, I sat in a room with a bunch of the world’s most experienced developers, as they outlined science fiction ideas about how gaming might work in the future: how games might be rendered remotely on giant super-computing clusters and then streamed to our homes. A year later the tech was being demoed – apparently live and functional – at the same event.
Cloud gaming, the idea of “games on demand” proposed by startup services like OnLive and Gaikai, suggests that the days of us buying powerful home processing hardware – be it consoles or PCs – could be numbered. The theory that these services ride on is that they will be able to render and stream games directly to “thin” client side devices: nothing more than a gamepad, a screen, and the processor required to decode the video stream. All the big graphics crunching will be done by the servers, and at our end a low-spec laptop will do the job.
So the age old cycle of upgrading from one generation of hardware to the next will be over: be it on your work PC, or via a small box under your TV, that’s all that even the most high-end gaming will require. This is a huge step, because it’s secure from piracy and cheating, and because it won’t suffer from the problems that we currently have in getting games working on our laptop, or home PC. It is, in that shiny 1950s jetpack sense of the word, The Future. (more…)
Today’s other necessary additions to your T-shirt collection: stateside import house NCSX has begun taking pre-orders for these official retro designs straight from Japan developer Taito, with both expected to ship in April.
On the left, obviously, their original arcade hit Bubble Bobble, on the right, the huge and clearly fast approaching battle ship King Fossil from their 1994 arcade shooter Darius Gaiden.
Cruelly currently restricted to the UK and Europe, UK games mag Edge has opened a new store to directly order T-shirts and goods previously only given away as subscription gifts.
In addition to the shirt designs shown above (the Edge logo in a full console setup collection, an officially licensed Team Feisar logo from Wipeout, and, my favorite, the bear), they’ve also got a 200-postcard set of every cover used for their recent issue 200 blowout that I very much need to get my hands on.
