They might come a decade too late to cash in on the game’s release, but Iain Reekie’s custom sculpey figures of main character Manny and speed demon Glottis from Tim Schafer’s LucasArts swan song adventure Grim Fandango would still make an excellent posthumous mass produced toy, if anyone’s willing to procure the license.
Have they gone too far? I think it’s possible they might’ve gone too far*.
Either way, with pre-orders just opening on “all leading digital download portals worldwide” for Dreamlore/Mezmer’s upcoming PC arcade/ real-time-strategy game Stalin Vs. Martians, the devs have also created a new page for fans with free downloads of a number of the soundtrack selections you’ve seen in previous video teasers.
Included are original teaser trailer composer Ilya Orange’s tracks Chastushki and My Pocket Stalinizer (!), a track from the Jerry-Lenin-headed “legendary Russian glam-rock band” Lady’s Man (says Dreamlore: “You wouldn’t believe, but Lenin is not a pseudonym, it’s a real surname.”), and — of course! — Hong Kong-based twee pop band My Little Airport, with a song title even Dreamlore haven’t bothered to translate from the original Chinese (my favorite of the bunch).
The next logical step after infographics, the fairy tale music video? Infographics the game. Collaboratively created by indie devs Jiggmin and Greg ‘aeiowu‘ Wohlwend of Intuition Games, Effing Hail‘s cleanly textbook-illustrated graphic conceit is the instant draw, the game’s just as interesting an exercise in indirect control.
Your task is simple: control an updraft of air to keep falling hail in the upper levels of the bee-, sea-, dee- and effing-spheres so that it has time to grow into massive stones, which you then let fall free to crush an increasingly complex ecosystem of houses, skyscrapers, planes, satellites and civilians themselves below.
The game is only hampered by its just-on-the-side-of-too-restrictive time limit, though, granted, it’s intentionally about making the most of that time, and, like Katamari, can quickly snowball (no pun) into a near-unstoppable winning streak under the right conditions.
It’s a steep uphill climb to learning those conditions, but unleashing massive destruction does do nicely as its own reward. The game could still do well with a tutorial or unlockable sandbox mode (again, like Katamari) as stress relief after racing against the clock, but, even without, is one of the best indie developments of the month.
Taking his original skeletal creations one logical leap further, Aaron Meyers has used the Spore API and ARToolKit to produce augmented reality versions of the day’s top 100 Spore creatures, or simply step through the gallery one by one in your browser via the basic Flash visualizer.
In a surprise announcement, EA has just sent out word that Sims and Spore creator Will Wright has officially left the company in order to focus on his Bay Area side project, The Stupid Fun Club, a venture he co-founded several years ago with Mike Winter.
EA will be investing the SFC, owning equal parts with Wright himself, and, says the release, “has the right to develop game concepts that spring from Stupid Fun Club projects.”
As it turns out, I actually spent the better part of a day getting a first hand tour of the Fun Club in the summer of 2006, and can report that it is as absolutely magical place as you might expect: imagine a toned down version of JF Sebastian’s toyland workshop from Blade Runner constructed with early-oughts technology, and you’re getting close.
I’ll update in the next few days with a full report of the things I saw there, or at least the ones that I’m allowed to talk about.
You can almost hear him straining not to mention when you read back over it now: in January, Harmonix head Alex Rigopulos mentioned in an interview that the studio would love to return to its earliest music game roots, say, with a new version of Amplitude.
And while not precisely a direct connection, with the unveiling of the first trailer for their previously announced portable debut, Rock Band Unplugged, it’s clear that we’re getting something just about as close as it comes.
While they’ve dropped all of the psychotropic futuristic abstractions, it’s like reuniting with an old friend to see that familiar “carpet” of tracks (as above) stretched across Unplugged, now more literally representing the four signature Rock Band instruments.
And while the trailer always jump cuts just at the moment when they might switch lanes, you can see the approaching end of the self-contained “phrases” that, like Amplitude (presumably, anyway!), will then auto-play that instrument and allow you to build up songs in the same way.
Most importantly, though, is the press release’s mention that not only will you be able to buy songs in-game directly from the Rock Band store, but that its first selection of exclusive songs will then later propagate to the console versions, suggesting that this is the start, at least, of the unification of the Rock Band catalog as a true cross-device musical platform.
Here’s a game design conundrum for you: what do Halo and football have in common? I’ll save those of you who are now deep in the process of trying to find a punchy Red Vs Blue pun the trouble. What Halo and football have in common is verbs. Or rather, a verb. Shoot.
Halo is a game about aiming a projectile, usually a bullet, to hit a target, usually someone’s jaw. Football is about aiming a projectile, usually a ball, to hit a target, usually a rectangular, poorly weatherproofed shack which is home to an angry man who jumps a lot.
Oh, wait, I should have said. That football. Real football. Sorry.
I’ve found it makes people uncomfortable when I call football a shooting game. Often this is because they fear I’m trying to be a smartarse, which is an understandable concern. Other times it’s because they’re focused on the specific meaning of ‘shooting’ in football, which they rightly point out is only a small part of the game, which is also about defending and maneuvering and passing and tackling.
For once, though, I’m not trying to be a smartarse. From my exhaustive study of the rules of football, you can only win if someone makes a projectile hit a target, and that to me is a shooting game. (more…)
The gist of this show, similar to earlier Giant Robot exhibits, was that all artwork was produced on Post-Its affixed directly to the wall from artists like Jorge R. Gutierrez, Sandra Equihua, Gabe Swarr, Jim Mahfood, My TarPit and Buffum himself.
Current favorites? Apart from the APAK, Snagg’s sewn-vinyl Atari cartridges, Lawrence Yang’s ‘Apocalypse’ series (especially Pac-Man), and Cupco’s Mario Samurai Armor. Also, Jay Howell’s completely left-field ‘High Five Myself‘ (for what, beating a level? finishing a game?) is all the more brilliant when you head over to his blog and see the following:
Oh shit, just looked the flier for the GR-SF show next month and everybody did video game art. Well, mine will be something else… You get what ya get and don’t have a fit.
