Inching the PSP ever closer to Sony’s long promise of the hardware du jour for the experimental and bizarre, import RPG stalwarts NIS have announced that they’ll be localizing Acquire’s Yuusha no kuse ni namaiki da. (roughly translated variously as “For a hero, you’re pretty impudent/audacious.”) with the similarly unwieldy title, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?
Originally released in Japan in late 2007 (and having already seen a 2008 sequel), its hook lies somewhere along the same line of games like Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper or (vaguely) the PSP’s Dungeon Maker, albeit refreshed with more obvious retro-graphic appeal.
In it, you play the unseen creator of a subterranean dungeon (represented by a pickaxe that can carve out the labyrinthine tunnels) all in an effort to create an ecosystem of monsters that can resist a chain of invading heroes all trying to bring the dungeon’s overlord (the titular Badman) back to the surface.
It’s all slightly more intuitive and approachable as it sounds — having played through the original import demo version a number of times — and should be one of the handheld’s most interesting titles of the year (particularly given the PSP’s relatively light lineup detailed so far): at very least, it’s a game now solidly on my radar.
It might not be a game, per se (he calls it a “software environment”), but either way it’s my favorite place to play today: if you were around and following the birth of Flash as a legitimized art tool nearly a decade ago, you’re probably familiar with the work of James “Presstube” Paterson.
Paterson’s latest creation, shown above, is The Rotten Fruit Tardis, which you can interact with fully here and which will be updated continually as the latest full incarnation of his presstube site.
It’s organic, vaguely disquieting, and not entirely outside the visual realms of, say, Edmund McMillen and his work on Coil and Aether, and it’s one of the best spaces I’ve recently explored.
According to Netherlands-based developer Hugo Smits, a publishing deal gone bunk due to bankruptcy threatened the death of his first DS project, Flipper, but heartened by the DSiWare channel Nintendo has just opened, he’s decided to retool it as his debut downloadable.
Built around a voxel engine of his own design, as you can see above, Flipper‘s hook is exploding and repairing the landscape in each of the game’s levels in order to find a way to your lost goldfish — and Smits adds that the game will feature “multiple themed worlds… a time mode, and bonus levels.”
It’s not entirely clear how far down the official channels he’s taken the game and if it’s already been approved for later release, or if this is part of a campaign to do so, but either way, you can see more screenshots of the game here, and follow its progress via his blog.
If you missed the opening of Offworld’s oft-bloggedGiant Robot/Attract Mode exhibit Game Over/Continue? (though, judging by the overwhelming turnout, not many of you did), you may have missed your chance for some time to play the four collaborative ‘artxgame‘ games created for the show.
While the games were up and running on opening night — and continually swamped, even if you could move through the thick of the crowd to get to them — they’ve subsequently left the scene for the time being (though the rest of the art remains).
So, for the rest of you then, a quick recap of what the four artist/indie dev teams (Hellen Jo/Derek Yu, Saelee Oh/Anna Anthropy, Souther Salazar/Petri Purho, and Deth P. Sun/Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom) produced. (more…)
He is, perhaps, just a few months too soon: with firmware 3.0’s newly added support for peripherals, the promise of hooking this up to bio and, err, radiation monitors (surely?) is too tempting, and a more logical use than displaying what appears to be a slideshow of game screenshots, though kudos for using the game’s soundtrack in the background as a faux Three Dog radio broadcast.
Filed under “something I had no idea I wanted to do, until I realized I had the opportunity to do it”: Insignificant Studios’ 8bitar Hero procedurally generates four Rock Band patterns from the audio of someone playing an emulated NES game, all in real-time.
If it sounds a little bit like magic, maybe start with Insignificant’s ‘For Dummies’ explanation (essentially summarized above), then dip a toe into the technical chart, then perhaps graduate to the full, exhaustive ‘For Intellectuals’ writeup to see what’s happening behind the scenes.
Creator Arthur ‘Mr. Podunkian’ Lee (also behind indie PC platformer The Underside) is still working out the final UI kinks, but plans to have the final kit together by the end of spring, at which point it will hopefully become a mainstay of retro-geek parties everywhere.
Says Edmund McMillen of the first work-in-progress shot of his WiiWare remake of Newgrounds flash game Meat Boy (WiiWare at left, original on the right):
Heres the 1st shot of super meat boy side by side with the original flash version.
Im currently going through and remaking the forest chapter, while Tommy gets the tile engine in place. The goal is to have a playable demo by June 1st to show at E3 and so far that’s looking very possible.
That background is a mockup (imagine more depth and lighting effects in the finished version), but it can give you a basic idea of the direction im going with it, that direction being “crap your pants awesome” if that hasn’t been apparently clear by now.
McMillen also reveals that he went in for a developer interview to be published on Nintendo’s official wii.com site, though he adds, in warning to all future indie devs: “Were you guys aware that wearing blood stained aprons to a Nintendo interview was frowned upon… i wasn’t sent that memo.”
I wish I could say that things were moving quicker, but I am only one guy. I work pretty much 12+hrs per day on this game and have since Nov. Does that mean it’s going to be the best thing since the wheel? Probably not. Will it sell as well as iShoot that was done in 6 weeks, maybe not. But, at least you know I have put my blood + sweat into cs.one because it is the kind of shooter that I have always wanted to play.
I don’t like to compromise and I think that too many iPhone games just don’t push the capabilities of the device. Instead they design around it or rely on gimmicks often letting the device dictate what they produce. Trying to push the envelope is seriously challenging, but worth the effort in the long run.
He’s also included a raft of UI screenshots and a few gameplay shots as above: check his post for more details, and head back to the original post to see the game in motion.
Essentially one of the most adorable games-related handmade plushes on the face of the earth, ‘cloud sparrow’ is now taking orders via Etsy for these custom little ‘Game Boy’s, made to your own specifications (including, as shown, swank leopard/zebra print).
Nintendo and Mattel’s 1989 experiment to bring wearable VR control to the masses may have ended with a whimper, but Flashbang programmer Matt Mechtley is celebrating the NES Power Glove’s 20th anniversary by trying to do it right:
I loved the Power Glove for what it represented — a precursor to virtual reality, a way for humans to directly manipulate computers, like an artifact from some sort of alternate future Earth.
I realized one day that we’re actually living in that future. It doesn’t look the same as we imagined it, but the necessary elements are all there. It’s been 20 years now since Mattel released the Power Glove, in 1989. Especially in the last few years, the availability of sophisticated sensing equipment to hardware hackers has grown by leaps and bounds. Technology like programmable microcontrollers, accelerometers, and Bluetooth are readily available — and cheap. In short, the time is ripe to re-make the Power Glove — and make it right.
Mechtley has “replaced the ultrasonic sensors with an accelerometer, the proprietary microcontroller with an open-source Arduino, and the wired connection with Bluetooth,” but to what end? Currently he’s feeding the device into Unity, or, more specifically, Flashbang’s recently blogged iPhone boxing game Touch KO, which you can see in motion via the video above.
