Like its indie game counterpart, GameSpot is providing a full length version of last week’s Game Developer Choice Awards ceremony, capturing LittleBigPlanet‘s wide sweep of the awards, World of Goo representing the indies, Parappa creator Masaya Matsuura introducing Harmonix’s Pioneer Award, Hideo ‘Metal Gear‘ Kojima’s lifetime achievement award, Tim Schafer’s spot-on hilarious hosting, and Mega 64’s brilliant interstitials.
Clearing out more of the didn’t-get-posted-in-the-GDC-frenzy archives: Double Fine has finally made good for the legions begging ex-LucasArts designer/DF founder Tim Schafer to make a new point-and-click adventure with Host Master & The Conquest of Humor.
In fantastic double-plus-meta fashion, video of the game — which takes place in the minutes leading up to the Game Developer Choice Awards as Schafer scrambles for jokes he hasn’t yet written — was used to lead in the actual Game Developer Choice Awards, as the real life Schafer was backstage basking in the glow of his own green room portrait.
Speaking of franchise potential Nintendo’s sternly neglected to bring stateside: most interesting of all the apps the company’s detailed in Japan’s latest downloadable DSiWare update is Band Bros. DX Radio, a receiver that will tune into a regularly-scheduled streaming audio station pumping out a variety of music from the DS game of the same name.
First released in late 2004, Daigasso! Band Brothers was Nintendo’s first and more group-play minded take on the burgeoning music game genre, with the d-pad and buttons mapped to distinct musical notes of particular instruments that you played along with a traditional musical staff, as well as the ability to compose your own songs.
For its 2008 sequel, Nintendo gave players the opportunity to upload those original compositions to a central server, where they’d be sorted and ranked and put up for download alongside regular Nintendo-made updates so others could play along.
It’s from that set of downloadables that the radio station will pull its material — Anoop Gantayat’s andriasang blog has translated the station’s program schedule, with shows dedicated to top 10 material, new material available from the online database, whole shows dedicated to one uploader, and more traditional rock, hiphop and game music programming.
With a similar downloadable WiiWare channel that turns your TV into a Band Bros. song player (see: Portal’s ‘Still Alive’, Band Bros style), it’s obviously a franchise Nintendo’s strongly supporting in the region, and it’s unclear whether simple copyright laws are stalling its move westward. With the DSi about to get a local slate of weekly DSiWare apps, it might (hopefully) be simply that the company was waiting until all its hardware cards were in place before introducing the concept stateside.
After first being announced for Xbox Live Arcade almost exactly a year ago and already several months behind schedule, it’s hard to tell if this is a move of frustration at the normally opaque process of console certification, or a move of pure indie developer philanthropy, but with the apparent full cooperation of Microsoft, it’s apparently a mix of the latter and a healthy dose of pure marketing savvy.
Well, ok, it’s not everything — they won’t go so far as to let you read their contract, though they do highlight the length of time it took to get signed, but they do, at least, let you see them caught with their pants down by the ever-reliable ESRB leak: all in all it’s quite good reading for fellow indie devs and anyone wanting to get a behind the scenes look at the console development process.
If any game were to become the iPhone’s real first platform franchise it couldn’t have happened to a better series than Hand Circus and ngmoco’s platformer Rolando. Though we already knew a sequel was in the works, the developer has officially announced its new title — Quest for the Golden Orchid — as well as a June release date.
ngmofo Neil Young also outlined the outlook for the series at his GDC Mobile kick-off keynote as recorded by toucharcade: between now and June the original Rolando will receive three more level packs in addition to its last, with another four level packs spacing out the time between Rolando 2‘s June release and the newly announced Rolando 3‘s November release.
Keep an eye on Hand Circus’s twitter feed as the dates roll nearer, where Simon Oliver has been teasing regularly about the sequel’s new engine, mechanics, and enemies.
Spotted via vinyl toy/comic/culture blog Super Punch, Big Bad Toy Store has begun taking pre-orders for the first set of Mezco’s LittleBigPlanet toy. $35 will net you a set of three, including:
SackBoy – With baseball cap, two sets of alternate hands, and bendable pop-it lasso.
Sky – With removable pigtails wig, dress, two sets of alternate hands, and bendable pop-it lasso.
Marvin – With afro wig, sunglasses, two sets of alternate hands, and bendable pop-it lasso.
All accessories are naturally interchangable for maximum customization, and, as previously mentioned, Mezco will also soon be releasing a blank version of the models to create your own one-off customs.
As you can see, it’s a show of community ownership and franchise devotion that’s essentially unparalleled in games (apart from the Starmen community’s first outpouring of fan art, in an attempt to get Nintendo of America to give the game the stateside support it would never receive), and, of course, does double duty as an exhaustive guide to the game itself.
From the Pork Army dust jacket that reverses to a clay model character poster and similarly excellent design throughout, to the reams of character art illustrating each page, it’s a true collective work of love and an essential purchase for anyone curious as to what this Earthbound fuss is all about.
Wicked old but a relevant and essential watch and listen following Fez‘s freshly-updated reappearance at this year’s GDC, Polytron co-founder Jason ‘6955‘ Degroot remixes his Fez title track live at Tokyo’s 8-bit music night Fami-Mode.
The biggest surprise from Keita Takahashi’s GDC session on Noby Noby Boy? That the team involved has just started work last week on an iPhone version that he said could possibly be given away for free.
Here’s the problem: even though players managed to get Noby Noby GIRL to the moon in the game’s first week, at the current pace of her growth, she won’t connect the entire solar system for another 820 years (“I’ll be dead by then!” he lamented).
To try and bump up those odds to at least 400 years, the iPhone version will likely connect to the same system, letting the collective stretches of a new army of many mobile Noby BOYs bring their love to GIRL as well.
I’m currently uploading video of the reveal and will update this post (and later will write up the fantastic talk in its entirety) as soon as YouTube finishes processing.
As you can see from the video above, it’s obviously currently in a pre-pre-preproduction state that simply lets you stretch the BOY and bounce him off the other letters, but his interest in the platform is one of my happiest surprises of GDC.
Just announced in Japanese games mag Famitsu and now shown off in motion, a new full HD version of Katamari Damacy has just been announced for the PlayStation 3, with (maybe even more excitingly) a full slate of remixed versions of its brilliant original soundtrack by Offworld faves like YMCK and Sexy Synthesizer.
More on it when I’m not about to dash out to see, coincidentally, Keita Takahashi himself for his Noby Noby Boy session here at GDC.
