I suspect we’ll be hearing much more about this soon, but at Apple’s ongoing conference announcing and demonstrating the features of the new iPhone 3.0 OS, ngmoco’s Neil Young has just showed off what the changes mean for the games sphere.
In particular, Young showed the iPhone’s long-promised and now official push notifications integrated with Stumptown Game Machine‘s virtual pet sim Touch Pets Dogs. The game has promised to be a social experience since it was first announced, and Young showed the game’s new ability to pop-up pet play-date invites in real time, outside the game itself.
Ngmoco have also just announced a new online multiplayer first person shooter, LiveFire, including, quips engadget, in-game chat.
Both games will take full advantage of iPhone 3.0’s other major new feature: the availability of new downloadable content purchasable entirely in-app, demonstrated by new custom clothes packs for your Touch Pets, and, apparently, new weapons for LiveFire bought on the fly while you play.
The latter, especially, is somewhat of a game-changer for the device: even though Apple has announced that only paid apps will be allowed to charge for in-game DLC (which seamlessly uses your same iTunes account for the transaction), the new feature could be a boon for the type of microtransaction-based games that have increasingly dominated the casual PC space — sell the framework for 99 cents, make that several times over with new custom content.
As promised, Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid devs The Behemoth have posted their first “super early” look at their next still-untitled game, and more than anything, I’m just dying for the explanation behind that violently psyche-rending green jewel MacGuffin.
Otherwise, I’m seeing very happy hints of N+‘s wall-sliding physicality meets Smash Bros‘s out and out competitive chaos meets Zelda: Four Swords‘ reluctant coopertition spread among what appears to be a number of game modes (paint the wall/ball games, or is everyone just frantically trying to escape? While holding the jewel?).
Persuasive Games head Ian Bogost points us to LAYOFF, a match-3 casual game that attempts to drive home the realities of the credit crunch and its effect on the average worker by making each play-piece an individual with a back-story visible just before you swap them over to “lay them off.”
Once laid off, rather than disappearing, the players congregate disaffectedly at the unemployment office at the bottom of the screen, and bonus matches are “rewarded” with white collar financiers who can’t be removed from the board.
Bogost adds:
All that notwithstanding, I found the rule preventing “suits” from being laid off to be forced. The idea that the white-collar is unaffected by the current economic downturn seems disingenuous, even if there are portions of it (AIG anyone?) who are surely acting in their own interest alone.
The game’s the latest from Mary Flanagan and her team at Tilt Factor/Values at Play, two organizations that share a similar mentality to Bogost’s timely and topical Persuasive output.
It’s a secret to everybody why Team Teamwork’s “Ocarina of Rhyme” — mixing Zelda’s Nintendo 64 soundtrack with under/overground hip-hop stars like Dre, Clipse, Common, Aesop Rock and DOOM — works so phenomenally well, but it does.
First mentioned exclusively on Offworld in early February, art/culture organization Giant Robot has officially announced Game Over/Continue? — its games-inspired art exhibition opening in San Francisco on March 27th, the final night of the Game Developers Conference.
In addition to the lineup of illustrator and indie developer crossover games being created for the show, Giant Robot has also announced a stellar list of designers and artists doing more traditional games-inspired artwork, including:
APAK, Robert Bellm, Christopher Bettig, Bigfoot, Blinky, Sean Boyles, William Buzzell, Scott Carl, Ako Castuera, Ethan Hayes-Chute, CUPCO, Liam Devowski, Elayne Dixon, Everybody Get Up, Matt Furie, Pete Glover, Tim Gough, Jay Howell, Yellena James, Jeremyville, Heisuke “PCP” Kitazawa, Chris Kline, Matt Lock, Aaron Martinez, Bill McRight, Mike Perry, Sidney Pink, Albert Reyes, Brian Ralph, RONDO, Brian Rush, Johnny Ryan, Robert Sato, Scrappers, Caleb Sheridan, Snaggs, Jim Stoten, Kaz Strzepek, Team Macho, Joe To, Lawrence Yang
Most intriguingly, the press release has also quietly announced the formation of artxgame, a formal collaboration between Giant Robot and upstart game/art collective Attract Mode, hinting that the four games being created for this show (Hellen Jo/Derek Yu, Saelee Oh/Anna Anthropy, Souther Salazar/Petri Purho, and Deth P. Sun/Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom) are just the first volleys in an upcoming series.
For more information on the artists and games being developed for the show — including a sneak preview of Oh/Anthropy’s collaboration — check Offworld’s original post on the exhibition. The opening reception for Game Over/Continue? will be held from 6:30 – 10:00 on Friday, March 27 at Giant Robot’s GRSF gallery at 618 Shrader St., San Francisco CA 94117.
Take one part classic 8-bit platformer (somewhere between Lode Runner and Solomon’s Key) and one part cerebral space-shifter (not exactlyPortal, but close enough to tweak precisely the same logic centers of the brain), and you get Polygon ★ Gmen’s Transmover: instantly accessible, instantly recommendable, infinitely customizable, and completely unquittable.
Heroes & Villains and Aquaria designer Alec Holowka has tipped us off to Relay for Life, a new charity CD being put together to raise money for the American Cancer Society. A $10 donation gets you a digital download — and a $25 donation will also net you a CD version — of a compilation of these indie games/music artists:
Mustin of OCRemix.org fame and head of Mustin Productions,
Jimmy Hinson, talented composer and arranger for OCRemix.org (big giant circles),
Kyle Gabler, fantastic composer from 2D-Boy and for World of Goo,
Alec Holowka, composer for the successful independent game Aquaria,
David Saulesco, super talented Swedish composer known for the Eternal Daughter soundtrack,
Inez S. deDeugd-McComas, ultra-gifted composer from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music,
Vincent Parrish, composer featured on thesixtyone.com,
Jay Tholen, talented and multi-faceted musician leading a successful solo career,
Barry van Oudtshoorn, Australian Composer Extraordinaire!
Josh Whelchel from The Spirit Engine 2 and Bonesaw: The Game,
and several others, including:
Jussi Nieminen,
David Thatcher,
James Starkey,
Shane Lu, and
David “Warrior Bob” H.!
With SXSW Interactive now winding to a close, a quick recap: though now diminished somewhat by Apple’s just-announced iPhone 3.0 updates — bringing push notifications, in-game content purchases and voice chat, local bluetooth multiplayer and the opening of the device’s SDK to 3rd party hardware peripherals — the biggest news out of the conference for the iPhone was its newly established connectivity to the Facebook platform.
With the untimely demise of Trism dev Demiforce’s Xbox-Live-like Onyx Online, this might do quite nicely for socializing the device, and threatens to immediately overshadow the work that the Aurora Feint devs have underway — a plan that allowed for avatars, friends, wall chat, and news, all features currently in place at Facebook, and now more publicly accessible, should users choose.
Currently, the features are limited to a handful of games: Who has the Biggest Brain, iBowl, Agency Wars, Tap Tap Revenge 2, Live Poker and Binary Game, and, having now investigated the seamless integration of even just the rudimentary personalized leaderboard in Playfish’s excellent logic/minigame collection Biggest Brain [iTunes link], it’s clear that there’s big potential to tap into the even bigger audience with something more tightly woven around the mobile/social experience.
Spotted at Screenburn’s Into the Pixel exhibit at SXSW: Jay Epperson’s epic landscape print from EA’s just-released DS puzzler/platformer Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, which looks even better in real life, and I intensely covet for my own wall. See it up close and personal here.
A confession and a high, high recommendation: for as thorough a radio junkie as I am (it was, in fact, my teenage career choice before veering wildly off onto the path that led me here), I find it almost impossible to get into a podcast groove.
Part of that is the nature of the beast itself: the usual podcast fare is limited to people I don’t know having a conversation I can’t participate in, making for an experience about as compelling as watching two amateurs gracelessly toss a frisbee back and forth for an hour.
Here’s where everything changed: the recent sale of Ziff Davis’s former games press unit to Hearst let loose one Robert Ashley, who took the opportunity to pursue his own radio journalist leanings and create his new podcast, A Life Well Wasted.
Really, podcast’s not the right term — it’s never been more apt to call something “internet radio,” because, despite the format, Ashley’s clearly a graduate of the Ira Glass school of production, and has put together as close to gaming’s version of This American Life as we’ll likely ever get.
The two episodes put together so far (the production work involved for a one-man team is so heavy that Ashley isn’t committing to more than an episode a month) aren’t about gamers and their opinions, it’s about the personal stories of This Gaming Life: the first episode introspectively devoted to the aforementioned Ziff Davis sale and the closing of U.S. games mag legacy EGM, and the second to “collectors and archivists” obsessively devoted to games.
And it’s that second in particular where you should start — near the end, Ashley pitch perfectly calls forth one of those fabled NPR ‘driveway moments’ with a tearful farewell from a game developer about to pull the final plug on an MMO server. Right there is where I knew Ashley got “it,” and where he set the high watermark for both games radio and for his own future episodes — I can’t wait to see where he goes next.
