Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, real-time strategy was the most important genre in the games store. Over there a Halo Wars placard, behind me the launch rack filled with the localised embossing of Empire: Total War (above), and on the shelf next to where a pretty girl has been looking bored: a copy of Pikmin Wii.
When I get back to the office I’ll be interviewing the lead designer of World In Conflict – which is being relaunched for the Ubisoft ownership – and then I’ll probably play some more of minor Russian epic, Men Of War. Or perhaps I’ll get on with messing around in the Battleforge beta – EA’s mix of card-gaming and real-time fantasy warfare.
Sure, there’s PC bias to all this, but there are copies of Red Alert 3 and EndWar sat amid the stack of green plastic atop my busy little 360 too. The real-time strategy is reaching out into every platform, and into the collection of every gamer. The avalanche of RTS games that began before Christmas seems to be picking up momentum as we enter 2009: they’re exploding out of every orifice in the games industry. (more…)
The other day, Nurse Toadstool and I talked in the break room over reheated mushroom casserole. She appeared sad. She mentioned turning a Goomba away because his health insurance wouldn’t give him enough gold coins for treatment. Then I realized why the same viruses continue to appear again and again. Each time we turn a patient away for financial reasons, not only are we denying care to the poorest creatures, who often need it the most, but we’re putting the disease back into the world, where it continues to spread. Furthermore, the patients I do treat get hooked on my expensive medicine. Mushroom Kingdom’s health-care system has turned into a sick, addictive game…
Here are some of the myths I shamefully propagated.
MYTH ONE
Mushroom Kingdom has the best
health care of any gaming world
Consider the hostile planet Zebes, which the female warrior Samus liberated many years ago. The Metroid viruses native to that planet are as nefarious as they are diverse. Among the viruses cataloged are Side Hoppers, Geegas, and fire-generating Gerutas. But Zebes, a planet larger than the Mushroom Kingdom, has reformed its health system. Free help comes in the form of Chozo statues. Is there a waiting period to receive this help? Yes, and oftentimes one needs to fire a rocket at a red door just to get treatment. It’s a small nuisance when you consider that you get an energy orb that grants full life. Not even my Megavitamins can make that claim.
Officially the first best thing I’ve seen come out of Maxis’ recently opened Spore API: Aaron Meyers’ 279 Spore skeletons (detail above, click through for the massive) — a beautiful and fragile looking little bestiary.
Chances are you’ve at least casually happened across the work of Space Invader before — the Parisian guerrilla artist has been devising his worldwide mosiac invasions for over a decade now, but, via Extermitent, we get a rare glimpse actually catching him in the act.
The slick editing makes it unclear how caught in the act he actually was: that would appear to be French authorities escorting him away from the Montreuil A3 freeway scene of the crime, but it ends with the plus-large result intact.
I’ve got my own set of invasion photos from around Paris and London via my Flickr, where you’ll also find some unartful snapshots of one of his first U.S. gallery installations. I dropped by the locale in 2004, and only slowly did it dawn on me that I was actually inside now astoundingly renowned Hope/Obama artist Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One (the Obey Giant switchplate cover finally tipped me off). Fairey wasn’t in that day, but I did get a quick thrill talking to the other staffers and getting to nose around the rest of the facilities.
And the flipside of the game-toy crossover: Offworld fave Argentinian illustrator/toy collective DGPH has just launched Molestown in the stylings of a full-on platformer puzzle. The design seems to be only surface deep, but it’s a nice way to explore their various characters and wares, and the long drop into hell was crazy dramatic: chalk them up as another character/design team I’d love to see behind officially produced games.
The latest games-vinyl toy crossover from Albert Art: this custom Ness Munny, star of the oft-blogged cult hit Earthbound, complete with to-scale backpack and cap. It’s the fourth games custom Art’s done recently, following his similarly nice work on Bomberman and Turbo-Grafx 16 underdog Bonk.
When you’re ready to graduate up from your Meggy Jr RGB: based on the “retro-minimalist homebrew game console” Uzebox Project, Ladyada’s Fuzebox is an even more self-contained, open-source DIY 8-bit console kit that sports the following specs:
Full 256 simultaneous output colors, 240×224 pixel resolution;
Tile & sprite support;
Two player ports, either with Super Nintendo or classic Nintendo controllers;
NTSC RCA composite and S-video out (PAL not supported at this time);
4 channel output mono audio for music and effects;
SD/MMC card support for future expansion;
Built on an Atmel AVR core, 64KB flash and 4KB of RAM;
Main microcontroller chip is preprogrammed with an STK500-compatible (sometimes referred to as Arduino-compatible) bootloader;
Write game code in C, using fully open source tools on any platform
The demo videos are all disappointingly, if understandably, hewing pretty close to clones of established retro hits — have any of you managed to create anything original with either the Uze or Fuze?
Probably the greatest chiptune madness you’ll hear all week, Jesse ‘Tugboat‘ Novak’s 8-bit hip-hop medley moves from Jay-Z to Kanye via T.I., Chamillionaire and Ludacris without dropping a beat, or a bit.
Jay-Z – Dirt Off Your Shoulder;
T.I – What You Know;
Chamillionaire – Ridin’;
Ludacris – What’s Ya Fantasy;
Bonecrusher – Neva Scared;
Kanye West – Overnight Celebrity;
Ludacris – Move Bitch;
Lil’ Jon – Get Low;
Kanye West – Gold Digger
Even though I know desperately little about Fall Out Boy’s music, they’ve got my attention for two reasons: they 1.) landed a favorite artist, Luke Chueh, to do the cover for their latest album, and 2.) their new starvingeyes-made advergame ‘Fall Out Boy Trail‘ is a startlingly elaborate recreation of Oregon Trail, with several new minigames added to the mix.
If you can forgive the product placement (the boys only eat McNuggets and only drink Vitamin Water), the modernization’s actually quite clever: you’ll stop off on tour dates to play low-bit versions of FOB songs ala Rock Band, and afterward gamble each member’s happiness meter by choosing one of several cliques (the emos, the rednecks) to party with, and do battle with surf zombies when attempting to ford any rivers.
As was rumored this week via cryptic clues being drip-fed to viral site SomethingInTheSea.com, retailer GameStop’s in-house magazine Game Informer has got an exclusive first look at 2K’s upcoming BioShock 2, with its just-revealed cover image showing the new game’s trademark enemy: the Big Sister.
The first game saw its narrative driven by the relationship between the vulnerable Little Sisters and their near-indefeatable Big Daddy protectors, which appears to continue in this prequel, albeit gender swapped. Little more is known about this game’s storyline, apart from the viral site mentioning frequent abductions by a “skinny monster with a single red glowing eye.”
New footage of the game is expected to land at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference. Take Two’s recent quarterly report scheduled BioShock 2 for a release before the end of the year, but, like Beaterator, made no commitment on the launch platforms.
