After being nominated in seven categories, Activision/Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4 took home three awards in the UKs just-completed 2009 BAFTA Awards, for Best Gameplay, Best Story & Character, and the audience voted game of the year award sponsored by UK retailer GAME.
It was beat out for best multiplayer by Valve’s Left 4 Dead, and in the judge-awarded Best Game category by Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy. Elsewhere Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet picked up the Artistic Achievement award, Boom Blox took home Best Casual Game, Spore left with Technical Achievement, and Nintendo/Level 5’s underdog DS puzzler Professor Layton took home best handheld game.
In the event’s student/indie One to Watch category, student team DarkMatter Designs took home the award for their platform/puzzler Boro-Toro, which can be sampled via the game’s website.
Click through for the full list of winners (each in bold). (more…)
Long taken for dead, the latest quarterly report from publisher Take Two has listed Rockstar Games’ Beaterator as back on track for a release at an unannounced date before the end of October. For release on unannounced platform, as well, actually, though what exactly to make of that is still up for wild guesses.
The Beaterator project originally appeared in 2005 as a Flash based music sequencer on Rockstar’s website — a curious sideproject for the Grand Theft Auto maker — and was announced in early 2007 as an upcoming PlayStation Portable release, with producer Timbaland said to be on board to help produce the app’s sound samples.
Shortly thereafter, though, the game quietly slipped off Take Two’s schedule, and hadn’t been heard of since until today’s report. It’s platform, however, is now listed as To Be Announced, and the company hasn’t clarified anything in its on-going conference call, so insert your guess here: a PlayStation Network release on PSP or PS3? Now a DS app? Could it be Take Two’s iPhone debut?
Anna the Red quite rightly saw her bento fame blossom after her December dip into games like Katamari Damacy, but I honestly haven’t seen any finer game food (bento, cup/cake, or otherwise) than her recent Half-Life headcrab delights.
How do you know your platform is gaining credibility in Japan’s gaming industry? When — even as the tech industry wrings its hands over its sluggish adoption — games press institution Famitsu devotes an entire new publication to it, as it has this month for the iPhone.
The first issue of Famitsu iPhone is due in tech shops and exclusive-iPhone-carrier Softbank’s retail outlets this Friday and will be given away for free. The publication will debut with coverage of I Love Katamari, Square Enix’s tower defense game Crystal Defenders, and an exclusive interview with Hideo Kojima on Metal Gear Solid Touch.
Famitsu doesn’t specify whether future issues will expand to a full, paid publication, but it does promise that while “some people still do not have an iPhone, if you read this you will want the iPhone.”
Thompson chats with PopCap VP Greg Canessa, who surmises that the more interesting underlying discrepancy between the game’s hardcore and casual audiences is purely perceptual:
For a casual gamer, Peggle seems too heavily based on luck. You aim the ball, but once you’ve dropped it and it hits the first peg, all bets are off: It bounces and careens through the forest of pegs in crazy, zigzagging patterns. For casual players, there doesn’t seem to be a clear enough correlation between how they aim and the results.
But hard-core gamers see the game quite differently. When they look at the Peggle board, they see the Euclidean geometry that governs how the ball falls and pings around.
“They’ll be sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, if I bounce the ball off that peg it’ll hit this other peg and jump over here, where it’ll take out two other colored pegs,” Canessa said.
I’d been doing some of my own idle thinking on the game’s appeal recently and came to the [probably dullard’s] conclusion that its smartest design decision was to never punish the player and make nearly every interaction a reward — straight down to the fact that a gutterball shot that misses every single peg and flies straight off the screen earns you a medal (great job!).
Click through to Thompson’s full column, though, for more on the hardcore/casual divide.
WayForward, the company behind Majesco’s Wii rehaul of A Boy and His Blob, are moving from strength to strength in recent days. Fresh off that announcement, the company has also given IGN the exclusive on its first downloadable DS game for the upcoming DSiWare service with Mighty Flip Champs.
IGN’s preview is a bit light on details, but from the screens above you can surmise that its puzzling mechanical hook is main character Alta’s ability to flip rooms displayed on upper and lower screens of the DS in order to move forward to the goal.
The game looks like classic WayForward stuff, particularly in the sense that I’m getting heavy vibes of the studio’s vastly overlooked 2001 Game Boy Color game Wendy: Every Witch Way, a game was sold as a licensed product based on Harvey Comics star — and friend of Casper the Friendly Ghost — Wendy the Good Little Witch.
The license was probably the primary reason it flew straight past the core audience that would have appreciated it, but underneath the product placement was a very clever puzzle/platformer revolving around Wendy’s ability to flip gravity and walk on ceilings to get past obstacles, in what looks on the surface like a similar manner to Mighty Flip. I’m coming up with a grand total of zero YouTube videos to illustrate, but you can see about six seconds of the game (dig that animation!) in this longer GBC clip.
Over at Behemoth’s development blog, the studio has announced that the first video of its third game — following Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers — will be shown off on March 18th, just prior to an early version debuting at the Tokyo Anime Fair.
They’ve teased the game with the image above… My guess? That they’re already creatively bankrupt and are cashing in with a Bejeweled clone (the obvious clue: the glowing red eyes of a million bored secretaries in the background). We hardly knew ye.
Blizzard wasn’t quite as thrilled with it as we were… We will be removing the Diablo shirt from our site on Thursday and will not be selling it after this date. We’ve marked the shirt down to only $5, get it before its gone for good!
We recorded our video game experiences from 1982 until 1988 in a variety of locations on the east coast. Most of the recordings come from Ithaca, NY, Albany, NY and Ocean City, MD. Other locations include Lancaster, PA, Falmouth, MA, Rehoboth Beach, DE and Key West, FL.
Luckily I stored all fourteen audio tapes in a safe place and rediscovered them when I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house in 1997. In the last several years I digitized these nostalgic recordings to preserve and share them.
Experience the magic and the wonder of the early years of coin-op video games. Hear the classic arcade ambience like you haven’t heard it in over a quarter of a century! The blend of several video games being played simultaneously, the kids yelling and the quarters clanking. We will never hear such beautiful chaos quite the same way again….
It’s already pre-faded/corrupted for you, just run it through a bit of tape delay and stick a nice beat behind it, and you’ve got an instant Boards of Canada-esque nostalgic album.
There is nothing I don’t like about the debut trailer for EA/Steven Spielberg’s latest Boom Blox Smash Party, apart from the faint muscle memory echoes of the repetitive stress injuries I sustained in my marathon sessions with the original.
As I mentioned in January, the most exciting hook here is that EA’s sloughed off the friend code burden and is making its sharable levels openly browse-able to anyone, and that its level editor has expanded even further to essentially include the same dev tool set EA themselves used to create those in the retail package.
