One of board gaming’s most prolific and revered designers, Reiner Knizia, is actively searching for iPhone devs to help bring his games to the device, says industry site boardgamenews.
Knizia’s seen a slow but growing uptake in the videogame sphere over the past year: Sierra Online brought his Lost Cities to Xbox Live Arcade, and — though the North American release stripped his name from the title — Eidos packaged a set of his puzzles as the Brain Age-esque DS game Brain Voyager.
It was exactly one week ago last night that I fell in love, and to be quite honest I’m still at a little bit of a loss for words. The new object of my desire? She’s Eliss, an iPhone game, and I say that only slightly facetiously, because I’m not entirely exaggerating when I admit to getting goosebumps every time I even just see her in the video above.
If her name rings half a bell, it’s because Eliss, from Barcelona/NY designer Steph Thirion, is up for this year’s design innovation award in the Independent Games Festival’s mobile division. I’d known that, but, even after posting about the entrants in this year’s awards, didn’t even pay it much mind: its preview shot was so abstract and frankly fairly ugly, stretched and muddied with jpeg compression that it didn’t make a lasting impression, like trying to size up a new Facebook/MySpace crush on poor photos alone.
But as soon as I’d laid hands on the playable code, it clicked. Like I said: I’m still not sure exactly what it is in me that Eliss laser-targets and tweaks, but for as many games as pass my eyes and hands in any given week, it’s a connection that’s rare. Part of it’s the music, surely, the tender electronic loops somewhere in the neighborhood of I am Robot and Proud or E*vax, but it’s also the game’s design itself.
Because there isn’t another game like Eliss — she’s one in a million. Thirion describes it most poetically:
Your job is to keep up harmony in an odd universe made of blendable planets. Touch-control multiple planets at once, join them together into giant orbs or split them up into countless dwarf planets, and match their size with the squeesars. Wipe off the stardust, resist the attraction of the vortex and other space phenomena, and slow down the passage of time. Each of the 20 levels will require creative ways and strategies in using your fingers. Warm up your hands, you’re up for some serious finger gymnastics in the bizarro galaxy.
But you don’t really needs words — and the game actually offers you precious few, just the iconic instructions seen in the video above — because for as abstract as it is, it appeals to exactly that innate sense of order and accomplishment as Tetris. Keep like colors together, join and split shapes to fill the vibrating ‘squeesar’ frames, and at all costs don’t let mis-matched colors touch.
Eliss gets all its vitality out of the economy of those three simple rules, multi-tasking them on a second by second basis, and is only made more difficult over time by overcrowding the field more quickly and introducing elements like those vortexes which slowly draw the objects together.
The game is currently undergoing the gauntlet of Apple’s approval process, but Thirion expects it to be released by the end of the month, is now available on the App Store [iTunes link] and I’m excited for you all to meet her, because there’s a lot to her that typifies precisely what good gaming should be about.
You’d imagine Thom Yorke via Koji Kondo would be completely ridiculous, and it is, but then you keep listening and it’s actually kind of completely wicked.
YouTube user Adolfobaez has many more of these, done presumably during his downtime when he’s not playing guitar for Mexico’s CUTECATS.
World of Goo creators 2D Boy are taking us all on a time traveling journey through the process in which Kyle Gabler’s Experimental Gameplay Project original became the studio’s WiiWare/PC indie hit as we now know it.
For the initial entry in their apparently seven part series (“before all the levels, before all the polish”), 2D programmer Ron Carmel revisits the game’s first week baby steps:
the date is august 20, 2006. the game is about one week old. basic rendering, collision detection, and physics are in place. no sound, music, or animations. it feels like you’re dragging balls inside a jar of honey and the connection logic for the strands is non-intuitive and often results in odd, unstable structures. the player is also able to grab the structure itself and swing it around like the wet towel that it is. and there are intellectual property issues, to boot :)
If you thought our original coverage of Dreamlore/Mezmer’s upcoming PC arcade/real-time-strategy game Stalin Vs. Martians sounded too good to be true — Stalin as a 200 foot tall playable unit against Lucky-Charms-colored otherworldly invaders? With a Cantopop techno score? — christ, man, you ain’t seen nothin’.
Let’s not even bother trying to put it further into words: just watch.
Related to the previous post: digging around the MySpace page of Big Bang Mini composers Yubaba, where they’ve listed their past, present and future game-ography, what do we find?
Nestled in between the Build a Bear and Horse Life 2 soundtracks, it also mentions that the group is working on new music for Big Bang Party, a game listed for release on the Wii in 2009.
That would better explain the ‘mini’ in Big Bang Mini, then. Neither Arkedo nor Southpeak have officially announced the game’s existence, though it does jive with Arkedo teasing the N-sider blog about a Wii sequel in late February, offering a few hints that the new version would “revisit five of the worlds from the DS original… and [add] a lot of new multiplayer modes,” and would include some manner of “horizontal shooter.”
Arkedo have told N-sider that the game would more likely be released in 2010.
With the relaunch of the website for Arkedo’s DS firework-cinder-dodging shooter Big Bang Mini (previously discussed here), now that the game is hitting European retail shelves, publisher Southpeak has also announced that they’re giving out the game’s soundtrack as a free download.
The score was done by Paris’s Xavier Thiry & Sylvain Hellio, better known as Yubaba, Smith & Fortune [MySpace], who are also behind the soundtrack for Arkedo’s DS debut Nervous Brickdown, and Offworld favorite bubble-blowing action game Soul Bubbles, from Mekensleep.
The 24 track strong soundtrack contains some fantastic stuff: give Relax, Abyss, and Challenge special attention for more ambient blips, and B.O.S.S. a listen for its more oldschool chiptune punk.
I haven’t given the game itself the proper write-up that it’s due, but next week should be an Offworld DS blowout, with more coverage of the frankly stellar line-up it’s seen over the past few weeks.
Gamasutra’s also carrying a very nice interview with Offworld favorite developer Masaya Matsuura, head of NanaOn-Sha and creator, of course, of PlayStation icon Parappa the Rapper.
The interview touches too many points to single out just one, but generally covers a lot of Matsuura’s approach to the music/rhythm game industry — a genre he played a very large part in founding, but now seemingly feels somewhat estranged from how the beast he helped birth has evolved.
Asked whether he ever intends to create a music game that, like Rock Band and its ilk, uses instrument peripherals, he stresses that his approach comes from the other end — making software to support the interface, rather than focusing on a peripheral to come at the software:
I really love real instruments — really love. The game peripheral feels like it’s very similar to an actual guitar, for example, but it’s a little different for me.
As I told you, I really want to feel as if I’m playing the actual guitar… Of course the game controller and the real guitar, there’s a very big difference between them, but if I can overcome these kinds of differences by making good software…
Maybe that is what’s interesting to me. I really want to make the experience appeal derive from playing the software. It’s a very potent thing.
There’s more good stuff in there as well on bringing his lesser known PlayStation cult hit Vib-Ribbon back in some form (watch this intro video immediately if that’s the first you’ve ever heard of the game), and his thoughts on developing for the iPhone.
Ex-Volition startup Blazing Lizard have sent word of another new iPhone game slated to hit the App Store soon after their dual-ship shooter CrossFyre: iSkyDive!, a free-falling/parachuting game which — as above — might be the closest we’ll get to a portable version of SNES classic Pilotwings.
Writer and academic Matteo Bittanti has announced that he will be working with curator Debora Norma Anna Ferrari to put together an exhibit “‘entirely dedicated to the art of the interactive medium” called ‘Art of the Game “Nuove Frontiere Tra Arte e Bellezza”‘ for Italy’s Museum of Valle d’Aosta.
There’s not much official detail on the pieces to be included, but Bittanti says the exhibit “will feature 40 international artists (illustrators, graphic designers, art directors, and more) and will open on May 22 2009.”
