If you’ve never been introduced to the Superf*ckers, from Monster Mii creator James Kochalka, here’s the lowdown: they’re “the baddest teenage superhero team around, and everybody wants to join. They live in a big clubhouse, play video games on their state-of-the-art supercomputer, smoke their teammate Grotus’ slime drippings, and fight amongst themselves like cats and dogs.”
Like Kochalka himself, lately their superhero hands have been all over Guerrilla’s PS3 shooter, Killzone 2, and so, in the first of what we’re all hoping is a long running series, Offworld presents Superf*ckers team members Jack Krak and Orange Lightning’s dual review.
A note to the younger and more sensitive readers: as their team name might suggest, the Superf*ckers are as M rated as the games they probably aren’t old enough to play. Consider this your first time warning: no one censors Jack Krak.
[James Kochalka‘s daily diary strips, which run at AmericanElf.com, have entered their tenth year and been collected in three print volumes. He is also the author of more comics than you can count on both hands (some for children, others not so much), and plays rock and roll and Game Boy punk as James Kochalka Superstar.]
Last night I killed eleven people. Not virtual people, not avatars, not NPCs. People. Some I knew, some I didn’t. Some who would have killed me first if they could, some who died trying to protect me. I kill because I was trained to, by a Russian master psychologist by the name of Dimma Davidoff. There are many like me, who live among you peacefully until we are called into action. We aren’t assassins but slaughterers, guided only by the twin impulses to kill and to survive. We call ourselves the Werewolves.
Actually, originally, we called ourselves the Mafia, but there’s probably some copyright infringement there and we had a rethink. Either way, Werewolf has been around for 20-odd years, enlivening frat parties and corporate retreats with a tang of bloodlust and betrayal.
How it works is simple. A roomful of people are distributed cards, in secret, which designate them either villagers or werewolves. At ‘night’ all the villagers close their eyes and the werewolves open theirs to identify a victim. During the ‘day’ the game moderator announces who has died and everyone – villagers and werewolves alike – must come to an agreement on who to lynch in the hope of eradicating the werewolf threat. There are thousands of rule variations, but that’s the heart of Werewolf: a game of deceit, misdirection and skepticism that I love more every time I play it. (more…)
Indie iPhone devs Hondune apparently get it, too, and have just revealed their take on the “genre” (if you can call it that) with their upcoming iPhone game Ouch!. As you can see above, the game looks to offer near limitless ways to ruthlessly torment its hapless main character, with 40 pre-built levels and a scene editor with 60 objects to construct new custom levels.
The game also lets you customize the character via photos or accessories, and, more intriguingly, lets you export and share both characters and levels by importing and exporting generated JPGs in your iPhone’s photo library — the visual version of Bangai-O Spirits‘ MP3 level sharing quirk.
Hondune say they’ve already submitted the game to Apple, and hope for a release within the next week.
If you follow iPhone developments at all, you’ll likely recall this video that made the rounds shortly after Apple announced the App Store early last spring, which showed a tilt-sensitive port of Id’s Quake 3 running on the device.
Alberta studio Hermitworks was behind the port, and while they won’t be bringing Id’s game to the App Store (though Id head John Carmack recently told Gamasutra that he’s been tooling with the idea), they’ve just started showing off footage of their first game for the device based on the engine.
Space Trader: Moon Madness is their mobile spinoff of PC/Mac original franchise Space Trader, and promises a vaguely Elite sounding premise, with a mission to “achieve a high score buying and selling commodities. Start on the Moon, buy low. Hop aboard your ship to new destinations. Sell high. So simple its madness.”
The first video footage above doesn’t show much (at least, much clearly), but thankfully shows that they’ve dropped the tilt controls for a much more sensible faux-dual-analog approach that may be one of the more workable first-person iPhone solutions.
After Nintendo Power teased with the first images of WayForward and Majesco’s Wii remake of David ‘Pitfall‘ Crane’s obscure NES/Game Boy platformer A Boy and His Blob, the developer has given IGN the first look at the game in motion.
As it should be, I’m getting a very strong vibe of a more than passing resemblance to Frontier’s WiiWare debut LostWinds — both in the serenity of its environments and in the absolute dependency between the boy and blob, something that the team is keen to stress above all else, down to including (according to IGN’s accompanying interview) a “hug” button.
Also striking is WayForward’s reticence to rely on any HUD clutter or narration, with all cues coming in the form of painted signposts and iconic representations of each jellybean’s effect rather than the original textual selector, amplifying its “storybook come to life” feel.
Hit the jump for an additional video from IGN showing the cityscape and underworld more closely modeled on the original NES game’s opening levels. (more…)
Keeping up with more housecleaning news: there’s one week left to enter EA/Phenomic’s contest to write the legend for Offworld’s exclusive in-game Mutating Frenzy card at right, after already receiving a good number of entries.
As a reminder, after the March 11th deadline, Offworld readers will pick their top three submissions, which will then be forwarded on to Phenomic to pick the grand prize. The third place winner will win an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card, second place will win the same and a BattleForge T-shirt, and the grand prize winner will receive an ATI Radeon HD 4870, BattleForge T-shirt, and have their submitted legend used in the game on its release.
If you want to better understand how the cards are used, Phenomic has opened the game for a public beta through March 26th. To download the client and try the game for yourself, visit this page with full instructions.
Submit your card legend as a comment on the original post, and refer to that post for the full writeup on the details of the game and the contest.
In early February, Joel suggested the Boing Boing Internet Action Squad help out an indie dev in need, with new spaceship graphics for Peter Lewis’s iPhone space game Aragom. Fully aware that the Boing Boing Gadgets crosspost quickly collapsed into gnashed-teeth chaos, I’m just wondering aloud here if anyone ever officially got in touch with each other?
Longtime demoscene institution scene.org has announced the finalists for its 7th annual Scene.org Awards, “honoring the previous year of demoscene releases in a more formal setting, and disregarding their ranks in other competitions.”
In the main competition, my money’s on the rhythmic ribbon of Still’s “The Seeker” (above), which placed first in Intel’s 2008 Demo Competition, though all the nominees were slick in their own right.
Your games connection? “Into the Pink,” which took 2nd place at Nvidia’s NVscene competition, was put together by Plastic, the same demo group that did Linger in Shadows, the PS3 demo released on the PlayStation Network late last year.
If you don’t have the hardware to run any individual demo, be sure to click on the ‘Pouet comments’ link for each, which will link you to streaming/YouTube versions of each.
Don’t miss the other categories, either, particularly the Oldschool Platform demos, where teams are still breaking through the silicon ceilings of ZX Spectrums, C64s and Vic 20s. PwP’s fantastic Vic 20 demo “The Next Level” (above) is my favorite of the bunch.
One of our all-time most-popular Gimme Indie Game posts was the recent mention of Andrew ‘Runhello’ McClure’s low-res/high-concept Jumpman, and with good reason. Sure, there were several who only dropped in to mention that Jumpman was the title of a widely ported original 8-bit game (a detail we’re fairly sure didn’t escape many, least of all McClure), but thisJumpman managed to charm nearly everyone with its wickedly clever puzzler heart and more obvious nostalgic appeal.
Happily, then, that won’t be the last we see of it. The Happy Medium‘s Travis Boisvenue wrote in to mention this excellent recent interview he did with McClure which reveals that McClure’s currently at work bringing the game to the iPhone, amongst other good shoutouts to Jason Rohrer and awesomely nightmarish Famicom import Bokosuka Wars.
Granted, he does mention it more as an aside, but Boisvenue also submitted a post-interview email tidbit that confirms it’s gone a bit further than just the pipe dream phase.
McClure clarifies that “the iPhone Jumpman will have to be different, but I’m still working out the details. I suspect that the level design will have to be fairly different to make sense on the smaller screen, and probably it’s going to be more focused around individual levels instead of the ‘paths’, to make pick-up-and-play easier.”
I was also pleased to see McClure name the person that did the above YouTube trailer’s lo-fi melody: Joe Mathlete of Houston’s The Mathletes, who, as a complete aside, I very well may have met at a late 90s Joan of Arc show at Chicago’s Fireside Bowl, unless there’s more than one Mathlete in this crazy world (Joe, was that you?).
In other PopCap goins on, as has been mentioned numerous times since posting the first image of the publisher’s forthcoming tower defense game Plants vs. Zombies, what little we’ve seen of the game has been conspicuously light on, well, actual vegetation.
But, as noted by PopCap’s own Garth Chouteau (who also submits the above pun) in the last post, there’s a good reason. Says Garth: “Lastly, I’ll just say this: the scene depicted in the screen shot is a *night* level, during which your standard ‘daytime’ plants don’t work so well…”
And on that note, has a Plants Vs. Zombies teaser been staring us in the face this whole time? As commenter Diamar pointed out: “There’s a sunflower at the bottom of PopCap’s home page, and [Bookworm star] Lex is staring at it quizzically. Good money is on it being from PvZ.”
I’ll be damned.
UPDATE: That settles that: NeoGAF forum-goer adg1034 points out that the most recent Peggle Nights bonus pack features this level above that definitively ties all of these loose ends together.
