I’m having a little bit of a hard time getting over how brilliant and yet how unattainable these Fallout 3 shirts are from Famitsu’s Game T-shirt Project, particularly the “prewar dirty T-shirt” emblazoned with the Church of the Children of the Atom scrawl and sullied in your choice of dried blood or glow in the dark rad sludge.
PopCap’s gone full bore Peggle Overload lately, with this week’s release of the DS’s Peggle: Dual Shot (produced with the help of, and featuring levels by, Rez/Every Extend Extra/Lumines dev Q Entertainment), the official announcement that the game will be coming to Xbox Live Arcade and the iPhone later this month (I can also personally vouch for its iPod port), and now this, a Peggle art contest.
I make particular mention of the latter because I’d be very pleased to see the collusion of our usual suspect designer/readers and one of our favorite inexplicable game obsessions: Olly Moss, Spacesick, Mikko Walamies — any takers? We’d love to see anyone’s entries, and the prizes PopCap’s offering aren’t to be sneezed at.
Chiptune scene regulars and “creators of loud, fast music with a hacked NES from 1985” Anamanaguchi have just released their latest EP, Dawn Metropolis, and — thanks to this handy embed (why don’t more bands do this?) — you can listen to it in its entirety above by clicking each of the glitch-strips.
You’ve got to admit it’s getting better: work steadily progresses on Infinite Ammo’s “Lemmings meets The Lost Vikings meets Awesome” iPhone puzzle game Heroes & Villains, and their latest work in progress video is looking quite wicked with a properly skinned futuristic cityscape, a freshly added soundtrack and an upgraded GUI.
Oh, this is excellent news: the games blogs are currently all a-flitter over news from the most recent issue Nintendo Power, which is exclusively revealing that WayForward — the studio behind end-days cult hit Game Boy Color platformer Shantae, fan favorite DS remake Contra 4, and recently mentioned WiiWare horror/puzzler Lit — will be bringing a new version of obscure NES game A Boy And His Blob to the Wii.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen publisher-to-be Majesco try to revive the property: a DS version was in the works and due for release in 2005, but was abruptly dropped when the publisher was undergoing financial troubles before re-inventing themselves as a casual/Cooking Mama powerhouse.
And from what little we’ve seen (the Nintendo Power site is carrying only a pixelated teaser, but is running the above image whole), it’s looking a damn sight better than that DS version (have a look via Unseen64, but only from between your fingers), with WayForward giving it a quasi-anime/LostWinds-inspired facelift, with a reported hi-res 2D perspective.
If this is the first you’ve ever heard of the game, a little background: the 1989 original was one of the later works from early gaming legend David Crane, originally designer at and co-founder of Activision, where he created seminal games like the Atari 2600’s Pitfall.
Blob was created after leaving Activision to found Absolute, but wears its Pitfall inspiration on its sleeve (as seen above), only with the kicker that while your player was just as vulnerable to his surroundings as Pitfall Harry, he brought with him his titular invulnerable blob, which could transform itself into various protective and navigational items after eating one of a certain type of jelly bean (obviously).
Terribly challenging (especially to an 11 year old) but wonderfully inventive stuff, it’s a property and a solid gaming foundation that’s been long overdue for a loving revival, and, with any luck, WayForward are just the studio to give it its comeuppance.
UPDATE: As SonicTail noted in the comments, Nintendo Power have lifted the pixelated veil on the first two pages of the feature, which show off more of the gorgeously reserved illustrative 2D style. Click above for the full width spread.
Sometimes if you ask, ye really shall receive: after digging up some first details of casual powerhouse PopCap’s long rumored (but still widely unseen) tower defense/strategy game Plants vs. Zombies, my subsequent google-fu came up embarrassingly short in trying to find the first image of the game that PC Gamer procured in late 2007.
But then! A little bird — more specifically, PC Gamer executive editor bird Logan Decker — dropped in with this, that self-same image, adding, “I recall having had to beg for that screen, so I’d like to get as much mileage out of the indignity as possible.” (click the image for the full screen fruits of that indignity)
And even though I’ve only got a quarter of an idea as to what’s going on, it’s as wonderful as I’d imagined: the swirly-eyed psychedelia of its rainbow mushrooms, the otherwise fungal Mario nods, what-I’m-presuming-is the makeshift screen-door shield, and the potential promise of those left-hand lawnmowers.
All signs are pointing to a gloriously outlandish Peggle-esque take on a traditionally reserved genre (PixelJunk Monsters withstanding), and, from what I’m gathering, this time the signs are right on.
I’ve been working my way up the belt-ladder on ngmoco and Demiurge’s spelling battler Word Fu since its release late last week, and it’s quickly beat out the letter-press competition with a much more compelling power-up system and arcade-like reflexive pace. What I haven’t been able to do, though, is properly test its multiplayer, which is limited to local ad-hoc networks.
That may soon change, though (at least, in part), as ngmoco announce via twitter, that a forthcoming Word Fu patch will bring the asynchronous multiplayer capabilities of its upcoming Topple sequel (Topple Too) to Fu as well.
Just what that means for either isn’t fully clear — whether it’ll simply be score challenges, ala competitive Facebook games — but, as I’ve said a few times, any moves toward socializing the iPhone (especially in light of the collapse of the Onyx project) are greatly appreciated.
It might only be three tracks, but it’s three tracks good: dB soundworks (the same previously mentioned studio behind Edmund McMillen’s WiiWare Super Meat Boy) are giving away their soundtrack for Flashbang’s just-released deep sea tentacle-whipper Blush, my favorite being the skittering and clicking ambiance of its “mellow” track.
The three songs can be downloaded or played via the site’s still inexplicably entertaining built in pixel-arena-rock header.
The Independent Games Festival has opened its voting for this year’s Audience Award with a list of all main competition finalists who have submitted a playable public demo of their game.
This year, the finalists are CarneyVale Showtime, Between, The Graveyard, Retro/Grade, Dyson, Cortex Command, Brainpipe, Osmos, Mightier (above), You Have To Burn The Rope, Musaic Box, The Maw, PixelJunk Eden and Coil, representing a nicely diverse group of PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 titles.
