As I mentioned in both Nintendo Wii/DS outlooks, Rockstar’s first DS outing, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, looks to be one of the year’s handheld blockbusters, somewhat returning the series to its birds-eye roots while maintaining much of the progress it’s made throughout — and on an even grander scale than — its 3D evolution. The developer has just released the first official trailer for the game, in which you can glimpse short bursts of gameplay in between its protagonist’s tale.
I’m just as happy to bring it to light if nothing else than for its title music, which, as Rockstar have just informed me (and I should’ve guessed) is a track from Wu’s Ghostface Killah and Offworld favorite MF Doom (or rather, just DOOM, these days), a musical collaboration that’s been threatening to release their debut album for just about what seems like forever now.
You might be forgiven at first glance to draw quick comparisons between Minotaur China Shop developer Flashbang’s just-released Blush and thatgamecompany’s PS3/PSP indie bedrock fl0w, but the two have little in common past their deep sea struggle.
Instead, Blush is another game in what is emerging as a Flashbang studio-signature as reliable as the Animal/Heavy Machinery meme they’ve seemingly just now deposed: as also evidenced in their original Raptor Safari and the later iPhone Raptor Copter, Flashbang have a passion for flagellation, be it by industrial mace [this kind] or, now, with literal flagella.
Because unlike fl0w or its later twice-removed cousin in the first stage of Spore, Blush is less about eat or be eaten — less about the head and more about the tail. It’s more about tracing graceful but deadly arcs through the water, and quickboosts to waypoints to deposit eggs collected through your kills, which grow your tentacles and further increase your speed.
As with nearly all of its web and iPhone ilk, it’s an arcade-style race against the clock for high scores and achievements — almost more of a sport than a natural sim, with a steady ramp of earned skill and subsequent challenge, and that ever present one-more-go urge when you see how pathetically you’ve stacked up to the rest on, even your best runs.
It’s also aggressively beautiful, everything softly and semi-translucently neon lit, and while it may not have the mathematical complexity or the slapstick charm of something like China Shop (in fact, it might be their most ‘serious’ game to date), it’s every bit as confidently constructed and polished as anything they’ve done.
Nintendo has sent over a breakdown of first and third party releases for both the Wii and DS, and, as I did for its winter update, I’ve done a little chaff separating and focused on the few that look the most promising. It’s a lighter schedule than last, looking solely at the next three months, and there are fewer surprises (and a few worrying omissions, NanaOn-Sha/Rodney Greenblat’s habitually-delayed Wii rhythm game Major Minor’s Majestic March having dropped from Majesco’s list), but still several titles worthy of mention.
The headline game here is Nintendo’s Wii remake of NES classic Punch-Out!! (above, as somehow fortuitously predicted by today’s Onion news), which they’ve dated for May 18th. This comes alongside other remade franchises like Excitebots, a new racing game from in its ‘Excite‘ (-bike, -Truck) series, due April 20th. (more…)
A new documentary titled Punched Out!!: The Mike Tyson Story, which follows the legendary boxer’s career from his debut as a challenger to the infamous DREAM FIGHT!! against Little Mac in 1987, will premiere at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival.
Ten of Tyson’s most well-known opponents are interviewed in the film, with Von Kaiser, Soda Popinski, Don Flamenco, King Hippo, and others reminiscing about the boxer’s career…
The film is premiering in the SXSW Film Festival’s documentary competition alongside Exciting Bikes, a documentary that explores many of the unanswered questions about motocross races of the 1980s, including the mystery of why the track was sometimes blue.
The best bit, though, is buried in the middle:
Tyson himself admits that it was his incessant blinking—the only time he showed any weakness in the ring—that ultimately lead to his demise.
As I brew up my own real life version of the above and prepare for the day, my morning scroll through the App Store has alerted me to the fact that Taito has just brought its much-beloved culinary mini-game collection Cooking Mama to the iPhone.
A quick run through has shown that at first glance it’s every bit as well played with a finger as with a stylus — I managed to prepare a silver medal shrimp gyoza plate that was going wonderfully until I oversteamed them at the end.
The move comes just a few days after Taito made the jump to the platform with an emulated version of the original arcade Space Invaders [App Store], and, as with that, Cooking Mama comes at a premium price ($6.99 here, $4.99 for Invaders) — I haven’t decided yet if that’s a console game maker’s naivete of the tooth-and-nail App Store economy, or well-deserved confidence in the name-brand power of its franchises.
A new indie PC music development I’m keeping a close eye on: Thinking Studios’ Raycatcher, which looks like a menage spawn between fan favorite Audiosurf (for its dynamically generated play), Newtonica (for its in-bound color matching), and Cyclomite, the InstantAction game from Stubbs the Zombie creator Wideload (for its flat-field spinning).
The demo currently offered by Thinking doesn’t give you a full sense of how it will eventually play (there’s no mp3 support, and you can’t even get really clever and try to test its mettle by sneaking in Animal Collective songs by renaming the demo mp3s in the data folder), but watching the video above should illuminate things, as it were (at least, until the RIAA/YouTube mutes the music).
Harrison ‘Volpin‘ Krix’s next trick, after creating one of the best fan-made games props we’ve ever seen with his Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device? As he has previously mentioned, a trip into Rapture, with a full scale version of BioShock‘s Big Daddy suit.
If it’s even half as good as this Adam syringe — the same used by Little Sister to extract and ingest the genetic enhancer for reprocessing — then we’re in for quite a treat.
Straight from the digital hardcore pinball underground: HyperPin forum admin BadBoyBill shows off his latest “side project,” a supersized dual LCD monitor cab-in-the-making that takes 3D pinball sim Future Pinball to some mind-boggling new level.
If you were fooled (as I was) into thinking the cartoon fan vid that made the music blog rounds a few days ago was official, you’ve missed out: Röyksopp’s actual debut video for their forthcoming Junior album is this glorious Reuben Sutherland-directed number which does real-life Space Invaders better than anything I’ve ever seen.
Sutherland’s no stranger to games invasions: he was behind two fantastic ad spots for Insomniac’s PS3 shooter Resistance, both of which can be spotted at his demo reel site.
Ed Stern is a senior games designer at Splash Damage, the UK studio that made Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. In this wide-ranging conversation we discuss the fluke of luck that was the original Enemy Territory game, and why originality might not be the best thing for game designers to pursue.
So let’s talk about games, in the first of my quaint fireside chats with developers. I will have already set the scene for readers by now, via some introductory text, so let’s plunge in. You’re known as senior games designer at Splash Damage…
Ed Stern: Yes, I worked on both the Enemy Territory games. I’m always a bit baffled by job titles. There is some standardisation of that stuff across the industry now, but the reality of the job from one studio to the next could be radically different. It’s much the same in TV or the film industry, “assistant director” might mean the guy who had incredible input to the film, or he might just have sat in the trailer doing paperwork. Game designer is a pretty general catch-all, every artist and coder and tester is helping designing the game too…
But you, at least, had some design input with the big break for Splash Damage, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a game that was enormously popular. A huge game for a very small company?
Stern: Well it was the result of a huge amount of work by Splash Damage, very little of it done by me. Splash Damage is Paul Wedgwood’s company, and much of it his graft. But it was also the consequence of a huge amount of luck, without the excellent intervention of Id Software and Activision we would never have got to work on the game. And sometimes that good fortune feels grossly unfair.
I keep hearing about people evidently considerably more talented than me who have been working in the industry for years and never seen a game released. Nothing wrong with their work, just bad luck with publishers or the business side of things. I feel pretty lucky to have had two, OK, arguably one and a half games shipped in my seven years, and have both of them be kindly received. (more…)
