In early December, Offworld debuted a track off Daniel Pemberton‘s then-forthcoming collection of his contributions to Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet, with the ragtime/big band turntablism of ‘Horny Old Man.’
Since then, the album — Little Big Music: Musical Oddities From And Inspired By LittleBigPlanet — has been properly released to iTunes [link], and, as was noted in early February, LittleBigPlanet‘s soundtrack has been nominated for the UK’s BAFTA award for best original score, alongside Assassin’s Creed, Dead Space, Fable II, Fallout 3, and Metal Gear Solid 4.
In celebration of the work that Sonica‘s Mat Clark, Media Molecule’s own Kenny Young and Daniel put into the game’s stellar soundtrack, Pemberton has given Offworld another exclusive track for your downloading or streaming needs.
This time it’s the haunted toy-box pop of ‘The Appliance of Science,’ one of the tracks from the game originally available on TVPOPMUZIK, Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra‘s debut album which also features ‘Pip Pop Plop,’ Pemberton’s excellent original theme song for Offworld fave Brit-com Peep Show (and is also available on iTunes and amazon.mp3).
In a very nice feature over at Kotaku (that I’m honestly a bit jealous didn’t come out of Offworld!), Michael McWhertor talks with artist Kristyn Hume and programmer Randall Furino (of, it turns out, Lego Universe developer NetDevil) for a behind the scenes look at the creation of Wrestle Jam, the faux-NES game played in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
The game is of course inspired by the NES’s Pro Wrestling, and is actually fully playable, with “an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks,” all put together in some two weeks.
Hit the link for more on the game, and on Infinity Ward’s reaction to getting a similar Call of Duty shoutout in the film.
Like Andy Helms’ Dude-a-Day dudes, Tom ‘Plan to Fail‘ Rhodes’ Old Game Characters series does up classic games guys, gals, and bubble bobblers in his own nicely Mad/Cracked-inspired comic style.
Click through for more Mario, Street Fighter, Half-Life, and Starfox interpretations.
Shortly before Offworld launched, EA let slip a limited beta of another in its very forward-looking campaigns with Mirror’s Edge 2D. That it was a cute Flash mini-game meant to promote the release of the proper console/PC game wasn’t much to celebrate, that they’d specifically partnered with an indie developer to create it was.
In this case, it was Brad Borne of BorneGames, who’d already worked up a name for himself with his twoentries in the Fancy Pants Adventures series, a smart pick given their single-minded focus on momentum and stylish platforming.
The original trial only included a single level, but now EA has officially launched a new full version of the game, which is fully networked with leaderboards for top Story Mode and Time Trial players, and an unlockable ‘Baddie Rush’ mode, should you find all of the game’s evidence files.
It’s wicked stuff, exactly the kind of free-running you’d expect from both Faith and Borne, and just the kind of indie success story the scene needs much more of.
Well this was unexpected: Hothead Games, the Vancouver studio behind Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness adventure game and Deathspank, the new adventure game from Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert, have announced they’ll be collaborating with indie devs to help bring their games to new platforms.
First out of the gates will be Jon Blow’s Braid, which was recently confirmed to be coming to the PC. Hothead says it will be both porting and exclusively publishing the new Mac version (presumably via the studio’s upstart games portal Greenhouse).
Also on the slate is a new Windows version of Twisted Pixel’s excellent recent Xbox Live Arcade action/puzzler and IGF finalistThe Maw, which will include “special features to make the crowd-pleaser compatible with multiple as-of-yet-unannounced digital distribution platforms and services.”
Buried deep within a lengthy press release detailing this year’s lineup for its PlayStation Portable, Sony has confirmed rumors that both Harmonix’s Rock Band and Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet are on their way to the handheld.
Sony hasn’t shared many details of its portable Sackboy experience, other than to say that it will offer “the same play, create, share experience for gamers on-the-go, in addition to brand new levels and environments specifically created for the platform.”
Of Harmonix’s addition, titled Rock Band Unplugged, Sony says the game will “leverage the PSP system’s Wi-Fi capabilities and becomes the first PSP game to include a fully-featured in-game store for downloadable content in the North American and Europeans markets.”
Elsewhere in the release, Sony has announced a new “lilac” colored version of the PSP “for female gamers,” (surely just what they were waiting for) to be bundled with a Hannah Montana rhythm/dance game, and a new Assassin’s Creed pack at the launch of an portable version of Ubisoft’s game later this year.
Via the Guardian’s games blog, Sony Online designer Sheri Graner Ray and Metaplace’s Raph Koster have set the wheels in motion on The Pub Game, which asks you to create a hypothetical pub/restaurant as created by any given game designer.
Examples:
If Sid Meier created this restaurant, first we’d have to invent the Chinese, and the Koreans and all the other Asian cultures before we could invent the food that would then be served in the restaurant…
If Will Wright created this restaurant, we’d have to continually monitor what each employee was doing, instructing them when to cook, when to clean and when to go to the bathroom, but eventually, it would burn down anyway.. and if it didn’t a natural disaster would occur to make sure it was destroyed.
If Richard Garriott created this restaurant, it would have been started by him and a number of his friends. At the restaurant, the customers could harvest the grain, mill it into flour, mix it and bake it into bread… which of course would have nothing to do with anything on the menu.
Very much enjoyed this latest entry in Duncan Fyfe’s “Domestic City” series, which imagines a not too distant future in which Spelunky still rules, OK and Cactus is the new Malkmus:
Emily’s posters were affixed by thumb tacks to her dorm room drywall. The posters, collected by Emily and her roommate, had been free — sort of, they had stolen them — and promoted the release dates of games like Castle Crashers and PixelJunk Eden.
When Emily left for class every day, she always threw on her white, faded and hand screened Minotaur China Shop t-shirt. It was the only game shirt that she owned and so she wore it as much as possible.
The most interesting thing about Yoshio Ishi’s Cursor*10 games isn’t its multi-single-player conceit that sees you playing cooperatively with the ghosts of all of your previous nine lives, though it’s hard to deny that that is a wickedly mind-bending concept.
It’s that Ishi’s managed to counter-balance all of the would-be help from those failed attempts (reminding you where not to move your mouse) with increasingly difficult or coordinated actions as you progress futher up its levels that make even your mistakes not good enough mistakes.
Ishi’s just done the second in the series and I’ll be frank and say I might just not ever have the gumption to get past that four-switch floor, but still think 2nd will likely be one of the smartest Flash games of the year.
If this is your first exposure to Ishi, don’t miss his much older monochromatic set of more literally Neko (cat) games.
