In ongoing de-luxe WiiWare Super Meat Boy news: creator Edmund McMillen writes in to notify us that a new live-action promo video has just gone live for your perusal. He explains:
Created by a good friend of mine James Id, the teaser is a huge throw back to those early 90s animated MTV video bumpers, Liquid Television and NES video game commercials. Meat Boy screams early 90s nostalgia, so i thought it would be perfect to do a teaser in the same vein.
And it is! On top of that, pop-culture-papercraft-mega-site CubeCraft is also celebrating the upcoming release with a roll-your-own Meat Boy Cubee that I’m promptly adding to my stacks of to-do folding just as soon as I get this printer up and running again.
In other cockle-warming developments, IGN forum user ‘beundertaker’ celebrates the end of the console wars with this set of Valentine’s lovely comics showing all competing consoles just getting along. My favorite is above: the sickly red-ringed Xbox 360 getting a little chicken soup for the soul from his friend Wii and PS3.
Also included in the update from yesterday’s Weekly Famitsu, which revealed that a downloadable DS Katamari Damacy block game would be released in March, was news that another cult Namco hit was on its way to both current Nintendo downloadable services.
The magazine brought news that both Mr. Driller World, a new WiiWare game with 24 new stages, and the frighteningly named SekuttohamureruHoriHoriAction Mr. Driller, a new DSiWare exclusive version of the game with a 17-stage mission mode, time attack mode, and Dristone mode, will be released next week on February 24th and 25th, respectively.
The Driller series, which is by all rights actually quite fantastic, has never caught on in the west as much as it has in Japan, but with good reason: the U.S. has been chronically deprived of all of the advances the franchise took throughout the early ’00s, from the Game Boy Advance’s Mr. Driller G and its first stirrings of story behind the madness, to Mr. Driller A, with a morphing virtual pet fed by the blocks you drilled, to all of the various plays on the standard arcade drilling seen in its Japan-only theme-park styled GameCube version, Mr. Driller: Drill Land.
Even Namco’s first opportunity to introduce just the Dristone mode to the U.S. (which, instead of continually counting down your oxygen level, drains it on a per-drill basis, for a vastly more strategic and less arcade-like game) was unceremoniously stripped from DS title Drill Spirits in order to have it ready for the hardware launch (the later European and Japanese releases retained it).
Instead, the first the U.S. had seen of Driller since the DS launch was the Xbox Live Arcade version, Mr. Driller Online, which, while retaining some of the excellent multiplayer race modes first introduced in the import-only Game Boy Advance versions, was crippled by buggy network code, with a patch that fixed the online play coming too late to avoid further sullying the Driller brand.
But there’s still hope that Namco might be ready to fix its prior mistakes: copyright/linkedin super-snoop blog superannuation recently noted that the publisher recently filed a trademark for Mr. Driller W, which would seemingly line up nicely with the WiiWare release, and will hopefully start to course-correct its reception in the west.
Having sated the core gamer demographic with the tilt-enabled Qix-meets-Trauma CenterDr. Awesome, the laser-line dual-analog shooter Dropship, physics stacker Topple, and, of course, strategic roller Rolando, publisher ngmoco is taking a much more casual bent with its next slate of games.
But first, a quick diversion: via its Twitter feed we learn that in addition to a free level-pack update to Rolando (which has also finally seen the addition of a free Lite version [App Store link]), Hand Circus is hard at work with a proper sequel to the game.
But back to the casuals: in addition to the previously coveredTopple sequel and letter-battler Word Fu (from Cambridge studio Demiurge, who previously have played supportive roles in the development of games like Mass Effect and BioShock), ngmoco has announced Touch Pets Dogs, a virtual pet sim from Stumptown Game Machine.
Disappointingly, while Touch Pets is already being brushed off as “just” a Nintendogs clone (as Rolando was with Loco Roco), it’s well worth pointing out that Stumptown head Andrew Stern was well ahead of the pack as one of the designers behind PF.Magic’s original Petz series: specifically, the 1995 release of Dogz and Catz (a franchise now in the hands of Ubisoft).
Stern was also the man behind 2005’s groundbreaking interactive story Façade — which saw players take a third-wheel dinner-date role in the midst of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’-level marital tension. As it turns out, the AI development for Façade is a key part of what Stern is expanding upon for Touch Pets, as he explained to Gamasutra in an excellent recent interview, and promises to make interactions with the pets richer than competing pet sims, certainly those already on the iPhone.
That, in addition to its integrated social scene (players can meet with friend’s dogs, and the game generates a story-like “Dog Feed”) makes this, however casually aimed, another of my most anticipated iPhone titles.
If you weren’t following the absolute scandal earlier last year, here’s the précis: Blizzard officially announce Diablo III, one of the longest awaited sequels in PC history, and the internet does explode. Blizzard then drop the first images, and thereupon unleash the deafening whoosh of a few million gamers collectively sucking breath through their teeth, because: the game known best for its monochromatic catacombs and hell-fire lit pentagrams is full of colors, rainbows even.
And behind it all, Blizzard just laughed, countering with new screenshots of unicorns shitting deadly Love Spree attacks, and distributing internal team logo shirts (via MTV) that bleed sunshine and lollipops.
So, now that you’re caught up, naturally, you want one, and NerdyShirts abides with a reproduction version of those self-same shirts for a low, low price, so you, too, can show the world just how your hardcore heart behaves.
A few days ago I held my breath, squared my shoulders and stepped through a magic portal. It sucked me forward through space and time, turned winter to summer and day to night. It also beeped because I’d forgotten to take my keys out of my pocket.
And now, having had three dinners in a row, and then three breakfasts in a row, I’m in Australia. Ten thousand and five miles across the globe from London; as far as it’s possible to be from base and still get a decent coffee. There should be jet-lag and there should be culture-shock (if only on the basis of how goddam cheery everyone is), but there isn’t. Instead there’s this: I just came home.
Not physically, virtually. After a happy holiday with another guild on another server, I recently put in a character transfer request so I could go back and join my original guild in their assault on Northrend. Fifteen quid for Blizzard to copy a heap of shamefully low stats (level 69 still, somehow, no raid gear, basic mount) from one World of Warcraft server to another. From one identical copy of the world to another. (more…)
Need another reason to pick up a freshly-announced DSi? Here’s what we know via the grey market underground of early-breaking news from Japan’s Weekly Famitsu magazine: on March 25th, the DSi’s downloadable game service DSiWare will see the addition of a new 500 Point ($5) puzzle game from Namco Bandai based on everybody’s favorite Katamari Damacy.
Instead of the stylus-rolling game everyone thought they wanted, though, Korogashi Puzzle Katamari Damacy will be a block puzzle game where players will make “sets” of the same “things” you’ve rolled up into stars a million times before, which then are, as best I can tell, ejected out into a black hole. (As 1UP smartly points out, the game appears to be a re-skinned version of Namco’s underdog puzzler Pac-Attack.)
Last week we brought news that Call of Duty creators Infinity Ward were working with Cursebird programmer Richard ‘Fantastic‘ Henry to bring.. well, something games related to Twitter. Grand notions started to run through our heads, hoping for something on the level with friend of Offworld Tom Armitage’s brilliant Left 4 Dead Twitter-bots.
Well, the project has officially launched, and it’s… well, not quite what we were expecting, but a good lesson on crowd-sourcing, I suppose. The #mw2 project is a way for Call of Duty designers — currently at work on Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to the best selling CoD4 [aka the first FPS that’s ever really, really sucked me in to multiplayer action with brilliant lite-RPG underpinnings] — to talk with the community about what they’d like to see in the new game.
At heart it’s a simple suggestion box that could’ve served its purpose on any stock forum, but it’s smartest twist is in letting the #mw2 community give a thumbs up or down to any individual suggestion, and then rank the best commenters on its own leaderboard, where you can then link back to their original tweets.
So it might not be any sort of real-world extension of the game as we’d originally hoped, but still a good effort for bringing developers and their audience closer together in this new “games are services” landscape.
The Paleofuture blog, dedicated entirely to looking at the future of predictive articles past, found this feature from a 1982 issue of ‘Electronic Games’ (the first U.S. all-games magazine) which does a surprisingly accurate job of describing the developments that would come in the following two decades.
Though it wasn’t quite prescient enough to see games moving into homes and the subsequent quiet death of the arcade itself, below are some of the choicest quotes, with links to the wishlist items that would essentially come true:
Look for arcades to be constructed along the lines of big-budget science fiction movie sets, with special effects a major attraction of the games. For example, there might be chairs that rock back and forth, swing from side to side or swivel a full 360 degrees…
The arcade games of the next century may not only be activated by voice command, but conceivably even by thought – at least in a sense. Something akin to galvanic skin-monitoring devices attached to the gamer’s arm, perhaps in the form of a bracelet, could measure emotional response and even act as a triggering device.
Nintendo has announced that its successor to the DS Lite, the DSi, will be getting an April 5th launch in the U.S. Originally somewhat panned for being “just” a DS with additional cameras and an SD card slot, I can safely say after spending several months with the import version that it’s absolutely worth the price of an upgrade.
Even though we haven’t yet seen any original retail games that fully make use of its new features, the downloadable DSiWare store has already proven itself with the addition of a number of new ‘Art Style’ games and free community based animation software, and Nintendo promises much tighter Wii/DSi integration in the future as it makes the standard SD card slots its defacto storage unit.
Even better, Nintendo has announced that its brilliant music game Rhythm Heaven, the DS sequel to the Game Boy Advance original — itself the subject of a recent Offworld One More Go column — will be launching alongside the hardware: the first the West will see of one of the company’s essential series.
The DSi will launch in blue and black on April 5th at a price of $169.99, $40 above the standard DS Lite price.
