GamesIndustry.biz carried a short blurb this morning on Paradox Interactive — the Stockholm based publisher of primarily PC strategy titles like Galactic Civilizations, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron — launching a new sub-label, Mezmer Games, specifically for indie games.
In itself that might not have immediately turned my head, but then I spied three words which tickled a long since dormant part of my brain: Stalin vs. Martians. It turns out the game will be one of the first to get the Mezmer treatment, and it’s one I hadn’t thought of since nearly a year ago when Russian developer Dreamlore Games first announced it.
If you think there’s some part of you that’s mis-reading the title, you’re not: the light and accessible PC arcade/real-time-strategy game is precisely what it says on the ration-tin, and gloriously so. Dreamlore spoke to friends of Offworld Rock, Paper, Shotgun last year after the first reveal, and explained (?) how the game came to be:
Obviously we were drunk a little bit and that’s how it all started. No vodka was involved though. Only rakia. We were drinking beer and at the certain point imagined that we are Serbs and continued our conversation after buying a bottle of the magical South Slavic drink. Perhaps it had some impact on the further discussion, so actually right now I’m starting to think of Stalin vs Martians as a Russian-Serbian co-production. Sort of.
The final shape of things and the final version of the concept came later, when we were 100% sober (believe us or not), but at the very beginning alcohol had its part. And was an important tool for the breakthrough of the Serbian game development industry, since Stalin vs Martians is perhaps the most groundbreaking Serbian computer game ever.
Even more wonderfully, at the same time, designer Alexander Shcherbakov also told EVO Gamer that the game would “use Chinese pop music in the soundtrack ‘as our tests showed that combination of mandapop/cantopop and Stalin game makes brains explode instantly. And that’s exactly what we want to achieve with our project.'”
Mezmer doesn’t currently have a projected release date for the game beyond Q2 of this year, but they do have an additional screenshot showing the playable Stalin unit himself, standing some 200 feet tall above his units as he did in real life, and I think that’s all I really needed to sate myself until it arrives.
For the latest in its series talking to all of the 2009 IGF finalists, Gamasutra caught up with Mazapan’s Kian Bashiri, the man behind 2008’s most widely recognized game-meme, You Have To Burn The Rope.
Up, somewhat controversially, for this year’s Innovation award, what’s interesting is Bashiri admits to a certain amount of second guessing on whether they went too far with the joke and should have played it even more straight:
Both me and Henrik think the best kind of humor is the kind where you’re not really sure if it is supposed to be funny at all. I mean, a joke is often funnier if the one who tells it stays in character and says it with a completely serious tone of voice. That’s what we tried to do with the game and everything that surrounds it.
I think that kind of backfired, though; as a result, it is vague and unfocused, and we went way to deep with the silly joke, with the game manual, walkthrough, etc. We never meant for it to be some kind of in-joke or a meme.
So, yeah, there are numerous ways I think I could have made it more focused without ruining it. For one, I should have added a way to die. If there was a variable outcome, it would be more of a game, and the more interesting theme of interactivity and false choices would have been more obvious.
The full interview’s got more smart talk of interest on storytelling and interaction, and on the ‘Still Alive’ inspiration for Burn The Rope‘s end-credits song.
While yesterday’s Pac-Man ghost lamps might never see the light of day, now we definitely have something to nip at with our Pac-potholders: John at BBG has dug up these “iBoo” ghost speakers, adding “it’s hard not to feel that a couple are required, not from the perspective of stereophonic completion, but from the casual joy-infusion of whimsical interior design.”
Update: The Woot-ers have sent word that the T-shirt is now back in stock via this link, which is nice! But we’re still left scrambling for the inspirational sculpture, despite Ridl’s best efforts.
Though obviously — because it’s not 15 minutes after the T-shirt was first posted — today’s Woot shirt is long since sold out, Joel Drakxxx Rose’s ‘Battle Fungale’ is still a nicely baroque homage to the Mushroom Kingdom, but something deeper’s been troubling me. Despite the years of art history education for which I’m still paying the piper, I can’t at all place what the image is a tribute to — surely I’m mentally misplacing some lost European statuary?
Matt Harding (Lead Designer/Dancing around the world guy)
alright:
Fly around in a UFO sucking rednecks and cattle onto your ship.
Anyone? Anyone?
Brad Welch (Lead Artist, future Design Director on DAH)
Is there a reason that a more adult style of humorous game is no good?!?
Doing a funny abduction game could actually be a laugh, or even doing a game that’s all sort of spoofing cliches…
I have no idea what the game would be…adult party game perhaps?!?
Dan Teasdale, now senior designer at Rock Band creator Harmonix, shares this email exchange that would launch Pandemic Studios’ cult hit franchise Destroy All Humans, beginning with what must have seemed like the most obvious unexplored idea in gaming. And, curiously, the thread shows how easily the idea almost immediately got derailed into conspiratorial territory before coming back that perfect germ.
And yes, Teasdale means Matt Harding is that ‘hello, I’ve got some 30+ million YouTube views’ dancing around the world guy. Fantastic stuff, and, sadly, comes a month after the studio was “set free” from parent company EA and subsequently shuttered.
Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in: I honestly thought last time would be the last Noby Noby Boy post until its official release next week, but I should’ve guessed that the ‘1’ in o–1–o would signify a series, and so it did.
This one’s even more stark than the last, but I can’t help but be continually utterly transfixed.
In which Heather and friends seek out that last hidden Mui Mui in Loco Roco 2.
This one, as well as the similar Silent Hill snowball battle and Pyramid Head pop-lock dance off come via NeoGAF — where the fine art of ripping game models from non-Valve games to import them into Garry’s Mod and let madness ensue is explained — comes roundabout via our first look at what the characters from Grasshopper Manufacture’s Offworld-20 ranking Wii game No More Heroes would look like minus the cell shading.
The answer to that, coincidentally, is: fantastic (linking to Travis because he’s the safest for work). The full excruciating process is laid out here.
Like Hatsworth below, Sega/PlatinumGames’ Wii brawler MadWorld is another upcoming Nintendo-related game that instantly pushed itself to the top of my watchlist, not so much for the brutal ultraviolence, but for the deeply tongue-in-cheek ‘Running Man’ parody that lies underneath.
Platinum’s latest trailer captures most of that in style, with running Sports Night commentary accompanying the duo-tone madness behind, and director Shigenori Nishikawa (formerly part of Capcom’s Resident Evil and Dino Crisis team) recently talked at length on Platinum’s own blog about striking that balance, blithely quipping, “the first element that I put into the game was shoving a sign through an enemy’s head.”
As I mentioned in early December, one of my most anticipated games from EA’s new-found mandate to provide as much boutique new IP as it relies on its hit franchises is Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure, the forthcoming DS game designer Kyle Gray — one of the Experimental Gameplay grads that also spawned World of Goo Kyle Gabler.
While for some time we’ve known that it’ll use its dual screens to concurrently provide both a lower-screen match-3 puzzle as you take the ol’ chap Hatsworth on a platforming adventure above, just how, exactly, was somewhat of a mystery.
But EA have just published this latest trailer that explains exactly what the life of one of those monster blocks entails, and does it brilliantly in mock educational-film style: giving you all you need to know to see why it’s at the top of our DS lists.
Something Awful’s Eve Online wing, GoonSwarm, has claimed what will likely go down in internet history as its greatest victory. It was an event described in a Metafilter headline thus: “It’s as if Apple dissolved Microsoft“.
That’s an incredibly accurate diagnosis of the events of last week. Thanks to a brutal betrayal of trust by an Eve player, the Something Awful superpower has used the game’s strange organisational mechanisms to take their arch-rival’s name away from them. Band Of Brothers (BoB), once the most feared of alliances, is now gone for good. The Goon victory wasn’t a great battle, nor a tremendous war brought to an end. Instead it was an inspired defector that led to the dissolution of one of Eve‘s most significant brands. It was a classic instance of underhand warfare tactics from the real world: sabotage by a traitor, trashing vital infrastructure, and leaving the gates of the fortress unlocked.
So what does it all mean? And how did it all come to pass? What it means is that upwards of several million man hours of work have been instantly obliterated, and a relatively peaceful region of Eve Online has been plunged into fresh war. The equivalent real-world costs are almost incalculable, given the sheer number of factors involved, and the thousands of people who have contributed to BoB. But it’s safe to say that we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual investment put at risk. (more…)
