Oft-blogged indie devs Flashbang have kicked off a new Friday feature web-casting the office goings on which, from what I’ve seen so far, has included live banana eating and further discussions of lunch. But! The team promise some blurry looks at what they’re building in there:
Fridays with Flashbang! We’re going to run a webcam every Friday for your amusement. Fridays are actually our experimental days, so people will be working on all kinds of random stuff.
Though honestly just part of nVidia’s drivers that support anaglyphic 3D views in a number of games (to varying degrees of success), gamerslastwill have posted directions to add new depth specifically to Left 4 Dead, which sounds like a capital weekend project, if I can just remember what I did with my glasses after testing out Polytron’s super HYPERCUBE.
But Duncan Fyfe’s recent thoughtful write-up is easily the best piece I’ve read on the game, and (be forewarned), he doesn’t take any shortcuts or dance around the point, so take the short time to give the game a runthrough first, but go with this poignant bit by Fyfe:
Gravity Bone is a 300-page novel that ends on page 60. Because the art style is so charming and pronounced, players might think that that’s the big attraction and therefore the extent of the game’s creativity. Gravity Bone’s purpose is to manipulate expectations by cutting them short, which is why it’s effective at all. Everyone who plays Gravity Bone gets played by Gravity Bone. If you remember the debate over Portal’s shortness from a year and a half ago, the consensus was that Portal’s brevity was beneficial. Here, it’s essential.
Gamasutra’s got a nice history piece running as today’s feature on the impact of EA’s Pinball Construction Set on the industry as a whole. One of the first games with truly integrated mechanisms for user-generated content, the piece traces routes from PCS to later games like Adventure Master, Adventure Creator, GameMaker and onward to its current pinnacle: LittleBigPlanet.
As a bonus, dig that beauty of a gatefold package for the game, a relic from when EA packaged each of its titles as lovingly and thoughtfully as music albums of the day.
Just officially uploaded by Audio Dregs co-founder Eric Mast (in case you missed it on, say, the early video UMD), the video for Paza’s 8-bit remix of Beck’s ‘E-Pro’ — a project Mast took on as Wyld File, his collaborative company with art collective Paper Rad.
For more excellent — but infinitely less games-ey — Friday morning watching, see E*Rock’s video for Ratatat’s Cherry and those at the Ratatat site linked above. Or, more appropriately, ‘Kiptok’s fan-video below for Ratatat’s Imperials, which interprets the song’s brilliant over/under-water hook via glitched-up footage of Ecco, Sonic and Mario.
While Capcom is busy ramping up anticipation for its soon to be released console version of Street Fighter IV with new DLC costumes, one other fighter is making his brawling debut: Barack Obama, who will be a downloadable character not for Capcom’s official release, but Street Fighter Online Mouse Generation, the free-to-play, play-by-mouse online oddball offshoot released by Daletto earlier last year.
As seen in Gpara’s preview, the significantly beefier (and, er, toothier) Obama lets loose furious “Yes We Can” fireballs, and shares a Valentine’s Day release with bow-wrapped chocolate versions of the game’s female fighters.
Valve have just sent word that Left 4 Dead, one of Offworld’s still most-played games, will be getting its first dose of DLC this spring with the “L4D Survival Pack.” Details are still scarce, but Valve says the pack will introduce a new ‘Survival’ multiplayer game mode, as well as two new campaigns for Versus mode.
On top of that, Valve says an SDK update will be making its way to the PC around the same time, that will allow for the creation of new custom Left 4 Dead campaigns, and a ‘critic’s choice’ edition of the game will ship this spring as well, bundling the game with that Survival Pack.
Olly Moss’s countdown continues with his latest redesigned cover, this time a visual pun that says “Niko Bellic tries to live the American dream and gets dragged into a world of crime.”
After some years working without much in the way of games media attention, it’s good to see Denki striking back as the release of its debut Xbox Live Arcade game Quarrel nears. Case in point, a two part studio visit feature by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the latest of which reveals some of studio head Gary Penn’s golden rules for games making.
Penn, as I noted before, was creative director for DMA Design as it formed the first Grand Theft Auto and, more recently, helped design the Xbox 360 sandbox sleeper Crackdown, and these rules I found especially interesting:
Feel
“This is about trying to create products that feel good – they are substantial, they aren’t sloppy, the controls feel responsive, and you feel in control. But it also makes you feel good, so there’s some emotional resonance going on there. It’s not some deep meaningful need to create a game that exploits the emotions of love or hate, it’s just… hey, you know… feel something, feel good. Smile.”
Alive
“We try to make products that feel alive. And that kind of operates on two tiers – informative and attentive. You’re never in the dark for too long, the game never feels like it’s crashed, which can still happen when you get this… dead air they call it on television, it’s horrible when you get that in games. It’s making sure the game is keeping you informed at the right times, with the right kind of absorbable information. The main thing we think of is, we as developers are performers, we’re building toys, the tools of play, for players who are also performers. Performing on your own is tedious, but performing in front of an audience is much more interesting. That’s where the attentive element comes in – if the product has life, it’s evocative and attentive, it says ‘hey that was pretty cool, I like the way you did that’.
Twist
“There has to be some sort of meaningful twist in there. And that doesn’t mean it has to be wholly original, it just has to have something that distinguishes it from everything else. It can be a twist in the concept, a twist in the execution, and it has to kind of manifest throughout the product.
