Developer David A Smith sends in this two part look back at his work on 1987 Mac adventure The Colony, a game that would take MacWorld’s Best Adventure Game of the Year award, and would spur a fortuitous meeting with Tom Clancy. Says Smith:
The video is a bit rough and focuses on the challenges of getting real time 3D on very slow machines, but you might find it entertaining. It is in two parts, separated by a system crash – code decays as it ages.
This led to a gig building a virtual set for the movie The Abyss with Jim Cameron, which turned into Virtus Walkthough in 1990. I also met Tom Clancy who contacted me while he was playing the game. He never asked for hints – just cussed me out. The game was somewhat … difficult. We later founded Red Storm Entertainment together.
As I mentioned in my guide to the 2009 IGF, Jakub ‘Amanita‘ Dvorsky’s latest Flash adventure Machinarium is the natural evolution from his earlier Samorost games: as intricate and expressive as those games were, but now mechanically more complex, with the addition of inventory-based puzzles, and more focused on the navigation through the world, rather than rotely pointing and clicking to progress.
Dvorsky has uploaded the latest look at the game and (minor spoilers aside), it’s a must-watch, and drives home why my bet is on Machinarium making a number of top 2009 lists.
Not content to let Olly Moss have all the fun with his ongoing series of classic Penguin book design inspired videogame covers, the Something Awful forums have started their own thread which, when I checked yesterday, hadn’t quite produced Something Amazing, but now is up to some 23 pages of jaw-dropping work, particularly those above.
Not everyone picked up on Moss’s proclivity to zero in on a single game-defining visual pun (the TF2 and Killer 7 covers which nail the style over the substance), but all are quite gorgeous in their own right.
Massive bonus points to any developer/publisher with moxy enough to take the meme to its logical end and let stuff like this propogate retail shelves by the end of 2009.
In a few more months the DSi will arrive in Europe, and this is something that I view with dread. It is, in part, because Nintendo’s incremental handheld improvement campaign has so far cost me more than a brace of PS3s (as any other victim of the evolution from GBA to Afterburnered GBA to SP to Micro to Original DS to Lite can testify), and I’d promised myself I’d stay on the wagon this time.
A bigger blow, however, is that the DSi’s single biggest strength – the ability to download and store games – is the final nail in the coffin of something very dear to me: cartridges.
They have a practical appeal, of course – more scratch-proof and less likely to get used as coasters than CDs – but that isn’t their magic. Their magic, or rather their alchemy, is that they change the nature of the thing you plug them into. A GBA on its own isn’t a games machine. It’s an elaborate gizmo for showing a little picture of its own logo.
Plug a cartridge in and it still isn’t a games machine. It becomes an Advance Wars Machine, or a Superstar Saga Machine, or a Metroid Fusion Machine. The cart becomes a physical component of the whole, changing it from something with potential but no function to something with a pure, specific purpose.
Which means that my Favourite Console Ever (this week) is my Rhythm Tengoku Machine, which I hand-built myself out of a GBA Micro and a much travelled import cart of Nintendo’s rhythmic masterpiece. Move over, Ben Heckendorn. (more…)
By now the audience is deeply divided over whether the iPhone’s I Love Katamari hit or miss its rolling target, even after an update took great strides at correcting much of its control issues (Takahashi himself, for whatever it’s worth, told me in 2007 that the original’s symmetrical dual-analog control was an inseparable feature of the game: draw your own conclusions about his non-involvement with later versions from PSP to Xbox 360 and on).
But I was very pleased to wake up to a new update that adds an even more essential omission from its first release: the Exquisite Collection book of everything you’ve rolled up in the course of the game. It’s always been my favorite part of the series (outside We Love‘s solar system view, which I still maintain is just about one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever interacted with [no luck finding a YouTube video/flickr pic]).
There’s something so essentially humanistic about its encyclopedic list of every object in the universe (well, you know, give or take), and it’s always reminded me of a particular favorite childhood book, Words (viewable online, somewhat akwardly, here) — part of the Little Golden Books series, and a primer on what it means to be a person on Earth.
Not to insinuate that it’s worth purchasing the game for that alone, and I Love‘s book is necessarily more brief than its console counterparts, but I’m happy to see Namco continuing to bolster the game with new, and unmissable, features.
Spotted via the now regularly useful VG Arts tumblr, LucasForums user ‘Laserschwert’s attempt to scan classic LucasArts adventure box covers and manuals and turn them into clean, poster-sized reproductions for printing and hanging:
I’ve always been a fan of both painted artworks/posters and the classic LucasArts adventure games, and so I’m trying to preserve those classic artworks by Steve Purcell, Bill Eaken and the likes, cleaning them up, painting out overlaying text or stickers, plus taking the extra step to make these babies printable in poster size (or make them work as posters AT ALL).
Fantastic work done on Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Sam and Max, and (best of all) Day of the Tentacle.
The remix is by Japan’s premier chiptune group YMCK, part of their selection done for Skip’s downloadable ‘Art Style’ game PicoPict that went live at the end of January.
Cartridge went to a lot of hard work to both earn and rip the tune, and it was worth it: it’s almost single handedly sold me on picking up the game myself as soon as I can.
Chiptune musician Simon Mattison describes his latest ep, Leaves, in an only partially decipherable poem:
the result of a unique tradition
returns to be is a 56k modem.
a free impro(bable) session
is author’s interest in high style groovy arcade
planets,
all-in-all, loads of a label.
but very-very deep and quality.
has a young electronic music spectrum
in high style and smooth sound carpets
But what you need to know: it’s nicely dub-influenced bleeps, done up on LittleGPTracker, a version of littlesounddj for obscure Korean handheld GP2X.
For other stylistically left-field chip music, try Bud Melvin, particularly the 657,644 album found on his site, who regularly overlays his Game Boy music with live banjo which, for all its anachronism, actually works. See especially Sun Salutation and Gajanana, two tracks written for a never-created Game Boy Color game based on the adventures of Hindu elephant god Ganesha (!).
I’ve got a heavy fondness for all games (and all things) Lego, so this morning’s announcement that TT Games is returning with a new DS game that skips the license and explores Lego’s toy history comes as a very welcome surprise.
TT is partnering with Hellbent Games (who have previously primarily been support-side, helping to bring games like Supreme Commander to the Xbox 360) to create Lego Battles, in which you’ll team up players from the classic Lego Castle, Lego Pirates and Lego Space series to “build their own Lego bases and battle teams” — though just how hasn’t yet been explained.
Beyond there, there’s still more TT/Lego in the works — rumored to be a Harry Potter game — and Netdevil is still plugging away at the forthcoming Lego Universe MMO.
Until that officially opens its doors, though, you can get a taste of online collaborative building/demolishing via Blockland — a game that shed its trademarkable skin shortly after its first release, but is still plugging along with its generic definitely-not-Lego colored blocks.
More brilliant iPhone news for the day: in a new interview with excellent UK portable site Pocket Gamer, HandCircus developer Simon Oliver has told the site that 2009 will see the return of Rolando, one of Offworld’s top 20 games of the past year, and certainly amongst the top tier of games for the platform, as well as more original works:
I can’t say too much about this now, but you’ll see some more activity on the Rolando front in 2009, and I’ve got a couple of new game ideas bubbling away at concept stage right now. I look forward to sharing them with you later on in the year!
Oliver says he’s still got “a ton of ideas waiting to get explored” with the game that didn’t make it into its debut, and if you haven’t played that debut yet, it’s time to do so now [iTunes link] (or, for the frugal, have a go with the free Lite version that publisher ngmoco has just announced is “coming v.soon“).
