One of 2008’s most pleasant surprises was just how approachable and engrossing Rare’s N64 original Banjo Kazooie felt on its Xbox Live Arcade release — it ended up being one of my year’s most played XBLA games.
Now, in an expected but still surprise announcement, Rare has updated their ‘Banjo Blog’ with news that a similarly hi-rez version of its sequel, Banjo Tooie, is headed to the service in April, “appropriate since Easter is the designated time for hunting multi-coloured eggs.”
Fans of the original will also be happy to hear that, finally, the game’s original “Stop ‘n’ Swop” feature will be properly implemented, saying “the Stop ’n’ Swop items collected in Banjo-Kazooie will ‘magically’ appear in Tooie, resulting in… well, you’ll just have to find out.”
Though I honestly find its exercise routine too broken up to feel genuinely satisfying (and have for some time instead been recommending — in all seriousness! — Respondesign’s PC/PS2/Xbox app Yourself Fitness), there’s great potential for harnessing and expanding on Wii Fit‘s connectedness to push it into essential territory (competing against friends? local/national challenges?) that to date has gone underserved.
But it appears in Japan, at least, Nintendo’s making good — andriasang files a translated story saying the company is partnering with NEC, Panasonic and Hitachi with a new Wii channel that will send a user’s Wii Fit data to the professional health industry to receive ‘health instruction’ and connect with a recently launched NEC ‘mobile health service.’
The site also says the new ‘Wii Fit Body Check Channel’ will connect with DS pedometer-enabled health app Aruite Wakaru Seikatsu Rhythm DS (which already has been used to transfer Miis for portable personality) to share mobile and local exercise data — here’s hoping all this interconnectivity makes its way stateside soon.
It’s apparently been too long since I last checked in with NeoGAF’s ongoing challenge collecting fan-made magazine ads for Sega/Platinum Games’ upcoming duo-tone Wii brawler MadWorld — I’d missed ‘geek’s fantastic paint-by-number photoshoppery that says everything an ad needs to say about the game (check back to my first half of 2009 Wii/DS outlook for more MadWorld specifics).
The latest in Olly Moss’s Penguin-inspired Videogame Classics series distills Freeman’s essence, rightly, as a game about “crowbars and teleporting.” My favorite part (having briefly moved away from the N64 now) is the top-left iconography showing the platform where the game originated.
One of my most heartfelt 2009 wishes: that Moss continue this as a regularly updated set.
Particularly notable is the game’s “Ode to Ancestors: 8th Movement,” a medley of parts of Beethoven’s 5th, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah, and “Spring” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which Bruno calls “such an absurd juxtaposition that I can’t help but laugh at it every time I listen,” its overt references to Neal Hefti’s Batman theme, and an 8-bit subversion of the Pig Mask Army’s leitmotif.
As before, it’s fantastic, MP3-supported stuff — Bruno’s one of the few that seems both qualified and passionate enough to take us on these smart sonic journeys.
Unless it’s my own over-dense prose, that is. As you may or may not have been experiencing, since launch our RSS feed has had a bit of a rough time properly converting line breaks, resulting in a single, near-unreadable mashed-up paragraph.
But no more: our own resident renaissance man Rob has finally kicked out the last of the feed gremlins and restored order, so you can now (re-)subscribe with confidence. Thanks to everyone who stuck that out.
I’ve also been getting an increasing number of emails and anonymous comments that some of you are having problems logging in to leave comments — we’re currently working on issues there and will let you know when those wrinkles have been ironed.
Let me know if you’re experiencing any other issues putting a damper on your stay here via the comments (you know, if you can) or that send-a-tip email at top right.
In its final spin-off awards announcement, the Independent Games Festival has named its finalists in the IGF Mobile competition, covering the best in games for the DS, mobile phones and, in partnership with oft-blogged publisher ngmoco, the iPhone.
The list, happily, reads like a who’s-who of some of Offworld’s favorites over the past several months (and indeed I took an earlier look at the full list of entrants in December): iPhone tower defense hit Fieldrunners, musical lover’s quarrel art-piece Ruben and Lullaby, Secret Exit’s rope-tied Zen Bound, and recent Offworld favorite cubist platformer Edge.
The Mobile competition this year is offering $30,000 in prize money, and the winners, as with its sister competitions, will be announced at the awards ceremony this March 25th (with a special Mobile conference awards show the night prior) during the 2009 Game Developers Conference.
Hit the jump for the full list of finalists and links to our previous coverage on the entrants. (more…)
New musical awesomeness spotted via ‘Dong’s excellent EngRish Games blog: Pause, the “music label and community with a focus on unorthodox forms of 8-bit music yet prone to various other styles,” has started a separate section called +PLUS, dedicated solely to releasing free soundtracks from a variety of indie games.
The five-strong list includes not only ‘Dong’s own soundtrack to his excellent abstract freeware shooter Nanosmiles, but an orchestral album for Studio Eres’ similarly abstract tower defense game Immortal Defense (one of my favorites of the genre), EMH Soft’s Endgame: Singularity, Arue’s Another Bound Neo, and, best of all, Disasterpeace’s short EP for Offworld favorite Rescue: The Beagles.
All are top quality releases well worth a download, as is most of the rest of the Pause catalog, which together should tide you over for a good long while.
My shameful admission: I have wasted more time today than I’ll willingly fess up to watching this video on repeat, completely transfixed by nothing more than: pulsing circle, moving checkerboard, strobing Hello Kitty, shifting rainbow bar, strobing Hello Kitty backward, file browser, sunburst heart. And again, and again.
The video is a 2-player live demo of Clément ‘Pikilipita’ Cordier’s PS24VJ, a custom-coded homebrew kit for ‘video jockeys’ to import their own graphics and video via a USB stick, and cut and manipulate from each to each using the standard DualShock controller, and — in the hands of its creator, at least — it’s way more mesmerizing than it should be.
Interestingly, PS24VJ is the third iteration of Cordier’s tools that span back to both a Game Boy Advance version, where you’re limited to his built-in graphics but freed up by its pocket size, and Pikix, a later version for the Linux-based Korean handheld GP2X.
Cordier is selling PS24VJ as donation-ware (contact him with an offer), and custom-flashed GBA carts appear to still be available alongside standalone ROM files (Pikix is available as a free download), and, just as I’d hoped, he notes that he’s eager to work on an iPhone version with networking capabilities for multiple VJs to mix at once.
This is how I picture it: it’s 3:30am and you’ve just got off the express train back to your cramped flat after a long drunken night at a secret Kiiiiiii show or Delaware exhibi+ion, where you down a few more beers to keep the buzz alive, and that’s when your friend, er, ‘Steve’ (apparently) breaks out the Super Game Boy.
Knowing full well that his grasp of English is even more tenuous than yours with Japanese, he gives you the full play-by-play anyway, because he knows that’s what makes it so funny, and it is.
I have to imagine it this way because it’s almost impossible to get your head around otherwise. I still don’t understand why the Goomba broke the house windows to bite the pizza.
