The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn’t much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it’s become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night. Coincidentally, it’s Tuesday night.
A host of unsavory-looking people makes up your audience for the night. They’re all staring at you expectantly.
A fake plastic guitar lies on the ground in front of you.
Bolted to the wall is a television screen, dark and foreboding.
It’s everything I’d hoped it would be, particularly its wry version of the audience enthusiasm/performance meter, and though I haven’t had the time yet to make it all the way through my first gig, Meltsner says the game does let you play the song to completion. He also hints that there are other audience-related and item manipulation easter eggs that I’ve yet to discover: let us know what you find via the comments below.
When Metal Gear makers Kojima Productions threw together their December teaser for a new game in the franchise, speculation ran rampant and hit about every possible outcome, but among the most logical was that the team might port its strategy card-game spinoff Metal Gear Ac!d to the iPhone.
In the end, while Kojima did make a move to the iPhone, it was instead with an original game based on the latest PS3 chapter in the franchise. But, Pocket Gamer are reporting, Ac!d still is going mobile with a new port by mobile games giant Glu, along with a new graphic re-design.
This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise — the franchise recently made a move onto Nokia’s N-Gage service, and a port of Ac!d is probably not too far behind. Whether this also means — based on the performance of fellow iPhone versions of Dance Dance Revolution and Silent Hill — that an iPhone update is on the way as well is anyone’s guess, but its gameplay would be perfectly serviced by a touch interface, and it remains high on our crossed-finger list.
As I mentioned earlier last month, one of the highlights of this Christmas was Nintendo dropping a free 1000 points on every DSi owner as they debuted Japan’s selection of downloadable DS games.
As predicted, I ended up picking up DSi animation app UgokuMemoChou, Utsusu Made in Wario (which I admittedly found a bit incomprehensible [I blame my bedroom’s poor lighting]), and Art Style: Aquario — the latest in developer Skip’s Offworld-favorite series of low-bit art games that’s extended back to the GBA’s bit Generations series as well as onto the Wii. As I’d hoped, Aquario duly delivered on the series’ promise of fantastically obtuse puzzling mixed with gorgeous plinging/acoustic music.
Now Nintendo has revealed the newest batch of DSiWare coming this Wednesday, and Tiny Cartridge does an excellent job rounding up the selection. Again it’s an Art Style game that’s singing its siren song, this time PiCOPiCT (seen above), a curious mix of classic Nintendo imagery and block/pixel puzzling vaguely reminiscent of Konami’s Quarth.
I’m not 100 percent sold on its mechanics: the seemingly staccato rhythm of the first bits looks like it’ll preclude falling into any kind of proper puzzle flow, but the Bowser boss (?) stage at the end seems to make up for it, and, best of all, music’s being provided by effortlessly charming chiptune group YMCK (who, coincidentally, have just released their latest album in Japan, Family Cooking).
Elsewhere, the service is getting a lite versions of Tetris Attack/Planet Puzzle League, and various other puzzle games, Solitaire, a metro/train map pack for a number of Japan’s major cities, and a cheap alarm clock that displays slide shows of your locally stored photos, which you can browse via the link below.
There’s been one game tearing breakneck across the blogs throughout the day, and it’s for very good reason. Joakim ‘Konjak‘ Sandberg, the indie dev whose creations have consistently hit that sweet spot of “retro with modern processing power,” has dropped PC freeware Legend of Princess, his take on where Legend of Zelda could have gone, “for no reason but being a big damn nerd.”
Like his earlier games, notably his 2008 IGF grand prize finalist Noitu Love 2 [YouTube trailer], a beat-em-up shooter which is almost more Treasure than a good number of that developer’s own games, Princess does Zelda by way of Capcom’s cult action arcade title Magic Sword and the deep-impact of Treasure’s rock-solid melee mechanics [YouTube].
As such, it feels like the parallel-universe Zelda we never got — the game Miyamoto might’ve made if he hadn’t cold-feet reversed his move after sidescrolling with Zelda II, and had given the SNES’s all to an action game. And, to our pleasant surprise, it feels brilliant: Konjak’s interpreted all of the series’ best enemy tactics and the best of Link’s item-bag of tricks to 2D, and topped it off with as memorable a boss fight as has come from Nintendo’s own.
The hitch: it’s not a full game by any means (done “to take a break from having little motivation with Solar Plexus“), but Sandberg’s added depth by making your two secondary items selectable from the start, each set making the game more challenging than the original — expect speed-run videos to invade YouTube in short order.
If you don’t mind spoiling some of its best kept secrets (and for non-PC users burning to have a look), IndieGames’ playthrough video showcases the game well, otherwise grab the game directly here, and give us your best Zora-thrashing tactics via the comments below.
The air is painfully infused with a whizzing sound as the ghost comes down on
you. The last you feel, are the ghost’s sharp teeth in your neck. As you regain
consciousness you are in the exact place, where you entered the maze first.
Even older (but more playable) than the similar Pac-TXT, but due for a resurgence in this post-Guitar Hero 1.0 world (which to my knowledge still isn’t playable — you disappoint me, internet) is mass:werk’s Pac-Man Dungeons, mixing all the thrills of a breakneck ghost chase with the joy of typing ‘e’ repeatedly.
This one’s been on my to-do list for several days now, but I’ve only just got around to it, and now comes as highly recommended as I imagined it would. Developed by Tyler Glaiel and artist Jon Schubbe, Closure is, like Gravity Bone, a game where the less explained the better, other than to say that it’s a sort of a playable version of the WYSIWYG rule, topped off with an ambient ‘Eraserhead’ soundscape that leaves you dreading the dark as much as you ever have.
If you haven’t already, also try Glaiel’s Aether, the plaintively nostalgic game he co-created with Edmund McMillen in late 2008. The initial learning curve is fairly steep and will take some adjusting to, but feeling my entire body relax once I understood I’d broken through gravity’s bonds was a bit of a magical moment, and its universe is fantastically realized.
As single use sites go, it doesn’t get much more useful than this, and just in time for the imminent arrival of Operation Anchorage: HACK-BOY takes a list of Fallout 3 terminal words and — with a bit of codemagic and a touch of in-game guidance — susses out the correct answer .
A cheap cheat, to be sure, but much more efficient than my preferred method of “keep guessing until you’re one attempt away from a logout -> exit -> login and try again,” or, like, using actual logic.
A little Monday morning epileptic error to get the week started right: I’m not sure which game this screenshot will end up being part of, but I’m almost positive it won’t be as excellent as this bug could’ve made it. For best results, mix with this.
With the veil finally lifted on Sega’s WiiWare title Pole’s Big Adventure, it’s clear producer Takao Miyoshi (Phantasy Star Universe) is going for a deeper retro feel than even recent revivals like Mega Man 9, harkening back to the NES’s earliest days.
The initial clip shows the basics of jumping and shooting, before delving into its more obvious gags, as above, including the most obvious Super Mario parody — the previously mentioned super-hyper mushroom grow — and a suddenly a cappella version of its chip-happy theme song.
The game also seems to be reveling in the discrepancy between the gritty realism of its comic-inspired character portraits and their ridiculously over-simple pixellated counterparts, capped off with a perfectly pitched faux cover art inspired by the best of the Famicom-era.
Via the deviant art of deviantart user peganthytus, Code Sharing, one of two (genuinely quite lovely) images of the forbidden love between gaming’s two most maniacal AI: Portal‘s GlaDOS and System Shock‘s Shodan.
