Curious timing: just as I was fidgeting about trying to resurrect from the tattered remains of Edge’s original website a fully-functioning copy of the magazine’s excellent Q&A with the artists responsible for Europe’s Wipeout Pure PSP booster pack (including my favorite track from friend of Offworld Jon Burgerman), word comes in of more fanciful Wipeout crossovers.
This time, it’s with LittleBigPlanet, as Sony Europe community manager ‘MusterBuster’ has laid out the next several months of LBP addon’s and packs, including, in February, a WipEout HD costume pack which transforms your little Sackboy into the pilot of his own little cardboard Feisar or Icaras ship.
Other new packs on the horizon: the Ape Escape and Toro (Japan’s PS3 mascot) costumes that originally shipped with Japan’s copy of the game, a God of War tie-in pack, a vaguely horrifying Groundhog Day pack, and a Valentine’s Day pack that promises at least one massive kitten head sticker.
No word on equivalent stateside release dates, but the wait’s rarely been long between territories.
The team haven’t revealed much beyond that, other than their terse Pong-instructions-like guidelines: “destroy enemies and collect their powers to increase your own.”
So, we’re happily slotting that in a category vaguely along the lines of Spore‘s initial stage or Thatgamecompany’s fl0w, then, but have no doubt Flashbang have more twists to add in the coming weeks, ahead of its projected March 1st release date.
Ian Dallas’s Unfinished Swan video enraptured blogs everywhere before Offworld had a chance to leave the launch pad, but now the game’s been named one of this year’s ten finalists in the Independent Games Festival’s Student Showcase, so I’ve got a great excuse to run the video again.
Elsewhere, the finalists included Feist, also a finalist in the main IGF competition (see my writeup of that in the Offworld Guide to the 2009 IGF), the environmentally minded “Tetris meets Sim City” City Rain, the “exploration of familial relationships” game Where is my Heart?, and, errr… the “funkalicious first person dish washing wonder” Dish Washington, created as… a Half-Life 2 mod?
Expect more in-depth looks at the games soon, and hit the jump for the full list of entrants and links to their respective IGF pages. (more…)
As if I needed another excuse to get my hands on Rogue Leaders, the visual history book on the golden age of Lucasarts I mentioned in December, Gamasutra has run a great excerpt not on any of the usual Monkey Island or Grim Fandango suspects, but rather Habitat, the late-80s Commodore 64 virtual world forerunner which ultimately failed for its beta trial’s overwhelming success.
The article explains of its creation:
Development began in 1985 and sketched out a virtual world where each player had an in-game “avatar” — a word defining a player’s online representation (and still used today). These characters could interact with other players, connected in a massive online world composed of 20,000 “regions” — essentially individual screens connected to as many as four additional regions…
Despite the apparent advantage of not having to program artificial intelligence for in-game characters, given that all the players were real people, creating rules for player interactions required the developers to broach subjects never before considered in game design.
Remarked Chip Morningstar in a long treatise on Habitat’s creative process: “A special circle of living Hell awaits the implementers of systems involving that most important category of autonomous computational agents: groups of interacting human beings.”
Easily the most incredible cosplay accessory ever created, ’emilyskeith’s real world Portal gun does everything just about perfect, and is so meticulously constructed I — no lie — can’t tell how it was made by anyone other than Aperture Science themselves.
How does our commander in chief relax after a long inaugural day? Surely, as with Gamu-Toys’ celebratory DiD action figure spread, with a quiet night in eating oranges with his trusty original Famicom never more than a few feet away (presumably with Namco’s classic Pac).
Would-be Game Boy musicians take note: Jose ‘BleepBloop‘ Torres has completed his run of 16Mbit custom Game Boy cartridges with built-in USB transfer capabilities, specifically created for budding Little Sound DJs.
The classiest part, though, is the on-board “I love my Gameboy” message, which I hope everyone will have the good sense not to cover with the included LSDJ stickers.
The mark of true game-making talent: pseudonymous Eyezmaze head ‘On’ has been an always reliable source of quality Flash gaming for going on five years now, and even if you swapped in new graphics, you can recognize his style from the mechanics themselves.
His newest, after nearly a year in hiatus, is Grow Tower and again consists of his signature fractal-array of possible item combinations that result in ever more bizarre reactions unique to each specific sequence. This one, On says, has only one solution for the truely maxed tower.
My best effort thus far: this 15 meter high contraption: I seem to have got the robot and the button working properly, but I’ve obviously underutilized that crank and gears…
Attention iPhone developers: commercializing these games is an absolute no-brainer (at 99 cents a pop, or as a higher priced collection?). I’m surely not the first to think of it though, On’s FAQ says he’s currently considering incorporating and heading down a monetized path.
Happy news for fans of Gish, Blast Miner, Tri-achnid, Aether and the just-IGF-nominated Coil: Edmund McMillen has announced via his blog that this year will see the release of a deluxe version of his Newgrounds hit Meat Boy on PC and Mac.
McMillen also teases a third “secret release platform,” but a quick jog over to the game’s new home site reveals that the game will also see a port to the Wii, presumably Nintendo’s downloadable service WiiWare.
The deluxe version will be programmed by Pillowfort dev Tommy Refenes, who was behind last year’s excellent Goo! (not to be confused with 2D Boy’s World of…), and original Meat Boy developer Jon McEntee.
Already three weeks in but just spotted today: Studio GameOn is a project in association with the Barbican Art Gallery’s traveling games history exhibit Game On — currently resting in Australia’s State Library of Queensland — to put together a development team and create a debut title in just six weeks.
The team’s lo-fi prototype for its B-movie stuntman simulator was just revealed on Monday — you can follow the group’s progress, as we will be, via its Flickr or YouTube channels.
