Over at TIGSource, work has continued anew on a fantastic community effort: Balding’s Quest: The Quest of Guy Balding, which isn’t so much a standalone game as it is a fully extensible 2D PC engine ready to be reconfigured with its own map, animation and dev editors.
Clearly a work in progress, development has been ongoing since early 2007 and for now consists of a pack of loadable maps which, from all that I tried range from difficult to brutally difficult. They’re so hard, in fact, that I nearly skipped mentioning it altogether, but Balding’s overall pleasant squish in every interaction and animation was so spot on (see also: Spelunky) that it comes recommended if only for a quick feel, although be sure to let us know if you manage to create something amazing, as well.
Just a single day after getting my own recently reissued version of Hudson’s long-coveted Shooting Watch — Japan’s digital ‘trainer’ meant to help strengthen your button-tapping muscles up to par with the hummingbird-fingered Takahashi Meijin — and wondering aloud what those two secret functions might be, 1up’s reliably niche Ray Barnholt comes through with an unofficial English language guide.
Obviously in need of some serious work, my own top score has never reached higher than my very first run of 8.2 button taps per second, half that needed to unlock what turns out to be… a random number generator. Well, that and the infinite respect of your peers/ability to explode watermelons at will, obviously.
If you’re feeling left out and strapped for cash, homebrew coder ‘retrohead’ has created a watermelon-enhanced version of the unit for the DS, or you can order your own at any number of online import houses.
Ending the day where we started, only 100 percent less destructively, Wonderland has discovered new plans recently added to Instructables for this wicked Atari 2600 joystick lamp, with a shade smartly done up in classic game covers — though, as Alice points out, it is solely for the tool/router/saw/sander/clamp-enabled.
Officially today’s most dangerous time-waster is Benzido/Ryan Chisholm’s deceptively difficult airlock puzzle, Evacuation. Procedurally generated (and therefore somewhat uneven from level to level — particularly when it inexplicably crowds all crew into the cockpit) and spanning some 200 levels, your goal is simply to open color-coded locks to eject invaders off your ship, while not exposing crew to either the aliens or the vacuum.
Via Metaplace’s Raph Koster we learn that a China based company has founded NewLively, a VMRL replacement for Google’s recently shuttered virtual world that’s quite, err, brazen in its interface, down to X-Ray Kid‘s character art on its familiarly-sparse login screen. The company claims, however, that its platform was rebuilt from the ground up:
After the closure of Lively, there is no greater happiness than to duplicate Lively for the sake of the Lively users. We understand that this activity would generate a certain degree of legal risk. However, whenever I remember the disheartenment and disappointment of that many Lively users, this risk is worth taking and the users will support us…
We are not using any codes whatsoever from Google Lively. The entire platform was created new from scratch. Only the concept and the interface remained as Google Lively and the amount of work involved in doing this was quite insignificant in comparison to the creation of the entire system. Moreover, in our understanding of the kinds of platforms, copyright privileges should go to the content providers. As long as these content providers are willing to transfer the platform to Newlively, there will be no issues.
I can’t quite figure out just what’s so bizarre about this 15 minute off-the-cuff riff session with nearly all of Metal Gear Solid‘s voice actors (Debi Mae “Meryl” West was sadly not in attendance), but I’m pretty sure that it all boils down to Paul “Col. Campbell” Eiding quietly lording over the entire proceeding at center back.
From one lost art to the next, Metafilter has spotted two fantastic repositories for scanned/PDF’d manuals for games both old and new. Most notable is Vimm’s Lair, which stocks over 350 each for the NES and PlayStation, as well as hundreds more for earlier systems, and Meekeo does the same for the more modern (and commenters call out ReplacementDocs for the PC set).
Edge magazine recently ran a nicely done requiem for/celebration of the dying breed of carefully attentive manuals, and the sadly antiquated practice of including ephemeral ‘feelies’ (cloth/foldout maps and the like). I’ve got especially fond memories of the lavish anime-esque (a term I wouldn’t know existed for another 15 years) artwork that graced the NES’s Zelda manuals for filling in the gaps between the 8-bit iconography and the ‘reality’ it represented.
In the most dangerously superfluous update of the day, the juvies at Destructoid have spotted this Instructables how-to that will turn your now outmoded Xbox 360 HD-DVD player into a real live ray-gun, capable of (at very least) burning electrical tape, popping balloons, and lighting matches from across the room, all of which seems like appropriate responses for having sided with the wrong team in the video format war.
Winning the Offworld award for Franchise I’d Thought Least Likely To Ever Make A Comeback, Playbrains has announced that cult indie arena-ball-brawler BaboViolent 2 will be given a facelift in 2009 with a new PC and Xbox Live Arcade version, now sporting original characters from short lived 80s fad Madballs (in their first appearance since Ocean’s “we’ll make a game of anything, really” C64 and Spectrum title from 1987).
Truth be told, my interest is actually slightly piqued by the video above, and, as GamerBytes points out, the original BaboViolent worked up enough of a community to spawn its own comprehensive fan-site: this may just be the retro revival we didn’t know we needed.
Fresh off the digital press: Rolando illustrator Mikko Walamies has created a handful of new iPhone wallpapers for Hand Circus, the most charming of which (at right) I believe might just be striking enough to finally unseat Kitsune Noir’s Mcbess paper I’ve been rocking since April.
