While I’m not at all opposed to the sentiment, there’s something intrinsically a bit lazy about relying on middleware to create a marriage proposal, isn’t there? But surely this’ll make at least a few couples quite happy: Multiple:Option’s software lets you input your proposal message and spits back out a DS rom featuring a simple match-up puzzle game that ends with the reveal once they’ve won.
“Whether it’s a marriage proposal or just a simple confession of love, Easy Proposal Maker lets you concentrate on what’s important – your relationship!” says the dev, and at very least I can’t think of a more wholesome excuse to get your hands on a flashcart.
As expected, Daniel Pemberton’s Little Big Music album — collecting the 18 tracks he composed for LittleBigPlanet — has indeed gone live on iTunes (take special note: iTunes Plus, actually, to the happy cheers of DRM foes everywhere).
You can hear ‘Horny Old Man,’ one of the seven ‘b-side rarities’ on the collection that didn’t make it onto the final release of the game in the preview he gave Offworld last week.
You can also get a preview of ‘The Orb of Dreamers,’ absolutely the hit of the album, via this YouTube preview of the game’s opening cinematic. With this going in one headphone ear, all I need now is my own personal Stephen Fry to coo paternally in the other to enhance my reality by about a thousand percent.
A nice follow-on from the last entry: Siliconera has noted that the ratings-board trawlers have dug up confirmation that Space Invaders Extreme, the forthcoming console version of the DS/PSP arcade techno-remix, will be coming to the PlayStation Network as well as Xbox Live Arcade.
As I mentioned last week, while there’s a tradeoff on the sliding scale of Miis to Xbox Live Avatars to Home’s too-real characters where Microsoft may have struck the smartest balance (despite my Mii being far more recognizably Me), what they’re doing even more correctly is letting them loose in the wild.
The snowglobe may have been a fun if schmaltzy addition to letting them populate games themselves, but now your Avatars spread more virally with Free Your Avatar, a simple but effective jpg exporter that lets you make Facebook/MySpace pictures and iPhone and desktop wallpapers out of your You.
Even with the limited selection of backgrounds and poses (something Rock Banddoes awesomely), compared to the arcane fan-made hacks necessary to extract your Mii from the Wii’s iron grip (as we have found out in bringing you Monster Mii) it’s a huge step in the right direction.
One of the most common misunderstandings — and sources of post-release backlash — about Toshio Iwai’s early DS software Electroplankton was that it wasn’t designed to be a portable music creation tool.
Instead, Iwai was essentially giving players a portable music interaction tool — shrinking down the larger gallery installations he’d done over the years and making them more accessible both in their distribution as commercial software, and by giving the plankton themselves happy-face anthropomorphic charm.
While that did put off some, who quickly found their best laid sounds succumbing to the whims of the easily-bored plankton, it didn’t put off Merleon Cedraeon, who writes he was “suddenly motivated to create a new type of music that I had never before attempted” on discovering the software.
His “Submersive” album is an ongoing work all based around Electroplankton, and his newest song, Neptune, can be heard via that album’s webpage. Like the others, it’s an ambient mix of a number of the plankton you can interact with, and a good representation of both of what the software and Cedraeon are capable of. Also recommended is ElectricMan, which mixes his plankton style with the DS’s bootup sound for a more rollicking electro-track.
Last night’s Spike TV Video Game Awards went off, well, not exactly without a hitch, but Jack Black managed at very least to not cause any major havoc with his flamethrower. In general, the awards themselves brought a keen list of winners (something I say with the caveat that I was one of several judges) from Media Molecule’s well-deserved studio of the year to Left 4 Dead‘s best multiplayer and World of Goo‘s audience-awarded best indie game.
Will Wright’s ‘little god in a virtual world’ acceptance speech, too, was nice to see broadcast nationally, even if corned up (to Wright’s awkward, “oh!”) with a silver-painted bikini-clad girl in angel wings descending on a wire-swing to deliver the statue itself.
That about summed up the rest of the awards ceremony itself, and brings me nicely to the point… (more…)
Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi is nothing if not one of gaming’s most endearingly (and deliberately mischievously) unorthodox figures, and today’s first look at his next near-finished PS3 downloadable creation Noby Noby Boy is proof positive.
At last year’s GameCity event, he took to the stage (sans shoes, and accompanied by an ambient soundtrack of rustling trees and crickets), and laid out succinctly where his mind is at on games as a whole: “About Katamari Damacy: I’m sick of it,” his hand-typed FAQ read. “What is the future of video games: I haven’t got a clue. What do video games bring us: It depends on what you’re after. What are video games: Who knows.”
With the opening of o–o, the game’s comically and annoyingly oversized website (and the url cutely modeled on the snakelike Noby Boy himself), we get similarly dismissive (and somewhat ‘King’ like) disclaimers: “This content cannot be classified as a so-called ‘game.’ It’s hard to explain in detail so we’ll skip it here. We don’t answer any question[s] about this content. No complaint will be accepted after you purchase this content.”
Just what Noby is is hard to explain, but the fundamentals are simple: you control a Noby “BOY” with both analog sticks: one for the head, one for the tail, flexing, stretching, and eventually tying yourself in knots, in a playground world that’s otherwise devoid of goals. And, as 1UP’s preview points out, a Noby “GIRL”, suspended in the heavens, is similarly stretchy, but only as a progress-bar reflection of the combined total of collective Noby Noby Boy player progress. As everyone plays, in other words, she grows, reaching new interstellar objects, which will in turn unlock new stages for all players (a brilliantly viral mechanic). (more…)
There shouldn’t be, but probably is, at least one amongst us who hasn’t yet known the delirious joy of an EXTREME FEVER or soared along to the Ode of Joy. For you, then, I’ll note that Valve has reduced the price of PopCap’s Peggle Extreme to nothing on Steam.
Extreme is the Half-Life-themed bonus version of the game first given away with the Orange Box, and therefore a very comfortable way to dip your toe into the experience, if you’re (inexplicably) the type that needs your unicorns to be head-crabbed, and your bug-eyed beavers to be flash-fried by a Team Fortress 2 Pyro.
Still in my very top tier of downloadable releases this year, Q-Games’ PS3 art/platformer PixelJunk Eden also gets the award for the game I’ve sworn at most profusely and most profanely. Those shouts (apart from scaring the dog) have apparently been heard ’round the world: Q has just announced that a new patch will be available very soon that’ll bring a continue system, more time, and, most intriguingly, an undetailed “new control system” — one of Eden‘s main attractions being its indirect control.
That collective whinny you heard earlier this morning was the sound of a thousand Llamasoft fans discovering that the PC version of Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe had finally been released for PC, alongside a demo version you can grab here [.exe]. As mentioned before, after the resounding and baffled silence following its Xbox Live Arcade release, the ‘softies have been working overtime to make the PC version a more accessible experience.
On top of toning down the psychotropia of the Tempest-esque strategic shooter with 100 new “NUXX” levels (alongside the XBLA version’s original “acid mix” levels), over the past quarter Minter and co. have been hard at work preparing a safe-place of video walkthroughs and tutorials to help coach you into the madness.
Minter also says the PC version adds “the capability for us to make available further level packs – which can be completely new levels rather than simply remixes – should there be sufficient interest,” including “chillout level packs, ultra-intense packs, shorter game packs (maybe 20 levels instead of 100 for those who want a shorter game), special themed packs to celebrate Christmas or L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday.”
