At the latest Austin Game Developer’s conference, Turner VP Blake Lewin made a prescient observation when he noted that URU, the beleaguered MMO based on Cyan Worlds’ franchise Myst, “lasts longer when the fans run it than when publishers do.”
Dropped quickly and unceremoniously by Ubisoft on its 2003 release after a beta that drew some 10-40,000 users, fans kept an unofficial server live for two years before being re-released by Turner’s GameTap service in 2006. After just a year in operation, though, it was shuttered again — Lewin noting that while successful for the service, the cost of operation was too much to maintain.
So, according to a note sent out by Cyan CEO Tony Fryman, the company is going to put the game back in the hands of its dedicated base for operation and expansions, and hope for the best. Said Fryman on the release:
Cyan has decided to give make MystOnline available to the fans by releasing the source code for the servers, client and tools for MystOnline as an open source project. We will also host a data server with the data for MystOnline. MORE is still possible but only with the help from fans.
This is a bit scary for Cyan because this is an area that we have never gone before, to let a product freely roam in the wild. But we’ve poured so much into UruLive, and it has touched so many, that we could not just let it whither and die. We still have hopes that someday we will be able to provide new content for UruLive and/or work on the next UruLive.
This is also a bit scary for the fans. We realize that this could turn UruLive into the “wild west” and lead to many fractured and diverse MystOnline servers. But it is our hope that with the help of dedicated core fans (if you are reading this, it probably means you) that a safe and secure MystOnline server set (many servers from around the world working together as one) can be created that will let people explore and live in UruLive.
Namco Bandai, it seems, is keen on wholly unannounced surprises. Like the sudden re-emergence of the entirely obscure Mr. Driller spinoff Star Trigon for the iPod, the publisher has quietly released a tilt-sensitive port of Katamari Damacy for the iPhone.
I Love Katamari is necessarily downsized from its console and handheld big brothers, but fully 3D (as opposed to the isometric mobile version) and every bit as warmly familiar. Each of the game’s five stages is split into four separate modes: a story mode in which the King requests a single item to be rolled (which unlocks subsequent levels), a time attack to roll as much as you can within the limit, an exact size mode to roll to a perfect fit, and an eternal mode which lets you freely roll however you’d like.
It’s safe to say, though, that the iPhone struggles mightily under the weight of your pile of collections, though a reboot and a quick switch to Airplane mode seemed to bring it a bit more under control. And, even moreso than Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, there’s a very pronounced acclimation period before your dual-analog brain lets go of that need for precision and lets your hands do the work (even still, there were moments when my whole body contorted hoping to squeeze just an ounce more torque out of the device).
But what it does do right is recapture the harrowing anxiety of the originals. I’ve yet to finish a level with more than 25 or 30 seconds on the clock, which leads me to believe that all my backward bends are exactly to design. Creator Keita Takahashi may have put the series behind him years ago, but there’s still a part of me very happy to have it in my hands again.
Swedish outlet Gamereactor has uploaded a ten minute walkthrough of the opening scenes of Red Fly’s Wii version of the Ghostbusters game, which, as becomes immediately apparent, has wisely been designed from the start as a unique experience from the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.
The stars have been caricatured to more cartoony forms, the clip shows off a number of the unique gadgets that you’ll utilize, and also shows that, 25 years later, you’ll finally be able to capture the first film’s librarian-ghost and bring some semblance of closure to the trauma of a childhood’s worth of screaming nightmares (for me, at least).
It’s been a bit too long since we’ve done one of these, but let’s make it a bit different this time. We’re all on different pages this weekend, Rob having just put Fallout 3 to bed as Joel just now re-emerges from the vault, John looking for groups on Left 4 Dead (via XBL name ‘drcrypt’ — mention Offworld in your request, please!), and me honestly still not sure where the weekend’s going to take me (I’ve been having a desperately hard time lately escaping Banjo Kazooie‘s Xbox Live Arcade remade paw/claw grip, and am looking forward to sinking in further to XBLA’s Meteos Wars).
So, this seems as good a time as any to launch our official Facebook presence, where I’ve kicked off a thread with our Steam/Xbox Live/PSN/Wii/etc. information, and encourage anyone interested to do the same. Hopefully, while we still fiddle with coming up with something a bit more official, we’ll have something more stable than our comments to keep us all together.
As usual, you can also join our Boing Boing Steam group and while I’m passing out our various web presences, I might as well mention that our Offworld Twitter feed is in its neophyte stages and will begin in full soon.
With the American arcade version still yet not made it to a location near me, I’m still not entirely convinced by the idea of PM Studios’ touch-screen rhythm game DJ Max Technika, its gameplay (which you can see here) on beat, but so seemingly divorced from the music itself.
It quickly conjures up happy memories of iNiS’s Nintendo DS underdog favorite Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan, but it’s not entirely clear how compelling the game will be played so straight, without the peripheral connection of your actions to comic vignettes that give EBA its vitality.
It might be sooner than we think to find out, though, in a new interview with Siliconera, PM Studios producer Michael Yum says the company is at work bringing Technika not only to the DS (with ‘secret’ DSi features), but to the iPhone as well, a device it looks almost tailor-made for.
Working for a little weekend watching? Motion graphics designer and illustrator Rex Crowle has just unveiled the site for Grip Wrench, his 10-part animated series for MTV Italy’s QOOB. Crowle, on top of doing fantastic ad work like Orange’s GoodThingsShouldNeverEnd website, is also the man behind much of LittleBigPlanet‘s striking visual design: you’ll instantly recognize his style in every little CMYK flourish you noticed around the game’s various worlds.
In this episode of Grip Wrench, the titular star (described as “Hollywood hard man, troubled veteran, reckless patriot”) “attempts to atone for previous disasters by taking part in a road safety film. But his easily distracted childlike mind chooses to focus more on playing videogames than saving lives, and as the bodycount rises so does the mayhem.”
It’s just ever so cutely on the NSFW side, but my favorite of the bunch and obviously a good fit for the Offworld crew, and it’s very likely you’re going to be seeing more of Crowle around the site in the near future.
Though the results are a bit stacked, with some really curious selections of particular character creations (and the most horrifying Home ‘Sarah Palin’ you’ll ever see), GamesRadar’s Avatar Showdown has pitted the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3’s personalization features against each other to interesting results.
Not only does the feature near-scientifically prove the theory of the Uncanny Valley, it also perfectly highlights Scott McCloud’s point in Understanding Comics about the universality of cartoon imagery.
Microsoft did very well to find a happy medium between the Miis (which Nintendo itself also did well in allowing more flexibility) and Sony’s honestly fantastically misjudged Home models (now that it’s widely available, I basically dare you to create an avatar which you can comfortably look at and say “that’s me!” — send us comparison shots if you think you’ve succeeded).
There’ve been steps in the right direction on the first two parts (Mii masks in Animal Crossing, avatar support in Xbox 360 games), but obviously the killer app would be the extensibility of the former with the social networking of the latter.
Still riding high on Jetdaisuke’s infectious Korg DS-10 saiko-fever, I was happy to see this live performance from October’s EXTRA Hyper Game Music Eventvia GameSetWatch, which brought together Ridge Racer composer Nobuyoshi Sano, all-star Final Fantasy rock band The Black Mages member Michio Okamiya, and Chrono Trigger composer Yasunori Mitsuda for an all-Korg techno blowout (skip to 5:20 to see what it looks like to get crazy down and dirty with a DS).
GameSetWatch correspondent Jeriaska talked with the three after the show where they talked about how the software came together and how the Chemical Brothers inspired Sano’s soundtrack for PS2 fantasy RPG Drakengard (!).
Well, this is certainly cute: making good on its promise of providing a New Xbox Experience, Microsoft has got into the spirit with an embedded shakable snow-globe that populates itself with your friends’ avatars. Entirely superfluous but well integrated, it’s just one more step on the path to make the console “the place you and your friends live.”
Before descending into punch-drunk madness of its own on the merits of pooping animals in games, Gamasutra’s recent interview with Offworld favorite The Behemoth — makers of sidescrolling shooter Alien Hominid and the recent Xbox Live Arcade retro-inspired beat em up Castle Crashers — covers some interesting ground on balance issues and the “gigantic nightmare” of stat tracking beneath Crashers‘ simple exterior, and their continued focus on consoles versus PC portals.
But, even better, artist Dan Paladin drops a metaphor for the Mythical Man-Month so succinct and apt that I’m tempted to try and get it redubbed Paladin’s Law:
A lot of people say, “Oh, one guy was drawing, and one guy was coding, so that’s why it took so long.” But that’s really not true. You can have nine ladies, but it’s not going to take them one month to have the baby.
