I knew funny business was afoot early this morning when Double Fine moved their Brütal Legend threat level system to “violated lemon” (‘I hear news knocking at the door!’), and it wasn’t for naught: the developer has just announced that EA will publish the they’re-making-me-call-it-NWOB-heavy-metal action/adventure for PS3 and Xbox 360 in Fall of 2009.
It’s good news not only for the game, which has been floating in somewhat of an uncomfortable news-void for the last year following the Vivendi/Activision merger, but also for EA, who’ve been moving from strength to boutique-gaming strength with this and the recent announcement that they’d be releasing a new game from Killer7/No More Heroes dev Grasshopper Manufacture.
As noted before (where you can also see its debut trailer), the first new footage of the game will be shown Sunday night at the Spike TV Video Game Awards show.
Bethesda has just sent word that its Garden of Eden Creation Kit has just gone live. The G.E.C.K., as mentioned in late November, is the official editing tool for the PC version of Fallout 3.
The full wiki user guide is over here, and be sure to leave us any comments when you’ve created something wonderful, as we saw over here.
It does share a lot in common with Daniel Benmergui’s previously mentionedI wish I were the Moon, both aesthetically and in its multiple endings it’s up to the player to experiment with to ferret out. Part of me wishes Weir had the same confidence to leave the narrative implied rather than explicit, though I suspect that has more to do with its participants not ‘reading’ quite as clearly as The Moon‘s in their low-res form.
But either way it’s a successful playfully lonely Cthulu-ish journey of discovery that I’ll not go into too much detail on for fear of giving away its best lines — have a look and let us know what you think.
Minotaur China Shop might not be Flashbang’s most accessible game (that prize would have to go for the much more parent-friendly puzzler Splume), but it is its funniest. It’s not just the latest blog entries from the overly defensive Minotaur himself, though that helps, or that in-game, Flashbang have played everything perfectly, wryly straight, even when the pegasus in leopard print walks in and desires the ‘fancy plate.’ It’s also the more subtle joke that, at heart, China Shop is a subversion of and a gentle dig at the current casual game glut of Diner Dash clones.
But it’s also that, played “right,” Flashbang have perfectly pegged that ever-present anger-management underlying tension. You get that from the Minotaur’s stiff bipedal wobble (who you “drive around” more than “make walk”), as well as the precariousness of the shop packed tight with breakables, and the absurdity of the beast choosing a new profession so dainty at its core (that’s made the juxtaposition an apt cliche from the start). All together, there’s never any doubt that you’re only one misjudged turn away from havoc.
And, smartly, Flashbang have tuned that havoc into just as lucrative an option as playing straight: once the Minotaur has let his rage get the best of him, insurance kicks in and compensates you for every broken item, though you’ll obviously lose your customer base and have to deal with security firing arrows to keep your aggression in check.
Set in five separate days over which you can tune and upgrade both the happiest and angriest play styles as you wish, Minotaur lends itself perfectly to experimentation and replay — exactly what you’d want from a web game — and has instantly rocketed itself to the top handful of our 2008 indie game list.
Celebrating “creative activities and the development of media arts” from games to animation to web design, the Japan Media Arts Festival has announced that Wii Fit has topped the list of its game entrants.
The organization says it recognized the game for “[broadening] the appeal of a device that tends to be thought of as a boy’s toy, turning it into a family communication tool; we can see in it a glimpse of the future of video games.”
Still yet to be publicly released, Justin ‘CosMind’ Leingang was one of the winners of the Austin GDC’s all-Texas Indie Games Festival showcase for his art-game Glum Buster, a game only described in the vaguest terms as “a collection of my daydreams, for your daydreams.”
As we patiently await more details on that (which he says are “coming soonish”), Leingang has been slightly more forthcoming about his new game for Austin publisher Aspyr that sounds similarly ethereal. According to a new interview with Gamasutra, Leingang is behind Treasure Trove, a DS game that lets players “hunt” for items that are generated from wi-fi signals in the surrounding area.
It’s a compelling idea — it’s nice to be able to harness all of that invisible data that we’re awash in to creative ends. And it’s an idea that that worked well in Konami’s PSP title Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops, which generated new collectible soldiers based on that similar mechanics. That game became a mainstay of my long Chicago bus trips — when I knew I’d continually hit fresh points as I moved across town — and Leingang reports similar results for the prototype of Trove.
It’s still not clear what kind of game he’ll be hanging the technology around — Gamasutra only further reports that collectible items also have musical properties that can be used to create exchangeable compositions — but it sounds like it’s coming together as a properly interesting portable mashup.
Sony has released new footage of one of my most anticipated 2009 downloads: longtime favorite Thatgamecompany’s PS3 downloadable Flower, a followup to their earlier fl0w, and similarly serene PC demo Cloud. I couldn’t be happier to see the PS3’s supercomputer core being harnessed purely for the purpose of rendering fluttering petals and waves of knee high grass, and making something as intangible as wind a ‘playable character.’
Bethesda has handed IGN the first extended details on the first downloadable content for Fallout 3, due January, which will see players working their way through a military simulation of the liberation of Anchorage from communist Chinese invaders.
From what I can gather from the frustratingly no-follow-ups interview, it sounds like the simulation will take a more strategic turn, including “interactive Strike Teams” (still unsure whether this interaction will extend beyond the “stick close to me, give me some room” rules that currently apply to the main quest’s partners). I’m similarly unsure exactly how to suspend my disbelief in bringing new weapons from inside a simulation back into FO3‘s real world, but I suppose it could be as simple as a storage locker next to the computer.
The interview also touches at minor hints at the two following DLC packs, including a wink I’m interpreting to mean that Pittsburgh has gone all-ghoul.
Designer David Sirlin had a thin tight rope to walk in remaking and rebalancing aspects of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo for its XBLA and PSN debut, and it’s fascinating to listen to him delve into the minutae of those decisions, revealing just how precariously and artfully constructed the game is, especially when he slings jargon like:
Their complaints led me to try the fairly extreme measures of letting his jab torpedo destroy fireballs — wow! — with his Hundred-Hand Slap being lower damage and lower priority, and his deadly Ochio Throw no longer being repeatable and only retaining half its dizzy power.
If you’re still the type that still struggles to appreciate the game as much more than a ratatat of flailing button mashing, I recommend watching this 2004 championship video to its end. Even if you can’t fully appreciate the complexity (the storyline gist goes: it sure looked like the girl was going to get the guy, but with just the thinnest sliver of life meter left he delivers a stunning comeback), the reaction of the crowd is enough to clue you in that something earth shattering has just happened.
Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos has some very smart reflections on the birth and evolution of music gaming in this recent chat with Wired, talking about the work and non-work of music creation software — which the company was founded to create — versus their music performance software as we know it today.
He also expounds on how familiarity with the music helps guide you as a player, and the risks in broadening its catalog from Guitar Hero‘s cherry-picked ‘best of the history of rock’ catalog to Rock Band‘s more all-encompassing selections that attempt to foster music discovery rather than just appreciation, and, implicitly, makes you understand why the company is at the fore of the music gaming genre.
I knew funny business was afoot early this morning when Double Fine moved their Brütal Legend threat level system to “violated lemon” (‘I hear news knocking at the door!’), and it wasn’t for naught: the developer has just announced that EA will publish the they’re-making-me-call-it-NWOB-heavy-metal action/adventure for PS3 and Xbox 360 in Fall of 2009. 
