More retro inspiration: there’s something about how the shading softens the hard pixel lines in Tibori Design‘s Dotter Dotter series that makes me almost lust for either a next-gen game done up with the renderer or — fire up your 3D printers — figure playsets of each. Nintendo’s already essentially done the latter nearly spot on with their Super Mario Bros. dioramas, so it’s up to somebody now to do the former.
Developer 5th Cell quickly established themselves at the vanguard of realizing the DS’s potential with their 2007 platformer Drawn To Life (and it’s Spongebob-licensed followup), which gave players the ability to draw and customize nearly all of the game’s assets — its main character, weapons, enemies, the world itself. That was followed on by the more traditional Lock’s Quest, a Tower Defense clone that, even if more traditional, was at least smartly timed with the boom of the genre across all platforms.
Now, IGN has revealed their latest game, Scribblenauts, with a premise so audacious it’ll be nearly impossible to follow on with execution that won’t end up falling short for someone. In it, you guide Maxwell on a quest to collect Starites by writing in the name of an object to help solve a puzzle with, and — as the IGN interview repeatedly italicizes — that object could be anything. As in the trailer above, a Starite stuck in a tree can be reached via ladder, knocked down with a football, or, of course, by conjuring a beaver to saw through the trunk.
As creative director Jeremiah Slaczka explains, the studio’s essentially been mapping out a spreadsheet of “everything” for months and firing off quick-drawn assets for each, along with how their properties affect each other (fire burns wood, doughnut attracts cop). It doesn’t sound entirely far off of the create-anything emergent possibilities of LittleBigPlanet, with the important caveat that the player designs the scenario as well as the means for solution in that game, where here the challenge will be working our way through 5th Cell’s mindset.
Whether they can succeed will remain a gaping chasm of an open question until more of the game comes to light over the coming months, but for now it’s hard not to stay just a little entranced by the magic of its possibility.
Scotland developer Denki has a pedigree that belies the attention its received: studio head Gary Penn was formerly of DMA Design (who you now know as Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar North) and has had design roles in games like Body Harvest (which you could argue was a prototype for how GTA would eventually function in 3D) and, more recently, Crackdown.
Denki, for itself, has been behind some of the best cult hits of the Game Boy Color/Advance generation from the very smart puzzle game Denki Blocks to Go! Go! Beckham!, a wholly unlikely and wickedly good GBA title that brought the soccer star cutely into a pastel Mario/Yoshi’s Island-esque world which he conquered with trademark footwork (see: this YouTube video).
Now, after a diversion onto set-top box game venture which hasn’t panned out technologically, Scottish games mag Square Go has got the first look at Denki’s new Xbox Live Arcade venture, Quarrel: Word War One. Square says the game plays out like “Scrabble x Risk x Countdown” (the last of which necessitated a google: I’d substitute Boggle, perhaps, for the Americans), where word games blossom out to territory control, which appears to feature Denki’s by now recognizably primary-colored aesthetics and might just turn out to be a surprisingly good development.
Most intriguingly, the earliest videos hint at a budding last-guy-on-earth romance between Zoey and Francis, which sounds just about as off-putting as they said it ultimately was, and the post shows the challenges of cutting down unintended comedy and making characters less vulnerable than they wanted them to be:
Through playtesting, we also found that the initial sections of the hunter sequence were lingering a bit too long, allowing viewers to wonder whether Louis would himself become infected. In later edits, this part of the intro would be edited more tightly and shot with more close-ups in order to remove any lulls in which the viewers would be tempted to ponder the fate of Louis themselves. You also notice that the hunter no longer gets away from the survivors but instead falls from the building and sets off the car alarm, providing a plausible cause for the Survivors setting off the alarm.
Following on our earlier post via Dengeki Online, Q Entertainment has officially announced that Lumines Supernova‘s U.S. release will also get the exclusive LittleBigPlanet skin. They’ve alsosent us the video above, showing off a newly remixed down-tempo LBP track, which we’ll admit fits the Lumines mood moreso than the Go! Team track we suggested earlier.
The company says that the PS3 release, which comes after the game has been ported to PS2, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, PC and mobiles, will also feature other exclusive new features, including a “dig down” mode that has you clearing an already-full playfield, and a sequencer mode that lets you “create your own background music using the sound loops provided in the ‘Sound Bank’ – drums, bass, synthesizer 1, synthesizer 2 and effects.”
As before, no strict release date has been set, but again has been slated for a ‘winter 2008/2009’ release.
Recently spotted in vinyl toy maker Kid Robot’s preview of upcoming additions to its gallery, a custom version of its signature Munny figure reworked in the image of Earthworm Jim. The custom was done, as eagle eyes will have spotted, by Andrew ‘Creatures In My Head‘ Bell, who you may also recognize from his Dot Overdose t-shirt which debuted at this year’s ComicCon.
It’s a very nicely done custom, though I am curious how he does his trademark head-whip from inside the helmet.
Originally created in June for a TIG Source competition based on procedurally generated content, indie developer 16×16’s winning entry, Rescue: the Beagles, has finished subsequent tweaking and been released as an official final version. As you might expect from the name, your humanitarian mission in the game is to hop between three layers of terrain picking up hurt and otherwise wandering beagle pups before they’re carted away to an animal testing facility.
This sounds easier than it is: the deceptively complex game requires more multitasking ability than you might expect, and relies heavily on split second decisions on which layer to jump to next as its randomly generated peaks and valleys come together and diverge.
The game is almost Spelunker-level strict (see: this awesome Japanese video for more on that) on how far you can fall to the next layer down, and any dog that manages to pass you by is an instant lose, but stick with it long enough and you’ll manage to work yourself into a very satisfying rhythm.
Though the stony silent video doesn’t give away much, so far as I can tell the game will be of the auto-fire variety, controlled by the iPhone’s tilt-sensor, and the ship flipped with a tap on the screen, all of which is looking quite elegant.
As more publishers take to the web to capture casual-gaming dollars, Sega has taken a page from EA’s Pogo.com and launched its PlaySEGA portal. The site currently is offering reworked Flash versions of its own hits (most notably the unfortunately Mario-less Sonic at the Olympic Games) as well as third parties (see: anything by pixel-geniuses Nitrome), and says that its for-pay VIP service will soon offer Sega classics like Columns, Puyo Pop, Chu Chu Rocket, Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Monkey Ball Tip n’ Tilt.
Like Pogo’s “gems,” playing PlaySEGA games will net you Sonic’s “rings,” which you can use to customize your avatar and add items to your delightfully named “Escape Zone” profile page.
Frozenbyte, the Finnish studio behind Steam’s top-down sci-fi action game Shadowgrounds, are making good on their new original IP strategy with the announcement of the forthcoming Trine for PlayStation Network and PC.
The short teaser above goes a long way in selling the game, giving away one of its most intriguing gameplay aspects: a drawing mode looking nothing if not like Crayon Physics brought to fantastic life, placing platforms and boxes into its fully physics-based world, and hot-swappable characters which each have their own specialty to advance you further into its levels.
The studio says the game should appear in the second quarter of 2009.
