Submitted without a trace of irony, the latest viral video for the recently released Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (and by proxy its just-released Xbox Live Arcade remake counterpart).
Apart from the honestly amusing Jinjo postcard, in keeping with Rare tradition, the video does contain hints of cute industry in-jokes (Kazooie apparently off taking part in a Women in Games conference), which carry through in the game itself, as with Humba’s continual references to her all-girl clan the ‘Hag Trolls,’ a play on Ubisoft’s Frag Dolls. The game always reserves its sharpest barbs for itself, though, from its very opening act, which sets you on a trademark ‘collect-a-thon’ before reeling you back in and starting the game proper.
Just as we said we hadn’t seen near enough of the Ghostbusters game yet, Atari delivers, with digital Bill Murray looking so much more spritely than we’ve seen him in his last howevermany sad sack films.
If you’re in NYC for Blip Fest or otherwise, it’s not too late to sign up to see Media Molecule founder and LittleBigPlanet programming lead Alex Evans at the Wired Store on December 4th, where, if you’re lucky, he’ll show off his demonstration video of the 2D prototype that sold the game to Sony.
Little known fact you can impress him by knowing: prior to his work with Bullfrog/Lionhead, Evans was a demoscene coder by the name of Statix, and, as his newer moniker Bluespoon, did generative visuals for the 2004 Squarepusher and Jamie Lidell tour with London Sinfonietta. No joke!
Following on Technabob’s Atari 2600 gently crammed in a Sega Game Gear shell, Ben Heck — the grandfather of all bizarro and beautiful gaming hardware hacks — has revealed his latest: a new revision of his laptop Xbox 360s. This time Heck notes:
It differs from my past Xbox 360 laptops in several ways:
* Removable standard Xbox 360 hard drive for easy profile/data swapping
* Both memory card slots accessible, same reason.
* No keyboard! Really, they have those chat pads, what’s the point? (Besides looking cool)
* Simplified layout of ports and buttons.
* Internal wi-fi module, no external antenna. Antenna is strung out inside unit like other consoles/laptops.
* Beveled edges! Countersunk screws!
The unit’s also got a built in Live Vision camera, an easy access panel to the 360’s hard drive, and as usual, is completely desirable for all its impractical manufacturing.
The main reason I’m happy to see today’s release of SingStar ABBA: they were (I’m man enough to admit) my first musical love (at 3!), and I’ve secretly been waiting my whole life for a valid excuse to recreate a performance as epic as Partridge’s above from the comfort of my own bedroom.
Capcom’s biggest ongoing error in judgment? Not realizing that Monster Hunter‘s Felynes make up about 75 percent of the game’s total charm (It’s a cat! Who carries in its paws a stick with an even bigger paw hand-sewn on the end!), and basically ache for a spin-off game of their own. You’ve given them their own brand of ramen, Capcom, peek over at Majesco’s success and give us a Wii/DS cooking game of their own — even Disgaea‘s bit-part self-destructive Prinny d00ds got their own game.
In a show of self-solidarity, then, I note that import house NCSX is taking pre-orders for two new Merarou and Airou Felyne toys, which, even at five times the cost of the crossover toys created by razor-toothed designer Touma, should probably be purchased en masse if only to prove to the developer just what it’s been sitting on all this time.
The most heartening part of 1up’s new interview with Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain director David Cage isn’t the part where he notes that they’ve entirely reworked the quick-time-event mechanics or the fact that the taxidermist scene shown off so far was created solely for demonstration and hasn’t given away any of the story itself.
It’s that he makes the case that Rain will be more about the banal complexities of real life, compared to Indigo‘s ‘fantastic’ final third:
We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers. This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories. I made this mistake myself at the end of [Indigo Prophecy], where I felt my story needed something spectacular because all I had so far was normal people leading a normal life. I realized that the “normal” part was the one that worked the best, and that it wasn’t necessary to save the world to tell something exciting anymore. Heavy Rain will be about normal people in real life, and I believe it’ll be much more emotionally involving, as gamers will easily relate to the situations and characters. This is a new approach. In Heavy Rain, you won’t be a superhero or a gangster. You’ll just be someone real.
That’s something we would happily like to see far more of.
Though Game Boy musicians prefer older model handhelds for their cleaner audio, it comes at the cost of visual clarity: the un-backlit portables aren’t exactly conducive to low-light club situations.
Via Tiny Cartridge, though, we see that ‘Nonfinite’ has hacked together a super sexy LED-lit solution in the whole spectrum of colors that he’ll be selling (both pre-modded and in kit form) at this weekend’s Blip Fest. You can also find the same on at his site, for both music making, and as Cartridge puts it, evil sessions of Game Boy classics.
Other good news out of the Atari event today: the Ghostbusters game, which Atari picked up after the Vivendi/Activision merger saw a number of games shed from their release list, was given a June 2009 release date on all its platforms: PS3, PS2, 360, PC, Wii and DS, CVG reported.
Though not much has been seen of the game, anticipation still runs high with Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd firmly behind the project, penning the script and reuniting the original cast. There’s something of some homespun pride here as well: Austin locals Red Fly Studios (the developer behind the just-released Primus-enhanced Wii title Mushroom Men) are at work on the PlayStation 2, Wii, and DS versions while North Texas’s Terminal Reality (Spyhunter, Bloodrayne) handle the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports, and Austin’s GL33K is handling audio, bringing in the original cast members to lay down their lines.
With the push for a 2009 release, the game will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the first film, and is being approached as an official interactive sequel to Ghostbusters II.
UK outlet CVG has just reported that at an ongoing Atari event in London, our oft-blogged studio Q Entertainment has announced that Space Channel 5, Rez and Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is making a move to the Wii with a new music title. Mizuguchi didn’t offer up any details on the game, but announced it solely as codename “QJ.” Former PlayStation head and now Atari president Phil Harrison has also said that the publisher is looking to bring QJ to other platforms, “including online.”
The studio also announced, according to CVG, that Atari will be publishing a new retail Xbox 360 disc for Europe called Q3, which will package all of Q’s Xbox Live Arcade games — Lumines Live, Every Extend Extra Extreme, and Rez HD — as well as their add-on content for 30 euros.
Apart from helping Harmonix/MTV localize Rock Band for Japan, Q has taken somewhat of a detour from its music/rhythm roots in recent months, so news of QJ is quite welcome, to say the least.
