Now in its fourth season, Ste Curran, Simon Byron and Ann Scantlebury’s One Life Left is literally the UK’s second best games-related radio program/podcast (or so says iTunes, at least) and an Offworld favorite, and — having more or less cornered that market — they’ve now set their sights on the music industry.
Printed in an extra limited edition of 800 (with 200 having gone missing in the mail), their debut CD ‘Music To Play Games By’ was compiled by the previously mentioned Simon ‘chewingpixels’ Parkin, and features a wide variety of micromusic and otherwise games-friendly artists from far corners of the globe, with names like Chicago/New York’s Mark Denardo, Portland’s Copy, Scotland’s Project A-ko, Norwich’s The Lost Levels and “Europe’s favourite satirical videogame-centric musical group” The doyouinverts.
Even if she’s not going vegetarian, at least she’s going green: in a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering how Mama has turned around Majesco’s fortunes, the publisher has announced that Gardening Mama will be released for the DS in Spring of 2009.
In it, she’ll be turning her attentions from the kitchen to let players “manage their garden through the seeding, blooming and maturation phases, and then produce items from the plants they’ve grown (i.e. grow strawberries to make jam or raise pumpkins and then carve a jack-‘o-lantern).”
And as Destructoid recently noted, her offspun hobbies don’t end there, Taito has trademarked Pet Shop Mama as well, which Tiny Cartridge reckons is a rebrand of import handheld stalwart Pet Shop Monogatari.
First announced in March and now existing somewhere in excruciating limbo, Introversion’s Darwinia Plus tops the list of my most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade games. Made up of the original arcade/real-time strategy Darwinia release and the more recent multiplayer version Multiwinia, this pitch-perfect parody trailer — sending up Halo 3‘s melodramatic “Believe” ad — does a good job of explaining why.
Just spotted via Kotaku are Marshall Alexander’s latest series of Foldskool Heroes, this time with a decidedly classic gaming bent: 64KRAM, your Commodore pal; Junior, a 2600 Jr. alike; and our favorite, the Pong arcade machine called Nolan, after Atari founder N. Bushnell.
If your fingers ache for more folding and tab-slotting after you complete these three, I recommend heading over to Cubecraft, where Christopher Beaumont has been cranking out scads more pop culture and game character projects: from the obvious (Mario, Mega-Man, Master Chief, Kratos, Katamari‘s Prince, Snake) to the more recent (Mirror’s Edge‘s Faith, Fallout 3‘s Vault Boy) to the obscure (Mother 3‘s Claus and Lucas, Braid‘s Tim and ‘creature’, Portal‘s Chell) to the just plain awesome (the Duck Hunt dog, obviously).
There’s been a bit of a tiny dust storm brewing over the release and critical reaction to EA/DICE’s Mirror’s Edge over whether reviewers cursed the darkness rather than light a candle over the things the game did right. Over at Tom Armitage’s Infovore site, he’s written his own very smartly considered reaction to just what Edge does do right, and how that rightness can manifest itself in feeling let down — though not the game letting you down, but you letting down the character you inhabit. Says Tom:
Mirror’s Edge is at its best in moments of free exploration, finding new paths over serene rooftops, feeling that sense of flow as you tuck your feet over a barbed-wire fence; when it captures the feeling of a body moving, be it through graceful falls or being violently hurled off a building by a former wrestler; feeling like you’re flying across the city.
It’s at its worst when, unlike on the rooftops and in the stormdrains, it places obstacles in its path – narrative, out-of-engine cutscenes, action-through-havoc that you can’t escape.
And especially when it makes you fail: Faith is clearly an experienced runner, and there are times where the player can’t live up to their avatar’s abilities. DICE choose to present that in binary success or failure, which has lead to criticisms of trial and error. Perhaps; at the same time, I’ve never encountered a single glitch or unrealistic motion throughout all my travels through the game. The coherence of the illusion is remarkable, and the price for that coherence is a definite kind of failure at times. I am not sure that’s necessarily a good enough excuse for some of the stop-start, but I feel that the coherence of the game’s illusion is something that isn’t praised enough. If only that could be provided without such a sensation of failing – not as a player, but failing the character you play.
I’ve been a long-time follower of comic artist and musician James Kochalka, and so was quite happy when we first met through the ‘net and traded Wii friend codes, and even more thrilled when a small but steady stream of delightfully bizarre characters filed in upon opening my Mii Channel the first time following.
So, in the spirit of sharing, and as part of that drive to widen the games community that I’ve been harping on about since the beginning, James and Offworld have partnered to bring you Monster Mii.
Monster Mii will be a regular feature introducing a new Mii monster each time for you to bring home to your own Wii. Once there, they’ll give you creepy stares from the sidelines of your Wii Sports, lap you rudely during your Wii Fit jogs, and in general liven up your Plaza and gaming day.
This week’s monster is Kzorx, who’s down on public affection, but big on incandescence. To bring him home, enter the Check Mii Out Channel’s Posting Plaza, click ‘Popular,’ then the ‘Search’ button at bottom. After that, hit the arrows at top right and enter in the code: 6140-6148-3207.
And let us know how he gets on with everyone else.
[James Kochalka’s daily diary strips, which run at AmericanElf.com, have just entered their tenth year and been collected in three print volumes. He is also the author of more books and comics than you can count on both hands, including some that are excellent for children, and others not so much. All are excellent. James also plays rock and roll and Game Boy rock as James Kochalka Superstar, and recently exhibited artwork at Giant Robot’s GR2 gallery. We are very happy to count him as a genuine Offworldian.]
2D Boy’s World of Goo is a fast and obvious pick for indie game of the year for myriad reasons, and in the spirit of showing, not telling, fellow indie developer David Rosen of Wolfire picks apart just about damn near every one in this lengthy and very incisive video. Although heavily design oriented, it also makes a smart introductory primer on the game, should you not mind getting a peek at its later levels, but it’s at its best elaborating on all the brilliant little details you intuited but perhaps didn’t explicitly notice.
Following its previously posted Black Friday deal (which, according to my just-now check of the NXE, is still available), Microsoft has announced that it’ll be dusting off a weekly holiday deal from now until the end of the year, starting with a third-off price drop on Halo 3‘s Legendary Map Pack, originally released in April. The pack contains three maps inspired by multiplayer levels from earlier games in the series: Avalanche, Ghost Town, and Blackout.
My suggestion for next? A price drop on the Xbox Originals versions of Psychonauts, Dreamfall and Indigo Prophecy, which would make for many happy holidays indeed.
What better way to show off the glittering power of your 22nd century handheld communications device than with a 1980’s ASCII UNIX RPG? Gandreas Software has ported Epyx’s seminal early-PC RPG Rogue to the iPhone as a free download, and — to be fair — has done a very noble job of bringing the game up to date.
Gandreas’s version adds tile graphics (and a very smart tilt-mode that morphs the landscape view’s ASCII mode into graphics as you turn it up to portrait) and gesture based commands (trace a W on the screen to wield a weapon, R to remove a ring), but keeps the same brutal difficulty of the original: be prepared to die a lot by the crooked claws of kestrels.
At a time when even NES cult brawler River City Ransom is finding new life as a sidescrolling MMO, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to hear that EA plans to do the same with its classic Bullfrog franchise Dungeon Keeper, especially given that the Asian online market is one of their biggest perceived growth opportunities.
Very few details have yet come out on exactly how the game might translate online. In their press release, developer NetDragon (who also are behind Ubisoft’s Heroes of Might and Magic Online and a forthcoming turn-based Disney RPG) have only dryly stated the obvious in calling it a “3D massively multi-player online role playing game.”
Bullfrog’s game was famous for turning the tables on RPG standards and letting players be the one to architect dungeons, placing traps and monsters to stymie marauding heroes. We only hope the game continues that same tradition and lets players switch off on directing dungeon design for others to plunder, and that the game gets localized for the wider world — the original release is coy on whether it’ll remain in the ‘Greater China’ region.
