Via BigDownload we note that Chronicle Books will be holding a San Francisco signing on December 4th for Rogue Leaders, its upcoming visual history of the golden age of Lucasarts adventures.
Chronicle says the book is “a deluxe compilation that traces its history through never-before-published interviews,” with “more than 300 pieces of concept art, character development sketches, and storyboards have been lavishly reproduced to showcase the creative talent behind such videogame classics as The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.”
Cartoon Brew ran a scan of the one-sheet several weeks back with a selection of the images inside. The signing will be this Thursday, December 4th at Chronicle’s 680 Second Street outlet, and the book itself will be released more widely in mid-December.
The biggest repeat offender on the list is the LEGO series (Star Wars and Indy) and various other Star Wars titles, which is no coincidence, as LucasFilm sound effect designers Ben Burtt and Richard Anderson were the pair credited with starting the trend. I’m going to have to replay Bionic Commando Rearmed and Team Fortress 2 with more open ears next time, though, and apparently even Halo 3 got in on the action.
The week’s off to a good start: as promised, mod team Black Mesa Modification has shown off the first trailer for their original Half-Life remake, which is shaping up better than we could’ve imagined.
File this under practical nostalgia: tchotchke megamart StrapyaWorld is offering new Tetris and Breakout LCD toy arcade machines done up in the style of Coleco and Nintendo’s original 80’s tabletop units which serve dual purpose as piggybanks, apparently charging a penny per play.
I’m sold, but I’m also holding out some scrap of hope that Tomy will have the good sense to localize BankQuest, their RPG piggy bank (which, coincidentally, was part of a recent Wired photospread).
On top of the hip-hop tribute Capcom put together for its Live Arcade/PSN remake Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, it worked with game music uber-community OC Remix to set down a reimagined version of all the game’s themes, which the site is releasing for free. Personal favorites: all of Malcos’s Dhalsim stage mixes, and Vurez’s perfectly Morricone-esque spaghetti Western themes for T.Hawk’s stages.
I’m stuck square in between horrified and delighted to see via Alice Taylor’s Wonderland blog that Sony has partnered with the UK edition of Vice — your monthly celebration of all things debauched — for an all-LittleBigPlanet blowout, including “Sackboy fashion shoots, fake Sackboy ads for perfume and clothing,” and, most disturbingly, the usual back-cover American Apparel ad with the little Sack lying alluringly in his/her banana-colored panties.
That said, anyone willing to send a copy overseas to Offworld HQ will be our new favorite person — I think we yanks are stuck with the (actually quite good) No Photos issue.
Yutaka ‘Yoot’ Saito hasn’t quite yet become a household name, but if you were gaming throughout the Dreamcast era you’ve probably at least heard of his work: he’s the creator of the wonderfully grotesque Leonard Nemoy-voiced pet simulator Seaman, as well as the designer behind Maxis’s SimTower (which later was released to GBA and DS as The Tower) and GameCube feudal Japan pinball/strategy game (!) Odama.
While we in the West haven’t been treated to Saito’s work since Odama, he has continued to rework his Seaman idea since, with a mobile phone version and a proper Seaman 2 sequel for PlayStation 2. Unlike the fishtank first, that sequel featured a Peking man with a disturbingly pert umbilical cord called Gabo, whom you communicated with as he went about his daily life (with a now more-evolved Seaman working as your companion).
His company DigiToys has uploaded a quick demonstration video of what to expect, and, after watching him mutter quietly to himself while tweaking and twisting his cord and then screaming impotently into the watery void, I have to admit I’m already forming a fast bond.
One of the games that unfortunately fell through the cracks in the first months of Offworld was Cipher Prime’s liquid musical puzzler Auditorium, but with the developer just announcing the release of a full commercial version, I can happily correct that oversight.
Auditorium is as gorgeous a game as it is deviously challenging, and is as organic a puzzle as they come, with no clear correct answers and no binary switches to impact its world. The best you can do is influence its light-stream through subtle gravitational bends, filling up receptors which conduct the underlying music.
It seems to tickle the same part of my brain as ‘fill-in crosswords‘ — the ones with a wordlist, but no clues. You know the answer is there, you can visualize how its streams will eventually intersect, but there’s no easy way to know what your first step should be, or even, at any given moment, how far off the path you are.
Where the demo version — still online to get a taste of what lies ahead — is spread across three acts, the just released full version contains 15 acts, promising some 70 levels.
While the unofficial modders have been busy doing dire and otherwise pedestrian things with their Fallout 3 installs like hacking in child killing and more realistic gun noises (or so I’ve just learned from the ‘related videos’), ‘airshom’ reminds us of why we like to let people tinker around inside their games. Be forewarned that if you haven’t seen everything there is to see around the Wasteland, you might end up seeing some things you’re not ready to see.
Bethesda: this is the kind of DLC we’d also pay for. We know you didn’t put those party hats in there without a good reason.
Xeni and I had been batting ideas back and forth earlier this week about what might go into a Thanksgiving-themed Offworld BBtv episode, and while we decided against it in the end, it still had me brainstorming about recent releases perfect for postprandial tryptophan-induced sedate-gaming. Here’s a quick list of three off the top of my head, add your own in the comments below if there’s something I’ve missed…
As I recently discovered — quite unintentionally — Bethesda’s RPG makes for perfect extreme-hangover gaming, a mindstate not too far away from a belly-full coma. Though it might sound like a slight, I take it as an asset: one of Fallout‘s draws is that a number of its sidequests and its exploration in general aren’t the most mentally taxing. In fact, one of the things I think the game does best is let you stumble almost continually on a series of small messes that exist only for you to tidy. It became almost a mantra during that hangover head sick session: “I found a building. It was a mess. I cleaned it up. I felt satisfied. I moved on.”
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Though I’ve never heard any of its directors or designers explicitly state it, I’ve got a strong hunch one of Animal Crossing‘s guiding principles was that of the Slow Life movement that spread across Japan in the early ‘oughts, seeking to “shift from a society of mass production and mass consumption, to a society that is not hectic and does cherish our possessions and things of the heart.”
It’s not just the provincial setting or the townsfolk whose lives are little more than neighborly gossip (see also: basically any post-war Yasujiro Ozu movie for the real world cultural touchstones there). It’s straight down to the game’s interactions themselves: try and get basically any task accomplished in less than a minute and you’ll be strained. The series forces you at every turn to sloooow down and settle into its signature torpor.
Soul Bubbles
Developer Mekensleep was taken to task by a number of enthusiast reviewers for a perceived lack of difficulty in its DS debut, but its underlying old-world and naturalistic environments basically demand more leisurely exploration. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have its own difficulties, or that complete runs of its levels are anything approaching a cakewalk. Soul Bubbles keeps its difficulty in places for you to seek it out if you want it, but leaves you free to enjoy yourself without it, making it one of the more suitably relaxing (and unfortunately underappreciated) games for the handheld.
As for me, I’ll be spending the rest of today wending my way slowly through a backlog of things I haven’t yet had a chance to get to and would like to talk about in the coming weeks: Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, BioShock‘s PS3 exclusive downloadable Challenge Rooms, and the European release of Grasshopper Manufacture’s DS adventure remake Flower, Sun and Rain.
