Like Microsoft, Sony has announced its own Black Friday digital download deals that seem pointed straight at the one true Offworld heart. PixelJunk Eden for starters, is a quintessential Offworld game. Developer Q-Games (a different Q, mind, than Rez‘s), after creating the more traditional DS shooter Starfox Command for Nintendo, has gone gloriously off the deep end and focused on partnering with musicians and visual artists outside the industry to create entirely new experiences. In Eden‘s case, that artist was Baiyon, whose organic vectors and thumping trance would form its inimitable playground, resulting in one of the most essential downloads on the PlayStation Network.
Not entirely far away is Sony’s own internally produced The Last Guy. Directed by the same Denki Groove-related team that put together Baito Hell 2000, the PSP high-weirdness mini-game collection (known in the West and also available for download on PSN as Work Time Fine [W.T.F.]), the easiest way to describe The Last Guy is as Pac-Man via Nokia’s Snake game all played out over Google Maps.
It might always be best known for its equally baffling promotional campaign — which depicted the developers as a backwoods Indian team known as Hindustan Electronics — and its unmistakably Popcorn-esque theme song, but the game itself is another true inspired Offworld cult classic.
Here are two reasons I like Microsoft’s Black Friday Xbox Live Arcade specials: one is that they’ve lowered the price on Q Entertainment’s HD remake of Dreamcast/PS2 rhythm/shooter Rez, which means there is essentially no excuse not to experience the game if you haven’t before. Inspired by, the story goes, one of his first rave experiences (this would have been the very late 90’s, mind), Sega designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi set out to create a game that could blend that light and sound and palpable pulsing rhythm as fantastically. The result was Rez, and a long series of music/puzzle games since.
The second is that it gives me an excuse to post this recent YouTube Live Genki Rockets video Q CEO Shuji Utsumi pointed to earlier today. As mentioned in the last Q-related post, Genki Rockets is Q’s music property fronted by teen pop star Lumi, the first baby born in outer space who beams her j-pop disco to Earth from 30 years in the future.
Even if the style of music isn’t your cup of euro-beats, there’s kind of nothing not amazing about the performance, from the faceless DJ-naut on the ones and twos, to Lumi’s eventual appearance on the monolithic low-res LED screen, fingers sending off glittering trails as she does her interstellar dance: all precisely the kind of synaesthetic experience that inspired Mizuguchi to create Rez in the first place.
Ken Moore’s patched together custom theremin, made from a Wii-mote and a Roland JV-1080 synth, is one of my favorite hardware mods making the rounds, but the experience is — as Ken’s wife is apparently quick to add — one better listened to than watched.
Despite being a certifiable friend of Boing Boing (having designed, if you recall, the excellent Jackhammer Jill t-shirt earlier this year), we’re just as surprised as everyone to learn that he’s quietly snuck four de-luxe aluminum Guitar Hero faceplates into his online store, which is giving us all kinds of wicked ideas about further artist-edition plates.
The swells of the end-of-year gaming surge are still carrying me out to sea, the living room floor strewn with the wreckage of Fable 2, Resistance 2, Little Big, Mirror’s Edge, Gears Of War 2, Left 4 Dead and an unopened copy of Moto GP ‘08 I found in amongst the cookery books. The tide is showing no signs of turning, sweeping me out further and further, later and later each night. But somehow, every evening, I struggle back to shore, to my safe, sheltered, gaming harbour: BudCat’s New York Times Crosswords. Despite Valve’s millions, EA’s blanket media blitz and Sony’s increasingly unlikable promo Sackboy variants, every evening ends with me grabbing my DS and firing up an 18-month old game which opens with a inept cartoon of a vomiting cat.
But why? What could a game with no score, no story, no spectacle, and no real character beyond the vomiting cat (BudCat may well have reworked their ident since their recent acquisition by Activision) have to lure me away from the riches of this Autumn’s release list? The simple answer: clues like the one above. And yep, that’s a real clue from a real New York Times Crossword. Reading it, all you know for certain is there are only two people in this deal – you and the guy who wrote the clue – and one of you is being really, really dumb. Donkey Kong company. Five letters. Could it be a trick? Some clever crossword subtlety you’re missing?
Or has the esteemed New York Times got its Japanese heavyweights confused – all the more understandable when you allow these puzzles were compiled a good few years before the Wii comeback coup – and wants you to commit the sacrilege of inscribing ‘NAMCO’ into the spaces? And that takes you into a very satisfying game of second-guessing. Would the not-very-videogame-savvy crossword designer be more likely to have heard of Namco or Taito? Could they have asked the advice of their Sony-loving 12-year-old and been told, disparagingly ‘Ninty’?
Then: curve ball. Solving another clue gives you a terminal ‘I’. I? Weird. Unless…unless. No, can’t be. Couldn’t be. They’re not even Japanese! But yes, what fits is Atari. And suddenly, with a single, trivial oversight, the New York Times rewrites gaming history. Suddenly, instead of Pong, Nolan Bushnell unleashes a stark, monochrome rescue challenge on the world. AVOID MISSING PRINCESS FOR HIGH SCORE burns itself into the brains of a generation. A couple of sequels expand the world of this strange new hero and, keen to bring its popularity to bear on the 2600, Atari execs strong-arm Warren Robinett into populating Adventure with mushroom monsters and making the green dragon friendly.
The new franchise becomes so popular, that – at the last minute – the decision is taken to stop development on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and instead divert full resources to Mario’s Revenge, a hypnotic shooter in which the plucky plumber must shoot fireballs through a dazzling, kaleidoscopic barrier while dodging Donkey Kong’s laser-barrels.
Mario’s Revenge is such a huge hit it leads to the Great Videogame Surge of 1983. With its vast resources of cash, Atari bring forward development of its revolutionary Lynx handheld, which – thanks to the popularity of Mushroom Kingdom Games, which features goomba-skimming, piranha-plant-vaulting and dinosaur racing – outsells the Game Boy ten-to-one. Nintendo, resources depleted after losing successive court battles, drops out of the videogame industry. Atari, looking to consolidate its home entertainment empire, diverts a fraction of its massive wealth to buy television manufacturers Sony, resuscitating the failing Betamax format in the process.
And on and on we go. From one slip of a crossword compiler’s pen, I get thirty years worth of games I’ve never played, machines I’ve never touched, and crossovers I’d never imagined (who can forget when Bronson Pinchot lost out to Charles Martinet for the part of Larry Appleton’s countrified Mushroom Kingdom cousin in Perfect Strangers?). How could the combined might of Sony, EA, Microsoft and Valve ever match that? Although, if they could give me a hand with 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank) I promise I’ll get back to Albion, asap.
[Margaret Robertson is the former editor of Edge magazine and now videogame consultant. One More Go is her regular Offworld column in which she explores the attractions of the games she just can’t stop going back to.]
While we here at Offworld gather exclusive content for future editions of Offworld’s BBtv transmissions, our second update is a status report, telling the wider world what we’ve been getting up to over the past week (including the rapid growth of our Boing Boing Steam group, as we all gather for Left 4 Dead extended plays), and a quick rundown of the new things coming to the site in the following weeks.
As usual, here’s the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.
Why we love other peoples’ idle hands: they do brilliantly devlish things like take one-off April Fools gags by World of Warcraft makers Blizzard and bring them gloriously to life. But man! Is it as hard as you’ve heard.
Terminally obsessed with player statistics — and with good reason, it being one of the top contributors to making their games as balanced and smart as they are — Valve have published current total Achievement percentages for the first week of Left 4 Dead sessions.
What do they show? That Smokers really aren’t all that bad, apparently, that it really is sort of every-Survivor-for-themselves, with only some 15 percent doing the majority of healing and pill giving (though we’re happy to see that 25 percent that have healed others when they’ve been on the outs themselves), and that it’s really quite hard to stay away from that Boomer vomit.
Upon further investigation this happens to be a bit old, but I’m going to fork it over anyway, for a number of reasons: a.) it was just indirectly pointed out to me by my old co-worker Simon Carless, b.) it gives me an opportunity to mention the always excellent work Raina Lee has done, and 3.) I’m hoping it’ll prompt her to properly finish.
Lee is the recent author of Chronicle Books’ Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide To Karaoke Domination, but prior to her empty-orchestra empire she earned her street cred with the 1up-zine, spanning three lovingly hand-crafted screenprint and xerox issues that brought an entirely different perspective to the usual print-media affairs. The writing was always personal, usually unapologetically nostalgic, and Raina gathered top class talent to do comics and art interspersed between the articles.
You can see a preview version (pdf) of her still-unfinished fourth issue, with some road-diaries of a cross-country trip to classics arcade Funspot, and a history of the joint itself from Twin Galaxies’ Walter Day, who you’ll all instantly recognize from his role in the fantastic King of Kong documentary.
There’s a certain primary education process that I think a lot of us take for granted about games, and assume in other people. Case in point: yesterday, I was invited to be a guest on Air America Radio to explain precisely what it meant that Obama’s new FCC transition team co-chair was a level 70 Tauren shaman.
I’d made a lot of assumptions, actually, including believing the call to be a pre-recording that would get slickly edited down to a few seconds of soundbytes (which I had all pithily prepared) to go into a longer NPR-style news clip, assumptions which were summarily shattered 10 minutes before my phone was supposed to ring when a friend wrote on the wall of my Facebooks, “So here I am, listening to Air America… ‘coming up later, Brandon Boyer,'” and I realized I was about to be on live for quite a long time, facing questions I might necessarily not be up to answer.
That was somewhat relieved when host Ron Kuby led in the piece as I was on hold by rattling off facetiously sweeping generalizations of who World of Warcraft players were, and then brought me on to do some very, very basic explaining. Turns out: that’s a lot more difficult when you’ve been immersed eyeball deep in the culture for as many years as I have and have to take it all back to square one. As in: have you ever tried to explain what exactly ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ is or why it’s funny? I’d never had to, until I was live on national radio.
You can hear me valiantly try, though, via Kuby’s archives at Air America (though from what I gather the clip ends rather abruptly after an offhand ‘teamsters’ analogy). Coincidentally, and it would take me another few hours for this to click, Kuby is indeed one-and-the-same the Ron Kuby you hear ‘The Dude’ Lebowski ask for after the Malibu chief of police beans him with a coffee mug (!). Oh, right, and, you know, also a civil rights activist and lawyer of fantastic renown.
