Investor news site VentureBeat has a very lengthy preview on the online multiplayer online features coming to Aurora Feint II, the sequel to the Puzzle Quest meets Tetris Attack iPhone game, which sounds like it’s coming together nicely:
One person plays a level of the game (which is, at its heart, a puzzle game) and when he or she is done, sends that data to the game’s servers. As a competitor, you can then download this data (which includes not only scores but also a play-by-play of how the player made his or her moves), and put it into your game, creating a sort of “ghost” competitor…
But what’s cool is that you can actually manipulate the opposing player’s score by making certain moves at the right time. This may seem a bit odd since the other person has already played, but using weapons, you can alter their game and work toward a victory.
Where the first hit was free, Feint‘s developers are banking on the hope that fans of the original will return for this $10 update, which greatly extends its social networking features.
File this one under wait and see, but when Shuji Utsumi speaks, I listen. Formerly variously VP at Sony Computer Entertainment, Sega and Disney, Utsumi is now CEO of Q Entertainment, the developer behind Lumines, Every Extend Extra and Xbox Live Arcade’s Rez revival — in general, one of the top studios driving music and games closer together outside of Rock Band and Phase creator Harmonix.
So it was with some interest that I noted via his blog that he’d just returned from a quick ‘Roman Holiday’ to visit the Nokia Games Summit, where he appeared on stage (above) to tell the audience that mobile media would soon be the “center of the media, replacing TV,” and, more interestingly, how happy he was to see Nokia working closely with content creators in the area.
Utsumi notes in his post that Stewart was impressed when he showed off another of Q’s music properties, Genki Rockets, who are, in Q’s own words, “a music group which vocal is 17 years old girl, Lumi, a first baby born in outer space and has never been to the earth” (and is, in fact, beaming her pop videos to us from 30 years in the future).
So what brings Q and a Eurythmic together? After doing a little further digging, we can see that Stewart attended the games summit as part of the company’s “Artists’ Advisory Council,” where he is helping to introduce “up-and-coming singer Cindy Gomez through [Digital Legends’ already-announced N-Gage game Dance Fabulous] with brand new songs including the theme song, ‘Street Dancing.'”
But after more digging, we can see that while the studio isn’t currently listed, in July of this year Q Entertainment did indeed show up on Nokia’s ‘Our Developers’ list.
So, like I say, file this one under wait and see until we get solid word from an official source — it could be as simple as Q porting Lumines to the device, as they have to PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, and PC (via Steam) — but either way, along with the mind-boggling but excellent N-Gage/PC strategy game Reset Generation and the intriguing looking Yamake, Nokia appear to be gathering a solid team beneath their wing.
Now that nearly everyone has signed on for Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience dashboard update, the community has been putting itself to good use. Above and beyond simple background pictures, the NXE allows developers to create their own premium themes that also decorate the spaces occupied by your now avatar-ized friends, the hitch being that you can’t preview a theme before you purchase.
The members of the otherwise raucous NeoGAF forum, though, have solved that with good (or, in some cases, you know, good enough) photos of each, letting me see that why, yes, I think I do want The Behemoth’s Castle Crashers theme.
At a clip that the company says makes it “the fastest-selling PC game of all time,” and clearly showing no signs of slowing down in the nearly four years since its original release, publishing juggernaut Activision Blizzard says World of Warcraft‘s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King has sold more than 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours, eclipsing January 2007’s Burning Crusade expansion record of 2.4 million copies in the same time.
Oh! What a time to have a busted web cam and a printer packed firmly away: while we wait patiently to see just how lovable Sony’s curiously Monchichi-esque EyePet will be, Digital Pictures Interactive have released the first stirrings of their own bespoke version which you can interact with now by printing a reference spot and training your webcam to your desk.
The studio is the same one behind their earlier Save Your Sensible campaign that also uses Papervision3D tech to do realtime 3D animation in Flash, utilizing, they say, “a file format originally created for first person shooter video games from 10 years ago (id Software’s Quake 2).”
The games potential for this type of augmented reality is obviously quite high, and while Sony is one of the few big players currently dabbling in it (also with their card RPG Eye of Judgment), we also have big hopes for Nintendo to do the same with the now camera-enabled DSi.
Let us know how you get on with your creature via the comments.
After an oxygen fire knocked our interstellar video link temporarily out of commission, we bring you our Boing Boing TV premiere via Azeroth, where my spiritual Death Knight equal gives you a little background on where we’re is coming from and where I hope to steer the ship. As usual, here’s the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.
Offworld bonus fact: in real life, my eyes and sword glow a much more vivid shade of blue. That is indeed, though, almost exactly how I shake a tail feather.
Sad news today for Lively enthusiasts as Google announces that it intends to shutter its 3D online world service to “focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.”
I’d just talked with creative director Kevin Hanna of X-Ray Kid, the studio headed by Marvel and The Batman cartoon series artist Jeff Matsuda, in September, who had revealed at the Austin Game Developers Conference that the project’s then-long-term goals included opening Lively’s API to developers, hoping to make it a ubiquitous browser-embedded 3D platform for games.
With October and November’s dogpile of blockbusters, it’s easy to forget that the year started off with a proper bang with Grand Theft Auto IV. As the release of PC version of the game draws nearer, Rockstar has started to show off the extensive power of that version’s exclusive video editor and video sharing — and we’re genuinely excited for the wave of machinima to follow, if only because we’re secretly hopeful for more Philip Glass-scored video and more footage of the everyday/mundane side of Liberty City.
But for Xbox 360 owners, today brings first official word via USAToday on the subject and release date of the first downloadable episode, which this time will focus only marginally on Niko, instead giving players the vantage point of one of the original game’s cameo stars:
This new episode, available Feb. 17 via download exclusively for those who own the Xbox 360 version (no price yet), stars Johnny Klebitz, a member of Liberty City biker gang The Lost.
“Johnny is a very different character than Niko, with a very different background,” says Dan Houser, vice president of creative development for Rockstar Games. “I can’t go into too much detail on the story, because we try not to give away too much plot before the game is released. But I can say that the story will show you a different side of Liberty City.”
After a slight snafu yesterday that saw the latest trailer for Hand Circus’s highly anticipated puzzle/platformer Rolando yanked just minutes before I’d posted it, iPhone publisher ngmoco has released new trailers for its two upcoming “fast apps” (lower price-tier games like their free Maze Finger and 99 cent Topple): Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon M.D. and Dropship.
The wonderful part of Dr. Awesome? It’s not the over-dramatic Phoenix Wright/Trauma Center portrait art, or the Qix-like gameplay, it’s the fact that you’re performing surgery on your friends, as imported from your phone’s address book.
As for Dropship, I’ve got a strong suspicion that touching will be believing — I’ve been miming my fingers overlaid on top of the video trying to get a feel for how it works and though it’s not quite connected yet, I’m suitably enamored with its radiant vector design.
While there hasn’t been nearly enough time since the New Xbox Experience update landed to fully dig into all of the new community games it has also brought with it, one game has jumped out ahead of the pack both in terms of sales (it’s currently, according to the new dashboard’s sorting options, the most popular community title) and in wider recognition over the past few days.
That game is Weapon of Choice, which seems to exemplify precisely what Microsoft’s community games campaign was set up to do: giving passionate one-person teams their platform for indie success. Industry news site Gamasutra talked with that one person, Nathan Fouts (who recently gave up his position at Resistance: Fall of Man creator Insomniac to form his startup, Mommy’s Best Games) where he admitted that his game wasn’t up to snuff to be accepted into the Xbox Live Arcade program proper, but perfectly fit the community game mantra.
Weapon of Choice is, at heart, a game you’ve played before — again and again and again, especially if you had your roots in early computer games — a bombastic and testosterone-drenched side-scrolling shooter with a ludicrous sci-fi storyline, blaring guitar riffs and multiple-screen-filling bosses. It’s so filled with the vitality of a singular vision, though — Fouts pulled in help with music and scriptwriting, but otherwise took the reins on all its art, programming and sound effects — that it’s hard to escape its auteur, throwback charm.
That’s not to say that it hasn’t brought anything new to the table: apart from handling as fluidly as a 16-bit shooter should on modern hardware, Fouts packed a few very smart gameplay aces up his sleeve. The first is ‘death brushing,’ a ubiquitous ‘bullet-time’ trick that zooms in on and slows down the action when you’re very near death (as you will be, often — Choice‘s screens are chaotic with over and undersized alien enemies all squelching and squeezing various fluids and particles from themselves at any given moment), allowing you to make narrow and stylish escapes.
For those moments where death brushing hadn’t worked out as well as you’d hoped, once you’ve died the game calls up a ‘vengeance missile,’ which, before you’ve called your next character into play, gives you a one shot first-person-bullseye-targeted chance to eliminate whatever it was that’d brought you down before.
Finally, the game gives you the chance to rescue that downed character that you’ve just replaced by slinging them — or other downed operatives you’ve find on the field — over your shoulder and carrying them to end-of-level safety, bringing about tough choices about who you decide to leave behind. It’s not until you’ve depleted your stock of rescued characters that the game is truly over.
It’s no surprise that, according to the interview with Fouts, his recently rediscovered teenage game design sketches share an uncanny similarity to game he’s just created: Weapon of Choiceis that game that the disaffected youth of the Psygnosis/Factor 5/Epic MegaGames/Apogee shareware era had always dreamed of making, and all the more glorious for it.
