PAX’S DARK CARNIVAL: SCREENSHOTS OF THE LATEST LEFT 4 DEAD 2 CAMPAIGN
Below the fold: a high-res look at the Dark Carnival, the latest Left 4 Dead 2 campaign being shown off at the ongoing Penny Arcade Expo, most notable (if not for its Pennywise-perfect Zombie Clowns) for the unveiling of The Jockey, a new grotesquely hunched Boss infected Valve says “lets you attack lone Survivors and wrestle control of their movement away from them-into fire, off ledges, or straight into the middle of a zombie horde.”
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PAX: SPLINTER CELL’S KEYBOARD SAM GOES FOR THE LOLS
Name the most unlikely scenario in which you’d ever imagine Splinter Cell‘s Sam Fisher, and Ubisoft will officially do you one better with this Keyboard Cat parody intro vid for their Penny Arcade Expo Conviction demo launch.
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PUPPY POWER: CAPCOM OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCE DS OKAMI SEQUEL OKAMIDEN
If you’ve played Capcom/Clover’s PS2/Wii original Okami, it’s not hard to imagine what form its newly announced DS diminutive sequel will take: just reduce all of the original’s gestural/analog-stick Celestial Brushed mechanics to direct stylus control, and you’ve got what could easily amount to a handheld epic, which, from the video above, seems to have lost none of its lush Ukiyo-e inspired design.
Capcom’s prepping the full reveal for Tokyo Game Show, but IGN has translated the bits and scraps from its Famitsu magazine reveal and said the sequel will directly follow the events of the original, and will follow Chibiterasu (the ‘chibi‘ [tiny] name a riff off Okami‘s star Amaterasu) and a yet-unnamed companion on a yet-undetailed quest.
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TOUCHDOWN THROWBACK: NO MORE HEROES 2 GOES 8-BIT, ON PURPOSE
I’d like to think that there’s some wonky translation afoot in this extended video with an increasingly iconic and self-aware Suda 51 introducing the new features in Wii sequel No More Heroes 2. The most interesting thing you’ll see within is that the new game’s part-time-job side-missions now take place in faux 8-bit NES style, which pseudo-Suda claims is “on purpose.”
I’d like to think what they meant is “deliberately”, because no one should have to basically apologize for a touch of nostalgia, especially when it looks as good as this. [via TinyCartridge]
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FOREVER IN 16 SECONDS: FARBS TEASES UPCOMING SPACE SHOOTER CAPTAIN FOREVER
Ask just about anyone in the indie underground know which upcoming game they’re most excited about and, after a lot of over-the-shoulder peeking for listeners-in, they’ll widen their eyes with sincerity and quietly hiss two words: Captain Forever.
Forever‘s just days away from proper pre-launch and while you haven’t heard much about it yet from creator Farbs (who you’ll remember as the dev behind 8-bit mashup ROM Check Fail or maybe Polychromatic Funk Monkey, or, for regular Offworld readers, as The Guy Who Quit His Job Via Super Mario Bros.), he’s just let slip the video above, giving you a full 15 minutes of play footage crammed into 15 seconds.
Watch this space (and his space, too) for much more of Forever‘s space soon.
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HEX-TATIC: HUDSON BRINGING TURN-BASED STRATEGY MILITARY MADNESS: NEO NECTARIS TO IPHONE
In other Hudson revival news, the company has just announced its fall lineup for the iPhone, which is most important for the announcement of Military Madness: Neo Nectaris, a version of its classic hex-based strategy game, following details of their forthcoming PS3/Xbox 360/Wii remake in the same franchise.
Whereas its console counterpart will cover ground from the original, the iPhone game is based on a mobile reworking of the 1994 PC Engine CD-Rom followup, albeit, says Hudson, with “with updated visuals, re-imagined cutscenes, and full touch screen gameplay” — though without, apparently, any of the original/console’s 2-player modes.
The rest of Hudson’s lineup includes Aqua Forest 2, a sequel to its original liquid physics puzzler, World RPS, a simple but honestly quite interesting sounding rock, paper, scissors that sees players competing with each other world-wide, and Knights of the Phantom Castle, an action RPG/strategy game based on a new Hudson IP (that will likely call for its own post in the future).
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INTO THE VOID: BIT.TRIP CREATORS UNVEIL THEIR LATEST WIIWARE ENTRY
After anonymously teasing a series of images via its new explorethevoid.com site (and going so rapidfire that I can hardly keep up with the last), Bit.Trip creators Gaijin Games have announced the latest in the WiiWare series with Void.
As you can see via the new video above, Void is less blatantly rhythm based than Beat and Core before it, and this time seems to draw more inspiration from the dark/light bullet-hell interplay of, say, Ikaruga.
Your mission this time, as best as I can tell, is to grow and maintain your void by continually collecting black pixels, each one adding, Katamari-style, to your girth, putting you in greater risk of colliding with the white, which appear to deflate you near instantly.
Gaijin says their latest entry will include local four player co-op, and, mercifully, mid-level checkpoints, and will see chiptune maker Nullsleep pulling guest star duties in this episode. The game is due for WiiWare release this fall, and will be on display at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo for first public consumption.
Bit.Trip Void [Gaijin Games]
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TYPE HEROES: PENTAGRAM TAKES YOU BEHIND THE FONT OF GUITAR HERO
But in less queasy Guitar Hero news, design studio Pentagram has just published a nice post-mortem on their work extending the franchise’s visual ident to its Band and DJ followups.
The changes necessitated creating the new proprietary font above, which go look and see how gracefully they’ve modified it to cut a clean peaked and valleyed line between the words on all three brands.
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ONE SHOT: DANCE DANCE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
When the Saints go Marching, presumably. Artist unknown, via Amy Seimetz’s MySpace, via Alex Litel.
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ONE MORE GO: METROID, FROM GIRL GEEK TO GODWIN’S LAW IN A SINGLE TRIPLE-JUMP
I spent this weekend playing Super Metroid, start to finish. I thought the ending was a bit weak, but I loved the puzzles with foam and the grenades.
Psyche! Metroid doesn’t have foam and grenades. But you knew that. What does have foam and grenades is Shadow Complex, which is basically Metroid in 2.5D with some nice water effects, courtesy of the Unreal Engine. But you knew that too, probably cos you spent the past weekends playing it as well.
I should stress that I’m not saying Shadow Complex is just 2.5D Metroid to belittle it. Metroid is a member of that very small cadre of games which are damn near perfect, and finding a smart, innovative way to update it is a substantial game design accomplishment. I may not quite have bought into Shadow Complex‘s fiction, and I may have had issues with some of its platforming, but shooting people was bloody satisfying, the sense of exploration and mastery was well conveyed and the bosses were sensibly designed. First game this year I’ve dedicated a weekend to, start to finish.
Finishing it – or rather, ‘finishing’ it (I’m a long way off finding all the keycards, let alone tracking all the bullion and every upgrade) – made me want to go back to Metroid. To talk about how emotional just a corner of the map makes me. To rave about the brilliance of the sound design. To preach about the strength of games whose environments form one interlinked whole, rather than a random scattering of different zones. To my enormous surprise, however, I’m not going to talk about any of those things. (more…)
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