PREORDERS OPEN FOR MEZCO’S LITTLEBIGPLANET FIGURE SET

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3.30.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

Spotted via vinyl toy/comic/culture blog Super Punch, Big Bad Toy Store has begun taking pre-orders for the first set of Mezco’s LittleBigPlanet toy. $35 will net you a set of three, including:

SackBoy – With baseball cap, two sets of alternate hands, and bendable pop-it lasso.
Sky – With removable pigtails wig, dress, two sets of alternate hands, and bendable pop-it lasso.
Marvin – With afro wig, sunglasses, two sets of alternate hands, and bendable pop-it lasso.

All accessories are naturally interchangable for maximum customization, and, as previously mentioned, Mezco will also soon be releasing a blank version of the models to create your own one-off customs.

Little Big Planet Series 01 – Set of 3 [BigBadToyStore, via Super Punch]

Previously:
I'm your puppet: Media Molecule/Sony reveal official Sackboy toys …
Custom kit: Mezco's naked little Sackboys – Offworld
Offworld: Toys Archives

OH MY PORK, INDEED: FANGAMER RELEASES FAN-CREATED MOTHER 3 GUIDEBOOK

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3.30.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

Yesterday’s best surprise was waking up to an early delivery of Fangamer’s fresh-off-the-press all-fan-created guidebook to the unofficially localized version of Game Boy Advance RPG Mother 3.

A quick video preview:

As you can see, it’s a show of community ownership and franchise devotion that’s essentially unparalleled in games (apart from the Starmen community’s first outpouring of fan art, in an attempt to get Nintendo of America to give the game the stateside support it would never receive), and, of course, does double duty as an exhaustive guide to the game itself.

From the Pork Army dust jacket that reverses to a clay model character poster and similarly excellent design throughout, to the reams of character art illustrating each page, it’s a true collective work of love and an essential purchase for anyone curious as to what this Earthbound fuss is all about.

Mother 3 Handbook – The English gamers’ guide to the world of MOTHER 3 [Fangamer]

Previously:
Earthbound goods for the rest of us – Offworld
Harvey James's Mother 3 fan art vanguard – Offworld
Mother 3: Behind the Music – Offworld
Mother 3 musical toe-dip into Bach, Vivaldi, Satie… Batman …
Saturn-ine: another Mother/Earthbound treat we can't have – Offworld
Mother 3 translators start Earthbound Central blog – Offworld

Wicked old but a relevant and essential watch and listen following Fez‘s freshly-updated reappearance at this year’s GDC, Polytron co-founder Jason ‘6955‘ Degroot remixes his Fez title track live at Tokyo’s 8-bit music night Fami-Mode.

Fez home [Polytron]

Previously:
Indie Games Summit: Polytron debut new Fez trailer – Offworld
Poly-amory: Polytron's Polyshop v0.1 offers Fez, Portable Pro …
Happy pills: Fez, Aquaria devs collaborating on new iPhone game …
Indie Games Summit: 2D Boy/Polytron's top 10 ways to market your …

The biggest surprise from Keita Takahashi’s GDC session on Noby Noby Boy? That the team involved has just started work last week on an iPhone version that he said could possibly be given away for free.

Here’s the problem: even though players managed to get Noby Noby GIRL to the moon in the game’s first week, at the current pace of her growth, she won’t connect the entire solar system for another 820 years (“I’ll be dead by then!” he lamented).

To try and bump up those odds to at least 400 years, the iPhone version will likely connect to the same system, letting the collective stretches of a new army of many mobile Noby BOYs bring their love to GIRL as well.

I’m currently uploading video of the reveal and will update this post (and later will write up the fantastic talk in its entirety) as soon as YouTube finishes processing.

As you can see from the video above, it’s obviously currently in a pre-pre-preproduction state that simply lets you stretch the BOY and bounce him off the other letters, but his interest in the platform is one of my happiest surprises of GDC.

o–o home [Namco]

Previously:
It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
Happy Holidays from Offworld (feat. Keita Takahashi) – Offworld
Only on Offworld: your first look at Panic's Noby Noby Boy T …
I was just dreaming: multiplayer, maracas coming to Noby Noby Boy …

Just announced in Japanese games mag Famitsu and now shown off in motion, a new full HD version of Katamari Damacy has just been announced for the PlayStation 3, with (maybe even more excitingly) a full slate of remixed versions of its brilliant original soundtrack by Offworld faves like YMCK and Sexy Synthesizer.

More on it when I’m not about to dash out to see, coincidentally, Keita Takahashi himself for his Noby Noby Boy session here at GDC.

Previously:
Katamari rolls onto iPhone – Offworld
Katamari Damacy coming to DSi as… a block puzzle game? – Offworld
It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
Listen: YMCK's Bowser-busting hardcore Mario remix – Offworld
Listen, too: Another PicoPict YMCK NES mega-mix – Offworld

ZENO CLASH FRAMED: ACE TEAM’S PROMOTIONAL WEB COMIC

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3.26.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

More GDC-week-cleanup: though their game was ultimately bested by Jakub Dvorský’s Machinarium at the Indie Games Festival, Chilean studio ACE Team has started the promotional push toward the release of their PC first-person brawler Zeno Clash with the release of this 4-page mini-web-comic which perfectly captures their breed of alien Neanderthal/native punk.

Click through to their full gallery for more fantastic art and screenshots, and pre-order the game via its Steam page where it’s currently offered at a 25 percent discount.

Zeno Clash comic [ACE Team, thanks Andres!]

Previously:
Blueberry Garden, Machinarium, Between top 2009 IGF Awards – Offworld
Offworld: The Offworld Guide to IGF 2009 (pg. 4)
The Young Machinarium: Another early look at Amanita's latest …

Today’s best art/toy/game crossover (and a nice snack before tomorrow’s Game Over/Continue? show), Australia’s Touch My Pixel has sent over the latest trailer for their forthcoming web game based on Nathan Jurevicius‘ Scarygirl.

TMP head Tarwin Stroh-Spijer says the final game will include “platforming and adventure elements as well as physics based bike riding and even a street Street Fighter style fighting game,” and I don’t really need to hear much more.

Scarygirl [Nathan J]

Previously:
Offworld: Art Archives
Offworld: Toys Archives

[via GameSpot]

Previously:
Blueberry Garden, Machinarium, Between top 2009 IGF Awards – Offworld
The Offworld Guide to the 2009 Independent Games Festival – Offworld

Always one of the top highlights of GDC, the 2009 Independent Games Festival Awards saw Erik Svedang’s pen-and-ink platformer Blueberry Garden come home with the top Seumas McNally Grand Prize — along with the $30,000 in prize money — now joining the ranks of games like Crayon Physics Deluxe, Aquaria and Darwinia.

Elsewhere in the evening’s proceedings (which contained a bit less of the antics of previous years), the Innovation Award (henceforth to be reclassified the ‘Nuovo’ Award for works that bring something genuinely new to gaming) was won by Jason Rohrer’s Between, and Machinarium brought home the Excellence in Visual Art award (accepted by Amanita Design’s Jakub Dvorský, above).

Digital Eel’s essentially terrifying BrainPipe took the Excellence in Audio award, Cortex Command (Data Realms’ long time IGF entrant) took home both the Technical Excellence and Audience Awards, KranX’s Musaic Box won for Excellence in Design, Best Student Game went to the DigiPen team behind Tag: The Power of Paint, and Hemisphere’s Osmos won the D2D Vision Award.

For more on all the winners of this year’s awards, check the comprehensive Offworld Guide to the IGF.

Previously:
The Offworld Guide to the 2009 Independent Games Festival – Offworld
Pixeljunk Eden, Osmos top 2009 IGF nominations – Offworld
The Young Machinarium: Another early look at Amanita's latest …
Passage's Jason Rohrer and emotional game experiences – Offworld

POSTCARD FROM GDC: SLOUCHING THROUGH WEDNESDAY

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3.25.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

Apologies for not having updated with more regularity throughout the first part of the week: as usual, GDC this year — particularly Monday and Tuesday’s Indie Games Summit — has been an unceasing torrent of back to back sessions punctuated only by chance hallway encounters in between of people you haven’t seen in years, people you’ve never seen in person, and people who you’ve always wanted to see, and I’m sitting on a mountain of backlogged notes I’ll work my way through over the coming days.

In a way, I wish the IGS was why we were all here, and that it could go the whole week through: especially this year there’s a palpable energy and even more a sense of purpose and community to the indie game devs. As more people leave their salaried positions to set up shop for themselves, there’s a definite (and in some cases, outright spoken) sense that This Is What We Should Be Doing, and There’s Room For All Of Us, and Let’s Not Let Anyone Else Get Left Behind.

All of this togetherness culminated with last night’s Flashbang/2D Boy/Grubby Games 10-Bit party at The Cellar (with Pixeljam co-founder Miles Tilmann and Shaw-Han Liem of I Am Robot And Proud providing the OST), followed by an impromptu and very, very, very inadvisable (but absolutely brilliant) afterparty that’s left me running on little more than the fumes of yesterday’s fumes today.

I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, though: I’ve seen things I’ve long been waiting to see and heard the first whispers of other amazing new things, all of which I’m busting to splash all over these pages when I can. Even if 2008 was The Year Indie Broke, there still stands a very good chance it’s going to break all over again in 2009.

Previously:
Indie Games Summit: Ron Carmel explains 2D Boy by the numbers …
Indie Games Summit: 2D Boy/Polytron's top 10 ways to market your …