OBAMA COMES TO STREET FIGHTER, SLINGING FIERY HOPE-BALLS
While Capcom is busy ramping up anticipation for its soon to be released console version of Street Fighter IV with new DLC costumes, one other fighter is making his brawling debut: Barack Obama, who will be a downloadable character not for Capcom’s official release, but Street Fighter Online Mouse Generation, the free-to-play, play-by-mouse online oddball offshoot released by Daletto earlier last year.
As seen in Gpara’s preview, the significantly beefier (and, er, toothier) Obama lets loose furious “Yes We Can” fireballs, and shares a Valentine’s Day release with bow-wrapped chocolate versions of the game’s female fighters.
LOVE LOVE on Valentine’s YES! WE CAN! [Daletto, google translation, via Tiny Cartridge]
Previously:
Obama: Famicom-aniac – Offworld
Obama's new Tauran Shaman of staff – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
GET HOTTED UP OVER PAC-MAN OVEN MITTS
The logical follow-up for your retro-infested kitchen after you’ve got your paws all over Fred & Friends Space Invaders ice-cube-trays (recently spotted by the Gadgets boys)? On the other end of the temperature extreme, an official Pac-Man silicone oven mitt.
Totally sold.
Previously:
Space Invaders goes icily crystalline, pixelaciously cubed – Boing …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
VALVE ANNOUNCE FIRST LEFT 4 DEAD DLC
Valve have just sent word that Left 4 Dead, one of Offworld’s still most-played games, will be getting its first dose of DLC this spring with the “L4D Survival Pack.” Details are still scarce, but Valve says the pack will introduce a new ‘Survival’ multiplayer game mode, as well as two new campaigns for Versus mode.
On top of that, Valve says an SDK update will be making its way to the PC around the same time, that will allow for the creation of new custom Left 4 Dead campaigns, and a ‘critic’s choice’ edition of the game will ship this spring as well, bundling the game with that Survival Pack.
Left 4 Dead home [Valve]
Previously:
Why Left 4 Dead has the best tutorial ever… and why you never …
Left 4 Love: Alexandria Neonakis' latest valentines – Offworld
Ragdoll Metaphysics: Left 4 Dead, The Thinking Man's Braindead …
Left 4 Dead: Savage beyond belief – Offworld
Surly Hate Machine: Dance to everything Left 4 Dead's Francis can …
Left 4 Dead: the twits don't stand a chance – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
MOSS GETS MODERN: GTA’S MOST WANTED AMERICA
Olly Moss’s countdown continues with his latest redesigned cover, this time a visual pun that says “Niko Bellic tries to live the American dream and gets dragged into a world of crime.”
Grand Theft Auto IV [Videogame Classics set]
Previously:
Olly Moss's Penguin-inspired Videogame Classics covers – Offworld
Olly Moss brings a touch of class to Black Mesa – Offworld
Olly Moss's Man With The Golden Gear – Offworld
And then there were four: Olly Moss takes on Silent Hill – Offworld
Moss creates a monster: Something Awful takes on retro-classic …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Olly Moss
THE WAY OF THE DENKI: GARY PENN’S GAME DESIGN RULES
After some years working without much in the way of games media attention, it’s good to see Denki striking back as the release of its debut Xbox Live Arcade game Quarrel nears. Case in point, a two part studio visit feature by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the latest of which reveals some of studio head Gary Penn’s golden rules for games making.
Penn, as I noted before, was creative director for DMA Design as it formed the first Grand Theft Auto and, more recently, helped design the Xbox 360 sandbox sleeper Crackdown, and these rules I found especially interesting:
Feel
“This is about trying to create products that feel good – they are substantial, they aren’t sloppy, the controls feel responsive, and you feel in control. But it also makes you feel good, so there’s some emotional resonance going on there. It’s not some deep meaningful need to create a game that exploits the emotions of love or hate, it’s just… hey, you know… feel something, feel good. Smile.”Alive
“We try to make products that feel alive. And that kind of operates on two tiers – informative and attentive. You’re never in the dark for too long, the game never feels like it’s crashed, which can still happen when you get this… dead air they call it on television, it’s horrible when you get that in games. It’s making sure the game is keeping you informed at the right times, with the right kind of absorbable information. The main thing we think of is, we as developers are performers, we’re building toys, the tools of play, for players who are also performers. Performing on your own is tedious, but performing in front of an audience is much more interesting. That’s where the attentive element comes in – if the product has life, it’s evocative and attentive, it says ‘hey that was pretty cool, I like the way you did that’.Twist
“There has to be some sort of meaningful twist in there. And that doesn’t mean it has to be wholly original, it just has to have something that distinguishes it from everything else. It can be a twist in the concept, a twist in the execution, and it has to kind of manifest throughout the product.
The full feature (and its first part) give more perspective on the studio’s process.
Gary Penn on the rules of game design [Guardian, via Infovore]
Previously:
Denki re-emerge with XBLA boardgame mashup Quarrel – Offworld
Denki does recruitment right – Offworld
Phil Spencer and Major Nelson talk Crackdown 2 – Offworld
See more posts about: Denki, Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
A LOOK BACK AT THE COLONY, THE GAME THAT BROKE CLANCY’S WILL
Developer David A Smith sends in this two part look back at his work on 1987 Mac adventure The Colony, a game that would take MacWorld’s Best Adventure Game of the Year award, and would spur a fortuitous meeting with Tom Clancy. Says Smith:
The video is a bit rough and focuses on the challenges of getting real time 3D on very slow machines, but you might find it entertaining. It is in two parts, separated by a system crash – code decays as it ages.
This led to a gig building a virtual set for the movie The Abyss with Jim Cameron, which turned into Virtus Walkthough in 1990. I also met Tom Clancy who contacted me while he was playing the game. He never asked for hints – just cussed me out. The game was somewhat … difficult. We later founded Red Storm Entertainment together.
The Colony (part 1) 1987 [part 2, via David A Smith]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
THE YOUNG MACHINARIUM: ANOTHER EARLY LOOK AT AMANITA’S LATEST
As I mentioned in my guide to the 2009 IGF, Jakub ‘Amanita‘ Dvorsky’s latest Flash adventure Machinarium is the natural evolution from his earlier Samorost games: as intricate and expressive as those games were, but now mechanically more complex, with the addition of inventory-based puzzles, and more focused on the navigation through the world, rather than rotely pointing and clicking to progress.
Dvorsky has uploaded the latest look at the game and (minor spoilers aside), it’s a must-watch, and drives home why my bet is on Machinarium making a number of top 2009 lists.
Machinarium home [Amanita Design]
Previously:
The Offworld Guide to the 2009 Independent Games Festival – Offworld
See more posts about: Machinarium, Offworld Originals
MOSS CREATES A MONSTER: SOMETHING AWFUL TAKES ON RETRO-CLASSIC-COVERS
Not content to let Olly Moss have all the fun with his ongoing series of classic Penguin book design inspired videogame covers, the Something Awful forums have started their own thread which, when I checked yesterday, hadn’t quite produced Something Amazing, but now is up to some 23 pages of jaw-dropping work, particularly those above.
Not everyone picked up on Moss’s proclivity to zero in on a single game-defining visual pun (the TF2 and Killer 7 covers which nail the style over the substance), but all are quite gorgeous in their own right.
Massive bonus points to any developer/publisher with moxy enough to take the meme to its logical end and let stuff like this propogate retail shelves by the end of 2009.
Make video game covers classy [The Something Awful Forums]
Previously:
Olly Moss's Penguin-inspired Videogame Classics covers – Offworld
Olly Moss brings a touch of class to Black Mesa – Offworld
Olly Moss's Man With The Golden Gear – Offworld
And then there were four: Olly Moss takes on Silent Hill – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
ONE MORE GO: RHYTHM TENGOKU, OR WHY PLUCKING THE HAIRY ONION MAKES A NEW WOMAN OUT OF ME
In a few more months the DSi will arrive in Europe, and this is something that I view with dread. It is, in part, because Nintendo’s incremental handheld improvement campaign has so far cost me more than a brace of PS3s (as any other victim of the evolution from GBA to Afterburnered GBA to SP to Micro to Original DS to Lite can testify), and I’d promised myself I’d stay on the wagon this time.
A bigger blow, however, is that the DSi’s single biggest strength – the ability to download and store games – is the final nail in the coffin of something very dear to me: cartridges.
They have a practical appeal, of course – more scratch-proof and less likely to get used as coasters than CDs – but that isn’t their magic. Their magic, or rather their alchemy, is that they change the nature of the thing you plug them into. A GBA on its own isn’t a games machine. It’s an elaborate gizmo for showing a little picture of its own logo.
Plug a cartridge in and it still isn’t a games machine. It becomes an Advance Wars Machine, or a Superstar Saga Machine, or a Metroid Fusion Machine. The cart becomes a physical component of the whole, changing it from something with potential but no function to something with a pure, specific purpose.
Which means that my Favourite Console Ever (this week) is my Rhythm Tengoku Machine, which I hand-built myself out of a GBA Micro and a much travelled import cart of Nintendo’s rhythmic masterpiece. Move over, Ben Heckendorn. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One More Go
IPHONE KATAMARI GETS EXQUISITE ADDITION
By now the audience is deeply divided over whether the iPhone’s I Love Katamari hit or miss its rolling target, even after an update took great strides at correcting much of its control issues (Takahashi himself, for whatever it’s worth, told me in 2007 that the original’s symmetrical dual-analog control was an inseparable feature of the game: draw your own conclusions about his non-involvement with later versions from PSP to Xbox 360 and on).
But I was very pleased to wake up to a new update that adds an even more essential omission from its first release: the Exquisite Collection book of everything you’ve rolled up in the course of the game. It’s always been my favorite part of the series (outside We Love‘s solar system view, which I still maintain is just about one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever interacted with [no luck finding a YouTube video/flickr pic]).
There’s something so essentially humanistic about its encyclopedic list of every object in the universe (well, you know, give or take), and it’s always reminded me of a particular favorite childhood book, Words (viewable online, somewhat akwardly, here) — part of the Little Golden Books series, and a primer on what it means to be a person on Earth.
Not to insinuate that it’s worth purchasing the game for that alone, and I Love‘s book is necessarily more brief than its console counterparts, but I’m happy to see Namco continuing to bolster the game with new, and unmissable, features.
I Love Katamari [iTunes link]
Previously:
Katamari rolls onto iPhone – Offworld
Autonomous Katamari-Roomba clean sweeps in 71 minutes – Offworld
It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
