GET THIS: THE SUPERLATIVE SOLO ACT OF ROCK BAND: UNPLUGGED

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8.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Harmonix — and, by extension, developers Backbone — had a difficult balancing act to achieve in creating Unplugged, their downsized PlayStation Portable exclusive version of Rock Band.

For the newcomers that have only found the studio’s output only via its most recent games, they had to carefully re-dress the experience of their foundational Amplitude and Frequency games in Rock Band‘s rock/gothic/punk clothes, and had to ensure that that re-dress didn’t also alienate the long-time supporters — the ones, you could say, who were there for the early dive-bar gigs and bought the hand-screened, car-trunk T-shirts.

As a card carrying member of the latter category, then, I can say with some happy surprise that they’ve succeeded with at least that much: though its four-lane compression (corresponding to Rock Band‘s traditional bass/drums/vox/guitar breakdown) might be the next step down from Freq‘s eight to Amp‘s six, returning to that twitchy lane-switching familiarity was entirely welcome after the nearly six year interim since Amp first hit the shelves. (more…)

GET THIS: THE RETRO-MODERNIZING MASTERY OF CHAIR’S SHADOW COMPLEX

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8.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

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It’s essentially impossible to enter into a conversation about Shadow Complex — the just-released Xbox Live Arcade game from Epic subsidiary Chair Entertainment — without conjuring either or both two earlier classic franchises, Nintendo’s Metroid series, or Konami’s PlayStation re-invention Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and, for once, it’s not simply lazy comparison, so much as overt, love-letter homage.

And because of it, you have to admit to (or, I will, anyway) at least a small amount of cultural bias — that the game’s surprise debut at Microsoft’s E3 conference brought with it at least a tinge of underlying skepticism, a nagging back brain thought that, “so, the Americans think they can do ‘metroid-vania’, now, do they? Right, good luck with that.”

As it turns out, our luck was the last thing Chair needed: Shadow Complex is, put simply, perhaps the best reinvention of the exploratory sub-genre since Nintendo and Konami’s own subsequent episodes, and certainly the best console iteration to sit next to their more diminutive Game Boy Advance refinements. (more…)

RAGDOLL METAPHYSICS: CHET FALISZEK ON VALVE CULTURE, WHY AI CONSTRUCTS ARE DEPRESSING, AND THE LARGER WORLD BEHIND LEFT 4 DEAD

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8.19.2009

Jim Rossignol

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Chet Faliszek, along with Erik Wolpaw, came to the attention of the all-seeing eye of the internet via Old Man Murray, one of the greatest gaming websites ever to have emerged from American bedrooms. As part of OMM, Faliszek became well known among a certain sector of net culture, including the guys at Valve.

Eventually, both Chet and Erik from OMM joined Valve’s development team, and now contribute as writers and designers. More recently, Faliszek has moved into the limelight as a spokesman for the Left 4 Dead projects. I decided it was time to sit down with him and see what was making the writer from Old Man Murray tick in 2009, with his thoughts on Valve company culture, the mixed messages and missed opportunities that spawned the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott, how the world of Left 4 Dead may or may not tie in to the world of Half-Life, and playing with AI versus playing with another real human being.

So you’re now doing this designer-spokesman role for Valve? We’re seeing you standing up and talking about the Left 4 Dead games at all the cons and stuff now…

Faliszek: Oh, well, I am writing dialogue too.

How is that kind of work meted out within Valve? Were you told you had to go meet the public?

Faliszek: Well actually I wanted to complain about our PR… But, you know, Doug (Lombardi, Valve’s main marketing man) is a smart guy, right, so it was unfair for me to sit on the outside and say “hey, there’s a problem”, I had to get in there and see how it worked. Doug is one guy doing all this on his own, which puts some miles on you.

What did you want to complain about exactly?

Faliszek: Well nothing, exactly, but I was confused about some of the choices we made when we were doing the Half-Life episodes. Of course this is a very open company: so we can just go ask. I can go ask Gabe about any of the decisions made by Valve as a company. So in this case I’ll just go ask Doug some questions, and try to understand what I need to ask. And Doug’s response was “oh, someone to help, thank you.” And that was it. (more…)

After a week’s worth of opaque teasing on the nature of revolutionaries, Lionhead have officially announced Fable III at the ongoing GamesCom convention, a game it says will put the player in the role of a revolutionary leader taking “very different paths to power, bringing about prosperity and poverty, peace and sometimes anarchy to their people”, due for release in late 2010.

Lionhead says the game will begin “five decades after the events of the last chapter, and you play as the child of your hero from Fable II. As you rule your kingdom as king or queen, you will be called upon to make choices and sacrifices that will test your morality and can affect your entire kingdom. Themes of heroism, leadership and consequence are taken to a grand scale as you fight to unite a divided people.”

In the meantime, and to ensure that there are enough child heroes populating the world by then, the studio has also announced the re-release of Fable II as an episodic downloadable series, bolstered by the Xbox 360’s new full-game digital download channel, Games on Demand.

The launch will begin September 29th, with the first episode being dangled for free, where players can complete the early-childhood section of the game, then choose to either purchase and download the next of five separate installments, or get the entire game at once. The episodes will also be compatible with players deciding to later purchase the game at retail, and with the previously released add-on content.

Hudson’s Wii platformer Shadow Tower has been quietly kicking around behind the scenes since it was first revealed in early August in Japan’s Famitsu magazine, but at the ongoing GamesCom conference it was finally announced for the West via new publisher Konami, now known as The Tower of Shadow, due for Wii release in 2010.

The most remarkable thing about it isn’t so much its gorgeous Ico-like design or the ingenuity of its mechanics, so much as its abject similarity to the Shadow Physics demo Steve Swink and Scott Anderson showed off in March at the Game Developer Conference’s Experimental Gameplay session:

The timeframe here is obviously far too tight to expect foul play at work, so I’m filing this one under that “all the monkeys in the world learn to wash their sweet potatoes at once” phenomena, and wholly expect both games to achieve entirely separate ends.

Konami’s press release struggles bravely to introduce exactly how its own light-manipulations will work, telling us that:

Gravity, for instance, does not apply in normal ways. Instead, when the source of light in a stage is parallel to the ground, the shadow is pulled towards the light. Similarly, if the angle of the light changes, so the gravity also shifts as the shadow is extended or reduced.

Which makes me feel the same way I did watching Julius Sumner Miller’s wild-haired physics demonstrations (you know who I mean, see this YouTube) as an elementary school tyke: “I’m almost totally with you.”

The press release also tells us that, rather than attempting to both control light and your character simultaneously, as with Shadow Physics, your manipulator here is a “winged sylph known as a ‘Spangle'” — which I’m fairly sure will equate to the Wii pointer — who can “manipulate physical items that the shadow boy cannot.”

Here’s to looking forward, then, to seeing more of both games, actually — the more experiments to go around the better.

Somewhat obscured in yesterday’s Slim/minis shuffle: the announcement of a new, exclusively downloadable PSP follow-up to Sony’s internal cult action game LocoRoco, Midnight Carnival, which will add new nighttime levels, minigames, and bonus stages to the mix, along with an apparent new ‘boing’ move featured above, and newly socialized play with competitive leaderboards.

As seemingly everyone trips over themselves to add their voice to the undead mix, Housemarque, the team behind the excellent PS3/PSP dual-stick space shooter Super Stardust HD, bring that same formula down to urban nightmare size with the online/local co-op grindhouse shooter Dead Nation.

The most potentially interesting detail about the PSN downloadable is the one only vaguely hinted at in the video above and on the game’s UK PlayStation entry, which notes that the game will be tracking daily zombie kills, and that all the countries in the world will be competing in what appears to be a metagame to “reduce the zombie virus”, which we’ll hopefully hear much more about soon.

A little mid-afternoon demoscene work with Shaping Reality, a NES demo created by 8bitpeoples regulars Nullsleep, Random, No Carrier and Enso for July’s LCP compo.

I honestly thought my emulator was on the fritz until I found the accompanying YouTube at top: you can break your own emulator with the .nes ROM here. [via Enso]

[UPDATE: Apologies to musician Random for leaving him off the original list of collaborators!]