GARAGEGAMES SETS INSTANTACTION FREE
InstantAction is somewhat the runt of the online games litter, and a bit unjustly — like the Unity player, IA’s plugin lets you play 3D games through the browser, and, better yet, the company has just done away with its pay-for options and opened up the entire site for free play.
Why should you care? Along with Stubbs the Zombie/Hail to the Chimp developer Wideload’s decent puzzle game Cyclomite, InstantAction’s main draw is third person shooter Fallen Empire: Legions, which, if you squint, you might call a not-too-distant cousin to PC cult shooter Tribes. That’s no accident — InstantAction’s branch on the family tree is just a few short leaps away from Tribes developer Dynamix, by way of IA’s parent company GarageGames.
InstantAction also has a number of games on the way: “Ace of Aces (aerial dogfighting), Lore: Aftermath (big time mech action), and BLUR (arcade racing),” which they’re giving people who’d already paid for game passes early access to as a token of appreciation.
Goodbye ActionPasses; Hello Freedom [Instant Action]
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STEVEN SPIELBERG GETS GAMES
What’s Steven Spielberg know about games? Quite a happy lot, it turns out: Tom Chick has just published a new interview with the filmmaker turned gamemaker for Yahoo, where he waxes on the staying power of his first collaboration with EA, Boom Blox (still a family favorite it turns out), and notes that it was his idea to include the “peanut gallery” of animal observers to cheer the player on (something we’ve touched on here before).
Spielberg then turns his attention to storytelling and says:
You know the thing that doesn’t work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels. That’s where there hasn’t been a synergy between storytelling and gaming. They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it’s under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative. And I think more has to be done in that arena.
That, as we also pointed to before when Jordan Mechner similarly discussed letting each medium do the job of the medium, is a very salient point and obviously something we very much agree with.
Chick has posted the full unedited exchange via the Quarter to Three forums, my favorite part being the implied ubiquity of games when Spielberg says “of course” he’s played Half-Life.
Steven Spielberg – Celebrity Byte [Yahoo! Games]
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A DEEPER LOOK AT KNYTT STORIES
As with his earlier look into the subtle complexities that made World of Goo so rewarding, David Rosen has turned his attention now to nifflas’s Knytt Stories, a game I chose as one of the top five freeware releases of 2007 in a former life.
As I said there, Stories takes the best parts of Cave Story (the similarly excellent freeware game), particularly the joys of its pure platforming and exploration, and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus‘s “propensity to strip away all of a game’s unnecessary layers until its shining core is revealed,” both of which Rosen expounds upon nicely with his attention on Knytt‘s smart handling of “progression” and control.
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ALL IS FORGIVEN? GIANA SISTERS TO MAKE COMMERCIAL DS DEBUT
The air’s a bit thick with irony with the announcement that publisher dtp and developer Spellbound will be releasing a new version of The Great Giana Sisters for the DS, Nintendo having, on original C64 release, pressured the game off the shelves for its overt similarity to Super Mario Bros.
For its part, the new version looks to have rightly ditched its Mushroom Kingdom garb entirely, and honestly sounds like a labor of love, having tapped composer Fabian Del Priore — known in classic computing days as ‘Rapture’ and now part of the Play! game music/symphony tour — to remix and update its soundtrack.
The game is expected to be released in June 2009.
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HOW DUNE II WAS INSPIRED BY THE MAC DESKTOP
Just appearing online is Edge magazine’s excellent ‘making of’ article on Dune II — the game that would essentially birth the real-time strategy genre — with the magazine noting upon a recent replay that “the same basic viewpoint, interface, controls and gameplay underpinning Dune II are still being reused today, with only the most minimal level of evolutionary advancement.”
Most interestingly, the feature goes on to quote producer Brett Sperry, who reveals that the game was less inspired by Herzog Zwei, as is often reported, but rather something much more mundane:
“Herzog Zwei was a lot of fun, but I have to say the other inspiration for Dune II was the Mac software interface. The whole design/interface dynamics of mouse clicking and selecting desktop items got me thinking, ‘Why not allow the same inside the game environment? Why not a context-sensitive playfield? To hell with all these hot keys, to hell with keyboard as the primary means of manipulating the game!’”
The Making of… Dune II [Edge Online]
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ESKIL STEENBERG’S LOVE HITTING ALPHA
As Jim alluded to in his most recent column, one of my favorite memories of this year’s GDC was watching both him and PC Gamer UK’s Tim Edwards trip over themselves for the words to describe exactly what they’d witnessed in seeing Eskil Steenberg painterly, user edited, generative FPS MMO Love. Words failed them then, words quickly break down into a pile of descriptors that don’t quite mesh correctly in the brain (as just then) and I think still don’t quite have the impact that they should.
But the time for words is steadily growing shorter: capping off a long reflection on controller schemes, feedback loops, and Quake‘s online multiplayer ’50 Milli Second rocket prediction,’ Steenberg has dropped a tiny grenade in our laps with this: “Next week when i get back home from LA, my first alpha will go out…” Hopefully we’ll have a few more words of our own to stumble through soon.
It started 50 milliseconds ago [Quel Solaar]
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LITTLEBIGWATCH: MIND-BOGGLING ‘AUTOMATIC REVERSI’
LittleBigPlanet creator ‘physicslike’ (who is also behind a few of LBP‘s Tetris creations) appears to have dumbfounded even Media Molecule themselves with the new ‘Automatic Reversi’ level, which I can personally now attest rivals the Gradius remake as one of the most ingenious rule-breaking stages yet created.
As above, the level lets players use black and white stickers to plot their next Othello move which, awesomely, sets in motion a series of clockwork events just barely visible behind the board that queues it for the next move. Your best bet to try it — with its all -kana name, is to search via the ‘physicslike’ username, where you’ll also find a number of other interesting machinework tests.
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SONY LAWYERS RANSACK SACKBOOK
Well, that was short-lived: just days after launching the by all rights completely excellent data scraped social networking site Sackbook, Sony have sent mastermind Chris Warren a cease and desist until “they take a look at how the data is accessed to ensure everything is safe and lovely (it is, but they are right to make sure of such important things).”
That shatters my theory, then, that Media Molecule had to be at least in part co-conspirators, and certainly ups my respect for his bit-jacking methods.
Sackbook shut down by ‘Sony’s Sacklawyers’ [Sackbook, via LittleBigPlanetoid]
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BOOM BLOX DOES MARIO, GALAGA, DUCK HUNT
All eyes might currently be on LittleBigPlanet for the new wave of user generated content, but I’m very happy to see Travis Hendricks’s enterprising series of retro remakes in EA’s Boom Blox. Hendricks covered all the bases from Donkey Kong to Galaga to Pac-Man to Super Mario Bros. to Duck Hunt, and eagle eyes might spot that the last one does indeed look like it was meant to include a dog you can finally, finally, bean for all the years of merciless taunting.
8 Bit Games Recreated in Boom Blox [Game On Nintendo]
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LOVE IS… EVER SO SLIGHTLY WRONG
Spotted via Tiny Cartridge and winner of today’s seriously?-most-unlikely-license goes to Zoo Digital and Elephant’s forthcoming Love Is… In Bloom expected just after the new year for Wii and DS.
Elephant’s site appears to have been crushed from the preponderance of in-bound love, but Zoo says the game will feature (as Tiny Cartridge aptly recalls) the Homer-Simpson-described “two naked eight-year-olds who are married” building “the best Florist shop around, by “preparing the soil and planting seeds to grow magnificent flowers that you can then sell them in your very own Flower shop to earn money and grow a little empire.”
We’re obviously not the target market here, but I’m also struggling to figure out who is, and only slightly unnerved by the image of even a little empire of the wo/man-children.
Love Is… in Bloom [Zoo Digital, via Tiny Cartridge]
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