A FELYNE OF YOUR VERY OWN
Capcom’s biggest ongoing error in judgment? Not realizing that Monster Hunter‘s Felynes make up about 75 percent of the game’s total charm (It’s a cat! Who carries in its paws a stick with an even bigger paw hand-sewn on the end!), and basically ache for a spin-off game of their own. You’ve given them their own brand of ramen, Capcom, peek over at Majesco’s success and give us a Wii/DS cooking game of their own — even Disgaea‘s bit-part self-destructive Prinny d00ds got their own game.
In a show of self-solidarity, then, I note that import house NCSX is taking pre-orders for two new Merarou and Airou Felyne toys, which, even at five times the cost of the crossover toys created by razor-toothed designer Touma, should probably be purchased en masse if only to prove to the developer just what it’s been sitting on all this time.
NCSX Import Video Games & Toys: Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G Airu DX – Import Preorder
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HEAVY RAIN’S CAGE ON THE CASE FOR NORMALITY
The most heartening part of 1up’s new interview with Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain director David Cage isn’t the part where he notes that they’ve entirely reworked the quick-time-event mechanics or the fact that the taxidermist scene shown off so far was created solely for demonstration and hasn’t given away any of the story itself.
It’s that he makes the case that Rain will be more about the banal complexities of real life, compared to Indigo‘s ‘fantastic’ final third:
We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers. This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories. I made this mistake myself at the end of [Indigo Prophecy], where I felt my story needed something spectacular because all I had so far was normal people leading a normal life. I realized that the “normal” part was the one that worked the best, and that it wasn’t necessary to save the world to tell something exciting anymore. Heavy Rain will be about normal people in real life, and I believe it’ll be much more emotionally involving, as gamers will easily relate to the situations and characters. This is a new approach. In Heavy Rain, you won’t be a superhero or a gangster. You’ll just be someone real.
That’s something we would happily like to see far more of.
Exclusive Heavy Rain Developer Interview
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NONFINITE’S DIY GAME BOY LED LIGHT KITS
Though Game Boy musicians prefer older model handhelds for their cleaner audio, it comes at the cost of visual clarity: the un-backlit portables aren’t exactly conducive to low-light club situations.
Via Tiny Cartridge, though, we see that ‘Nonfinite’ has hacked together a super sexy LED-lit solution in the whole spectrum of colors that he’ll be selling (both pre-modded and in kit form) at this weekend’s Blip Fest. You can also find the same on at his site, for both music making, and as Cartridge puts it, evil sessions of Game Boy classics.
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GHOSTBUSTERS GAME COMING JUNE 2009
Other good news out of the Atari event today: the Ghostbusters game, which Atari picked up after the Vivendi/Activision merger saw a number of games shed from their release list, was given a June 2009 release date on all its platforms: PS3, PS2, 360, PC, Wii and DS, CVG reported.
Though not much has been seen of the game, anticipation still runs high with Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd firmly behind the project, penning the script and reuniting the original cast. There’s something of some homespun pride here as well: Austin locals Red Fly Studios (the developer behind the just-released Primus-enhanced Wii title Mushroom Men) are at work on the PlayStation 2, Wii, and DS versions while North Texas’s Terminal Reality (Spyhunter, Bloodrayne) handle the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports, and Austin’s GL33K is handling audio, bringing in the original cast members to lay down their lines.
With the push for a 2009 release, the game will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the first film, and is being approached as an official interactive sequel to Ghostbusters II.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
MIZUGUCHI MOVES TO WII WITH ATARI
UK outlet CVG has just reported that at an ongoing Atari event in London, our oft-blogged studio Q Entertainment has announced that Space Channel 5, Rez and Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is making a move to the Wii with a new music title. Mizuguchi didn’t offer up any details on the game, but announced it solely as codename “QJ.” Former PlayStation head and now Atari president Phil Harrison has also said that the publisher is looking to bring QJ to other platforms, “including online.”
The studio also announced, according to CVG, that Atari will be publishing a new retail Xbox 360 disc for Europe called Q3, which will package all of Q’s Xbox Live Arcade games — Lumines Live, Every Extend Extra Extreme, and Rez HD — as well as their add-on content for 30 euros.
Apart from helping Harmonix/MTV localize Rock Band for Japan, Q has taken somewhat of a detour from its music/rhythm roots in recent months, so news of QJ is quite welcome, to say the least.
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ONELIFELEFT’S ‘MUSIC TO PLAY GAMES BY’
Now in its fourth season, Ste Curran, Simon Byron and Ann Scantlebury’s One Life Left is literally the UK’s second best games-related radio program/podcast (or so says iTunes, at least) and an Offworld favorite, and — having more or less cornered that market — they’ve now set their sights on the music industry.
Printed in an extra limited edition of 800 (with 200 having gone missing in the mail), their debut CD ‘Music To Play Games By’ was compiled by the previously mentioned Simon ‘chewingpixels’ Parkin, and features a wide variety of micromusic and otherwise games-friendly artists from far corners of the globe, with names like Chicago/New York’s Mark Denardo, Portland’s Copy, Scotland’s Project A-ko, Norwich’s The Lost Levels and “Europe’s favourite satirical videogame-centric musical group” The doyouinverts.
Parkin has put up preview clips of several of the tracks on the CD, which can be purchased worldwide via AmazonUK.
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MAMA IN THE GARDEN
Even if she’s not going vegetarian, at least she’s going green: in a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering how Mama has turned around Majesco’s fortunes, the publisher has announced that Gardening Mama will be released for the DS in Spring of 2009.
In it, she’ll be turning her attentions from the kitchen to let players “manage their garden through the seeding, blooming and maturation phases, and then produce items from the plants they’ve grown (i.e. grow strawberries to make jam or raise pumpkins and then carve a jack-‘o-lantern).”
And as Destructoid recently noted, her offspun hobbies don’t end there, Taito has trademarked Pet Shop Mama as well, which Tiny Cartridge reckons is a rebrand of import handheld stalwart Pet Shop Monogatari.
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THE ART OF VECTOR-WAR
First announced in March and now existing somewhere in excruciating limbo, Introversion’s Darwinia Plus tops the list of my most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade games. Made up of the original arcade/real-time strategy Darwinia release and the more recent multiplayer version Multiwinia, this pitch-perfect parody trailer — sending up Halo 3‘s melodramatic “Believe” ad — does a good job of explaining why.
The PC versions are available now via Steam or direct from Introversion.
See more posts about: Darwinia, Introversion, Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
GETTING CRAFTY WITH FOLDSKOOL AND CUBECRAFT
Just spotted via Kotaku are Marshall Alexander’s latest series of Foldskool Heroes, this time with a decidedly classic gaming bent: 64KRAM, your Commodore pal; Junior, a 2600 Jr. alike; and our favorite, the Pong arcade machine called Nolan, after Atari founder N. Bushnell.
If your fingers ache for more folding and tab-slotting after you complete these three, I recommend heading over to Cubecraft, where Christopher Beaumont has been cranking out scads more pop culture and game character projects: from the obvious (Mario, Mega-Man, Master Chief, Kratos, Katamari‘s Prince, Snake) to the more recent (Mirror’s Edge‘s Faith, Fallout 3‘s Vault Boy) to the obscure (Mother 3‘s Claus and Lucas, Braid‘s Tim and ‘creature’, Portal‘s Chell) to the just plain awesome (the Duck Hunt dog, obviously).
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ON THE MOMENTUM IN MIRROR’S EDGE
There’s been a bit of a tiny dust storm brewing over the release and critical reaction to EA/DICE’s Mirror’s Edge over whether reviewers cursed the darkness rather than light a candle over the things the game did right. Over at Tom Armitage’s Infovore site, he’s written his own very smartly considered reaction to just what Edge does do right, and how that rightness can manifest itself in feeling let down — though not the game letting you down, but you letting down the character you inhabit. Says Tom:
Mirror’s Edge is at its best in moments of free exploration, finding new paths over serene rooftops, feeling that sense of flow as you tuck your feet over a barbed-wire fence; when it captures the feeling of a body moving, be it through graceful falls or being violently hurled off a building by a former wrestler; feeling like you’re flying across the city.
It’s at its worst when, unlike on the rooftops and in the stormdrains, it places obstacles in its path – narrative, out-of-engine cutscenes, action-through-havoc that you can’t escape.
And especially when it makes you fail: Faith is clearly an experienced runner, and there are times where the player can’t live up to their avatar’s abilities. DICE choose to present that in binary success or failure, which has lead to criticisms of trial and error. Perhaps; at the same time, I’ve never encountered a single glitch or unrealistic motion throughout all my travels through the game. The coherence of the illusion is remarkable, and the price for that coherence is a definite kind of failure at times. I am not sure that’s necessarily a good enough excuse for some of the stop-start, but I feel that the coherence of the game’s illusion is something that isn’t praised enough. If only that could be provided without such a sensation of failing – not as a player, but failing the character you play.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
