MORE LIKE LITTLEBIGDEATHOFINNOCENCE, INNIT
I’m stuck square in between horrified and delighted to see via Alice Taylor’s Wonderland blog that Sony has partnered with the UK edition of Vice — your monthly celebration of all things debauched — for an all-LittleBigPlanet blowout, including “Sackboy fashion shoots, fake Sackboy ads for perfume and clothing,” and, most disturbingly, the usual back-cover American Apparel ad with the little Sack lying alluringly in his/her banana-colored panties.
That said, anyone willing to send a copy overseas to Offworld HQ will be our new favorite person — I think we yanks are stuck with the (actually quite good) No Photos issue.
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SEAMAN DEV GOING IPHONE WITH GABO
Yutaka ‘Yoot’ Saito hasn’t quite yet become a household name, but if you were gaming throughout the Dreamcast era you’ve probably at least heard of his work: he’s the creator of the wonderfully grotesque Leonard Nemoy-voiced pet simulator Seaman, as well as the designer behind Maxis’s SimTower (which later was released to GBA and DS as The Tower) and GameCube feudal Japan pinball/strategy game (!) Odama.
While we in the West haven’t been treated to Saito’s work since Odama, he has continued to rework his Seaman idea since, with a mobile phone version and a proper Seaman 2 sequel for PlayStation 2. Unlike the fishtank first, that sequel featured a Peking man with a disturbingly pert umbilical cord called Gabo, whom you communicated with as he went about his daily life (with a now more-evolved Seaman working as your companion).
Though it’s fairly clear we’ll never see a proper English version of Seaman 2, Saito has now revealed that he’s bringing Gabo to iPhones as a low-priced app that lets you more directly poke at, pester, feed, and clean him, with what looks to feature about as much functionality as your average Tamagotchi.
His company DigiToys has uploaded a quick demonstration video of what to expect, and, after watching him mutter quietly to himself while tweaking and twisting his cord and then screaming impotently into the watery void, I have to admit I’m already forming a fast bond.
Gabo! ver1.0 [DigiToys, YouTube trailer]
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CIPHER PRIME’S LIGHT-SYMPHONY PUZZLER AUDITORIUM GOES COMMERCIAL
One of the games that unfortunately fell through the cracks in the first months of Offworld was Cipher Prime’s liquid musical puzzler Auditorium, but with the developer just announcing the release of a full commercial version, I can happily correct that oversight.
Auditorium is as gorgeous a game as it is deviously challenging, and is as organic a puzzle as they come, with no clear correct answers and no binary switches to impact its world. The best you can do is influence its light-stream through subtle gravitational bends, filling up receptors which conduct the underlying music.
It seems to tickle the same part of my brain as ‘fill-in crosswords‘ — the ones with a wordlist, but no clues. You know the answer is there, you can visualize how its streams will eventually intersect, but there’s no easy way to know what your first step should be, or even, at any given moment, how far off the path you are.
Where the demo version — still online to get a taste of what lies ahead — is spread across three acts, the just released full version contains 15 acts, promising some 70 levels.
Auditorium [Cipher Prime]
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FALLOUT 3: EVERYBODY DANCE! EDITION
While the unofficial modders have been busy doing dire and otherwise pedestrian things with their Fallout 3 installs like hacking in child killing and more realistic gun noises (or so I’ve just learned from the ‘related videos’), ‘airshom’ reminds us of why we like to let people tinker around inside their games. Be forewarned that if you haven’t seen everything there is to see around the Wasteland, you might end up seeing some things you’re not ready to see.
Bethesda: this is the kind of DLC we’d also pay for. We know you didn’t put those party hats in there without a good reason.
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AN OFFWORLD THANKSGIVING: L-TRYPTOPHAN EDITION
Xeni and I had been batting ideas back and forth earlier this week about what might go into a Thanksgiving-themed Offworld BBtv episode, and while we decided against it in the end, it still had me brainstorming about recent releases perfect for postprandial tryptophan-induced sedate-gaming. Here’s a quick list of three off the top of my head, add your own in the comments below if there’s something I’ve missed…
Fallout 3
As I recently discovered — quite unintentionally — Bethesda’s RPG makes for perfect extreme-hangover gaming, a mindstate not too far away from a belly-full coma. Though it might sound like a slight, I take it as an asset: one of Fallout‘s draws is that a number of its sidequests and its exploration in general aren’t the most mentally taxing. In fact, one of the things I think the game does best is let you stumble almost continually on a series of small messes that exist only for you to tidy. It became almost a mantra during that hangover head sick session: “I found a building. It was a mess. I cleaned it up. I felt satisfied. I moved on.”
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Though I’ve never heard any of its directors or designers explicitly state it, I’ve got a strong hunch one of Animal Crossing‘s guiding principles was that of the Slow Life movement that spread across Japan in the early ‘oughts, seeking to “shift from a society of mass production and mass consumption, to a society that is not hectic and does cherish our possessions and things of the heart.”
It’s not just the provincial setting or the townsfolk whose lives are little more than neighborly gossip (see also: basically any post-war Yasujiro Ozu movie for the real world cultural touchstones there). It’s straight down to the game’s interactions themselves: try and get basically any task accomplished in less than a minute and you’ll be strained. The series forces you at every turn to sloooow down and settle into its signature torpor.
Soul Bubbles
Developer Mekensleep was taken to task by a number of enthusiast reviewers for a perceived lack of difficulty in its DS debut, but its underlying old-world and naturalistic environments basically demand more leisurely exploration. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have its own difficulties, or that complete runs of its levels are anything approaching a cakewalk. Soul Bubbles keeps its difficulty in places for you to seek it out if you want it, but leaves you free to enjoy yourself without it, making it one of the more suitably relaxing (and unfortunately underappreciated) games for the handheld.
As for me, I’ll be spending the rest of today wending my way slowly through a backlog of things I haven’t yet had a chance to get to and would like to talk about in the coming weeks: Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, BioShock‘s PS3 exclusive downloadable Challenge Rooms, and the European release of Grasshopper Manufacture’s DS adventure remake Flower, Sun and Rain.
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SONY’S OWN INSPIRED HOLIDAY SALES
Like Microsoft, Sony has announced its own Black Friday digital download deals that seem pointed straight at the one true Offworld heart. PixelJunk Eden for starters, is a quintessential Offworld game. Developer Q-Games (a different Q, mind, than Rez‘s), after creating the more traditional DS shooter Starfox Command for Nintendo, has gone gloriously off the deep end and focused on partnering with musicians and visual artists outside the industry to create entirely new experiences. In Eden‘s case, that artist was Baiyon, whose organic vectors and thumping trance would form its inimitable playground, resulting in one of the most essential downloads on the PlayStation Network.
Not entirely far away is Sony’s own internally produced The Last Guy. Directed by the same Denki Groove-related team that put together Baito Hell 2000, the PSP high-weirdness mini-game collection (known in the West and also available for download on PSN as Work Time Fine [W.T.F.]), the easiest way to describe The Last Guy is as Pac-Man via Nokia’s Snake game all played out over Google Maps.
It might always be best known for its equally baffling promotional campaign — which depicted the developers as a backwoods Indian team known as Hindustan Electronics — and its unmistakably Popcorn-esque theme song, but the game itself is another true inspired Offworld cult classic.
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A HOLIDAY DEAL ON SOUND AND VISION
Here are two reasons I like Microsoft’s Black Friday Xbox Live Arcade specials: one is that they’ve lowered the price on Q Entertainment’s HD remake of Dreamcast/PS2 rhythm/shooter Rez, which means there is essentially no excuse not to experience the game if you haven’t before. Inspired by, the story goes, one of his first rave experiences (this would have been the very late 90’s, mind), Sega designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi set out to create a game that could blend that light and sound and palpable pulsing rhythm as fantastically. The result was Rez, and a long series of music/puzzle games since.
The second is that it gives me an excuse to post this recent YouTube Live Genki Rockets video Q CEO Shuji Utsumi pointed to earlier today. As mentioned in the last Q-related post, Genki Rockets is Q’s music property fronted by teen pop star Lumi, the first baby born in outer space who beams her j-pop disco to Earth from 30 years in the future.
Even if the style of music isn’t your cup of euro-beats, there’s kind of nothing not amazing about the performance, from the faceless DJ-naut on the ones and twos, to Lumi’s eventual appearance on the monolithic low-res LED screen, fingers sending off glittering trails as she does her interstellar dance: all precisely the kind of synaesthetic experience that inspired Mizuguchi to create Rez in the first place.
The rest of Microsoft’s sales are at Major Nelson’s website.
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THE FACE OF THE WII THEREMIN
Ken Moore’s patched together custom theremin, made from a Wii-mote and a Roland JV-1080 synth, is one of my favorite hardware mods making the rounds, but the experience is — as Ken’s wife is apparently quick to add — one better listened to than watched.
See also: Ken playing the Star Trek theme via the system.
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COOP DOES GUITAR HERO
Despite being a certifiable friend of Boing Boing (having designed, if you recall, the excellent Jackhammer Jill t-shirt earlier this year), we’re just as surprised as everyone to learn that he’s quietly snuck four de-luxe aluminum Guitar Hero faceplates into his online store, which is giving us all kinds of wicked ideas about further artist-edition plates.
Products | Guitar Hero Faceplates | Coopstuff
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ONE MORE GO: NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORDS
“7 DOWN (5 letters): Donkey Kong company”
The swells of the end-of-year gaming surge are still carrying me out to sea, the living room floor strewn with the wreckage of Fable 2, Resistance 2, Little Big, Mirror’s Edge, Gears Of War 2, Left 4 Dead and an unopened copy of Moto GP ‘08 I found in amongst the cookery books. The tide is showing no signs of turning, sweeping me out further and further, later and later each night. But somehow, every evening, I struggle back to shore, to my safe, sheltered, gaming harbour: BudCat’s New York Times Crosswords. Despite Valve’s millions, EA’s blanket media blitz and Sony’s increasingly unlikable promo Sackboy variants, every evening ends with me grabbing my DS and firing up an 18-month old game which opens with a inept cartoon of a vomiting cat.
But why? What could a game with no score, no story, no spectacle, and no real character beyond the vomiting cat (BudCat may well have reworked their ident since their recent acquisition by Activision) have to lure me away from the riches of this Autumn’s release list? The simple answer: clues like the one above. And yep, that’s a real clue from a real New York Times Crossword. Reading it, all you know for certain is there are only two people in this deal – you and the guy who wrote the clue – and one of you is being really, really dumb. Donkey Kong company. Five letters. Could it be a trick? Some clever crossword subtlety you’re missing?
Or has the esteemed New York Times got its Japanese heavyweights confused – all the more understandable when you allow these puzzles were compiled a good few years before the Wii comeback coup – and wants you to commit the sacrilege of inscribing ‘NAMCO’ into the spaces? And that takes you into a very satisfying game of second-guessing. Would the not-very-videogame-savvy crossword designer be more likely to have heard of Namco or Taito? Could they have asked the advice of their Sony-loving 12-year-old and been told, disparagingly ‘Ninty’?
Then: curve ball. Solving another clue gives you a terminal ‘I’. I? Weird. Unless…unless. No, can’t be. Couldn’t be. They’re not even Japanese! But yes, what fits is Atari. And suddenly, with a single, trivial oversight, the New York Times rewrites gaming history. Suddenly, instead of Pong, Nolan Bushnell unleashes a stark, monochrome rescue challenge on the world. AVOID MISSING PRINCESS FOR HIGH SCORE burns itself into the brains of a generation. A couple of sequels expand the world of this strange new hero and, keen to bring its popularity to bear on the 2600, Atari execs strong-arm Warren Robinett into populating Adventure with mushroom monsters and making the green dragon friendly.
The new franchise becomes so popular, that – at the last minute – the decision is taken to stop development on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and instead divert full resources to Mario’s Revenge, a hypnotic shooter in which the plucky plumber must shoot fireballs through a dazzling, kaleidoscopic barrier while dodging Donkey Kong’s laser-barrels.
Mario’s Revenge is such a huge hit it leads to the Great Videogame Surge of 1983. With its vast resources of cash, Atari bring forward development of its revolutionary Lynx handheld, which – thanks to the popularity of Mushroom Kingdom Games, which features goomba-skimming, piranha-plant-vaulting and dinosaur racing – outsells the Game Boy ten-to-one. Nintendo, resources depleted after losing successive court battles, drops out of the videogame industry. Atari, looking to consolidate its home entertainment empire, diverts a fraction of its massive wealth to buy television manufacturers Sony, resuscitating the failing Betamax format in the process.
And on and on we go. From one slip of a crossword compiler’s pen, I get thirty years worth of games I’ve never played, machines I’ve never touched, and crossovers I’d never imagined (who can forget when Bronson Pinchot lost out to Charles Martinet for the part of Larry Appleton’s countrified Mushroom Kingdom cousin in Perfect Strangers?). How could the combined might of Sony, EA, Microsoft and Valve ever match that? Although, if they could give me a hand with 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank) I promise I’ll get back to Albion, asap.
[Margaret Robertson is the former editor of Edge magazine and now videogame consultant. One More Go is her regular Offworld column in which she explores the attractions of the games she just can’t stop going back to.]
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