OFFWORLD BBTV PREMIERE: WHAT’S OFFWORLD?
After an oxygen fire knocked our interstellar video link temporarily out of commission, we bring you our Boing Boing TV premiere via Azeroth, where my spiritual Death Knight equal gives you a little background on where we’re is coming from and where I hope to steer the ship. As usual, here’s the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.
Offworld bonus fact: in real life, my eyes and sword glow a much more vivid shade of blue. That is indeed, though, almost exactly how I shake a tail feather.
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GOOGLE SHUTTERING VIRTUAL WORLD LIVELY
Sad news today for Lively enthusiasts as Google announces that it intends to shutter its 3D online world service to “focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.”
I’d just talked with creative director Kevin Hanna of X-Ray Kid, the studio headed by Marvel and The Batman cartoon series artist Jeff Matsuda, in September, who had revealed at the Austin Game Developers Conference that the project’s then-long-term goals included opening Lively’s API to developers, hoping to make it a ubiquitous browser-embedded 3D platform for games.
X-Ray Kid, for their part, updated just days ago saying they were at work on “a large number of different, diverse and wonderful projects,” so presumably they’ll survive the blow. More discussion on the closing can be found at virtual worlds blog Terranova and at Metaplace creator Raph Koster’s blog.
Official Google Blog: Lively no more [Google]
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GRAND THEFT AUTO GETS LOST
With October and November’s dogpile of blockbusters, it’s easy to forget that the year started off with a proper bang with Grand Theft Auto IV. As the release of PC version of the game draws nearer, Rockstar has started to show off the extensive power of that version’s exclusive video editor and video sharing — and we’re genuinely excited for the wave of machinima to follow, if only because we’re secretly hopeful for more Philip Glass-scored video and more footage of the everyday/mundane side of Liberty City.
But for Xbox 360 owners, today brings first official word via USAToday on the subject and release date of the first downloadable episode, which this time will focus only marginally on Niko, instead giving players the vantage point of one of the original game’s cameo stars:
This new episode, available Feb. 17 via download exclusively for those who own the Xbox 360 version (no price yet), stars Johnny Klebitz, a member of Liberty City biker gang The Lost.
“Johnny is a very different character than Niko, with a very different background,” says Dan Houser, vice president of creative development for Rockstar Games. “I can’t go into too much detail on the story, because we try not to give away too much plot before the game is released. But I can say that the story will show you a different side of Liberty City.”
Grand Theft Auto IV [Rockstar]
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NGMOCO SHOWS OFF IPHONE’S DR. AWESOME, DROPSHIP
After a slight snafu yesterday that saw the latest trailer for Hand Circus’s highly anticipated puzzle/platformer Rolando yanked just minutes before I’d posted it, iPhone publisher ngmoco has released new trailers for its two upcoming “fast apps” (lower price-tier games like their free Maze Finger and 99 cent Topple): Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon M.D. and Dropship.
The wonderful part of Dr. Awesome? It’s not the over-dramatic Phoenix Wright/Trauma Center portrait art, or the Qix-like gameplay, it’s the fact that you’re performing surgery on your friends, as imported from your phone’s address book.
As for Dropship, I’ve got a strong suspicion that touching will be believing — I’ve been miming my fingers overlaid on top of the video trying to get a feel for how it works and though it’s not quite connected yet, I’m suitably enamored with its radiant vector design.
Check out the gameplay trailer video for Dr. Awesome after the jump. (more…)
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WEAPON OF CHOICE, THE GAME THAT CRASH-LANDED FROM 1992
While there hasn’t been nearly enough time since the New Xbox Experience update landed to fully dig into all of the new community games it has also brought with it, one game has jumped out ahead of the pack both in terms of sales (it’s currently, according to the new dashboard’s sorting options, the most popular community title) and in wider recognition over the past few days.
That game is Weapon of Choice, which seems to exemplify precisely what Microsoft’s community games campaign was set up to do: giving passionate one-person teams their platform for indie success. Industry news site Gamasutra talked with that one person, Nathan Fouts (who recently gave up his position at Resistance: Fall of Man creator Insomniac to form his startup, Mommy’s Best Games) where he admitted that his game wasn’t up to snuff to be accepted into the Xbox Live Arcade program proper, but perfectly fit the community game mantra.
Weapon of Choice is, at heart, a game you’ve played before — again and again and again, especially if you had your roots in early computer games — a bombastic and testosterone-drenched side-scrolling shooter with a ludicrous sci-fi storyline, blaring guitar riffs and multiple-screen-filling bosses. It’s so filled with the vitality of a singular vision, though — Fouts pulled in help with music and scriptwriting, but otherwise took the reins on all its art, programming and sound effects — that it’s hard to escape its auteur, throwback charm.
That’s not to say that it hasn’t brought anything new to the table: apart from handling as fluidly as a 16-bit shooter should on modern hardware, Fouts packed a few very smart gameplay aces up his sleeve. The first is ‘death brushing,’ a ubiquitous ‘bullet-time’ trick that zooms in on and slows down the action when you’re very near death (as you will be, often — Choice‘s screens are chaotic with over and undersized alien enemies all squelching and squeezing various fluids and particles from themselves at any given moment), allowing you to make narrow and stylish escapes.
For those moments where death brushing hadn’t worked out as well as you’d hoped, once you’ve died the game calls up a ‘vengeance missile,’ which, before you’ve called your next character into play, gives you a one shot first-person-bullseye-targeted chance to eliminate whatever it was that’d brought you down before.
Finally, the game gives you the chance to rescue that downed character that you’ve just replaced by slinging them — or other downed operatives you’ve find on the field — over your shoulder and carrying them to end-of-level safety, bringing about tough choices about who you decide to leave behind. It’s not until you’ve depleted your stock of rescued characters that the game is truly over.
It’s no surprise that, according to the interview with Fouts, his recently rediscovered teenage game design sketches share an uncanny similarity to game he’s just created: Weapon of Choice is that game that the disaffected youth of the Psygnosis/Factor 5/Epic MegaGames/Apogee shareware era had always dreamed of making, and all the more glorious for it.
Weapon of Choice [Mommy’s Best Games, YouTube trailer]
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ATLUS BRINGING TRACKMANIA DS STATESIDE
Today’s award for Most Unlikely Publisher goes to RPG stalwarts Atlus, who have just announced they’ll be bringing Firebrand Games’ Trackmania DS to the U.S. in March of 2009, and even for ‘just-slightly’ casual fans of racing games, this should be happy news.
It’s no mistake that the franchise has one of the largest and most dedicated audiences in the genre: the series excels at joyfully purist arcade design mixed with puzzle and stunt elements and a fully-featured track editor, all of which, European reviews have very happily reported, have perfectly made their way to the portable version. Essentially, if you have any nostalgia for racing classics like Stunts and Racing Destruction Set, or, quite simply, like to move things quickly around a track and make awesome jumps and loop-de-loops, this is the game you want.
Try the free Steam version, Trackmania Nations Forever, for a taste of what the fuss is about.
Trackmania DS [Atlus]
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CELEBRATE HALF-LIFE ANNIVERSARY FOR LESS THAN A DOLLAR
As if on cue, seconds after posting the previous entry, word arrives that Valve have dropped Half-Life‘s price on Steam to 98 cents in celebration of the 1998 release:
Launched 10 years ago today, Half-Life was greeted with overwhelming review scores (Metacritic of 96%), earned over 50 Game of the Year Awards, and birthed a franchise with over 20 million units sold to date. The special 10 year anniversary price is available via Steam until 12:01 pm PST on November 21.
Half-Life [Valve]
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SCOTT THOMPSON (BARELY) PASSES A PORTAL CHALLENGE
We’re always thrilled to see our cross-cultural interests fortuitously converge, so forgive us this latest Kids In The Hall MySpace tour video, in which Scott Thompson proves himself about as adept at handling Portal‘s Companion Cube as he was at taking care of his Sony Aibo — that is to say (if you haven’t watched the Kids’ ‘Same Guys, New Dresses’ DVD), not at all.
Scott in a horrible mood flees to the back of the tour bus. [via Kotaku]
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A QUICK TOAST TO THE DEATH OF BLUEPRINT
EA Blueprint was my favorite division of the publishing giant that I was never fully sure existed, and, according to a new expose on Variety’s games blog Cut Scene, never officially did and now surely will not. What I did know, or had gathered piecemeal from various sources was that it involved producers Neil Young (whose work had quite rightly given me the outright creeps in college when I’d beta tested his Majestic, many moons before we’d all properly learn the acronym ARG) and Alan Yu.
I did know that it had had within its scope the creation of cross-platform games (beyond console ports: most excitingly, a dip into social games, as it did by extending last year’s Wii trivia game Smarty Pants to Facebook), and the ability to bring Stephen Spielberg into the building and walk out with the Wii’s Boom Blox, an almost entirely unlikely game to come from such a major Hollywood producer.
Blox, which Variety posits will now be getting a sequel, had an energy and a fundamental delight in core mechanics — you do, after all, do little more than explore play possibilities inside a very simple block-and-ball physics engine, just for the pleasure of watching things topple and explode — that could easily have come from a passionate indie.
I knew there was a worrying pall in the air nearly a year ago when I’d heard whispers that both Young and Yu were planning an exit from the company, but it wasn’t until only very recently that we’d find out why, when they founded the iFund-backed iPhone startup ngmoco, which, even just two games so far in, shows more promise at understanding what makes gaming on the platform unique than most others.
Knowing what we know now from the Variety article at the start of this year, I might have been worried for EA having “shuttered” what felt like its most exciting prospect, but with newly announced projects like Kyle Gray’s DS puzzle/platformer Henry Hatsworth and the ‘wonder-triplet-powers, unite!’ EA Partners deal that will bring together No More Heroes and Killer 7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, and, peripherally, Rez, Lumines and Meteos developer Q Entertainment, my worries have been almost fully abated.
Electronic Arts shuts down Blueprint, making Boom Blox 2 [Variety]
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF RHYTHM
Why do we like UK games journo Simon ‘chewingpixels‘ Parkin? First, and most obviously, because he’s taken the time to prepare this exhaustive timeline charting the evolving course of rhythm games, and second, though it doesn’t appear in the timeline, he has correctly called out 1987 Famicom Disk System game Otocky (from Electroplankton /Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai) as one of the true groundbreakers (as well as included some uber-obscurities like PlayStation 2 title Dog of Bay). He explains, though, on Otocky‘s absence, as well as notable others:
I’ve limited the list to rhythm-action games in the strictest sense, that is, games in which you time inputs to match prerecorded music. So there’s no Rez, ElectroPlankton or WiiMusic, titles in which a player’s inputs do create musical outputs, but not necessarily in a scored or timed framework.
We have to go back and check again to see if they break the rules, but we might have a few additions — Agetec’s recent DS title Rhythm ‘n Notes springs quickly to mind, as well as Wonderswan Color game Rhyme Rider Kerorican and the forthcoming Major Minor’s Majestic March (both from Parappa creator NanaOn-Sha) , as well as at least one other original PlayStation obscurity which is escaping us at the moment.
chewing pixels » The Rhythm-Action Timeline
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