PIXEL ON WITH MEGGY JR RGB
As originally pointed to on the Mother Boing, electronics kit manufacturers Evil Mad Scientist have announced that its Meggy Jr RGB handheld gaming kit will be shipping this week. If your homebrew skills have been hampered by too many fancy pixels and colors, you’ll be pleased to learn that the Meggy Jr comes in at just 8×8 LEDs, looking nothing so much like the kid-friendly Game Boy version of Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-On.
Meggy will ship with EMS’s own “pixel-blasting side-scrolling shoot-em-up” Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes, and we fully expect to see your own low-res rainbow-light creations over coming months.
Meggy Jr RGB [Evil Mad Scientists]
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NOKIA GAMING UP REALITY WITH YAMAKE
It seems likely that LittleBigPlanet has cemented 2008’s legacy as the breakout year for bringing user-generated content to games, but on the even-littler side, Nokia and UK mobile developer Gameware have been making strides to do the same with Yamake, Nokia’s N-Gage game that it says will let players make and share mini-games from photo and video content created on their phone, sounding not entirely unlike the WarioWare Myself project Nintendo is preparing for its camera-enhanced DSi.
While Nokia’s been somewhat tight-lipped on just what Yamake will offer, they have geared up on the participatory side with the Yamake Art Project, a promotional campaign curating vinyl toy customs of the game’s soft-form mascot, and, even more wonderfully, the above reality-enhanced video from Helsinki motion-graphics studio Fake.
Yamake Art Project [Nokia]
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HARVEY JAMES’S MOTHER 3 FAN ART VANGUARD
On top of the already massive archives of fan art the Earthbound community has produced over the series’ lifespan, the release of the third game’s previously mentioned unofficial translation has already kicked off a new wave of inspired illustration, most notably so far Harvey James’ latest takes on the game’s porcine villains, the Pig Mask Army.
A massive collection of Harvey’s fantastic retro and manga-inspired work can be found at his website, including our favorite, this T-shirt design for soon-to-be-launched games inspired fashion outlet Attract Mode.
Mother 3 Pig Mask Desktops [Harvey James]
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CHARTING LOAD TIME IMPROVEMENTS WITH NXE HARD DRIVE INSTALLS
One of the most intriguing features of Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience is the ability to install and launch games from the Xbox 360’s hard drive. Our own tests have proven the feature has made trawling Fallout 3’s Wasteland that much more seamless, but Binge Gamer has set up the first beta-tested chart to denote just how much, showing (if currently somewhat anecdotally) improvements on the order of 30 percent to, simply, “a lot faster.”
So how much time are you saving? – Xbox 360 NXE Hard Drive Install Chart [Binge Gamer]
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AN ESSENTIAL ADDITION TO YOUR WASTELAND SURVIVAL GUIDE
By now you might already know the terrain like the back of your hand, but Planet Fallout’s recently launched user edited Capital Wasteland Google map is digging even further into the minutiae packed into every crevice of Fallout 3’s DC metro area, with growing guides to all of the special weapons, Enclave outposts, and easter eggs Bethesda have snuck in.
Fallout 3 Capital Wasteland Map [Planet Fallout]
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DEVELOPMENT CONTINUES ON ODDWORLD’S MOST PROMISING PROJECT
Fantastic news coming out of a recent round of developments at Oddworld Inhabitants: as Brash Entertainment folds and former COO Larry Shapiro becomes president of Oddworld, leaving former president and co-founder Lorne Lanning to focus solely on creative tasks, other co-founder Sherry McKenna has told UK news site GamesIndustry.biz that its long-quiet game/CG film project Citizen Siege is still in development, though now without former animation partner Vanguard, headed by John ‘Shrek’ Williams.
Why the excitement? Following on the relatively more tame environmental politics ever present in the series of Oddworld games, Citizen Siege — first hinted at in 2004 and later announced in 2006 at UK festival GameCity in what (it’s thankfully becoming easier to forget) was a significantly darker political period — was sounding like Oddworld’s most alluringly savage but ultimately hopeful work to date, spanning, Lanning said at the time, “martial law and the diminishment of civil liberties,” and later adding:
1984’s a little dark, whereas this is really about the power of the human spirit and the potential of the individual. Anyone familiar with our previous work knows that that’s always a strong underlying tone in the worlds that we create. This will be no different–it’s just in a more relevant world. It’s really a story about an everyman, a very common man who becomes something he never could have dreamed of through first unfortunate circumstances and then taking off the blinders to the world that he really lives in.
It’s still not clear what form the property will eventually take, the Siege universe was said as recently as last year to cover at least one game, Wage Wars, on top of its video properties, but add to that the re-emergence of the Oddworld franchise itself, and all that remains is for Microsoft to help bring Oddworld Stranger, quite possibly the last great Xbox title, to the Xbox 360’s Originals digital download program, and we’d have a holy trinity from one of the consistently smartest developers working in games today.
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BIT BLOT BRING INDIE-HIT AQUARIA TO MACS
Mac gamers may have finally gotten their big break: indie developer Bit Blot has announced that its debut adventure game, Aquaria, has made the jump to the platform nearly a year after the release of the PC original. For those that may have already forgotten, the game took home the grand prize at the 2007 Independent Games Festival, a well deserved award, as Bit Blot put together one of indie gaming’s most ambitious works that year — a sprawling, gesture-controlled underwater adventure that felt warmly familiar to fans of Metroid‘s incrementally revealed worlds.
What’s more, Bit Blot says the Mac version isn’t just a simple port:
Aquaria for Mac includes nearly a year of work in new features, bug fixes and improvements – bringing the version number up from 1.0.3 to a big shiny 1.1.0. With new and beautiful wide screen support; a new world map system complete with progress recording, location names, user-created markers and beacons, user-friendly improvements to the cooking system, changes to make puzzles more intuitive, additional graphics, auto updates, a built-in help system – and more! Even some of the music tracks got a bit of polish.
They add that while all of the new features and updates will eventually be coming to the PC version, they’re not in a great rush to release a patch as “a small gift to our patient Mac fans who have waited many months.”
Aquaria 1.1.0 for Mac Released! [Bit Blot]
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ONLY ON OFFWORLD: POLYTRON & KOKOROMI’S ANAGLYPHIC SUPER HYPERCUBE
Montreal collective Kokoromi‘s GAMMA games and music events are quickly becoming the top neo-future salons for art/game curation (last year’s event saw the release of Jason Rohrer’s low-res memento mori Passage, which quickly circulated as one of the most thought provoking games of the year), and it’s easy to understand why they’ve made 3D the subject of this year’s show: Kokoromi co-founder Phil Fish has spent the majority of the past few years playing with that dimension as one of the minds behind the forthcoming indie platformer Fez.
If you haven’t yet been exposed to Fez, a quick recap. Starting off as an otherwise innocently and nostalgically charming low-res 2D pixel platformer, Fez‘s central conceit revolves (no pun intended) around giving the player control of an otherwise hidden axis that fwoom‘s the world into the third dimension, re-aligning the position of 2D element and letting you venture deeper into its levels. It’s a difficult mechanic to put properly into words, but one that is genuinely jaw-dropping the first time it’s performed, and utilized to a more logical and involving extent than seen in the Wii’s similarly dimensionally screwy Super Paper Mario.
For this year’s GAMMA, then, the collective invited the indie developer community to get just as playful with the third dimension, only, in true retro-futurist Kokoromi style, limited developers to using only red/blue stereoscopy and explore, as they put it, “alternative depth and location cues” and the “ability to hide information in separate viewing channels.”
Kokoromi themselves — consisting of programmer Damien Di Fede, Fish, creative director and researcher Heather Kelley (who you might remember from her “magical pet adventure and stealthy primer on female sexual pleasure,” Lapis, and digital media theorist Cindy Poremba — together with Polytron programmer Renaud Bédard, set out to up their own 3D ante and have created, Offworld can exclusively reveal ahead of the event, super HYPERCUBE.
Kelley explains, “The gameplay of super HYPERCUBE is kind of like that “human Tetris” event on those Japanese game shows… but with cubes. You have a cluster of procedurally generated cubes right in front of you, and your goal is to quickly line it up to fit through the hole in the wall that’s moving toward you, by rotating the cluster with the controller.”
“To see the hole in the wall on the other side of the cluster (and thus figure out what direction to rotate the cube to line it up) you have to lean,” Kelley continues, “The better you play, the bigger the cluster gets, and so the further you need to lean in order to see the wall behind.” Simple enough, but — and here’s where their true innovation comes into play — to implement that leaning, Polytron’s Bédard took a cue from Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Lee’s famous Wii-mote head tracking concept, and hacked together a pair of stereoscope glasses that lets players literally lean to navigate their way around the space.
The short videos we’ve seen of the experience appear just the tiniest bit magical — the combination of anaglyph 3D with movement-based perspective, on top of the game’s slickly minimalist style reminiscent of nothing so much as early PlayStation puzzler Intelligent Qube perfectly fits that Kokoromi retro future vision. It’s not hard to imagine the 70’s early game pioneers predicting that this would be the shape of games to come.
The ‘super’ version of super HYPERCUBE will be playable one night only at tonight’s event, but, Kelley says, a version simply called HYPERCUBE which uses the Xbox 360 controller to lean will be released after the show, as will the games from its other selected developers, including Infinite Ammo’s Paper Moon, Lee Byron and Joannie Wu’s Fireflies, Tim Winsky and Johanna Arcand’s AltiToad, Jim McGinley’s The Depths To Which I Sink, and Antony Blackett, Corie Geerders, and James Everett’s BlottoBrace.
GAMMA 3D takes place tonight at 9pm EST, at Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT).
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RAGDOLL METAPHYSICS: LEFT 4 DEAD, THE THINKING MAN’S BRAINDEAD SHOOTER
“It’s totally worth giving up TV real estate to be able to punch your buddy in the shoulder during friendly fire incidents,” says Valve’s Left 4 Dead development frontman, Chet Faliszek. He’s talking about the split-screen mode on the Xbox 360 version of the spectacular multiplayer zombie shooter – something that inquisitive players recently dug out of the PC demo code. As it turns out, the PC will actually support that split screen version too, although you might need someone on an Xbox pad and someone on mouse and keyboard to make it work.
I was lucky enough to sit down and play the full game on a high-end PC with a huge Dell monitor, alongside three of my closest friends, all of whom had a similar rig. Ideal conditions, you might say, for a four-player PC shooter. Especially since we were playing against Valve themselves… But however you intend to play this game, you’re definitely going to get a special kind of kick out of it. The 360 version (there will be nothing on PS3) has already generated massive interest, and Faliszek revealed that early numbers outweigh even the pre-orders of Valve’s previous console outing, The Orange Box (Portal, Team Fortress 2, Episode 2). The zombie apocalypse is coming, and it’s going to be multi-platform.
It works like this: you play as one of four survivors who must co-operate to escape the zombie hordes. There are four hour-long campaigns, each with four sub-sections. Getting through them is a grueling, thrilling cycle of zombie horror and astonishing slaughter. Even if one person drops from a survivor team there are still four characters: Valve’s remarkable AI takes over within moments, allowing that person to return a few minutes later, or not at all. (As my buddy discovered to his peril when we argued that we’d rather keep the bot after his restroom break.) This seamless AI handling means that the game can be played solo, or with just a couple of people: the vital four-man fireteam of the survivors remains intact – a vital necessity, as you can’t survive without buddies to drag zombies off you, or to save you from tumbling off a roof.
The computer intelligence goes even further than this, however. Left 4 Dead is never the same on any single play-through, and that’s not just down to human free will, there’s also an unseen hand at work: The Director. This smart piece of programmer effectively controls the ebb and flow of the teeming zombie masses. And we mean teeming. The Zombies are fast – 28 Days Later fast – and they come pouring out of tower-block windows or churning over fences. The Director’s job is to make things dramatic each time you see this, and it does that by varying the pacing, and delivering huge surges of zombie attackers when the moment is right. Think you’re just about holding off that screaming mass of bodies coming towards you down that alleyway? Then look behind you…
The aptitude with which this artificial system delivers moments of surprise and terror is quite startling, even spooky. Portal writer Erik Wolpaw claimed that “We’ve started attributing real-life events to The Director…” And you can see why. Just when you’re about to make it to the safe-room, or to get yourself out of a tight spot, things only get worse. The Director knows exactly what’s happening on the level at all times, and it’s going to make things harder for you. Particularly when The Witch is involved. This is one of the boss infected – super-zombies that are vastly more powerful that the sprinting, rotting hordes you face moment-to-moment. The Witch doesn’t like to be disturbed, and if you can avoid her it’s best to leave her alone. Startle her with bright lights, gunfire, or close proximity and, well, things get bad.
The boss infected each play their own crucial roll – vomiting on you to attract and enrage nearby zombies, strangling you with prehensile tongues, or simply pinning you down to rend your flesh. It’s in the Versus mode that these abilities will really have an impact – as players step behind the scenes of the zombie flick to become the infected. Versus mode sees two teams of four-aside swap places across the four sections of each campaign, and the competition becomes fierce as each one tries to outdo the other in griefing the survivors as they run for their lives. Play well and the survivors won’t even make it out alive, fail to make the most of your unnatural abilities and a co-ordinated survivor team will come through with nary a scratch. Needless to say, Valve flattened us quite firmly in our Versus session. A harsh-but-firm lesson in how much skill it actually takes to play the bad guys.
It’s hard to see Left 4 Dead failing to be anything other than a critical and commercial smash hit. The concept was fully playable almost two years ago, the full focus of the Valve team in the intervening months has smoothed and sculpted this into another multiplayer masterpiece. Between the B-movie in-jokes, the rounded, chatty characters, and the sublimely-timed moments of sheer panic, it’s hard to imagine another zombie game ever having quite the same impact again. The question that hangs over Left 4 Dead isn’t so much about how much players are going to love it, but more about /how long/ they’ll love it for. Will those four campaigns really be enough to satiate our hunger for novelty? Will the asymmetric Versus mode stand up to long-haul competition?
Perhaps the true, crucial question going forward is whether Valve are intend on supporting this game as they have Team Fortress 2, with free follow-up updates in the coming months? “Definitely,” says Faliszek, and they’ll be knocking out detailed tutorials for people to build and implement their own campaign maps too. “Turning your college or office into a level should be relatively easy,” says Faliszek, as if that’s the most natural urge in the world. And, with a few hours of battling the infected under your belt, maybe it is.
Left 4 Dead is available on Xbox 360 and PC from November 18th. The demo is out now on Live and PC.
[Jim Rossignol is an editor at RockPaperShotgun.com and the author of This Gaming Life, an account of the life of modern videogames and some of the people who play them. Ragdoll Metaphysics is his Offworld column exploring and analyzing gaming’s vast world of esoterica.]
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DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS GALLERY TOYS GET REFLECTIVE
As the venerable Dragon Quest RPG series continues its ongoing revival via Nintendo DS remakes (most recently with the release of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen), Square Enix has announced new HD figures in its ”Dragon Quest: Monsters Gallery” toy series. Running on the order of $50-70 for a 9 piece blind-box case due for release at the end of the year, consider the gauntlet thrown in resisting the charm of the above King Slime reflecting pond.
[photo via Hobbystock, which is just about completely covered in other wildly probably-not-work-safe toy photos]
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