And then this happened: World of Warcraft got TweetCraft, its own dedicated Twitter client, available as a free download via codeplex, which lets you:

* Send/receive Tweets in-game (Immediate sending reloads your UI)
* Queue Tweets to send when it’s more convenient for you
* Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
* AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement
* Extensible so that AddOn authors can register messages or events to AutoTweet

[via laughingsquid]

3M should really consider putting together dedicated pixel-kits for as well loved as they are as such. [via Blog Agog]

Tim Schafer gives IGN a full walk-through — well, OK, of just the first seventeen minutes, really — of Double Fine’s forthcoming Brütal Legend (the second video is below the fold), but that’s more than enough to fall for Eddie’s Clementine: the guitar brought back with him to the Age of Rock which is now imbued with special powers.

Probably you’ll want to hit that ‘play hi-res’: IGN’s embeddables are annoyingly quite rigidly sized. UPDATE: replaced with a Giant Bomb player much more embed-friendly.

HEY, MONTREAL: SEE BUBBLYFISH, ALICEFFECKT, MORE AT THE TOY COMPANY 4 CHIPTUNE SHOWCASE

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7.2.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Coming July 11th to Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT): Toy Company 4, an all-star chiptune lineup that will include formerly Boing Boing Video’d and Bit.Trip Core title-artist guest star Bubblyfish, the previously featured Aliceffeckt, and artists Mattfuzz, Cougarettes, Pero, with visuals by VJ Pocaille, DJ Erreur 404, and more.

Polytron’s Phil Fish has also said that Kokoromi’s early-Offworld featured game SUPERHYPERCUBE will also be on display, its full head-tracked stereoscopic form.

See the SAT’s page for more information on the show and its lineup. [via Phil Fish]

POLYTRON OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCE FEZ FOR 2010 XBOX LIVE ARCADE RELEASE

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7.2.2009

Brandon Boyer

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After many months of (probably misguided, given its ever-clear XNA roots) speculation, Polytron has finally, officially announced that their space-warping 2D/3D debut Fez will be released for Xbox Live Arcade in early 2010.

LOW-TOP, HYRULE: KYOZO KICKS’ CUSTOM LEGEND OF ZELDA SHOES

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7.2.2009

Brandon Boyer

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How do you follow the blog-hype over your own Noby Noby Boy and Grim Fandango custom painted shoes? With two pairs of Zelda shoes, one pair based on each particular shield from Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.

Creator Nicholas ‘KyozoKicks‘ Tonks has gone a step further this time and is taking orders for either pair for any interested party: £125, available worldwide.

The Zelda Collection. [Kyozo Kicks]

TRAIN FACTOR: CHRONICLING THE MIS/USES OF TRAINS IN GAMES

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7.1.2009

Brandon Boyer

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The day’s most awesomely cranky (and unfortunately several months silent) monomaniacally focused website: Torsten Kammer’s Trains in Games, a website devoted solely to game developer rail mistakes, “partly because I like them very much, partly because no developer seems to care about them.”

Examples? Crates in trains (nobody uses them), couplings on trains (they’re frequently not modeled or otherwise missing), and tracks of the wrong width. Developers, consider yourself warned: you’re doing it wrong, and the world is watching. [via Edge-Online]

BENZIDO/RYAN CHISHOLM’S SPACE PUZZLER EVACUATION RELEASED FOR IPHONE

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7.1.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Long-time readers may recall Evacuation, Benzido/Ryan Chisholm’s deceptively difficult airlock puzzle, as an early Gimme Indie Game entry in which your goal was to airlock-eject aliens by opening and closing color-coded airlock doors, while trying not to eject your own crew.

If you do remember the game, as I do, with fondness, you’ll be happy to hear it’s been ported to the iPhone, and is available now for a paltry 99 cents. [App Store link, via TIGSource]

PET SOCIETY DEVS LAUNCH WORMS-ESQUE FACEBOOK GAME CRAZY PLANETS

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7.1.2009

Brandon Boyer

4 Replies

Today’s most pleasant gaming surprise: reigning Facebook game champs Playfish — creators of the still-notification-hogging Pet Society and Who Has The Biggest Brain? — have officially released their more or less essentially Worms-alike game Crazy Planets to the social networking site.

A 2D turn-based battler at heart, each Planets round gives your profile-photo’d avatar 30 seconds to move around its Mario Galaxy-esque mini-planets to get in position to attack (in its earliest levels) invading robots.

As you level up in the game by completing more of its successive missions, you’ll get the opportunity to both level up and unlock new weapons (part of its repeat-play social draw), and unlock new player controlled units of your army, here represented by choosing one of your Facebook friends to accompany you.

On top of that, the game gives you bonuses (like shorter research times for new weapons) for inviting your friends, or, like Pet Society, allows for real money microtransactions to instantly make upgrades available.

But at heart, based on a few [too many] introductory hours of play, it’s just good, free casual fun, well drawn and animated, with fantastically solid and weighty physics, and the always pleasing gimmick of getting your friends literally into the game — feel free to add me there if you’re playing as well.

Crazy Planets [Playfish]

In production for what feels like ages (since early 2006, though, to be fair, they only promised it would be finished “sometime before the end of time”), Metanet — the Toronto indie studio behind the widely ported ninja platformer N — have just officially revealed the first actual in-progress look at their second game, Robotology.

Well, kind of. The game’s protracted development has been the result of an extended research into its underlying physics model, which the studio has blogged about at mind-sizzling length in the past. Like N, physics will play a deeply rooted part in the game, but, unlike N, the physics involved here — Metanet have called the game a cross between the unpredictable gravity of Mario Galaxy, fully jointed and self-ambulating giants ala Shadow of the Colossus and the wire swinging of obscure import hook-grappler Umihara Kawase — are necessarily more complex.

What you see above may not be what you want to see, given the three namechecks above, but it is proof that the game — some three years on — is moving in the [morphing turnable] direction they want it to be, and is incrementally closer to seeing the light of day.