ONE SHOT: HOLLIS BROWN THORNTON’S THE EARTH ON THE BACK OF THE GIANT TURTLE

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6.6.2009

Brandon Boyer

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It’s exceptionally hard to pick a favorite from Hollis Brown Thornton’s The Earth on the Back of the Giant Turtle series, which eventually devolved into various meditations on Invaders approaching Earth, so I’ll pick the most abstracted instead. [via Clayton Cubitt]

WEEKEND WATCHING: THE STORY OF TETRIS, 25 YEARS LATER

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6.6.2009

Brandon Boyer

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As you’ve no doubt seen by now, no less than Google has given Alexey Pajitnov’s landmark game Tetris the official re-design nod in celebration of the game’s 25th anniversary. In celebration of our own, I figured it’d be as apt a time as ever to give mention to BBC4 documentary From Russia With Love — still the most complete and directly resourced (though admittedly occasionally heavy handed with its Soviet melodrama) re-telling of the story of Tetris‘ birth and rise to ubiquitous acclaim.

I don’t think many people still know just what a fascinating story it was, between the iron-curtain drama and international business intrigue, and just how shrewdly major players were acting behind the scenes to all get a four-block piece of the action, creating a whirlwind with Pajitnov — here portrayed as someone who just, quite simply, was happy to have created an appealing game — at its center. [Though he would later tell me, with a sly smile, that he didn’t necessarily go without taking at least some advantage of the situation.]

Since the complete documentary has been stripped from Google Video’s archive (and still, bafflingly, hasn’t been released on DVD), it’s presented here in six YouTube chunks (with the remaining five after the jump): make your way through it while you still can.

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Like Alpinist, one indie development I’ve been keeping a very quiet but steady eye on is Florian ‘1000points’ Hufsky’s micro-skirmish blowout Puit Wars, which he succinctly and comprehensively describes as a “world-exploration story-driven arcade-action-platformer rts-townbuilding and space-exploration game.” Something for everyone, then.

Do I have any grasp of what’s going on in that video above? Not especially, and yet, with every passing in-progress screenshot posted to Hufsky’s work blog, I find myself minding less and less, and am incrementally more willing to put my trust in his pixel-sculpting hands. It helps that Hufsky is co-developer of the widely ported (and wildly IP confounding) four-player party game Super Mario Wars — it also helps that Hufsky realizes, as I’ve suspected all along, that Aesop Rock should be scoring many, many more games (Fight Night 4 aside).

Of all the under-sung games of E3 that popped up over the past week, the one that I was happiest to see make a stateside appearance was fyto’s WiiWare puzzler You, Me and the Cubes.

As I mentioned back in March, the game is the console comeback of Kenji Eno, the director behind Dreamcast horror adventure D2, and the co-creator — with Chibi-Robo producer Kenishi Nishi — of the aesthetically similar early iPhone game Newtonica.

The goal? As above, dropping the hapless ‘Fallos’ on to a series of ever-more-complex interconnected cubes, while attempting to maintain some semblance of balance and harmony, to keep them from falling into precisely the same terrifying void as One More Go’s just-mentioned Intelligent Qube.

Nintendo lists the game for a summer 2009 release, which, considering it also did so for the just-released DSiWare game Mighty Flip Champs, could mean it’s due to make its appearance in just a few short weeks.

Though the impact will have been undercut just slightly by seeing the pre-E3 leaked video of ‘Project Trico’, watching the first official video of The Last Guardian — the PS3 debut of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda — is honestly no less heartbreaking.

The reason? In its full, updated glory, details emerge that either weren’t present or as prominent in the years-old Trico video: most notably, the spears and arrows still cruelly jutting out of the gryphon’s thinning plumage — evidence of abuse endured during his time chained up before breaking free.

The updated trailer also shows the first sequences of the game’s protagonist without the companionship of his new-found friend, looking much more vulnerable to his surroundings than either Ico or Shadow of the Colossus‘s Wander, and, at the very end, some of the same now-signature sun-drenched washed out courtyards that’ll take you straight back to some of Ico‘s most beautiful scenes.

In case you still haven’t made it through archive video of Microsoft’s E3 conference, meet Milo, the virtual playmate from Black and White and Fable producer Peter Molyneux and his cohorts at Lionhead.

In the works for some time now and originally known as Project Dimitri, Milo will use Microsoft’s just-announced motion/voice/facial recognizing hardware Natal, allowing you — as the video above only slightly unbelievably promises — full, fluid back and forth conversations with Milo, and other fourth-wall breaking tricks like “handing” Milo a drawing via instant Natal scanning, a drawing he will be able to recognize as well.

Watch the ‘real magic’ in the video above, and see Joystiq’s live demo impressions for some early real-world interaction, who also note that, yes, there will be a ‘Millie’ for those that are more in need of female companionship.

ONE SHOT: POLYTRON’S LATEST #FEZFRIDAY TEASER

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6.5.2009

Brandon Boyer

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My new favorite reason to slog through the week: Polytron’s continued work-in-progress looks at their forthcoming Fez. Adds co-founder Phil Fish this week:

We’re getting really close to finally coming clean regarding Fez, platforms and release. We haven’t been able to so far for legal reasons.

As they quietly teased a few weeks ago, Media Molecule has just confirmed that Shadow of the Colossus DLC (and, presumably, Ico as well?) will be coming to LittleBigPlanet next week as part of their ongoing game crossover campaign.

And that’s my week officially made.

19-year-old, precious, wind-swept Tom ‘hexachordal‘ Milsom does a fantastic cover of All My Little Words by long, long-time Offworld favorite Magnetic Fields (sobering realization: I first discovered them when Milson was three), equipped only with a Game Boy and a copy of LSDJ. [via Buzzfeed, via Tiff]

GIMME INDIE TOOLS: ADAMATOMIC RELEASES HIS FLASH ENGINE, FLIXEL

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6.5.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Just released by Adam ‘Atomic‘ Saltsman for the benefit of indie devs everywhere: the Flixel engine, an open-source, fully featured, newly updated version of the Flash AS3 library Saltsman used for both his original web hit Gravity Hook, and the most recent Offworld-featured Fathom.

Flixel, which is meant to forgo the Flash IDE entirely, contains a number of improvements to how Flash handles 2D games, with support for spritesheets, baked in basic physics and particle effects, and the procedural map-generation code he used for the deep fathoms of Fathom.

You can dig through Flixel’s documentation via the official home site, and try Mode (above), the included de-Mo (see what he did there?) game that demonstrates the engine’s built-in features.

Flixel [AdamAtomic]