E309 ONE SHOT: NINTENDO TEASES THE NEXT WII ZELDA

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6.5.2009

Brandon Boyer

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At a post-E3 press conference meeting, Nintendo quietly let slip a ridiculously large print-ready concept art teaser of the next Legend of Zelda game, currently in development. [via BitMob]

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: FINISH THOSE GAMES!

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6.5.2009

Tom Armitage

7 Replies

E3 is over, and my feedreader, Twitter-stream and pub conversations have, at long last, all calmed down from their temporary frenetic haze of hype and speculation. As usual with the industry’s tentpole conferences, there’s always far too much to take in, far too big a glut of announcements, and at least as many announcements of returning franchises as new IP.

Yes, I dropped the F-bomb. Franchise is such an unpleasant word; it signals the point where a game becomes a business, where annual or biannual updates are guaranteed until the title is unpopular, and where the return on your investment is likely to decrease between each successive installment.

Or does it? Much as the F-word makes me nauseous, many of my favourite games end in a number. There’s nothing wrong with a good sequel, just as long as it is a genuinely good sequel. And lots of the suffixed titles shown off this year looked jolly good.

The footage we’ve seen of Modern Warfare 2 (above) once again proves that, when it comes to pacing and technical perfection, Infinity Ward really know their stuff. I’m quite excited by what’s been shown of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2, both in terms of where they’re taking the narrative tone and the tweaks and enhancements being applied throughout the game’s mechanics.

I’m trusting Valve in their decision to make the already high-up-my-list Left 4 Dead 2 a stand-alone title in its own right. I’m even, dare I say foolishly, somewhat interested in the spectacular (yet potentially dull) Assassin’s Creed 2 (above). And I don’t think there’s anyone that won’t relish the chance to return to all those beautiful planetoids in Super Mario Galaxy 2, especially now there’s a dinosaur companion to enjoy them with.

Looking down that list serves a purpose other than tiding me over the quiet summer months and starting to write my Christmas list, though. It also reminds me of how many games on my shelves aren’t finished.

And so that’s my plan for the weekend, and indeed the coming weeks: triaging the stack, and Finishing Some Games. I’ve returned to Mass Effect, having cleared the horrible difficulty spike that is Matriarch Benezia, and am looking forward to wrapping the adventure up, my savegame ready to be imported into the sequel come next year. I’m slowly pushing on with my plan to get my regular cohorts into Advanced campaigns on Left 4 Dead, and maybe – just maybe – survive one without dropping the difficulty level.

And, having just acquired a Wii, I’m stepping into the majesty of Super Mario Galaxy for the first time. What a game! It charms and thrills in equal measure, and whilst I may be collecting stars for the first time, I’m sure many of you still haven’t collected all 120. If not, now’s the time to fire it up again and remember what that wonderful world feels like.

And then, when all my games are wrapped up (as if that will ever happen), I’ll be ready – dare I say it, even deserving – of the treats to come in the Autumn and beyond. What’s on your unfinished stack, Offworlders, and what are you going to be finishing up this weekend?

For a while there, the updates on Heroes & Villains — the superhero iPhone puzzler from Paper Moon creators Infinite Ammo — were coming thick and fast, only to drop off suddenly in the weeks surrounding this year’s GDC.

So, wha-happen? As you can see by the latest video above, the game’s caught in flux between tantalizingly near-complete, but struggling to make that last jump, as Infinite Ammo co-founder Alec Holowka explains:

The main stumbling block with releasing the game is that there are some interface problems. Right now its too hard for most people to pick up and play – which is a required aspect of iPhone games.

There’s also the question of being able to produce enough level content to make the game worthwhile. I wanted to aim for about 50 levels. There’s a fair amount of work involved in that, and I want to be sure that it’ll be worth the effort.

To whit, I’m employing the aide of some of my indie game developer friends – to have them assess, praise or destroy what I have in the game now, and hear how much potential they think it has. I think it’ll at the very least be educational; hopefully it’ll lead to the game improving and eventually being released.

The main reason for Holowka’s dilemma: he’s also putting the majority of his development efforts into the previously teased Marian, the tale of a re-animated puppet who’s “caught in the dream world between life and death,” and a game that was only spoken about in hushed, reverent tones by the Ammos during GDC.

The Ammos are actually taking a community poll to see what players would prefer them to focus on, and I’ve made my own vote, but will also publicly say that for as much as I’d like to see the Marian magnum opus come to life as soon as possible, I’ve been hangin’ on so long for the Heroes that I’d be devastated to see it get the premature axe. Knock that one out of the park and then go full-tilt heads down on Marian from there, please!

KINDLY CUSTOMIZED: JOE OF WAR’S ANDREW RYAN BIOSHOCK FIGURE

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6.4.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Probably the most unlikely custom toy I’ve run across in recent weeks, in which “joe of war” takes Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Jiles, and morphs him confidently into BioShock antagonist Andrew Ryan, who clearly always packs heat for his putter practice. [via toycutter]

E309: NINTENDO TO LOCALIZE DS PUZZLER RITTAI PICROSS AS PICROSS 3D

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6.4.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

One More Go columnist Margaret Robertson has already done a wonderful job of explaining the sculptural brilliance of HAL’s logic puzzler Rittai Picross: a game of “destructive artistry at its finest, with just a hint of witchcraft.”

Even though it’s still worrying listed as a ‘TBD’ release, Nintendo has just given us the strongest sign that it intends to bring the game to the U.S. with an appearance as Picross 3D at E3. That’s no sure bet: its GBA bit Generations lineup made a strong debut at E3 the year they unveiled the Game Boy Micro, as well, but let’s hope this little bit of noise will be proof that the game does have a willing audience.

Rittai Picross [Nintendo]

Also gone almost entirely noticed over the course of the E3 week: the fact that twisted indie platformer And Yet It Moves, from Vienna studio Broken Rules has been stealthily announced for a WiiWare release in Fall 2009, after only just made its way to Steam and other digital download services in early April. Above: a teaser trailer for its PC release.

It’s been far too long since I last mentioned 5th Cell’s puzzler/adventure game Scribblenauts, where — as I mentioned last December — your goal is to collect ‘Starites’ by conjuring, well, essentially almost any object to help traverse the landscape, as seen in the game’s latest trailer above.

Over the past 7 months, 5th Cell has continued to up the ante on its gimme-an-object-any-object promise (enlisting artists like Pirate Baby Cabana Battle’s Paul Robertson to help quick-draw new additions), and how well does it work?

Well, from the show floor video above, pretty stunningly well, only failing out on the Nintendorks‘ fairly reasonable request for Obama, but managing to pit a jackalope, a stegosaurus, a kraken, God (and, anecdotally, Death [Death killed God!]), and Einstein against each other.

And, just in case you were wondering (I wasn’t, but I’m glad to know now), as apparently witnessed by ex-1UP/EGM writer Nick Suttner (who makes a cameo above): yes, Keyboard Cat is in the game.

UPDATE: Tiny Cartridge and Joystiq writer JC Fletcher updates with a picture of not just keyboard cat playing the Scribblenauts level off, but also feline cohort meme Longcat stretching into the sky.

Hideo Kojima’s biggest surprise for E3 wasn’t the potentially 4-player portable Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker or Raiden’s return for Metal Gear Solid Rising, but — newly unveiled at Konami’s late-Wednesday conference — the fact that he will be assuming production control for Lords of Shadow, the latest attempt at bringing Konami’s decades-old Castlevania franchise to life in full 3D.

In development for PS3 and Xbox 360 by Madrid studio Mercury Steam — the same team behind Clive Barker’s Jericho — Konami says Lords of Shadow is “one of its most ambitious and innovative titles to date”, with “a rich, open game world that traverses snowy mountain ranges, Gothic castles, and undead-strewn wastelands in a devastated Southern Europe during the Middle Ages,” and a star-studded voice lineup that will include Robert Carlyle, Natasha McElhone, Jason Isaacs, and, yes, as above, Patrick Stewart.

Whether those key words “open game world” are code for a game that will retain the later 2D Castlevanias signature slowly-unfolding back-tracking structure remains to be seen, but Kojima’s involvement, however executive and overarching, is surely meant to inspire confidence that this might be the 3D Castlevania done right, after a series of four earlier attempts across Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2 that, by most accounts, were not.

Hit the jump for a collection of high res screenshots. (more…)

ONE SHOT: POPPING THE CHILD-PROOF LID ON INFINITRON POLYPHARMA

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6.4.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

Fez co-creator Phil Fish unveils a new logo for ‘Infinitron Polypharma’, with the tagline “curing diseases as we invent them”, which can only mean one thing: work steadily continues on Power Pill, Polytron’s iPhone collaboration with Paper Moon creators Infinite Ammo.

Another game that I only heard mentioned once during the entirety of E3 was Blitz Arcade‘s Invincible Tiger: The Legend Of Han Tao, a game that’d apparently escaped my attention for too long during Namco’s spring lead-up to the convention.

Blitz were on hand demoing the game on their special polarized-3D setup, but it’s not quite the game to do 3D justice: what it is is the apparent next-gen heir to the NES’s original simply titled Kung Fu, only with a fluidity that’s rare even for modern brawlers, and that perfect amount of hammy badly-printed HK kung fu film filter. [indirectly via Jean Snow]