ONE SHOT: POLYTRON’S WORK-IN-PROGRESS #FEZFRIDAY DEBUT

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5.29.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Polytron co-founder Phil Fish kicks off his new #fezfriday feature — showing off whatever he happens to be working on in Fez at the moment — with this eye-popping and inter-dimensional work in progress shot of one of the game’s floating islands.

GALLERYNES: OPEN SOURCE PIXEL-ART SLIDESHOW VIEWER FOR THE NES

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5.29.2009

Brandon Boyer

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New from Don ‘No Carrier’ Miller, the oft-mentioned current king of NES programming and creator of software-circuit-bender glitchNES: galleryNES, an “an open source picture gallery for the Nintendo Entertainment System” that lets you “create your own pixel art and view it on a real NES in slideshow format.” [via True Chip Till Death]

Work in progress video from homebrew creator Peter Sjostrand, creating the Paper Mario, co-op version of Mega Man we had no idea we wanted until right now — more wallpaper-sized screens are at Sjostrand’s site. [Thanks, Torley!]

COLOSSAL FIND: THE LAST SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS ART ARCHIVE YOU’LL EVER NEED

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5.29.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

This is a heads up simply to point out that there exists a fantastic Picasa gallery that’s collected all things Shadow of the Colossus, from the stupefyingly hi-res screenshots like the above, to scans of its artbook and viral campaign images, and, oddly, a fan-made collectible card game based on Fumito Ueda’s second PS2 masterpiece. [via Tom]

Dredged up from the unknown depths at French gaming site JeuxVideo: the first video of TT Games and Harmonix’s fantastically unlikely crossover Lego Rock Band. While it doesn’t show off any gameplay, per se, since we’ve been playing Rock Band for the past two years, it shouldn’t take too many guesses there as to what to expect.

What it does hint at is some of the environmental destruction detailed several weeks back, as well as the game’s “fantasy locations” (ie. big yes to Lego pirate/castle stages), and, at the tail end, TT Games’ propensity for slapstick bricks.

LITTLEBIGWATCH: OFFICIAL ICO/LITTLEBIGPLANET CROSSOVER ART EMERGES

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5.29.2009

Brandon Boyer

4 Replies

This is about all we know: an image surfaces on LittleBigPlanet Central‘s forums, purportedly from creator Media Molecule themselves. The studio confirms it to be official art. It is Ico with Sack-Yorda, it is beautiful, it is as muted and subtle as the original game itself, it is my new desktop. That’s about all we really need to know for now, isn’t it? [via VG247]

ONE SHOT: TOM GAULD’S END OF LEVEL BOSS

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5.29.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

Your worst videogame nightmare, circa 1865. From Tom Gauld‘s forthcoming comic The Gigantic Robot. [via Creative Review]

Put together for Tokyo’s most recent Pecha Kucha Night (which, as inspired GDC’s MicroTalks session this year, features a series of speakers given 20 seconds to narrate 20 auto-advancing slides), game developer Mark Cooke — most recently programmer on Konami’s Zombie Apocalypse, but whose resume stretches as far back as Grim Fandango — challenged himself to create 10 games in as many hours.

As you’ll see, not all managed to come in under the one-hour limit, and not all were necessarily successes, but he did manage a good dose of creativity for each, particularly the Shinjuku Shame ‘homeless staring FPS’ and the procedurally generated Surfing on Sine Waves.

Head over to the official Pecha Kucha Night page for another video of Cooke actually delivering the presentation to get a better sense of how well the games went over with the crowd, and for news that the Pecha Kucha organization will be working with Cooke to create an official iPhone app out of his Can You Say Pecha Kucha? rhythm game.

Mark Cooke’s presentation [Pecha Kucha Daily, thanks Jean!]

SHADOWPLAY: SALTYANDSWEET’S TEAM FORTRESS MOBILE

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5.29.2009

Brandon Boyer

4 Replies

One of Valve’s most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they’re instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.

And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and “extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze,” and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow’s jarate-tossing champs today.

Team Fortress mobile [Etsy, thanks Matt!]

TRIPLE ROCK: FAMOUS OR INFAMOUS? MORALITY AND CHOICE IN SUCKER PUNCH’S PS3 DEBUT

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5.29.2009

Simon Parkin

6 Replies

Earlier this week Tom Chick, editor of the Sci-Fi television channel’s videogame blog, Fidgit, was presented with something of a moral dilemma. Having posted his impressions of Sony’s exclusive PlayStation 3 title, inFamous, in two easy-to-digest posts, one outlining ten great things about the game and the other ten ‘poor’ features, Sony explained that his scheduled interview with the game’s development team would no longer be forthcoming.

According to the publisher the interview was “no longer appropriate” in the light of Chick’s coverage of the game. Chick’s dilemma? Whether to inform Fidgit’s readership of the Sony PR team’s apparent petulance, further antagonising its PR department, while reassuring the audience of the site’s continued impartiality in the face of mild threat. Or, alternatively, whether to bite his tongue as a way of protecting future interviews and exclusives with the publisher’s development teams (who, after all, had little to do with the snub) thus serving the readership’s interests by safeguarding the site’s continued relevance.

With convincing arguments on both sides it can’t have been an easy decision to make, especially because the repercussions of either choice are unclear. But this is exactly the sort of grey moral or professional choice that human beings are routinely called upon to make: a cat’s cradle of cause and effect with unpredictable outcomes and unfathomable implications. Life rarely presents black and white moral choices, even if our fables, parables and stories mainly deal in such extremities. (more…)