ONE SHOT, CIRCA 2000 AD: LITTLEBIGPLANET ABOUT TO GET DREDD-FUL

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5.8.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Remember that off-hand bit about Media Molecule’s plans to team up with UK comics legend 2000 AD for official LittleBigPlanet downloadable content? That appears to be happening sooner than later. [via MM]

As followers of the Twitter account and my semi-exasperated Facebook friends will already be well aware, I’ve spent the better part of the week taking part in a cross-blog challenge with ngmoco and developer Rough Cookie‘s upcoming tower defense game Star Defense.

The task was one of simple survival: we were given an early build of the game with a single planet and asked to last as many rounds as we could, which, in my case, started in the low 20s and built to a bedtime-last-night high of 49, which, it turns out, fell far less than half short of PocketGamer Tracy Erickson‘s minorly-staggering winning 132 rounds.

But, public embarrassment aside (I blame my lightly smashed-up screen [which I’m holding out on fixing/replacing until June’s alleged 3.0 model (you’d really better not hold out on me, Apple)]), what the challenge has done is both familiarize me with Star‘s setup, and, I have to admit, almost entirely win me over.

Like Tom mentioned earlier in talking about Plants Vs. Zombies, I’m not the most fanatical tower defense player: I wasn’t one of the forward-thinkers who called Desktop Tower Defense their top game of 2007 (c’mon, it was a dead heat between Phase, Earth Defense Force 2017, and Raw Danger), and the last TD game that really grabbed my attention at all (PvZ aside) was Studio Eres’ gorgeously abstract Immortal Defense — watch its demo trailer and the appeal is clear.

That’s nothing against the Fieldrunners and the Elemental Monster TDs, per se, it’s more about the heart of the mechanics themselves, which derive a large part of their underlying tension from the essential ‘waiting game’ of setting your positions and sitting idly by to see the effect they’ll have, and finding out 10 or 15 waves later that you’d been thinking wrong since the beginning. I’m not a fan of lost time.

And that’s something that Star Defense — or rather, the one level I’ve played — seems to have minimized. I’ve completely forgotten now where I’ve heard this, but Nokia designer Scott Foe — the main man behind the N-gage’s excellent flagship mobile/PC crossover game Reset Generation — said somewhere that one of the ways they’d got past the inescapable lag inherent in a multiplayer game running over slow mobile networks was to design the playfield to be larger than the mobile screen itself, which they then ported directly to the PC, even though a standard monitor could have easily displayed it whole.

The reason? In that 7+ seconds between every player’s turn, users would constantly scroll around the playfield looking for their next move and exploitable opportunity, which meant zero seconds of staring at a static screen.

So, here’s another mea culpa: all the times I’d expressed some skepticism about Star Defense‘s spherical — and thus 70% obscured at any moment — playfields, it turns out I was thinking wrong here, too, and one of the game’s strengths is that once you’ve placed your initial barriers that can ably destroy any earlier weaker waves, you’re then completely free to scout out the rest of the planet for deeper strategies.

Add to that a button that — and maybe I’ve just overlooked this in every other TD game? — forgoes the auto-timer and immediately sends out the next wave of enemies, and Star Defense is the first game of its type I’ve played that actively avoids any of that dead time that’s got under my skin, and one in which I’m never not directly interacting with its world [as a side note, this is something Plants Vs. Zombies does very smartly, too, by requiring you to click on randomly popped up bits of sunshine].

Star Defense should be landing on the App Store quite soon, and, with some several hours already happily put into Groundhog Day repeating just 1/7th of its galaxy, could easily be the game that has finally taught me to stop worrying and love the tower.

Star Defense [ngmoco, Rough Cookie]

There was a certain amount of understandable skepticism when Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka announced that his new games company, Prope, had moved on to create a game that took all of the reductivist complaints about the Wii and its controls — that it’d reduced gaming to wild flailing — and reduced it even further.

His Let’s Tap asks players instead to not even hold the controller, instead placing it on a box (included with the game) and rap their hands against it, which, in a sense, isn’t as crazy as it sounds, as it flips the rhythm-gaming staple of costly peripherals on its head.

And, as it turns out, it may have been a step in just the right direction, with no less than Edge magazine giving the collection of five games very high marks, and above is the just released trailer for the Tap Runner segment of the game, which is due for U.S. release this Summer.

Let’s Tap [Sega]

THE SOUL STILL BURNS: KONAMI ANNOUNCES NEW WIIWARE CONTRA

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5.8.2009

Brandon Boyer

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In a parallel universe, all the rampant Konami-Coded sites would have been viral prelude to this: Konami has just made the surprise announcement of a new WiiWare version of its venerable Contra series — the very game that made the Konami Code famous — due to be released in Japan next Tuesday, and, surely, the Western world not long after.

Konami offers few details other than saying the game will maintain its run/jump/shoot ‘guerrilla tactic’ core, which you can see in style — along with at least one larger-than-full-screen boss, via the developer’s newly opened site.

Contra Rebirth [Konami, google translated]

In other new overseas surprise announcement: after creating Namco’s original Offworld favorite action/puzzler Mr. Driller and moving on to Sony to work on that company’s own excellent Ape Escape series, director Yasuhito Nagaoka has been reunited with Driller designer Kaori Shinozaki for Qruton, a new puzzle game coming in June for both PSP and the PS3.

Beneath its cute-goth exterior lies an interesting take on number puzzling, with grouped digits rolling forward (or, with fours, back to one) and marked to explode if they lie next to similar digits, with a minorly brain-bending entire-screen combo viewable in the trailer above.

Sony’s been less consistent with bringing PlayStation Network exclusives to all territories, or at least in a consistently timed manner, so it’ll be a waiting game to see if Qruton makes the jump to the U.S. and UK stores.

Qruton [Sony, via andreasang]

Maxis art director Ocean Quigley shows off this prototype for a post-SimCity 4 game eventually cancelled, then known as Simsville. Quigley explains the process, known as “impostering”, would have allowed for a freely moving camera around the city and much more detailed models than previously utilized, as the process renders out complex 3D objects as simple sprites.

And, of course, gives the game that wonderfully soft-shaded illustrative style.

Impostering in Simsville [Ocean Quigley]

Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours do digital hardcore with a backdrop of glitched out pixel lovelies at the previously previewed Pulsewave show at NYC’s The Tank. Vimeo uploader Gideon captured most of the night’s performance, including several of the open-mic performers — see also: 8BK-ok’s 8-bit Rocky Horror show, and also: JDDJ3J’s MySpace, where he’s got the best low-bit version of Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi I’ve ever heard.

Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours [MySpace, Gideon on Vimeo]

THE SINCLAIR SOLUTION: BIOSHOCK 2’S FIRST MULTIPLAYER DETAILS

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5.8.2009

Brandon Boyer

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In its ongoing drip-feed of BioShock 2 details, 2K has let loose the first details of the game’s multiplayer campaign. For such a deliberately single-starring narrative experience as the original game was, multiplayer might have seemed an odd choice, but developer Unreal co-developer Digital Extremes are promising something entirely uniquely modeled to capitalize on the game’s fiction — thankfully not simply giving us a Big Daddy Arena.

2K says the multiplayer segment of the game will work in parallel with the single player experience that will be set “during the fall of Rapture,” prior to ‘Jack’s arrival in the first game, with users taking the role of test subjects for the then-experimental bio-enhancing Plasmids.

There, players will explore pre-wreckage environments seen in the first game like Kashmir Restaurant and Mercury Suites, and, taking a page from Call of Duty 4‘s multiplayer playbook, they’ll earn experience points that will grant access to better weapons, Plasmids and Tonics to be recombined to fit your style of play.

BioShock 2 is due for release in October for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

There’s something in the sea [2K]

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: PLANTS VS ZOMBIES

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5.8.2009

Tom Armitage

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This weekend, I will mostly be playing Popcap’s excellent new Plants vs Zombies.

That’s not what I’m planning to play. What I’m planning is: ploughing on through the excellent Chronicles of Riddick; having just acquired a Wii after all this time, I’m hoping to dive back into Metroid Prime 3 and the sublime Super Mario Galaxy; and checking out Tale of Tales’ The Path, now that a Mac port is available (as previously reported on Offworld).

Things won’t go according to plan, though: the siren song of zombies, clamouring for brains, will lure me back to my garden.

It’s hard not to have escaped the casual-games juggernaut that is Popcap, following the success of their previous titles, such as Bejeweled, Zuma, and Peggle. Plants Vs Zombies continues their tradition of making finely crafted, perfectly balanced, and maddeningly addictive games.

Plants Vs Zombies is Popcap’s take on Tower Defence. I am not the greatest fan of Tower Defence games – even the delightful Fieldrunners. They’re fiddly, require a great deal of information to be processed at once, and demand increasingly precise interactions as the playing field fills with tiny turrets. For something that is supposedly strategic, they seem to descend into motor-control tests all too quickly.

Popcap take all that and throw it away, reducing the genre to a skeleton: defending a house against zombie attackers, with limited resources and limited space on your lawn. No building mazes of little turrets here; there are up to five “rows’ for enemies to walk down and you to build on. The play-field clears after every level. There’s only one resource — sunlight — and it has to be gathered by hand. The various plants at your disposal are, like all the game’s graphics, large, clear, and beautifully drawn. There’s no “upgrading” of turrets; each plant has a unique function to perform, and all have strengths and weaknesses, which usually come down to balancing power against the cost to build and the time it takes before you can build another.

New plants and capabilities are added very slowly – one per level at most. You’re never overwhelmed with choice. Even once your repertoire of plants is bulging, the game keeps that in check by limiting you to taking six different types of seeds to battle. And then, just when you think you’ve got the whole thing sussed… it throws night levels into the mix, where there’s no sunlight to restock your supplies, but where fungi come into their own (as they don’t have any need for sunlight). There’s a lot more depth to Plants Vs Zombies than you might expect from a casual game, but that depth is meted out slowly and carefully. It has to be, given how useful the help screen is:

Popcap are well-known for their attention to their craft; Plants Vs Zombies has been in the pipeline for quite a while, but it’s clearly not been released until it’s absolutely ready, and the Popcap attention to detail shows. Plants Vs Zombies is really, really good. Like all Tower Defence games, it can get repetitive, but it’s not designed for long periods of play. It’s much better suited to frequent short bursts, and the charming character design and inventive array of zombies ensures that it’s never long after a play-session before you’re double-clicking on it again.

Plants Vs Zombies is available now for PC and Mac as direct download from Popcap, as well as on Steam and other services; it’s currently only $9.99 on Steam, which is a steal. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be stumping up the second the hour-long free trial is up. And then not playing very much else. Whatever you choose to play, have a fun weekend, Offworlders; what’s in your gaming future for the next two days?

Plants Vs Zombies [PopCap]

Above, a preview of the title screen and first song from Alex Mauer’s second Vegavox album, his third LP to be released on an actual NES cart. Mauer’s been previously mentioned for his musical work both on the NES ROM flier for April’s Pulsewave show and the PlayPower organization’s work on a cheap 8-bit computer for developing worlds.

The album will be out soon on Pause Records (previously noted for their +Plus series of free indie game soundtrack downloads), and while his second collaborative NES cart album, Color Caves (preview), is out of print, you can still get his first Vegavox album (preview) via his headlessbarbie site.

headlessbarbie [Alex Mauer, Pause Records, via Daniel Rehn]