ONE SHOT: MACHINARIUM’S RUSTED IRONWORKS DECAYED ARCADE
From Jakub ‘Amanita‘ Dvorský’s forthcoming adventure game, Machinarium.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
BREAD AND CREAM: TALE OF TALES’ THE PATH HITS MACS
So it’s been some weeks since Tale of Tales’ Red-Riding-Hood-via-coming-of-age-horror game The Path first hit the digital marketplace, and I haven’t said a word about it since my IGF roundup, based on a build from a year earlier.
That’s not an intentional snub, it’s simply logistics, with my main PC now so horribly outdated it suffers under the weight of a Plants Vs. Zombies or a Today I Die, let alone anything taxingly 3D.
But those days might now be behind me, as Tale of Tales has just announced that The Path has just been released for the Mac — which hopefully will keep the MacBook happy — and alongside it, they’ve released their lengthiest and most ‘traditional’ trailer to date, which gives you just about everything you need to see to understand why it’s quickly become such a critical darling.
The Path for Mac is NOW available! [Tale of Tales]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
PIZZA CITY: PIXELJAM’S RETRO-MODERN STYLE COMES TO ADULT SWIM
In a move entirely coincidental with my tip of the hat to Rich Grillotti earlier in the morning, Adult Swim has released its latest web game, Pizza City, which so happens to have been created by Grillotti and PixelJam partner Miles Tilmann.
The game’s the Atari 2600 version of Grand Theft Auto we never got, if the game had necessarily been limited to GTA‘s delivery side missions and been stripped of all its violence (minus, that is, that toward clowns and mimes), but with all its hidden bonuses sprinkled around its open world.
If it seems at first glance that its pace and expansion are too time consuming for quick-shot web play, that’s because they are: though it’s not immediately apparent (it wasn’t to me, anyway), pressing ‘S’ inside the pizza shop will save your progress, meaning I can (and will) come back to grind my way to those better cars teased just outside your starting point.
Pizza City [adult swim, PixelJam]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
LITTLEBIGWATCH: HYMANATOR’S OUT OF THIS WORLD/ANOTHER WORLD TRIBUTE
LittleBigPlanet creativity seems to be on the rise lately: following yesterday’s electro-mega-mix, PSN user ‘Hymanator‘ has done up Eric Chahi’s classic Another World/Out of This World in style, with the full intro sequence, shadow-beast, cage-breaking sequence and all.
Hymanator (where he’s got more Robocop, Back to the Future tribute vids) [Synthasite, thanks Malcolm]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
CODE WARRIOR: CATALOGING THE INTERNET’S USE OF KONAMI CODE EASTER EGGS
After ESPN’s recently discovered (and since removed) hack created a firestorm of blog attention, one new site is doing its duty to catalog the rest of the uses around the internet of hidden Konami Code easter eggs.
The one hitch, you’ll need to know the code to access it. Figure it via Dueling Analog’s image above, or I’m sure it’s hanging around Offworld somewhere as well.
The best/worst use? jQuery’s hack leads you to a hidden site with a fully playable YouTube-linked version of Keyboard Hero, which is amazing until you realize it’s actually almost fully un-playable.
konamicodesites [via Tom]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
LITTLEBIGWATCH: MEDIA MOLECULE TO OFFER STICKER PACKS FROM JON BURGERMAN, MORE
Back in Offworld’s earliest days I noted (with some amount of congratulatory jealousy that I didn’t think of it first) the excellent work of LittleBigPlanetoid in bringing artist-designed sticker packs to LittleBigPlanet from illustrators Matt Buchanan and Will Scobie.
There’s been a bit of a lull in the packs since then, but for good reason: LittleBigPlanetoid operators James Spafford and Tom Kiss have since made the jump to Media Molecule itself, hired on as community managers.
So it’s not too much of a surprise (but a very happy one!) to hear via the newly refreshed Edge Online of a now officially-sanctioned campaign to bring artists and designers on board for new sticker packs in coming months.
The first confirmed pack, reports Edge, will come from Offworld favorite Jon Burgerman (previously mentioned for his fantastic work in creating a new level for the PSP’s Wipeout Pure), with plans to approach Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and artist Claire Wendling for future packs.
See the full interview with LittleBigPlanet art director Kareem Ettouney for more on Media Molecule’s other DLC plans, including a crossover content pack with legendary UK comic house 2000AD.
Graphic Artists Jump On To LittleBigPlanet [Edge Online]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
ONE MORE GO: GOD HAND, OR WHY HARDCORE GAMES RING MY BELL
Videogames are sometimes disparagingly described as mere wish fulfillment power fantasies. If we accept that for a moment, then here’s what I learned about my psyche today. Sometimes, you have days bad enough and journeys home stupid enough that all you want is to be able to boot someone in the nuts so hard that they ring like a bell. Hrwah! Pow! DING!
Thankfully, since videogames are all just wish fulfillment power fantasies, I can do exactly that. And, while I’m at it, sate my secret, Freud-perplexing lust for midgets, cigars, chihuahuas and robots. Capcom’s majestic God Hand (pronounced, gloriously, ‘Goddohando‘ in Japanese, preferably in a screaming crescendo of plosives) is a game designed purely to meet the needs of your inner unreconstructed badass, the part of you that calls people douchebags under its breath and gravitates naturally towards leather overcoats.
It’s not as if beat’em ups have ever in their history been a source of mundane, minimal restraint, but God Hand takes all the excesses of the genre and amps them up to eleven, dresses them in spandex and spanks them on the arse.
It’s a game that does a lot of things that we often think games are bad at, and does them brilliantly. It’s funny – properly funny – in all kind of ways. It surreal, satirical and self-aware, and full of elegantly conceived jokes: musical, verbal and visual. It is, on its own terms, a credible romance, as Gene’s feelings for Olivia morph between adoration and exasperation, with occasional bouts of flat-out terror. But it’s a game with a secret – a very surprising secret for a game conceived from the off as a purely hardcore experience.
It gets harder the better you are at it. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One More Go
GIMME INDIE GAME: THE PLAYABLE POETRY OF DANIEL BENMERGUI’S TODAY I DIE
If you’ve played Daniel Benmergui’s I Wish I Were The Moon — one of Offworld’s first top-shelf recommended indie games — then you know generally what to expect from his just-released Today I Die.
Hushed and humbly poetic, Moon gave players a small time-based sandbox with which to manipulate variables in an effort to discover one of several outcomes, but Moon‘s only part of Benmergui’s evolution that brought him to this point.
His Storyteller, released shortly after Moon is the other key to that puzzle. Like Moon, it’s an exercise in variable outcomes, but in contrast, it’s one in which all of your decisions are made at your leisure, and where all outcomes are shown on the fly in real-time.
Somewhere in between, then, is Today I Die: like Storyteller, you’re free to experiment with your variables — here both represented by the actors and the very words themselves — to shift and morph your surroundings, but, unlike either of the earlier games, these lead to sudden shifts that demand faster attention. Nothing, though, is outright undo-able, until the very last moments of the game (so far as I’ve found in a number of repeat plays) but it is the most ‘action-oriented’ of the three, for as much as you can call it that.
The most fascinating part of Benmergui’s indie output is watching him work at ideas in which he’s essentially alone, or at least on this digestible a scale: it’s all the volumes of open-world and meaningfully-consequential design challenges that Deus Ex and Far Cry 2 have tried to tackle reduced to one delicate little pamphlet.
As above, it’s a game that demands replayability, though not necessarily to explore parallel realities (as with Storyteller), or to tick off X amount of endings (as with Moon — though I am curious if there are more than the two I found, I could easily be wildly underestimating the options), but more to reflect on what the variable flickers are trying to say, rather than the rote mechanical meaning of how you do them — to dive further into its poetry rather than its playability.
Today I Die [ludomancy]
[As a sidenote, Benmergui is experimenting with a patronage system, with an anonymous donor helping him keep the game on a “quiet, ad-free website”, but in return, he’s set up this page to accept donations of three dollars and up for a downloadable package of all games mentioned above, with special bonuses to those that donate even more — do him the favor of at least making the minimal donation: he’s a voice in games we definitely want to support.]
Previously:
See more posts about: Gimme Indie Game, Offworld Originals
ONE SHOT: DAN SCHOENING’S ‘SCREW ATTACK’ METROID MONTAGE
“Screw Attack,” from Dan ‘traditionaldanimatio‘ Schoening, who’s got many more Nintendo and other games-related illustrations in his gallery.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
ONE SHOT: SNOW FALL, AND SPACE INVADER’S 763RD SPACE INVADER
Space Invader‘s space invader, January, Paris’s A3 motorway. See the invasion in progress here.
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
