BRICK HOUSE: HARMONIX, TT OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCE LEGO ROCK BAND

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4.21.2009

Brandon Boyer

4 Replies

After months of speculation and an accidental reveal via GDC slide notes, Rock Band creators Harmonix and Lego Star Wars/Batman/Indiana Jones creators TT Games have officially announced that 2009 will see the release of a Lego branded Rock Band for Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and DS.

Why Lego? As it turns out, the game is being positioned as a way to take Rock Band‘s suggestive metal posturing and give it family-friendly smiley-face accessibility, with “classic favourites suitable for younger audiences” like:

Blur: “Song 2”;
Carl Douglas: “Kung Fu Fighting”;
Europe: “The Final Countdown”;
Good Charlotte: “Boys and Girls”;
Pink: “So What”

As for the Lego integration itself, apart from being able to customize your minifig-avatars (as well as your roadies, managers, and crew) as you’ve classically been able to do, the studios say that instead of mimicing real-world venues, the game’s performances will take place at “venues, stadiums and fantasy locations on Earth and beyond, that mimic the imaginative settings that the Lego world offers.”

I have to admit: I’m as excited for this as I have been for any of the franchise’s other iterations, despite the toned down approach, though if it doesn’t have guitars smashing into a handful of 1×1 bricks, both Harmonix and TT are a little bit dead to me.

THE END-GAME AND NON-END GAME OF FALLOUT 3’S NEW DLC

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4.21.2009

Brandon Boyer

5 Replies

Remember that time when you finished Fallout 3? Yeah, not so much, with the new Broken Steel DLC coming May 5th. As previously promised, and in keeping
with producer Todd Howard’s lament that players were “pissed off that it ends,” after the studio “underestimated how many people would want to keep playing,” the DLC will allow players to forgo the ending and continue their quest in a newly evolved world.

Shacknews was on hand in London for the full reveal, who said:

In a nutshell, Broken Steel will remove the game’s ending entirely, with Bethesda’s Pete Hines saying simply to fans that called for an open-ended resolution, “We got the idea.” Players will still have to make the final choice, but following that climax the game will continue, presenting new prologue quests, another 10 levels to gain, and new perks, monsters and achievements to keep the climb interesting.

For instance, one new perk will be “Puppies,” a passive ability that sees Dogmeat reincarnated into a puppy after he is killed in battle. A new weapon shown off called the “Heavy Incinerator” works like a projectile flamethrower, firing bursts of flame from long distance.

Click through for the full details, which — be forewarned! — include previous end-game spoilers.

Fallout 3 ‘Broken Steel’ DLC Preview [Shacknews]

SEAL OF QUALITY: HELLEN JO AND CALVIN WONG’S ARTXGAME INSTRUCTION MANUALS

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4.21.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

Spotted at attractmo.de — and then promptly ordered from Calvin himself: comic artists Hellen Jo and Calvin Wong made their appearance at Portland’s Stumptown Comics Fest armed with these ridiculously pitch-perfect faux-NES instruction manuals.

The manuals, of course, detail their crossover ‘artxgame’ created with Spelunky creator Derek Yu for Giant Robot’s oft-blogged Game Over/Continue show. See more of their game here, and more photos incoming when the manuals themselves arrive.

Stumptown this Weekend [electricantzine, via attractmo.de]

Also new on the ngmoco front: the first direct feed footage of developer Rough Cookie‘s upcoming 3D spherical tower defense game Star Defense. I’m still curious to see how a tower defense game will operate under heavy stress when the majority of the playfield is obscured by itself, but the new preview again shows the game’s consistently impressive production levels.

More screenshots of the game’s environments (and one curiously unspherical close-up) below the fold. (more…)

ROLANDO GETS NEW LEVELS, ROLANDO 2 GETS NEW HOME

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4.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

Fresh from Rolando developer Hand Circus, two new secret levels have just gone live on the App Store with the game’s 1.2 update [App Store], including Torrid Twist, another of its Cameltry-like free-rotating puzzle challenges, and Excavation, an enormous traditional level that requires progressively more challenging bomb-play to free Rolandos trapped deep underground.

Also newly updated: the official home page for this summer’s forthcoming Rolando sequel, Quest for the Golden Orchid. Ngmoco are adding new information to the site every Monday until the game’s release, and this week they’ve started with two new characters, now given more distinct personalities than the first game’s cast.

Orchid, as you might be able to suss out from the image above, is shaping up as a properly British colonial adventure (as compared to the first’s storybook/fantasy underpinnings), with the captain of the HMS Plunderful, General Sir Richard Smythe, on his quest for the rare flower, accompanied (this week) by Lord Derby Disraeli, his treasure authority.

Though Hand Circus have long promised new mechanics for the sequel, it’s clear that some things will remain the same — even silhouetted, the outlines of the larger Rolando Royalty that you shepherded through the first remain. Henry Hatsworth not withstanding, good old fashioned 19th century sea-bound exploring is rich and unexplored thematic territory of its own, though, and very happily accepted here.

Rolando 2 home [ngmoco, Rolando App Store link]

HEY LA: GO SEE HER SPACE HOLIDAY/PCP AT POKETO ON APRIL 24TH

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4.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

So I’d noted this as early as last Wednesday via my infinitely-more-artsy/designy-than-Offworld tumblr (in a fit of jealous pique for not being anywhere near the west coast), but seeing as how Poketo wrote in specifically to see if it’d be of interest to Offworld, I can’t help but see how it’s not.

This Friday, art/apparel/decor design shop Poketo will be hosting Bang! Bang! Draw! at their Los Angeles studio, an event that will bring together live music by Offworld favorite solo orchestral-sampled pop outfit Her Space Holiday with visuals done in collaboration with Tokyo artist Heisuke ‘PCP’ Kitazawa.

Your unnecessary and tenuous games-related link? You might’ve seen PCP’s fantastic(ally vertical) Ico-related mural, “the end of ICO is beginning of another”, at Giant Robot’s oft-blogged Game Over/Continue show.

On top of that, Kitazawa — who will also be exhibiting his art in a post-music gallery show at the studio — was one of the select artists Nintendo and FM802 curated for their 2004 “ART MEETS GAMES” exhibit (now sadly offline and obliterated by the wayback machine), which attempted to show off the dual-screen potential of their then-upcoming DS by getting illustrators to do wall-size faux-DS artwork.

But either way, you should go not for its games-relatedness, but because both are fantastic artists in their own right. Hear Her Space Holiday’s Forever & A Day below for a sample, or try his My Boyfriend’s Girlfriend, as well.

Bang! Bang! Draw! will be held at Poketo Studio at 510 South Hewitt Street, #506 (5th floor) in LA on Friday, April 24th. The Her Space Holiday set will run from 7:00 PM – 7:30 PM, with a moderated q&a session, and will be followed from 7:30 PM – 10PM by PCP’s art show and party. Poketo will be releasing two signature wallets, a mug, and a T-shirt all designed by Kitazawa at the show. Head over to their blog for more details.

Poketo presents: Bang! Bang! Draw! on April 24th 2009 [Poketo, PCP home, Her Space Holiday home (designed by PCP)]

ARCHITECTING THE UNREAL: THE HUBS AND SPOKES OF BIOSHOCK’S RAPTURE

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4.20.2009

Tom Armitage

3 Replies

[Guest blogger Tom Armitage can usually be found writing at Infovore, about games, design, software, and whatever else takes his fancy. By day, he works as a maker and writer, most of the time for Schulze & Webb; by night, he’s a Tauren Hunter, a passable Abel, a shoddy Cammy, and slayer of thousands of zombies.]

Steve Gaynor’s latest post on Fullbright is a lovely analysis of one of the parallels between level design and architecture. Using BioShock as an example, Steve considers the problems facing a level designer wanting to keep players oriented and making progress within the game.

That’s not too hard if you’re on a strictly linear ride. In a game like BioShock, though, a degree of freedom is important to the player’s experience of a game (and in this particular example, you could argue it’s essential). And that freedom is often delivered through much less linear kinds of level design.

“How does the designer keep the player oriented, and give them the information they need to easily navigate from one side of the level to the other?” That’s the question Steve sets out to answer. The parallels with real-world architecture he draws are interesting. This, for instance:

minor spaces are always closer to major spaces than they are to other minor spaces– the player always passes through the hub to get to another spoke.

seems like as important a maxim for real buildings as it does for the fictional ones of Andrew Ryan’s Rapture.

It reminds me a lot of Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School – which is, if you’ve not read it, a delightful and very readable book that serves as a nice crash course in some maxims of architecture. It’s not going to qualify you to build skyscrapers, but as a series of notes on the construction of spaces to be experienced by humans, it’s well worth a read, and has all manner of interesting crossovers with many forms of design.

It’s a good post, anyhow, and well worth your time – as is Steve’s blog, if you’re interested in all things game design. Although Fullbright is his personal blog, Steve’s a designer at 2K Marin – who are currently working on BioShock 2 – and whilst he openly admits that this post, is “personal observations having spent a lot of time examining the levels from BioShock, and not any kind official process or information”, it’s always nice to know that there’s a certain kind of thoughtfulness going into the games you’re looking forward to playing.

Reorienteering: spatial organization in BioShock [Fullbright]

Not to be shown up by the Super Mario-singing laser cutter, an Atari 800XL, a TI-99/4a (my first gaming PC!), an 8″ floppy disk drive, a 3.5″ hard drive, and an HP ScanJet 3C walked into a bar… and there is no joke: they sang Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody together and it was beautiful.

Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix [bd594, roundabout via “Eric” Marcoullier]

VIVA NEW VEGAS: BETHESDA, OBSIDIAN ANNOUNCE NEW FALLOUT FOR 2010

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4.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

Coming not even an hour after reports that developer Bethesda had registered new trademarks for both Fallout-related movies and TV series, the studio has made a surprise announcement at a London event that a new game in the franchise — Fallout: New Vegas — is due for release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2010.

The title will be developed by Knights of the Old Republic II/Neverwinter Nights 2 creators Obsidian, and while no overt details were announced, Gamasutra quotes Bethesda PR Pete Hines as saying:

It’s not Fallout Tactics — it’s not Brotherhood Of Steel. It’s another Fallout game. It has no impact on what [Bethesda director] Todd Howard and his guys are planning.

As Gamasutra notes, a number of Obsidian employees are former staff of original Fallout series creator Black Isle, who famously had begun work on their own Fallout 3 coded named Van Buren as early as 2003.

Bethesda, Obsidian Announce Fallout: New Vegas [Gamasutra]

SPEAK ABOUT DESTRUCTION: INTROVERSION HOPE FOR 2009 RELEASE OF DS DEFCON

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4.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

With rumors floating for nearly two years now and yet no official word, developer Introversion has made a surprise announcement this morning that they do indeed have an essentially finished version of their global thermonuclear wargame Defcon ready and aimed for the Nintendo DS, but are now in need of a publishing partner.

Introversion — whom Offworld recently spoke to at great length on their past projects and future developments — has recently re-acquired the rights to the game after a deal went south with former partner Pinnacle and is hoping to bring the game to store shelves by autumn 2009, given a new deal can be struck.