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]

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]

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]

EVERYTHING YOU’VE WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT LEFT 4 DEAD’S SURVIVAL MODE DLC

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4.17.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

With Left 4 Dead‘s first free DLC pack to touch down as soon as next week, Valve have finally let loose precisely what its new “Survival” mode will amount to, and, in typical Valve style, they’ve done it with a thoughtful, chart-enhanced look behind its design.

As it turns out, it will be as simple as requiring a team to survive a fairly constant onslaught of infected as intense as the campaign mode’s final moments — and will chart via leaderboards the tighest-knit groups around the world — but, the team found, even an onslaught needs to be properly tuned.

Says Valve:

Given the extreme pace of Survival Mode, the number of zombies killed in a single round often outnumbers an entire campaign. Even optimizing towards using pistols to eliminate common hordes, ammunition usually becomes an issue at some point. As ammo piles provide a unique infinite resupply for players, they tend to be in relatively less defensible positions in the Survival arenas. This means making an all important ammo run is rarely a safe proposition and requires good teamwork and planning. Timing your resources correctly to be able to make a run when necessary can make or break a team. The perfect pipebomb or well placed molotov can mean the difference between a cakewalk and catastrophe.

The Hospital Elevator, for example, might seem like an easy Crescendo Event to conquer. Hit the elevator button and holdout until the doors open for a quick escape. In Survival Mode, however, the area begins locked down. Areas open as the hordes come in, breaking down the doors to reach the survivors. In each room there are additional caches of vital pills, pipes, and Molotovs. By moving from location to location, using up the plentiful supplies as needed, a team can maximize their time in a game where the elevator never arrives to offer escape. In other maps, items may be less plentiful and require careful planning on their usage. Managing one’s inventory and resources works hand-in-hand with teamwork in Survival Mode.

Head to the official Left 4 Dead blog for more on finely crafting chaos.

Surviving the L4D Survival Pack [Valve]

DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO: TOM FRANCIS ON ENDING BIOSHOCK

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4.15.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

There is essentially no part of Francis’s writeup that doesn’t qualify as a massive spoiler, so avert your gaze entirely from the included link if you haven’t seen BioShock all the way through.

If you have, though, PC Gamer UK’s Tom Francis sez:

I wrote this post – a rant I’ve bored many friends with about how BioShock should have ended – on the 10th of October 2008, but never got round to taking shots for it. Then on February 10th, I got to see what 2K Marin are doing for BioShock 2. And annoyingly, some of it overlaps with what I suggest here.

That meant a) I couldn’t post this, since this would look like me leaking the details I was under a non-disclosure agreement to keep secret, and b) by the time I could post this, those details would have been announced and it would seem woefully unoriginal. I’m posting it anyway.

Ending BioShock [Pentadact]

As Xbox Live Arcade flagship title Braid makes its PC debut (or mostly, anyway, the Steam release seems to have been delayed to tomorrow, check Impulse, Greenhouse and Gamersgate for the download and demo), artist David Hellman updates to note that an “official” soundtrack has been put together for sale with all of the tracks licensed for the game.

With contributions from Jami Sieber, Shira Kammen, Cheryl Ann Fulton and two remixes by Jon Schatz, the album is being offered for download at a variable rate — set your own price between $5 to $18 — or on CD for an extra $6 on top of that (UK and Euro prices also available).

Sieber, Kammen, Fulton and Schatz – Music from Braid [Magnatune, via David Hellman]

In other hardware hackery news, larppodcast-er Joe has won today’s master-of-the-obvious award by creating a real-world Pip-Boy out of an iPod Touch and the Fallout 3 Survival Edition’s included wrist-mountable clock.

He is, perhaps, just a few months too soon: with firmware 3.0’s newly added support for peripherals, the promise of hooking this up to bio and, err, radiation monitors (surely?) is too tempting, and a more logical use than displaying what appears to be a slideshow of game screenshots, though kudos for using the game’s soundtrack in the background as a faux Three Dog radio broadcast.

Pip Boy 3000 + iTouch [larppodcast YouTube, via Kotaku]

Previously:
Fallout 3 Survival Edition ships with real-life Pip Boy for your …
Three Dog's iTunes mix tape – Offworld
The Glow, Pt. 3: Literally the best Fallout 3 T-shirts ever made …
Before and After: the Capital Wastelands – Offworld
Fallout 3: Everybody Dance! edition – Offworld

FULL DISCLOSURE: INTROVERSION PUBLISH CONFIDENTIAL DARWINIA+ DOCS, EMAILS

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3.30.2009

Brandon Boyer

6 Replies

After first being announced for Xbox Live Arcade almost exactly a year ago and already several months behind schedule, it’s hard to tell if this is a move of frustration at the normally opaque process of console certification, or a move of pure indie developer philanthropy, but with the apparent full cooperation of Microsoft, it’s apparently a mix of the latter and a healthy dose of pure marketing savvy.

In either case, Darwinia and Defcon creators Introversion have taken the unprecedented step of uploading any and all documents relating to the ongoing development of Darwinia+ — the Xbox 360 port of their original Darwinia and later multiplayer followup Multiwinia — laying bare all the “good, bad and very very very bad” for everyone to see.

Included you’ll find their internal schedules and project plans, problematic early 2008 confidential usability reports from Microsoft, snippets of Darwinia‘s AI code, and nothing less than e-mails between the team and Microsoft.

Well, ok, it’s not everything — they won’t go so far as to let you read their contract, though they do highlight the length of time it took to get signed, but they do, at least, let you see them caught with their pants down by the ever-reliable ESRB leak: all in all it’s quite good reading for fellow indie devs and anyone wanting to get a behind the scenes look at the console development process.

Darwinia+ home [Introversion]

Previously:
What's he building in there: Introversion's Subversion – Offworld
Introversion's DefconAR: mutually destructive augmented reality …
Introversion playing with fire with unbeatable DEFCON AI – Offworld
The art of vector-war – Offworld
Offworld: The Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie & Overlooked (pg. 2)

ONLY ON OFFWORLD: A NEW LOOK AT DENKI’S XBLA WORD/STRATEGY GAME QUARREL

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3.19.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

Here’s what I know for sure: as mentioned back in December, Square-Go broke the first news of what will be the Xbox Live Arcade debut for Scotland’s Denki (headed by Crackdown designer Gary Penn), Quarrel. The site described the game as ‘Scrabble x Risk x Countdown’, where strategic territorial control was hard won by word-game battles between warring areas.

At the time, it looked quite nice, in Denki’s traditional primary colored way (see also: Denki Blocks / Go Go Beckham), but my eyes did bug out slightly when the studio sent over these new work-in-progress shots of the game, seeing that tradition now amped up gorgeously.

Here’s what I’m still not sure of: well, how it plays, other than in the vaguest terms, with Denki continuing to evolve the game over the past several months, but! Denki’s own David Thomson is currently in my own city of Austin, and is apparently carrying on his person a paper prototype of the game which, with any luck, I’ll have in my hands in less than a day from now, and can update accordingly. For now, rest your weary eyes on these for a jolt of that Denki spirit.

Denki home

Previously:
Denki re-emerge with XBLA boardgame mashup Quarrel – Offworld
The way of the Denki: Gary Penn's game design rules – Offworld
Denki does recruitment right – Offworld