QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST BANJO?
Submitted without a trace of irony, the latest viral video for the recently released Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (and by proxy its just-released Xbox Live Arcade remake counterpart).
Apart from the honestly amusing Jinjo postcard, in keeping with Rare tradition, the video does contain hints of cute industry in-jokes (Kazooie apparently off taking part in a Women in Games conference), which carry through in the game itself, as with Humba’s continual references to her all-girl clan the ‘Hag Trolls,’ a play on Ubisoft’s Frag Dolls. The game always reserves its sharpest barbs for itself, though, from its very opening act, which sets you on a trademark ‘collect-a-thon’ before reeling you back in and starting the game proper.
An Eiffel of Banjo [YouTube]
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GHOSTBUSTERS: THE GAME: THE NEW TRAILER
Just as we said we hadn’t seen near enough of the Ghostbusters game yet, Atari delivers, with digital Bill Murray looking so much more spritely than we’ve seen him in his last howevermany sad sack films.
YouTube – Ghostbusters: The Video Game – Atari Live Trailer
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BECAUSE HE COULD PART DEUX: THE ORIGINATOR’S NEW PORTABLE XBOX 360 EXPERIENCE
Following on Technabob’s Atari 2600 gently crammed in a Sega Game Gear shell, Ben Heck — the grandfather of all bizarro and beautiful gaming hardware hacks — has revealed his latest: a new revision of his laptop Xbox 360s. This time Heck notes:
It differs from my past Xbox 360 laptops in several ways:
* Removable standard Xbox 360 hard drive for easy profile/data swapping
* Both memory card slots accessible, same reason.
* No keyboard! Really, they have those chat pads, what’s the point? (Besides looking cool)
* Simplified layout of ports and buttons.
* Internal wi-fi module, no external antenna. Antenna is strung out inside unit like other consoles/laptops.
* Beveled edges! Countersunk screws!
The unit’s also got a built in Live Vision camera, an easy access panel to the 360’s hard drive, and as usual, is completely desirable for all its impractical manufacturing.
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GHOSTBUSTERS GAME COMING JUNE 2009
Other good news out of the Atari event today: the Ghostbusters game, which Atari picked up after the Vivendi/Activision merger saw a number of games shed from their release list, was given a June 2009 release date on all its platforms: PS3, PS2, 360, PC, Wii and DS, CVG reported.
Though not much has been seen of the game, anticipation still runs high with Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd firmly behind the project, penning the script and reuniting the original cast. There’s something of some homespun pride here as well: Austin locals Red Fly Studios (the developer behind the just-released Primus-enhanced Wii title Mushroom Men) are at work on the PlayStation 2, Wii, and DS versions while North Texas’s Terminal Reality (Spyhunter, Bloodrayne) handle the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports, and Austin’s GL33K is handling audio, bringing in the original cast members to lay down their lines.
With the push for a 2009 release, the game will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the first film, and is being approached as an official interactive sequel to Ghostbusters II.
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THE ART OF VECTOR-WAR
First announced in March and now existing somewhere in excruciating limbo, Introversion’s Darwinia Plus tops the list of my most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade games. Made up of the original arcade/real-time strategy Darwinia release and the more recent multiplayer version Multiwinia, this pitch-perfect parody trailer — sending up Halo 3‘s melodramatic “Believe” ad — does a good job of explaining why.
The PC versions are available now via Steam or direct from Introversion.
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ON THE MOMENTUM IN MIRROR’S EDGE
There’s been a bit of a tiny dust storm brewing over the release and critical reaction to EA/DICE’s Mirror’s Edge over whether reviewers cursed the darkness rather than light a candle over the things the game did right. Over at Tom Armitage’s Infovore site, he’s written his own very smartly considered reaction to just what Edge does do right, and how that rightness can manifest itself in feeling let down — though not the game letting you down, but you letting down the character you inhabit. Says Tom:
Mirror’s Edge is at its best in moments of free exploration, finding new paths over serene rooftops, feeling that sense of flow as you tuck your feet over a barbed-wire fence; when it captures the feeling of a body moving, be it through graceful falls or being violently hurled off a building by a former wrestler; feeling like you’re flying across the city.
It’s at its worst when, unlike on the rooftops and in the stormdrains, it places obstacles in its path – narrative, out-of-engine cutscenes, action-through-havoc that you can’t escape.
And especially when it makes you fail: Faith is clearly an experienced runner, and there are times where the player can’t live up to their avatar’s abilities. DICE choose to present that in binary success or failure, which has lead to criticisms of trial and error. Perhaps; at the same time, I’ve never encountered a single glitch or unrealistic motion throughout all my travels through the game. The coherence of the illusion is remarkable, and the price for that coherence is a definite kind of failure at times. I am not sure that’s necessarily a good enough excuse for some of the stop-start, but I feel that the coherence of the game’s illusion is something that isn’t praised enough. If only that could be provided without such a sensation of failing – not as a player, but failing the character you play.
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MICROSOFT KICKS OFF WEEKLY XBOX LIVE HOLIDAY DEALS
Following its previously posted Black Friday deal (which, according to my just-now check of the NXE, is still available), Microsoft has announced that it’ll be dusting off a weekly holiday deal from now until the end of the year, starting with a third-off price drop on Halo 3‘s Legendary Map Pack, originally released in April. The pack contains three maps inspired by multiplayer levels from earlier games in the series: Avalanche, Ghost Town, and Blackout.
My suggestion for next? A price drop on the Xbox Originals versions of Psychonauts, Dreamfall and Indigo Prophecy, which would make for many happy holidays indeed.
Xbox LIVE Marketplace Holiday Deal of the Week
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FALLOUT 3: EVERYBODY DANCE! EDITION
While the unofficial modders have been busy doing dire and otherwise pedestrian things with their Fallout 3 installs like hacking in child killing and more realistic gun noises (or so I’ve just learned from the ‘related videos’), ‘airshom’ reminds us of why we like to let people tinker around inside their games. Be forewarned that if you haven’t seen everything there is to see around the Wasteland, you might end up seeing some things you’re not ready to see.
Bethesda: this is the kind of DLC we’d also pay for. We know you didn’t put those party hats in there without a good reason.
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AN OFFWORLD THANKSGIVING: L-TRYPTOPHAN EDITION
Xeni and I had been batting ideas back and forth earlier this week about what might go into a Thanksgiving-themed Offworld BBtv episode, and while we decided against it in the end, it still had me brainstorming about recent releases perfect for postprandial tryptophan-induced sedate-gaming. Here’s a quick list of three off the top of my head, add your own in the comments below if there’s something I’ve missed…
Fallout 3
As I recently discovered — quite unintentionally — Bethesda’s RPG makes for perfect extreme-hangover gaming, a mindstate not too far away from a belly-full coma. Though it might sound like a slight, I take it as an asset: one of Fallout‘s draws is that a number of its sidequests and its exploration in general aren’t the most mentally taxing. In fact, one of the things I think the game does best is let you stumble almost continually on a series of small messes that exist only for you to tidy. It became almost a mantra during that hangover head sick session: “I found a building. It was a mess. I cleaned it up. I felt satisfied. I moved on.”
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Though I’ve never heard any of its directors or designers explicitly state it, I’ve got a strong hunch one of Animal Crossing‘s guiding principles was that of the Slow Life movement that spread across Japan in the early ‘oughts, seeking to “shift from a society of mass production and mass consumption, to a society that is not hectic and does cherish our possessions and things of the heart.”
It’s not just the provincial setting or the townsfolk whose lives are little more than neighborly gossip (see also: basically any post-war Yasujiro Ozu movie for the real world cultural touchstones there). It’s straight down to the game’s interactions themselves: try and get basically any task accomplished in less than a minute and you’ll be strained. The series forces you at every turn to sloooow down and settle into its signature torpor.
Soul Bubbles
Developer Mekensleep was taken to task by a number of enthusiast reviewers for a perceived lack of difficulty in its DS debut, but its underlying old-world and naturalistic environments basically demand more leisurely exploration. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have its own difficulties, or that complete runs of its levels are anything approaching a cakewalk. Soul Bubbles keeps its difficulty in places for you to seek it out if you want it, but leaves you free to enjoy yourself without it, making it one of the more suitably relaxing (and unfortunately underappreciated) games for the handheld.
As for me, I’ll be spending the rest of today wending my way slowly through a backlog of things I haven’t yet had a chance to get to and would like to talk about in the coming weeks: Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, BioShock‘s PS3 exclusive downloadable Challenge Rooms, and the European release of Grasshopper Manufacture’s DS adventure remake Flower, Sun and Rain.
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A HOLIDAY DEAL ON SOUND AND VISION
Here are two reasons I like Microsoft’s Black Friday Xbox Live Arcade specials: one is that they’ve lowered the price on Q Entertainment’s HD remake of Dreamcast/PS2 rhythm/shooter Rez, which means there is essentially no excuse not to experience the game if you haven’t before. Inspired by, the story goes, one of his first rave experiences (this would have been the very late 90’s, mind), Sega designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi set out to create a game that could blend that light and sound and palpable pulsing rhythm as fantastically. The result was Rez, and a long series of music/puzzle games since.
The second is that it gives me an excuse to post this recent YouTube Live Genki Rockets video Q CEO Shuji Utsumi pointed to earlier today. As mentioned in the last Q-related post, Genki Rockets is Q’s music property fronted by teen pop star Lumi, the first baby born in outer space who beams her j-pop disco to Earth from 30 years in the future.
Even if the style of music isn’t your cup of euro-beats, there’s kind of nothing not amazing about the performance, from the faceless DJ-naut on the ones and twos, to Lumi’s eventual appearance on the monolithic low-res LED screen, fingers sending off glittering trails as she does her interstellar dance: all precisely the kind of synaesthetic experience that inspired Mizuguchi to create Rez in the first place.
The rest of Microsoft’s sales are at Major Nelson’s website.
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