The second meme-lifting promo video in under a week sees Gearbox’s post-apoc sandbox shooter Borderlands getting the full Christian-Bale-flip-out treatment as helper bot Claptrap just tries to tell you that the game’s wasteland creatures are every bit as procedurally generated and diverse as its ’87 bazillion’-ish weapons.

ONE SHOT: THE BEATLESBOX 360

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9.8.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

Microsoft sets up a charity auction for this Beatles: Rock Band painted Xbox 360, to benefit Doctors Without Borders, the same charity receiving a cut of your “All You Need Is Love” Rock Band download, which doing so — completing the loop — will also enter you into a contest to win one of these Beatles: Rock Band painted Xbox 360s.

Limited edition consoles might not be my usual beat, but I’m mentioning this here because I still contend Passion Picture’s cinematic — from which the design is lifted — is one of the most fantastically surreal game intros of all time.

As predicted, Dean Dodrill has taken home the $40,000 grand prize in Microsoft’s XNA/IndieGames competition Dream Build Play for his previously mentioned beat-em-up Dust: An Elysian Tail.

The oft blogged CoinApp and their tiny-planet shooter Max Blastronaut has come in at second place, for a $20,000 prize.

The third place $10,000 prize went to Nivel21’s Rotor’scope:

And finally, ‘kong fu’ action game HurricaneX2 Evolution took home the $5,000 fourth place prize:

This year’s winners, according to the press release, will again be supported with the “opportunity to publish their games on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games Channel” and the extra promotional push the contest will give them — as with last year, there doesn’t seem to be a channel to promote the winner to a full Live Arcade release as Microsoft did with 2007’s Ska Studios winner The Dishwasher.

I haven’t had a chance yet here to give Twisted Pixel’s latest Xbox Live Arcade release ‘Splosion Man the full respect it genuinely deserves, but before I even can, the developer goes and makes an announcement for its latest game, Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley.

The Penny Arcade Expo-revealed trailer above doesn’t give you much of a sense of its eventual mechanics apart from promising ‘a new style of gameplay’ beyond what they admit lies beneath a core of ‘run, jump and shoot’, and the more obvious stylistic underpinning where each comic Smiley jumps to will alter the look of the game from what appears to range from PowerPuff Girls to Sin City.

Twisted Pixel have yet to announce target platforms or release dates, but I’m going to go ahead and assume at very least a continuation on Xbox Live Arcade, for now.

You’ve had enough with the words and the photos already and you want to see DeathSpank — Hothead’s action RPG/adventure from Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert now officially announced for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 — in glorious motion, and glorious it is.

And below the fold, a full high-res gallery of the currently released DeathSpank screenshots, for your added enjoyment.

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When BioShock 2‘s multiplayer segment — a separate narrative that explores the fall of underwater u-/dys-topia Rapture via test subject trials for plasmid manufacturer Sinclair — was first announced, I noted that I was glad co-developer Digital Extremes wasn’t simply giving us Big Daddy Arena.

Then, watching this first video footage (prepared for the Penny Arcade Expo) of its online deathmatch exploits, right about 1:45 when the hollow whale-moan struck, I went 100% full reverse on that sentiment.

Only one question remains: exactly what manner of soul-stealing devilry is she performing with that camera at 1:26?

PAX’S DARK CARNIVAL: SCREENSHOTS OF THE LATEST LEFT 4 DEAD 2 CAMPAIGN

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9.4.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

Below the fold: a high-res look at the Dark Carnival, the latest Left 4 Dead 2 campaign being shown off at the ongoing Penny Arcade Expo, most notable (if not for its Pennywise-perfect Zombie Clowns) for the unveiling of The Jockey, a new grotesquely hunched Boss infected Valve says “lets you attack lone Survivors and wrestle control of their movement away from them-into fire, off ledges, or straight into the middle of a zombie horde.”

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Name the most unlikely scenario in which you’d ever imagine Splinter Cell‘s Sam Fisher, and Ubisoft will officially do you one better with this Keyboard Cat parody intro vid for their Penny Arcade Expo Conviction demo launch.

HEAD ON: HUDSON REVIVING BONK’S ADVENTURE FOR XBOX 360/PS3/WII

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9.1.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

Despite Hudson’s claims that the character stars in one of its “most widely requested platformers”, ‘Bonk’ still remains (unfortunately) not exactly the most household of franchise names. Although he did make side-quests from his native home on the ill-fated TurboGrafx-16 to the Super NES, GameBoy, and later an import-only (and minorly excellent) revival on GameCube and PS2, he’s still played the sixth-or-seventh prehistoric fiddle to Nintendo and Sega’s more iconic figures.

But after the Virtual Console re-releases of his earliest adventures, the company’s giving him a new push with Brink of Extinction, a new downloadable adventure for WiiWare, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live Arcade due in Spring of 2010.

Sporting a much more cohesive look than the last aforementioned paper-cut and textured revival, the company says the new version will include online co-op play in its story mode, and will see his traditional meat-eaten powerups take him into one of eight different yet-undetailed forms (though I’m guessing the West still isn’t quite ready for his effete kiss-blowing transformation from the import version of Bonk 2 [see 1:45 or so of this YouTube]).

Hit the jump for a better look into his new lovingly recreated world. (more…)

CAVE STORY: DEREK YU’S SPELUNKY COMING TO XBOX LIVE ARCADE

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9.1.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

The biggest late night bombshell that could be the most excellent news of the week: creator Derek Yu has simultaneously announced that his long-in-development procedurally generated 8-bit platformer Spelunky has officially hit its 1.0 milestone for PC, and is now freely downloadable from its new home at spelunkyworld.com.

But that’s not the bombshell bit: that would be the greyed out icon for an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade version of the game, which Yu (and his newly established studio moniker Mossmouth) has confirmed will be arriving in 2010, adding:

It’s going to be much more than a straight port of the PC game – I’m planning on stuffing it with new graphics, audio, and other features for XBLA users. With all the other great independent games on XBLA or coming to it, I’m hopeful that Spelunky will feel right at home there. I think it’s a cool platform and I’m excited about what I’ll be able to do to make the game special.

If you haven’t played the game since I last mentioned it here in December, you’ll be surprised to see just how much its evolved, just how much more rich and complex it is, and — even through it’s as punishing (if not more) than it ever was — it’s still one of the most vital indie developments of the past five years.