I’ll take any new looks at Coin App’s upcoming planetoid brawler/shooter Max Blastronaut where I can find them, even if they’re simple spycam off-screen footage taken by a developer’s brother. The new enemy-roundhouse melee and orbiting shots are looking quite nice, but they’re nothing compared to the fancy synthesized dog-bark modeling they’ve got going on.

Found, appropriately, via Phil Fish, who called out the original teaser trailer in his Indie Games Summit session as one of the best examples of hooking an audience with an unmissable video: a new, extended look at Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, the forthcoming game from artist Michel Gagne and FuelCell’s Joe Olson.

Based on the world Gagne created for the Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets animations shown on Nickelodeon in 2005, Fish is right: there isn’t a single second of this video that doesn’t make me want to play, though it’s still unclear when we might be able to. New posts at the game’s blog seem to all but ensure an eventual Xbox Live Arcade release alongside the previously planned PC version, which could put it months away.

But that’s a bit beside the point: the point is it’s trumped its own record and become one of the most bluntly wicked trailers I’ve laid eyes on since The Last Guardian, and re-rocketed the game back up my most-anticipated list.

ONE SHOT: THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE UN-DEAD, IF THE RAIN COMES

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7.10.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Into each (reanimated) life, some rain must fall: Valve show off the first look at “Swamp Fever”, the Left 4 Dead 2 campaign being unveiled at San Diego’s Comic Con, happening later this month.

Presumably, the point they’re trying to hammer home is the claustrophobic environmental effects that inclement weather will bring, and/or that the horde really don’t like getting wet.

MASTER-PIECE: TURN YOUR HALO 3 SCREENSHOTS TO FINE ART

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7.10.2009

Brandon Boyer

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The last thing you expected to come from the Halo universe: haloscreenshots, a new partnership between Bungie and fine arts printer Global Arts Group that turns your Halo 3 screenshots (which can be captured and uploaded on-console) into “unframed paper prints or gallery quality stretched canvases.”

Above is one of my favorites from the HSS:BOB collection, and while I sort of flatly believe that it’s impossible to have not been jimmied with in some post-proc way, I will take them at their word, because it’s a striking image regardless (though a little more Optimus than MJOLNIR, no?).

My favorite feature of the site, though? The scale to Master Chief function:

haloscreenshots.com | where halo screenshots become art [Bungie, via Tom]

And the other revival of the morning: there was a lot of speculation in late 2007 and across 2008 as to what upstart studio Smith & Tinker (winners of one of my top 10 developer logos) were up to. Studio founder Jordan Weisman was the series creator of the original MechWarrior franchise at FASA, but had since moved on to found 42 Entertainment — creators of ARGs like Halo‘s now-renowned ‘ilovebees’ campaign.

The direction started to shape up a bit more when news hit that he’d reacquired a number of his early properties from Microsoft — MechWarrior and Shadowrun among them — but it wasn’t until today that the studio’s debut project was revealed: a current-gen reboot of MechWarrior, as seen in actually kind of unexpectedly wicked action above.

There’s currently no set publisher or release date, but Weisman gave IGN a number of good details as to what to expect from the game in an exhaustive interview, of note particularly for their ideas on a semi-persistent, Call of Duty 4-esque experience-based mode for its multiplayer.

THE BREEDERS: TEAM17 REVIVING AMIGA CLASSIC ALIEN BREED

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7.9.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Two stories of beloved cult hits getting overhauled for the now-gen this morning: the first, that Worms, Stunt GP, etc. creators Team17, as they quietly announced in late 2008, are due to turn their early-90s Gauntlet-esque Amiga shooter Alien Breed (above), into Alien Breed Evolved:

The studio are still quiet on platforms and details, but promise more information in the summer, and that its co-op game will be “an absolute blast.”

A quick note to relay Microsoft’s plans for the rest of Xbox Live Arcade’s summer: following next week’s debut of the re-made Secret of Monkey Island, July 22 will see the release of the 3D remade arcade original TMNT, Turtles in Time Re-shelled, which will then be followed by Capcom’s fighter Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

August 5th will then see the release of ‘Splosion Man, above, the 2D puzzle platformer from Twisted Pixel, the studio behind ace 3D PC/XBLA puzzle game The Maw, followed then by Trials HD, the console port of Red Lynx’s surprisingly engrossing heavily physics-laden motorbike puzzler, and finally, August 19th will be the launch date for Shadow Complex, the 2.5D Unreal Engine enabled ‘Metroidvania‘-esque platformer from Undertow devs Chair Entertainment first revealed at Microsoft’s E3 conference.

Tim Schafer gives IGN a full walk-through — well, OK, of just the first seventeen minutes, really — of Double Fine’s forthcoming Brütal Legend (the second video is below the fold), but that’s more than enough to fall for Eddie’s Clementine: the guitar brought back with him to the Age of Rock which is now imbued with special powers.

Probably you’ll want to hit that ‘play hi-res’: IGN’s embeddables are annoyingly quite rigidly sized. UPDATE: replaced with a Giant Bomb player much more embed-friendly.

POLYTRON OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCE FEZ FOR 2010 XBOX LIVE ARCADE RELEASE

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7.2.2009

Brandon Boyer

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After many months of (probably misguided, given its ever-clear XNA roots) speculation, Polytron has finally, officially announced that their space-warping 2D/3D debut Fez will be released for Xbox Live Arcade in early 2010.

Slipping in just this side of its promised June release (several hours before the week’s Xbox Live Arcade content made its July 1st debut), Microsoft has officially released its LOGO-like 3D baby’s-first-programming Xbox 360 application, Kodu.

Having given it a very cursory go, I can say that it does — as I mentioned early on — entirely disprove the press’s lazy comparison as “Microsoft’s answer to LittleBigPlanet“: it does nothing to provide a cohesive, freestanding game experience itself, and is instead an entirely modular set of sparse, broken down worlds intended to both teach the new user basic rules of programming logic, and tiny sets of finished “games” (a lite whack-a-mole, a very basic Frogger clone) to prove what can be done as you come to terms with its setup.

What it doesn’t do is ease users into that interface, as much as it does into its principles: while I didn’t have any problem immediately picking up on its sentence-structured syntax, I’m not positive its younger-skewing audience might without supervision.

Despite that, it does succeed at providing both one of the most charming learning environments I’ve ever toyed with, and does allow for a fairly staggering amount of complexity — with even up to four-player multiplayer functionality — if you let it. It’d be an app I returned to often to catch up on the progress made by its audience, though currently sharing levels only takes place on a peer-to-peer basis, and Microsoft haven’t given any indication that might change to a browsable repository anytime soon.

But still, as a research experiment brought fully to life, and as an engaging logic tutor, it’s instantly become one of the highlights of Microsoft’s Community Games initiatives — whether or not it should have broken fully out to Live Arcade is a debate I’ll save for another day.