i love katamari on iphone
Just when I thought I could put an end to the gaming needs (and not even the otherwise brilliant Left 4 Dead could keep me down), Offworld posts the news that the cultic Katamari franchise brings a new wildfire chaos baby that's now available through ITunes. Disastrously fantastic. I am now doomed. (via bb offworld)
riddick: assault on dark athena trailer
Because in the end, everybody bleeds the same. (New game arrives in 2009 June, including Escape from Butcher Bay.)
official 2d mirror's edge in beta, full version in three weeks tops
Kotaku sez, Mirror's Edge 2D should be pretty self-explanatory. Despite dropping a D, the Flash-based sidescrolling experience is still pretty deep. Built by Borne Games, aka Brad Borne, creator of Fancy Pants Adventures, Mirror's Edge 2D is still in beta, but EA reps tell us that the full version is expected to launch in two to three weeks. The full version will include fanciness like leaderboards and a version that doesn't have the "beta" concession. It's gorgeously animated and much easier on the motion-sick prone. (via kotaku)
mirror's edge launch trailer released
Mirror's Edge has gone gold and will be released on XBOX and PS3 on November 11, PC version comes later. Trailer song download link is in the YouTube vid description.
audiosurf: $2.49 now on steam (one week auction)
Indiegames blog sez, Audiosurf's price has been also reduced to $2.49 (originally $9.99) to coincide with the release of a new client update. Note that the offer is valid for one week only. (via indiegames via big download)
gatheryn, a casual steampunk mmo
“Gatheryn welcomes players into a world where steam powers everything from vehicles to mechanical monkeys, and mystery enshrouds a romantic landscape reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ Victorian London.”
According to the Kotaku guys, the devs at MindFuse plan to let players forgo the usual level grinding in favor of just buying equipment and costumes using game currency earned from playing the casual games or just coughing up with a credit card.
A closed PC beta will be available for sign up in December, with an open beta in the new year.
(link, via kotaku)
ea resuscitates syndicate franchise
EA is set to reveal a brand new entry in Bullfrog's cult classic Syndicate series, CVG has been told. The gritty cyberpunk action-strategy game that put you in charge of a global military corporation sending out a team of cyborg agents to perform missions throughout the world was released in 1993 and was continued in 1996 with a sequel with a very fucked up game interface, Syndicate Wars. The game was amazing, very monotonous and a very good hotbed for a normal remake. (via cvg)
weirding wednesday: the lego bdsm scene
Ectoplasmosis always has the weirdiest, tentacly links for your daily pleasure to freak out your fellow workers and friends. This time, a new LEGO scene. (And, by the way, merry October for you, pussies.)
the unfinished swan and whitewash
The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.
Back with more obscure indie game techdemos at your fingertips! The Unfinished Swan, described as a surreal maze game set in an entirely white world is all about splattering paint around yourself to find your way. There's a very similar techdemo called Whitewash that plays along the same line, though you'll need to have a Unity plugin to check that out. Games' been nominated at a few places - if you're interested, check the original post on Indiegames.
multiwinia / king of the hill
During the past few months I've been quite lazy checking up on what Introversion's doing. After the genre-creating hacker simulator Uplink, the retro-neon RTS-lookalike Darwinia and the dramatic noone-wins-the-game kind of global nuclear war simulator Defcon, here's the multiplayer version of Darwinia untitled Multiwinia and a quick, very British teaser trailer of its King of the Hill gameplay mode via Kotaku.
cthulhu lego, predator bust lego, alien lego
Being a child was immensely fun, building post-apocalyptic landscapes out of chunks of lego blocks you could instanly kill a weightlifter or alternatively, a bull, with, but the most creative thing (apart from a very bad hair crashlanding day in NYC) I ever came up with was a tidy little moon base in the corner of the room. Antennas, chemlabs and all that shit, very Parisien, but not really creative.
So all these weird-ass lego creations on Playlandstation (really selected from the lego orgasm galore of Brickshelf) just give me the love bumps and I will so buy everything to build an Alien soldier (by the Arvo brothers), shiny black, oh my god. (My friends have recently made potentially lethal efforts to move me away from a shelf of Technics. Rovers, mecha and everything that we could build REAL mechas from. Beware!)
everyday shooter out on steam, also released on psp
Jonathan Mak's Everyday Shooter ended up as something of a concept album for the abstract shooter hardcore afficionados. Eight completely different levels, in theory, forty-something minutes of an all-guitar soundtrack for your geometric senses. Check the yt above for complete demonstration of the first three levels and embrace godly love - although it was originally released on the PlayStation platform, it's now available on Steam (been for a while) and according to what Kotaku writes, the game will be available for the PSP around November. (via wired)
mazer mayhem: kenta cho strikes again
Mazer Mayhem, the latest 360-degrees spin-around arcade shooter by wireframe aesthetic god Kenta Cho is another reason why I should invest into an Xbox360. (Come to think of it, this and Rez could be the two main reasons, as GTA4 is arriving on the PC platform soon with all the other blockbuster titles. Apart from Force Unleashed.) BTW, dear readers, show me how to port XNA2.0 code onto PC platforms and my problems will be neatly solved. The graphics are not yet on par with oldschool Rez - but the music is definitely getting there. (link)
coign of vantage / fez
Assemble 2d pixel graphics by turning a cloud of 3d pixels with your mouse. Amazing piece of browser zen game. And what you see above, that's really, really a cow. If you like the idea, check the Fez trailer below - it's a platformer with basically the same premise. And hell of a lot of bad Engrish, by the way. (link, via tigsource)
the week in games
Quickly browsing through the hottest piece of screaming sexy junk on Kotaku and HW, an E308 without babes (also receiving immensely negative reviews, the lack of quality in anything, I mean, eat the Duke Nukem trilogy trailer, that's the worst trailer the game industry released in the past decade, it's that bad) and here's what delivers.
One of Steve Schofield's dramatic cosplay pictures, full gallery here. (And check the FANTASTIC Half-Life 2 Combine aggro mashup pic on Kotaku!)
MadWorld, the uberbloody machizmo fatality quasi-TV show for Wii got a new trailer and it's got some newer and more surreal kinks. Question is, how many ways do the devs implement for us not to get bored? If this gets released, I buy a Wii, that's for so sure.
And some more Mirror's Edge that's becoming less attractive the more details I see - future parkour, fantastic. Running around on rooftops, great. Running around for five minutes in urban areas where all the elements look practically the same - less than intriguing. Missing out all the funny parts, like, running in parks, manoeuvering yourself in the dense urban traffic, through/above/under cars, pedestrians, cars and giant ebola fetishists from Connecticut - not that good. Yes, I know Asian parkour chicks rock the geeks but come on, this is not really worth it.
On a final note, Flagship Studios died, the financial/marketing disaster flushing both neo-Gothic-futuristic Hellgate:London and the WoW-clone Mythos down the drain. I regret both of them, as Hellgate:London could have been the next WH40K-clone MMO if handled perfectly, whereas Mythos was based on Fate, the next best substitute for Diablo 2 in the long years of desperate waiting. Bill, you should have hired me instead of Ivan, ehm ehm.
mirror's edge story trailer
In a city where the movement of people and information is closely monitored, the safest way to transport sensitive information is the hire a Runner - a courier that operates via the rooftops and skyways, sez the new story trailer of parkour-cum-cyberpunk first-person-runner glory MIRROR'S EDGE. The almost-Nic-Endo protagonist's sister is taken hostage and Faith - whom we all came to love - is doing everything she can to handle the situation. The 2D trailer with all the action sequences is quite an enjoyable piece, brings back some Aeon Flux memories - only this time it's really white and blue (whereas the enterieur pieces are more like red, brown and yellow). And take this loveable and shamefully glorious 1980's slogan:
On the edge of the city, you find out who you really are.
soul calibur iv: tits and gothic lolitas
Reading up on SC:IV ends real well: it's basically all about tits, gothic lolitas and an unfair amount of Star Wars (and I tell you, dropping McFarlane out of the game was a bad choice). Tonight we don't have no Darth Vader urethra busting, no. (new bust shots and female fighting rolls on kotaku)
Diablo 3 - officially in the works. Goodbye, life.
Diablo 2 and its expansion pack was the first game I ever bought for money. (I'm a fucking liar, Might and Magic V, the French cyberpunk B.A.T. and some other mindless masturbations on floppy disks came earlier. But this was the first game I bought and then played a LOT. Compared to myself, at least.) And I might be buying a second set, just for backup.
The good thing is, it never really got boring. The gameplay - continuous looting and grinding, that becomes boring after a while and the labyrinth jungles were just a hassle. But the music, the whole atmosphere, it just got you going on. And no game, no game got ever close to this, not Titan Quest, not Sacred, not the other hack and slash games that got published throught the years and then died off in misery and solitude. (One coffee does that to your stylistic glands, you know.)
But now, it's all butterflies, songs and brutal, virgin-raping hellfire. Blizzard has just announced Diablo III and following the news, it's going to be full-3D, environment-interactive and as far as I know, the Barbarian and the Witch Hunter Doctor (thx, Korovjov!) are two classes to be featured. (Funny thing, on one of the forums there was this guy who wrote my friend works for Blizzard so I payed him a dinner and asked him to tell me everything. And basically the guy told him what we know now and obviously noone believed him before :D) Now that's some awesome news for today, just to start a terrific Saturday :)
requiem: bloodymare
There just isn't any MMORPG that would keep me interested after three days. The game that was the closest to an MMORPG and had me playing for years was Diablo II and that was just because of the loot system and the hysteric urge to level up and get more items, possibly because I couldn't really cope with the very mundane tasks of my own life. But I digress.
Hellgate:London was - and still is - basically, dead babies in candy cover. Mythos - the second game of Flagship Studios - is in beta now and as I'm enrolled as a tester and no NDA binds me - it's a revamped and rehashed version of Fate set into multiplayer, having the same kind of lame-ass bad perspective cartoon graphics that World of Warcraft has. (I tried it as well and I got to hate it for the graphics only. And that was just an hour's work.) Guild Wars looks marvelous but it's monotonous. Very. Grinding was fun in Diablo II, it got very frustrating there.
Now we've got another horror MMORPG that got into its public beta stage. REQUIEM: BLOODYMARE has nightmare boss monsters, weapon enhancements, beast possession system, epic PvP and a DNA system that sounds very promising. The concept art looks very kinky. You end up with screenshots like these, though, and you think it's pretty much Lineage 2 mashed up with Painkiller. Painkiller meets Diablo 2 meets Guild Wars graphics, now that would totally rock. But I digress again. 2.3 gigs installer arrives in ten minutes. And I only give myself one hour to prove it has bad tentacle power.
mirror's edge scee gamer's day trailer out
Without too much to say about this: first trailer of Dice/EA first-person parkour game Mirror's Edge, the best of part of which is by far the music. I'd still opt for the Tony Hawk Pro Skater-kind of TPS solutions but anyways. Eat this with a grin.