With the latest Team Fortress 2 update, which includes the new Heavy class achievements, weapons, and a new game mode, Valve has also released another short trailer for the game: Meet the Sandvich.
The "sandvich" made its debut in the Meet the Scout video, where it changed hands between the Heavy and Scout after a scuffle, and continues to be the source of conflict in the newest video. It's also a new unlockable item for the Heavy class. It can heal 120 health, and the Heavy who has it equipped has an unlimited supply. The downside is that eating it makes a considerable amount of noise, and leaves the Heavy vulnerable for four seconds while he consumes it.
Though it still feels like I got the required amount of relaxation this weekend, I look back on all the stuff I did (or played and watched, to be more specific) and almost feel like I couldn't have. Throughout the weekend I've watched two movies, beaten one game, played through a good amount of another, spent a good portion of time with my girlfriend, and even got some work done on some web/game stuff I've been meaning to do.
Tropic Thunder
The first thing my girlfriend and I did on Sunday was head on over to the local theater to catch the matinee of Tropic Thunder. I'd read glowing reviews, a little bit of controversy, and I'm a fan of both Ben Stiller and Jack Black, so I had a feeling the movie would be good. And it was. From the opening trailers (go see it, you'll see) to the end credits, the movie was intensely funny. If you're into comedy flicks and you don't mind humor that is occasionally offensive humor, you'll enjoy Tropic Thunder.
Before the movie began, we sat through all the silly trailers. I think that out of the seven to eight trailers shown before Thunder started, only one looked decent. Most of them just left me, my girlfriend, and the rest of the audience making jokes and shaking our heads in shame and disgust. One trailer in particular comes to mind now, for "Disaster Movie," but not because it was particularly good, and surely not because the movie looks like it will be anything but another steaming pile of crap in the line of "_____ Movie" parody films.
I find it funny that the trailer for Disaster Movie was shown though, because after watching Topic Thunder, you can't help but feel bad for anyone who actually believes that that movie, or any of its ilk, is in any way "real" comedy. I guess every now and then Hollywood manages to produce something above and beyond the norm, and it serves to put all the other trash back in its place. That's not to say that Tropic Thunder is a perfect movie (it's certainly not), but it's entertaining, it's damn funny, and it makes you wish more movies could be like it.
Overlord
About a week ago, while I was waiting for my girlfriend to get done picking out some clothes at the local mall, I wandered into the nearby GameStop and found a game I'd been meaning to pick up for some time but hadn't yet seen it available for $20: Overlord.
It's not the best game ever made; the controls are a little hard to get used to, and the camera bugs me sometimes. But I really like the concept of Overlord, and the way the game actually works is just really amusing to me, so I enjoy playing it. Overall, there's a lot more good stuff here than bad.
In Overlord, you play as the newly resurrected, evil "Overlord," and you lead an ever-growing horde of minions (little gremlin-ish creatures) to do your bidding. At your command, the throng of minions will destroy everything in sight, gang up on baddies, and clear the way for you to continue forth. As you play, you gain the ability to control different types of minions, each with a unique ability. You also learn magical spells and forge new items at your tower. The core game works a lot like Fable, where you pick up new quests as you move along, and have the option to complete them when you want, albeit instead of having to choose between acting good or evil, in Overlord, you usually have to choose between acting evil or acting more evil.
As I mentioned above, I really like the idea behind Overlord - that some nameless, evil guy runs around with his crowd of minions, and together they conquer the land. It's a clever idea, and it runs against the grain of all the traditional "hero" games in a really fine way. The voice acting for the minions and their leader is excellent and brings the game to life in a way that could not have been achieved otherwise. The ability to customize your evil tower and imbue your arsenal with the powers of your minions were also great additions and serve to round out the game in a satisfying way. Codemasters put a lot of effort into making Overlord fun to play, and in my opinion, they succeeded.
Hopefully that opinion doesn't change as I much through the rest of the game!
The Simpsons Movie
I finally had the opportunity to watch <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/simpsons_movie/" target="_blank">The Simpsons Movie</a>, and I enjoyed it a lot. The movie was consistently funny throughout, and not one opportunity was lost to use one of the show's hundreds of characters. I've always liked how the Simpsons works so many levels of subtle (and often not-so-subtle) social commentary into the plots of each show, and the movie followed suit with this trait in spades.
Truthfully, the whole thing seemed a bit like a really long episode of the normal show, only with better animation, but I think this was one of the movie's strengths. It gave the writers time to do jokes that simply aren't possible within the constraints of a thirty minute show, and there's hardly a moment where you feel like the film has lost its momentum.
There are plenty of awesomely funny moments in The Simpsons Movie, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes the show.
Braid
After spending over three hours working out the last two puzzles I had left (one of which I solved on accident after giving up completely), I've finally beaten Braid. I won't spoil things for anyone who's playing (or planning on playing) the game, but I will say that the ending is appropriate to the rest of the game, and I can say with confidence that if you enjoyed the game up to the end, you will enjoy the ending a lot.
3D Animated Texture Water
Like that picture above? That's a screenshot of a new 3D water example I've got ready for release - but I really want to write up a tutorial so people can learn how I made the textures included in the example. It looks great in motion!
Anyway, that's my weekend in a nutshell. Thanks for reading, and sorry for the delays between posts, I'll try to be more prompt with future posts.
Every now and then a game comes along and takes you by surprise. I had the pleasure of experiencing this a few days ago, and I feel that my horizons as both a gamer and a developer have expanded because of it.
The harbinger of my elation goes by but a single name: Braid.
By now you've probably heard a little bit about Braid here or there - it seems impossible not to. After only a few days on the XBL Marketplace, Braid became the highest rated game on XBL Arcade, and entered the exclusive list of top 10 all-time highest rated games for the Xbox 360, which includes titles like Grand Theft Auto 4, Gears of War, and Bioshock.
While notable in itself, this is quite an accomplishment considering the game was made by only a small team of indie game designers and artists, on an infinitesimally smaller budget than any of the other AAA titles it's contending with.
So what's all the hoopla about? At the outset, it's simple enough - Braid is a 2D platform game where you traverse an assortment of levels to find and collect jigsaw pieces. Delve a bit deeper though, and the game quickly sets itself far apart from most other platformers you've played. Time, and the manipulation of it, plays an important role in the narrative of the story, and more importantly, how puzzles in the game are solved. Braid's development team went to great lengths to craft smart, unique levels that take advantage of this element of the game. Each chapter of levels offers a different take on the way time affects you and the environment, with each puzzle more devious than the last. And even though most of the puzzles seem to have only one or two possible solutions, each one will leave you with a feeling of deep satisfaction for solving it.
At this point, I could stop writing and you'd have a pretty good idea of why Braid is a good game, but I really feel that merely describing the game for its amazing technical presentation isn't fully doing it justice. There's a lot more to Braid than that. The entire presentation is mentally stimulating.
Braid's narrative, told through a handful of dialog boxes and books placed on a series of podiums before each level, tell the emotional story of the game's main character, Tim, and his troubles. The text in the game is well-written, and is in some ways, very touching.
Braid opens with what looks like a painted title screen. After a few moments, you realize that what you're looking at isn't really just a title screen - it's the actual game, and you can actually play it right from the start. I really liked the way the game opens without an interface, and I think it says a lot about how great the game's design is that you don't even need to access any menus until you're ready to leave.
The game's graphics (courtesy of David Hellman) are incredible though; I think I spent the first 20 minutes of the game just looking at the backdrops. Scenes that would look amazing as flattened artwork scroll with depth unimaginable, and everything in the foreground is gorgeous to boot. So much effort was put into making Braid a visual feast, it's almost impossible to imagine that time was spent to ensure the game was enjoyable as well. The soundtrack, licensed from some very talented people at Magnatune, is equally as good as the graphics, and wraps the game in an enchanting veil that lends credibility to the story and completes the presentation in a satisfying way.
I've been playing Braid over the last few days, taking small bites at a time, and trying to complete each puzzle I come across. Everything about the game is incredible, and though I've gotten to the point where some of the puzzles seem a bit on the hard side (or maybe I'm just not trying to do things the right way), I'm having a blast. The $15 price tag sounded steep before I tried the demo, but after only a few minutes of playing, I made the choice to buy.
Braid is the collective work of many people who obviously care about their craft, and this shows at every turn. I hope that the Braid team goes on to do create more unique games. This should serve as a lesson to the nay-sayers who cry that indie games don't have a place in the highly commercial world of video games. They do, and Braid proves it without missing a step.
If you've got an Xbox 360 (or if you can hold out for the PC version), buy Braid. It's an amazing game that deserves to be experienced by everyone.
Grids, numbers, and logic. What comes to mind at mention of such things?
Countless squares filled with seemingly random numbers here and there, all working towards some final solution that one without a deep background in mathematics might never fully understand. These things should be kept under wraps in the cold, dark recesses of Excel files and databases.
But what is this? I've been having quite a good deal of fun over the last few days with all these things. No, I've not gone completely mad (yet); you won't find me poring over any massive spreadsheets or manually entering thousands of bits of data into MySQL in the late of night.
No, I've found myself yet another game to add to the collection, and a fun little one at that.
Picross DS.
As an artist who has embraced the pixel for many years, I've had my eye on games like Picross DS for quite some time, but never really had a chance to get into it fully. The previous Gameboy version was unfortunately released before I ever owned a Gameboy myself, though I do remember reading about it in Nintendo Power. If it counts for anything, I have trained for the game somewhat, with innumerable hours in Mario Paint, working with the limited collection of user-editable stamps.
So I strolled into Circuit City the other day, just to see if I could find anything cheap, and sure enough, there was a bargain bin set up with an assortment of games inside. I nabbed two games for only about $30 total: Picross DS and Lost: Via Domus (or Lost: Easy Achievement Points, as I like to call it).
My time with Picross has been thoroughly enjoyed so far. The game is addictive, contains many puzzles, and works great with the DS's touch-screen interface.
Playing the game is simple enough; each puzzle consists of a grid of empty squares, and it is up to you to use the numerical clues around the edge of the board to figure out which cells are filled and which aren't. The clues indicate how many cells in each row and column are filled, and how they are grouped (so for example, a row labeled "1 1 2" has three segments of filled cells in it, and each segment is 1, 1, and 2 fills long, in that order). You are given 60 minutes to finish each puzzle, and any mistakes made usually result in a 2-4 minute penalty. The game is over and you win when you've correctly identified and marked all the cells that are filled.
The game includes multiple modes, a tons of puzzles, and can also be played against other people online. Nintendo has also released a good number of downloadable puzzles, including many from the original game, which you can grab off the Nintendo WiFi network. I've already downloaded a bunch of these, and I've assembled Mario's head, a Goomba, and a Bullet Bill. 15x15 puzzles are pretty intense!
For some sweet icing on an already sweet cake, Picross DS also includes a built-in editor so you can craft your own puzzles and send them to friends via WiFi or local connection.
I'm actually going to stop writing this now, so I can get in a little bit more Picross DS before I hit the sack for the night. The game's been out for a while now, but I still feel it's worth mentioning here, so anyone out there in search of an oft-overlooked puzzle game might find another solid addition to their DS library.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy the game if you try it!
Thanks to everyone who entered the raffle to celebrate Marty Blog's 50th post, and congratulations to the winners, listed below! And no, that's not a picture of me up there.
Runners Up ($5 game via Steam): CoolGmrSms and Xxypher
Grand Prize (Team Fortress 2 or $20 equivalent via Steam): Xot
I will be contacting the winners via email. Hope to see you all around the site again soon, and thanks for helping to make this a successful raffle!
Well, it's finally happened - Marty Blog's 50th blog post is here! Not too shabby for a project that sprang to life as a mere experiment to organize my thoughts on gaming, art, developing, and the rest of that fun stuff. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Marty Blog so far, and I've got some neat stuff planned for the future, so I hope that you'll join me as I add more content and features to the growing pile o' stuff here.
To help celebrate the continuation of Marty Blog, and to give back to everyone who's helped make the blog fun for me, I've put together a little raffle - which I've dubbed Post & Win!
What can you win?
The grand prize for the raffle is a brand new (digital) copy of Valve's über fun frag-fest Team Fortress 2!
If you've already got a copy of TF2, or if it's not really your thing, I'll also let you sub in any other single game of equal or lesser value that's currently on Steam.
Additionally, two runners-up will be able to choose from any single game currently on Steam for $5 or less. This includes such classics as Commander Keen, Day of Defeat, and Silent Hunter III.
How do you enter?
Simply post a comment below (make sure to enter an email address I can contact you with in the appropriate area of the comment form) and tell me what you think about Marty Blog. Suggestions, criticism, and long manifestos of support and encouragement are welcome!
Your name will only be entered into the raffle once, no matter how many comments you leave, and registered users of the site who comment will have a slightly higher chance of being chosen.
Entrants must have a Steam account or must be willing to register for one if they win. Steam is free, it's a great service, and I am happy to promote it. If you win and I am unable to award you your prize within a reasonable amount of time, the item will be re-raffled. Apologies to anyone who lives outside of the U.S. or who doesn't have access to Steam or its catalog of games.
Attempts at entering your name into the raffle more than once (or any other kind of cheating) will result in your name, and all aliases thought to be associated with you, removed from the drawing. And of course, Marty Blog reserves all rights to make the final decision on the validity of any entry.
Entries close at the end of the weekend - Sunday, August 3rd at 11:59 PM PST - so be sure to make your comment before then! Winners will be announced the following day.
Thanks again to everyone out there who reads Marty Blog now and then. I truly appreciate your visits to this site, and I hope that the site remains fun and enjoyable to you as we move into the future!
Sad times are here again as the weekend draws to a close and the usual grind picks up again with a week full of work looming ahead. I didn't get a whole heck of a lot done this weekend, but as always, I managed to have some fun, so here I am to share my adventures.
Game Maker Robot AI Programming Competition
Though I haven't had as much time to work on this program as I'd like so far, I have made some decent progress on getting the engine ready for a new contest. First proposed a few days ago on the Reflect Games forums, I'm hoping the new robot AI programming comp proves to be a more fun replacement for the old, more involved contests.
The idea is that I will create a base application which everyone can download and play with - essentially just a room from top-down view, and a simple "robot" object - and anyone wanting to participate in the contest will write an AI for the robot that will compete against others' creations. Movement and attack variables/objects will be the same across all entries (I'll be coding those in scripts), and once everyone's AI script is finished, we'll draw up a tournament tree, I'll have the bots compete, and then record the results and broadcast them, via either YouTube or some kind of live Podcast.
One of the goals of the new competition format is to encourage creative coding without forcing entrants to commit to an entire game, which can be both difficult and frustrating at times. I think that with an AI programming tournament, people will have more opportunity to show off good coding without being bogged down by the need for other assets, they'll have a more interesting method of feedback (watching their bot compete with another, as opposed to a "secret" judging), and expansion of the competition can evolve more naturally - if the contest proves to be fun and engaging, we can add more weapons to the bots' arsenal, more customization, etc.
Though it's taking me a long time to get things rolling, I'm very excited about this project. We've already got lots of feedback about how this competition should work - be sure to visit the Reflect Games forums to voice your opinion too!
World of Warcraft MVP
Over the last few days, I've managed to grind my way to Exalted status with two (more) factions, the Shattered Sun Offensive, and the Kurenai, netting myself a new title, some sweet additions to my gear, and a new mount that I'll probably never use.
Gaining exalted with SSO, even without visiting any instances, is pretty easy - it only took me a few days, and I only had to visit the Isle of Quel'Danas and complete all the daily quests there a handful of times. I liked the variation and overlap in the quests there though, and going from that back to grinding the other factions' reputation was a pretty rough transition. By contrast, the only quest I could take in Nagrand to gain Kurenai rep was the repeatable Obsidian Warbeads quest, which meant enduring the monotony of killing hundreds of ogres. Not exactly my cup of tea, and I will probably be looking for different quests when I start my quest for Consortium rep... even if it just means a simple change in scenery.
One good thing about grinding in Nagrand however, is that I was able to pick up a lot of mining nodes that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. I've now got a mining bag (20 slots) almost full of stacks of Fel Iron Ore and Adamantite Ore - which I'm not sure what I should do with yet. Selling at the auction house will net me a huge sum of gold, but my blacksmithing skill is only at 300, so it might just be better spent on leveling.
My chances for scoring some decent raiding increased significantly last week as well, as I was inducted quite unceremoniously into Encore, an awesome guild which a few friends from college are pretty well-entrenched in. Though I'm not always up for 5-6 hours of raiding, the occasional run through the higher-level dungeons should be new and fun.
Ubuntu Test Drive
Though I've played with the live CD version of Ubuntu before, I finally took the plunge this weekend. I dug an old hard drive out of the closet, popped it into my older computer, and installed it. I've taken some time to play around with it this weekend, and I've mostly enjoyed my time with it.
Downloading Ubuntu and installing it was a piece of cake. All you have to do is get on the official site, download the CD image, burn it, pop it in the preferred computer, and boot from it. The live CD will load Ubuntu just like it would from the hard drive (a bit slower, of course), and once you're in the OS and you've played around with it, you can choose to install directly from a link on the desktop. The only confusion I had during this process was with which file system I should format the drive, but after doing some quick research, I settled on ext3, which seems to be holding up just fine.
So far, I am impressed with Linux. Though I couldn't see myself switching over to it for good, I like many things about it, and I will probably continue to tinker with it. The customization Gnome/Compiz provide is great, and being able to move around virtually every button on the desktop is just plain awesome. The extra effects you can perform with capable hardware are not only fun to look at - they are often genuinely useful. And although there are a few bits of oddness here and there, the OS feels mostly cohesive and with a few more generations of work, I think it really could rival the quality of similar Unix-based OS's, like Mac OS.
Another thing I am particularly fond of is that fact that Ubuntu comes with just about everything you need pre-installed. From the "Faux-toshop" (yes, I made that up), GIMP to the entire suite of OpenOffice.org tools, there's really not much aside from games that need to be installed after loading up Ubuntu for the first time. And of course, that's where the problem lies.
Ubuntu has an impressive number of built-in games, like Solitaire, Blackjack, etc. but if you're like me, you want more meat on your games. Unfortunately, not many games are currently being written with a native port of Linux in mind. There are options available however, like WINE, which can run Windows applications nicely, and can even throw around a growing list of games (it ran my installation of Guild Wars flawlessly, if only a tiny bit slow).
But whatever - running my games in WINE is silly when I've got another hard drive in the same computer with Windows on it, so I'll be dual-booting my older computer on Windows and Ubuntu for now. I'm sure Linux will continue to be fun to play around with, or at least a good diversion from working on my projects and playing games.
Odds & Ends
Aside from all that stuff, I also got to spend a lot of time with my girlfriend, and we finally found some time to start researching home loans. Hopefully we end up qualifying for a decent loan, and we can find a nice place to live - I'm a little sick of the apartment life!
Oh, and it was also my brother's 24th birthday!
Anyway, it's about time I wrapped up this weekend wrap-up. Hopefully everyone else out there had a good weekend too. Thanks for reading!
It's been a long time in the making, but Too Human is nearly here!
For those of you who aren't familiar with Too Human, it can be described fairly simply as a Diablo-ish dungeon/loot-dropping game, set in a futuristic Norse mythology-inspired world. You choose a character class at the outset and battle your way through hordes of enemies with swords, hammers, guns, and other weapons in order to collect experience points and gear, which you can use to upgrade your character, and ultimately unravel the game's plot.
To kick off E3, Silicon Knights released a demo of the game on the XBL network, and it's been available for about 3 days now. I went in with an open mind, and not expecting too much, and I was pleasantly surprised at the game. Beyond a few small quirks, Too Human is looking to be a fun little dungeon crawler that just might satisfy your lust for loot (at least, for a while) as we wait for Diablo 3 to come around.
Graphically, Too Human is good, but not quite on par with other games of similar style, like Gears of War. The characters and enemies are all very detailed, and the combat is filled with lots of neat effects, which serves to add some color to the sometimes bland palette of the indoor environments. There's even some nifty "organic" environments located in the area called 'cyberspace.' Too Human misses the mark in a few of the details though, most notably in animation. Honestly, things aren't animated all that bad, but the movements of characters, both during playable and cinematic sequences, can be a bit stiff at times - it's just not the graceful experience other games, again, like Gears of War, have lead me to expect from "next-gen" titles.
It's not all bad though, so as long as you aren't expecting something on par with the latest offerings of Pixar or Dreamworks, you should be fine. Overall, I'd say that in terms of graphics, Too Human falls somewhere between Halo 3 and Gears of War.
Unfortunately, I can't comment much on the sound for the game, because during the one opportunity I've had to play it so far, I wasn't able to turn up the volume very high. The voice acting didn't seem all that bad though, and the sound effects seemed spot-on.
Gameplay for Too Human was what you'd expect from a game like Diablo - there's hordes of enemies, lots of fighting, and various rewards that usually end up upgrading your character in some way. Occasionally you'll run into a sub-boss, which is a tougher variation of the other normal enemies you've already fought, and eventually, a bigger, badder (and usually larger) boss. The boss enemies drop the best loot, though all enemies have the potential to, and you'll find an assortment of weapons, armor, etc. Too Human also rewards players with experience points that can be used to spec your character down a certain line of the three branches of the skills tree, and you can also receive points that go towards crafting items and re-speccing your character, should you decide you want to take a different route.
I enjoyed the fact that Too Human employs an item-naming scheme similar to Diablo, where you find items whose names imply what they do (for instance, and not a real item at all, "Fred's Cardboard Sword of Major Justice"). It lent the game some familiarity, even though the items and descriptions were worlds apart from the medieval weaponry of Diablo and its ilk of competitors.
Another thing that I liked about Too Human was that, although the levels themselves were mostly very straightforward, there were certain points where you were required to enter "cyberspace" (an alternate world of sorts), and interact with items there that influence your path in the dungeon you're running through. These segments broke up the action in the dungeons nicely, and were a welcome reprieve from the dark corridors of the main dungeons.
As with any Diablo-type game though, you should expect some repetitiveness as far as fighting goes. If you're like me though, and you're always in it for the loot, you probably won't mind grinding hundreds of monsters for a chance at capturing a coveted item... even if only for bragging rights as you play co-op with a buddy.
At one time, I was one of the naysayers of Too Human - I thought that any game which has been in development for almost 10 years, and which kept jumping ship from platform to platform was pretty much doomed to mediocrity (or worse). Over the last few months, I've learned a bit more about Too Human and I got interested, and now, after playing the demo, I am seriously considering buying the game. I'm a fan of dungeon crawlers, and I in my time with the demo, my problems with its quirks were minimal; I found most of the emerging complaints of the game to be rather petty. No camera problems or horrible framerate issues here.
If the rest of the game turns out to be as good as the demo, I think Silicon Knights can count me among any new fans it might have accrued over the last week. I highly recommend you try out the demo if you've got an Xbox 360, and you're interested in this type of game. It might not be your cup of tea, but I think that if you give it a chance, you might just find something you like.
As many of you already know, E3 is officially underway, and many of the top companies in the games industry are busy pushing announcements out of airplanes and watching them fall on the unsuspecting crowd at the show. Unfortunately for me, I am not at the E3 show, but as a faithful fan of the Xbox 360, I feel it my duty to talk about some of the more amazing reports that have come back from Microsoft's side of the show.
Read on for my list of awesomely unexpected Xbox 360 E3 announcements!
Microsoft partners with Netflix, NBC / Universal
Thanks to a new partnership with NBC / Universal, TV shows and movies under these companies will be coming to the XBL Marketplace. This is great news for fans of movies like The Bourne Trilogy and TV shows like 30 Rock. Hopefully The Office (my favorite show) will see some Marketplace love as well!
Netflix will also be supplying its streaming movies service through the Xbox 360, and those of you who already have a subscription will be given access free of any additional charges. It seems Microsoft is really pushing the 360 as a more universal media device. So long as they keep the primary focus on games, you won't hear any complaints from me.
Massive Dashboard Update, Avatars, the whole nine yards
Rumors about a dashboard redesign, including a new avatar system, have turned out to be true.
I've not investigated this very deeply yet, but it seems that the blades system currently in the OS will be the new in-game dashboard, and the normal OS screen will look more akin to the screenshot above. Avatars will be the new way to identify players. The many other new features are included:
8-way chat
Social functions, photo sharing,
Ability to watch Netflix movies with others
Optionally install games to the hard drive, for faster loads (and quieter gaming?)
Purchase / queue content on the web for download with your PC, automatically starts on Xbox
Xbox Live Primetime announced, which incorporates achievements, leaderboards, and real prizes into a TV / game hybrid
There are probably a lot more updates as well - these were only the larger of the ones I've read about. These changes all reflect the (slightly) new direction Microsoft is taking with Xbox Live, dubbed the Xbox Live Experience.
Exclusive Content & Pile O' Games
Among the many Xbox Live Arcade titles announced, a few stood out among the rest:
Banjo Kazooie (of Nintendo 64 fame)
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
Fable 2 Pub Games (earn money for your character in Fable 2 before the game is out)
Portal: Still Alive
The exclusive downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto 4 was also mentioned briefly - purportedly as what will be a huge event. It was also announced that Fallout 3 (by Bethesda) will have exclusive content via XBL as well.
Not to be left out were the usual slew of big game announcements for the upcoming months, including one massive bombshell (at the end of the list):
Fable 2 (October 2008)
Gears of War 2 (November 2008)
Halo Wars (First Half 2009)
Final Fantasy XIII (excluding Japan, same day release as PS3 version)
Mind you, all of this was only announced in one day - it seemed for a while as if the internet might implode from all the awesome news, and the buzz surrounding it. And then, since we always want more, demos for Too Human and Tales of Vesperia were placed on XBL for play.
I've already tried out the Too Human demo, and though it does have a few odd quirks (including a slightly story that's impossible to follow with the TV volume turned down), I had some fun with it, and I think I just might buy the game. More on that later though - I'm going to go take some time to digest all this news (and maybe a little midnight snack as well).
One thing's for sure - it's a very good time to be an Xbox 360 owner!
I'm pleased to announce that Team Wanderlust has finally unveiled a 'public' demo of Wanderlust: Rebirth, a game that many (myself included) feel is already one of the richest experiences crafted with Game Maker to date.
The game, a solo / online action RPG, represents a re-imagining of the original Wanderlust game, of sorts. Upon starting, players can choose from a handful of classes, and can level up their character with points as they progress through the game's chapters. Each chapter that is completed unlocks the next, and can be repeated again in order to obtain a higher rating, and earn more points.
Rebirth also features an intuitive dialog system, killer retro 16-bit style graphics, customizable controls, and of course, online play. Using the Reflect account system, or by connecting directly, players can join up with each other and play through chapters as a party of up to 4 players. The co-op gameplay is actually encouraged, as the game awards alternate scores for different group sizes, so if you want to complete the game in its entirety (and have some fun to boot), gather up some buddies and have at it!
I've really enjoyed watching this game as it is developed, and it's great to see it finally released to the public and finding a warm reception therein. A lot of work has been put into this game by just a handful of talented people, and I hope to see it finished in the time to come.
Matt, Rebirth's chief programmer, has also given me some great ideas to expand the functionality of Reflect as well - you'll see some of his suggestions come to fruition in future updates.
Anyway, I highly recommend you take the game for a test drive. I'm sure you'll agree with the growing consensus that the new Wanderlust is truly an epic game, with lots to do, and lots of rewards for both the casual and the dedicated alike.
Wanderlust: Rebirth's topic at the GMC can be found here, or you can download the game directly here.
