In his recent mammoth sized Destructoid interview , Luc Bernard eluded to the fact that his upcoming game Eternity’s Child has gained some additional game play elements in the process of making the jump from XBLA to WiiWare, but at the time he didn’t get into the details of what those elements would be. Well, today the little French/English tease has finally put out, if only just a little.
Luc’s latest (and perhaps greatest) Destructoid Community Blog contains info on not only a new playable character, but those new WiiWare specific game play mechanics as well. I just contacted Luc for some additional info on this development, and was told specifically by Luc to “Blog it right now, before Kotaku does! I just sent them an email!” So forgive me if these seems rushed.
Hit the jump for the details.
[Via Luc Bernard’s C-Blog]
Mario Kart Wii doesn’t have voice chat. But it’s got text chat at least, right? No. It doesn’t even have that. Nintendo of America have announced that the game will instead allow players to choose from a limited selection of automated statements/responses while playing the game. “Hello”, “I’m sad”, etc. I’d say welcome to 1996, Nintendo, but 1996 is still awaiting your arrival.
Mario Kart Wii Text Chat Details [IGN]
From gamepro.com:
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GamePro examines four recent multi-platform titles (Assassin’s Creed, Burnout Paradise, Call of Duty4, Devil May Cry 4) to determine which console has the better games–PS3 or Xbox 360. What we discovered challenges the common wisdom that “Xbox 360 is better.”
While we can’t definitively name one console as having better multi-platform releases across the board, there’s a clear winner among these four games: PlayStation 3 beats the Xbox 360 handily. Call of Duty 4 plays nearly the same on both systems, differing only in superior online integration on PlayStation 3. With Devil May Cry 4, the game is all-around better on PlayStation 3 (despite the horrendous installation process). Burnout Paradise emerges as decidedly better on Sony’s system thanks to EA Criterion’s decision to make it the leading version of the game. The exact opposite is true for Assassin’s Creed where Xbox 360 beats out its PlayStation 3 counterpart visually.
Judging by what we’ve seen with these recent games, you may be better off picking up PlayStation 3 versions of high-profile multi-platform games for the time being. The notion that PlayStation 3 ports are inherently inferior to Xbox 360 simply doesn’t hold water these days. Some games do perform worse on Sony’s console–Blacksite: Area 51 has been plagued with performance issues, for instance, and The Orange Box suffers from groan-inducing load times and chugging framerates.
These issues are slowly being addressed, though, as many publishers are starting to churn out multi-platform releases with an eye for the PlayStation 3. LucasArts recently announced an initiative to make the PS3 their leading platform for development, joining a growing wave of developers seeking to improve multi-platform games heading to Sony’s console. With any luck, this movement will result in better performance for all gamers, Xbox 360 and PS3 alike. For now though, just enjoy fragging terrorists, crashing cars, and slicing demons in half on your PlayStation 3.
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Full Story: gamepro.com (4 pages)
SAN FRANCISCO — As a game designer, James Silva’s greatest inspiration was Bruce Lee.
“I had been a dishwasher at a restaurant three or four years ago. You get no respect as a dishwasher. And every time the waitress would come back with a stack of dirty dishes, ignoring me, I’d go, ‘You know, Bruce Lee was a dishwasher once!’”
As the sole creator of the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game Dishwasher, Silva found himself the poster boy of Microsoft’s efforts to “democratize game development” at Game Developers Conference. The Utica, NY independent game maker shared the stage with game design luminaries like Tomonobu Itagaki and Peter Molyneux at Microsoft’s GDC keynote.
Afterwards, I got to play Dishwasher in co-op mode with Silva at Microsoft’s booth. A trial version of the game is currently available for free download on Xbox Live.
Silva was a first-place winner of Microsoft’s “Dream, Build, Play” contest, which challenged indie game makers to create games using their recently released XNA development environment, which lets anyone program an Xbox 360-compatible game.
“Ever since I was 10, in the 8-bit days, I was telling myself that it would be the coolest thing ever to be able to write a game for a home console. Playing it in the living room on couches as opposed to on a PC,” Silva says.
Drawing on his dejected days on the bottom rung of the restaurant hierarchy, Silva created the story of “a lowly guy in a position of no respect, who goes from dishwasher to someone who is not to be messed with.”
Silva says the two-player cooperative, 2-D side-scrolling platform combat game takes a cue from Devil May Cry in its “stylish action look.” But I found it a bit more like God of War, since the button mapping is identical — heavy attack, light attack, jump, and grab are in all the same places on the controller.
“It’s got its own sort of fluidity to it, and it obviously takes its own life the way the combat pans out,” says Silva as he shows me how the game’s early zombie enemies can be taken out just by grabbing them once.
The finished game, which Silva expects to have completed in the next few months, will contain about fifty arcade-style pick-up-and-play challenges (the trial version has three), and a story mode in which you build and evolve your character.
Silva created the entirety of Dishwasher on his own, with minimal help from Microsoft. “Most of it is stuff I handle on my own. I did ask some technical questions to the XNA team, but for the most part it’s pretty easy to figure out what you’re doing,” he says.
He has a masters in computer science, but said it wasn’t really applicable to working in XNA. “School was mostly theory. It was good to get some sort of foundation, but XNA is all mostly self-taught.”
Silva is quite happy with his current super-flexible work environment. “If I could keep doing this, that would be great,” he says. “Or just keep the team small.”
Photos: Jim Merithew, Wired.com
If you haven’t played the original N, then that’s great. Well, it’s not great, since you’ve essentially missed one of the greatest flash games ever created, but it’s great that you’ll be able to go into N+, the game’s updated HD sequel/remake, with no expectations.
N was incredibly good; N+ seeks to improve upon its mechanics with more levels, better audiovisual components, and a sexier difficulty curve. If you haven’t played N, then you will love N+, there’s no two ways about it. Yet I feel that most of you who are reading this have played the hell out of the original N, and probably enjoyed it as much as I did.
“Is it worth buying?” you wonder. “Why should I pay good money to replay a free flash game?”
Well, to make a long story short, you should buy it, and it is worth the 800 Microsoft points. To make a short story long, hit the jump and find out why.
MTV reports that THQ is pimping out their Drawn to Life franchise to the SpongeBob SquarePants universe. Normally I’d be all over the another-crappy-kidsploitation-game band wagon, but I happen to think this is a fantastic idea.
The game will feature DoodleBob, the horrible disfigured, and slightly Frankenstein-esque SpongeBob knock-off created by the yellow sponge in one of his cartoons. In the original show, a fan favorite at our house, SpongeBob finds an artists pencil and uses it to create a version of himself, which turns out to be quite evil.
Fantastic fun and more than a little bit creepy. What will make or break this game, I think, will be whether they include the creepy or sanitize it and make it into the sort of cartoon that only kids get, but bores adults, aka not SpongeBob. The fact that Altron, makers of Alex Rider: Stormbreaker for the DS, is behind this version doesn’t bode well.
Hit up the link for the game’s fact sheet and such.
Exclusive: Next ‘Drawn To Life’ Set In SpongeBob SquarePants Universe [MTV]
From informationweek.com:
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Microsoft has fixed a technical glitch that locked out thousands of users around the world from their Windows Live accounts, Hotmail e-mail, and other Microsoft online services, the company said.
“An issue began that has caused some consumers worldwide to experience difficulty logging in to their Windows Live ID accounts. This issue has since been resolved and normal operations have been restored to all customers,” said Samantha McManus, Windows Live product manager, in an e-mail late Tuesday to InformationWeek.com sister site ChannelWeb.
Microsoft didn’t disclose the nature of the bug, but reports indicate that in addition to Hotmail and Windows Live, it affected numerous Web services — including Xbox Live online gaming and Microsoft’s Windows Messenger instant messaging platform — that rely on users’ Windows Live IDs for logins.
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Full Story: informationweek.com
A recent article over at PC World explains some of the procedure for putting Linux on your Nintendo Wii… check out the quote below.
You’ll need a GameCube SD card adapter, a 1GB (or higher) SD card, a copy of Zelda (for the Wii), and of course, a Nintendo Wii itself. Next, you’ll need to make sure your version of Zelda is one of the anointed — apparently not all copies of Zelda are created equal. Finally, you’ll have to do a bunch of extracting, copying, renaming, deleting, saving, etc., load the game, load a hacked save file and actually talk to a guy in-game to trigger the loader, which drops you out to a black and white screen, at which point you get to have fun figuring out how to load Linux itself.
Anyone interested in giving it a try?
From the ELSPA press release:
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Two men, who peddled a while-you-wait console chipping service at a Midlands computer fair while simultaneously selling pre-chipped Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Wii consoles have been arrested.
The men, who operated a stand alongside other genuine businessmen, were caught offering the ’service’ at the Robin Park Sports Centre in Wigan, where it was also discovered they were selling a number of illegally copied Xbox 360 and Wii games and a number of counterfeit DVD films.
The warrant for the raid, obtained and executed under the Trade Marks Act 1994, was carried out on the evening of 16th January at the Robin Park computer fair by officers of Greater Manchester Police and Wigan Trading Standards following investigative test purchases made by ELSPA’s (the Entertainment&Leisure Software Publishers Association) I.P. Crime Unit.
One of the two men arrested, who, like his partner-in-crime, cannot be named until further investigations have been carried out, was a resident of the West Midlands. Consequently Wolverhampton City Council Trading Standards Service, West Midlands Police and ELSPA investigators executed an entry warrant at his home in Dudley where it was discovered he was running a functioning chipping factory in his garage. Further documents found at the premises resulted in the execution of a further raid at a business premises in the Wolverhampton area on 17th January from where other counterfeiting equipment was seized.
The second arrested man was a resident of Leyland in Preston, Lancashire, and during the search of his house a substantial quantity of Wii and Xbox 360 games were recovered.
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Full Press Release: here
Yahtzee and I met at Game Developers Conference. True story. Actually, I should have probably realized, because of course I work with Susan who is married to Russ who employs Yahtzee, so of course we were going to sit at the same table for the Game Developers Choice awards, right? Sadly, I wasn’t at all prepared and so I think the first words I spoke to him on this historic occasion were, quote, a foot-long streamer of drool. To his credit he did not call the police.
This week’s episode of Zero Punctuation attacks one of your favorite games, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Please enjoy it.
Zero Punctuation [The Escapist]