Blip Fest headed to NYC December 4-7

While it might be too regrettably late to make a last minute journey to Montreal for tonight's previously mentioned Gamma 3D, before you pull a low-bit four-color freakout (as above), I'll note that there's still plenty of time to plan for NYC's forthcoming BlipFest, the December 4-7th celebration of NES, C64, Atari ST, and Game Boy "chipmusic and its related disciplines."

The schedule is all still TBA, so I can't yet point toward any single can't-miss night, but the overall line-up is star-studded enough that any night's a sure bet for something a little bit amazing.

BlipFestival2008

Atlus bringing Trackmania DS stateside

Today's award for Most Unlikely Publisher goes to RPG stalwarts Atlus, who have just announced they'll be bringing Nadeo and Firebrand Games' Trackmania DS to the U.S. in March of 2009, and even for 'just-slightly' casual fans of racing games, this should be happy news.

It's no mistake that the franchise has one of the largest and most dedicated audiences in the genre: the series excels at joyfully purist arcade design mixed with puzzle and stunt elements and a fully-featured track editor, all of which, European reviews have very happily reported, have perfectly made their way to the portable version. Essentially, if you have any nostalgia for racing classics like Stunts and Racing Destruction Set, or, quite simply, like to move things quickly around a track and make awesome jumps and loop-de-loops, this is the game you want.

Try the free Steam version, Trackmania Nations Forever, for a taste of what the fuss is about.

Trackmania DS [Atlus]

Celebrate Half-Life anniversary for less than a dollar

As if on cue, seconds after posting the previous entry, word arrives that Valve have dropped Half-Life's price on Steam to 98 cents in celebration of the 1998 release:

Launched 10 years ago today, Half-Life was greeted with overwhelming review scores (Metacritic of 96%), earned over 50 Game of the Year Awards, and birthed a franchise with over 20 million units sold to date. The special 10 year anniversary price is available via Steam until 12:01 pm PST on November 21.

Half-Life [Valve]

A fresh look at Black Mesa's Half-Life remake

On the 10th anniversary of the release of Valve's original Half Life, mod team Black Mesa Modification has released a slew of new work in progress screenshots of their detailed remake of the game in the current Orange Box engine, which, if the mod ever sees the day, will easily lead to our third or fourth playthrough. Says the team:

2008 has been a very eventful year for us. Making a 12+ hour game is a monumental task, but we're still powering ahead with development and making great progress. Our programmers have been hard at work overhauling and expanding the AI, and lots of our NPCs have been brought to life by our talented voice actors. Levels and chapters continue to be worked on and fine tuned, with large sections strung together and playable.

[...]

Last but not least, the team worked very hard to get a trailer out along with all the other media. But as we've always done when faced with the choice, we decided to take a few extra days to polish it to a mirror shine before releasing it to the community. Be sure and look for that in the days ahead!

A celebration of the last decade! [Black Mesa Modifications]

A quick toast to the death of Blueprint

EA Blueprint was my favorite division of the publishing giant that I was never fully sure existed, and, according to a new expose on Variety's games blog Cut Scene, never officially did and now surely will not. What I did know, or had gathered piecemeal from various sources was that it involved producers Neil Young (whose work had quite rightly given me the outright creeps in college when I'd beta tested his Majestic, many moons before we'd all properly learn the acronym ARG) and Alan Yu.

I did know that it had had within its scope the creation of cross-platform games (beyond console ports: most excitingly, a dip into social games, as it did by extending last year's Wii trivia game Smarty Pants to Facebook), and the ability to bring Stephen Spielberg into the building and walk out with the Wii's Boom Blox, an almost entirely unlikely game to come from such a major Hollywood producer.

Blox, which Variety posits will now be getting a sequel, had an energy and a fundamental delight in core mechanics -- you do, after all, do little more than explore play possibilities inside a very simple block-and-ball physics engine, just for the pleasure of watching things topple and explode -- that could easily have come from a passionate indie.

I knew there was a worrying pall in the air nearly a year ago when I'd heard whispers that both Young and Yu were planning an exit from the company, but it wasn't until only very recently that we'd find out why, when they founded the iFund-backed iPhone startup ngmoco, which, even just two games so far in, shows more promise at understanding what makes gaming on the platform unique than most others.

Knowing what we know now from the Variety article at the start of this year, I might have been worried for EA having "shuttered" what felt like its most exciting prospect, but with newly announced projects like Kyle Gray's DS puzzle/platformer Henry Hatsworth and the 'wonder-triplet-powers, unite!' EA Partners deal that will bring together No More Heroes and Killer 7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, and, peripherally, Rez, Lumines and Meteos developer Q Entertainment, my worries have been almost fully abated.

Electronic Arts shuts down Blueprint, making Boom Blox 2 [Variety]

Introversion playing with fire with unbeatable DEFCON AI

Apparently having learned nothing from Hollywood history, indie developers Introversion have put out a public call for AI students to create an unbeatable computer opponent who can mutually assure total destruction in their serenely-terrifying 2006 real-time wargame DEFCON.

The fab-four have been working with The Imperial College Department of Computing and API creator Robin Baumgarten (interviewed here on the subject) to push the development of DEFCON AI in academic study, and Baumgarten has made the that API publicly available inviting everyone to, as Introversion put it (to our horror), "write the most efficient killing machine."

DEFCON [Introversion Software]

Scott Thompson (barely) passes a Portal challenge

We're always thrilled to see our cross-cultural interests fortuitously converge, so forgive us this latest Kids In The Hall MySpace tour video, in which Scott Thompson proves himself about as adept at handling Portal's Companion Cube as he was at taking care of his Sony Aibo -- that is to say (if you haven't watched the Kids' 'Same Guys, New Dresses' DVD), not at all.

Scott in a horrible mood flees to the back of the tour bus. [via Kotaku]

A Brief History of Rhythm

Why do we like UK games journo Simon 'chewingpixels' Parkin? First, and most obviously, because he's taken the time to prepare this exhaustive timeline charting the evolving course of rhythm games, and second, though it doesn't appear in the timeline, he has correctly called out 1987 Famicom Disk System game Otocky (from Electroplankton /Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai) as one of the true groundbreakers (as well as included some uber-obscurities like PlayStation 2 title Dog of Bay). He explains, though, on Otocky's absence, as well as notable others:

I’ve limited the list to rhythm-action games in the strictest sense, that is, games in which you time inputs to match prerecorded music. So there’s no Rez, ElectroPlankton or WiiMusic, titles in which a player’s inputs do create musical outputs, but not necessarily in a scored or timed framework.

We have to go back and check again to see if they break the rules, but we might have a few additions -- Agetec's recent DS title Rhythm 'n Notes springs quickly to mind, as well as Wonderswan Color game Rhyme Rider Kerorican and the forthcoming Major Minor's Majestic March (both from Parappa creator NanaOn-Sha) , as well as at least one other original PlayStation obscurity which is escaping us at the moment.

chewing pixels » The Rhythm-Action Timeline

Only on Offworld: Polytron/Kokoromi's Anaglyphic super HYPERCUBE

Montreal collective Kokoromi's GAMMA games and music events are quickly becoming the top neo-future salons for art/game curation (last year's event saw the release of Jason Rohrer's low-res memento mori Passage, which quickly circulated as one of the most thought provoking games of the year), and it's easy to understand why they've made 3D the subject of this year's show: Kokoromi co-founder Phil Fish has spent the majority of the past few years playing with that dimension as one of the minds behind the forthcoming indie platformer Fez.

If you haven't yet been exposed to Fez, a quick recap. Starting off as an otherwise innocently and nostalgically charming low-res 2D pixel platformer, Fez's central conceit revolves (no pun intended) around giving the player control of an otherwise hidden axis that fwoom's the world into the third dimension, re-aligning the position of 2D element and letting you venture deeper into its levels. It's a difficult mechanic to put properly into words, but one that is genuinely jaw-dropping the first time it's performed, and utilized to a more logical and involving extent than seen in the Wii's similarly dimensionally screwy Super Paper Mario.

For this year's GAMMA, then, the collective invited the indie developer community to get just as playful with the third dimension, only, in true retro-futurist Kokoromi style, limited developers to using only red/blue stereoscopy and explore, as they put it, "alternative depth and location cues" and the "ability to hide information in separate viewing channels."

Kokoromi themselves -- consisting of programmer Damien Di Fede, Fish, creative director and researcher Heather Kelley (who you might remember from her "magical pet adventure and stealthy primer on female sexual pleasure," Lapis, and digital media theorist Cindy Poremba -- together with Polytron programmer Renaud Bédard, set out to up their own 3D ante and have created, Offworld can exclusively reveal ahead of the event, super HYPERCUBE.

Kelley explains, "The gameplay of super HYPERCUBE is kind of like that "human Tetris" event on those Japanese game shows... but with cubes. You have a cluster of procedurally generated cubes right in front of you, and your goal is to quickly line it up to fit through the hole in the wall that's moving toward you, by rotating the cluster with the controller."

"To see the hole in the wall on the other side of the cluster (and thus figure out what direction to rotate the cube to line it up) you have to lean," Kelley continues, "The better you play, the bigger the cluster gets, and so the further you need to lean in order to see the wall behind." Simple enough, but -- and here's where their true innovation comes into play -- to implement that leaning, Polytron's Bédard took a cue from Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Lee's infamous Wii-mote head tracking concept, and hacked together a pair of stereoscope glasses that lets players literally lean to navigate their way around the space.

The short videos we've seen of the experience appear just the tiniest bit magical -- the combination of anaglyph 3D with movement-based perspective, on top of the game's slickly minimalist style reminiscent of nothing so much as early PlayStation puzzler Intelligent Qube perfectly fits that Kokoromi retro future vision. It's not hard to imagine the 70's early game pioneers predicting that this would be the shape of games to come.

The 'super' version of super HYPERCUBE will be playable one night only at tonight's event, but, Kelley says, a version simply called HYPERCUBE which uses the Xbox 360 controller to lean will be released after the show, as will the games from its other selected developers, including Infinite Ammo's Paper Moon, Lee Byron and Joannie Wu's Fireflies, Tim Winsky and Johanna Arcand's AltiToad, Jim McGinley's The Depths To Which I Sink, and Antony Blackett, Corie Geerders, and James Everett's BlottoBrace.

GAMMA 3D takes place tonight at 9pm EST, at Montreal's Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT).

Othello gets Puzzle Quest treatment with Neopets Puzzle Adventure

Readers over a certain age will be forgiven a healthy dose of skepticism in accepting that a game featuring Neopets -- the plush animal franchise which includes a digital version of each toy to interact with online (which anyone with an acquaintance under that certain age will likely be familiar with) -- might be the next to occupy an inordinate amount of their time.

But anyone that's lost a chunk of their life to Puzzle Quest, the 2007 RPG/puzzle game that's touched as many people through word of mouth as it has platforms that will take it (the count currently stands at PC, PS2, PSP, PS3, Wii, Xbox Live Arcade, and mobile phones) will also understand that developer Infinite Interactive has an uncanny ability to tap into that lizard brain sector of the human psyche and keep it dead-locked for hours at a time.

And so it will likely go with Neopets Puzzle Adventure, an online demo of which Capcom has just released. Like Puzzle Quest's embedding of an essential 'Bejeweled' match-three core inside a complex RPG framework, Puzzle Adventure does the same with the classic game of Othello.

What you don't get in the demo version is the taste of the new game's true complexity: like Puzzle Quest's spells, Adventure will require you to capture and train 'petpets' and find items that throw curveballs into the otherwise straightforward Reversi design, but what you will get, (or at least, I did) is the first thrill of an absolutely crushing victory you've had against an AI controlled Othello opponent in as long as you can remember.

Capcom plans to bring the online playable game to DS and PC in late November.

Neopets Puzzle Adventure demo [Capcom]

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