The first trailer for Team Meat's upcoming Super Meat Boy also serves to announce two previously unknown features: a 'retro world' warp zone that lets you play as 8-bit Meat Boy, "by old school rules", says designer Edmund McMillen, and, even more fantastically, a replay system that lets you see every previous attempt you'd made on each level, all at once.
Sporting a heroin-chic-weathered 'body' decal that likely won't be working its way backward into the company's toy line, French game news site JeuxVideo gets the first look at Iggy Pop's appearance in TT/Harmonix's upcoming Lego Rock Band -- click through for the full plastic performance of The Passenger. [via mbf]
Stick with the first 19 seconds of awkward silence: though the subsequent teaser video only lasts long enough to show you the basic season shifting/hurricane summoning mechanics of Frontier's upcoming LostWinds sequel Winter of the Melodias, it's enough to make you ache to return to its world.
Things the NES original Boy and His Blob did not include: an oversized, super-punching blob-mech-fighter, a eerily rendered blob-boy-clone, and, of course, hugs, but ahead of the game's October 13th retail release, Majesco's just-released 'final trailer' for WayForward's update lets you see all three in action.
Nintendo announced the WiiWare game over the weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, where IGN reports that it played like a simplified 4-player Gauntlet, with simple two-button controls to melee or special attack invading Pokemon (with all the franchise's rock/paper/scissors-like offensive/defensive weaknesses/strengths intact), collecting defeated enemies, and re-summoning those enemies as your own.
Apart from IGN, all of the on-site reporting over the weekend seemed to unanimously agree that the game was surprisingly well-received, and so it climbs the list of anticipated WiiWare games due out before the end of the year.
I'd like to think that there's some wonky translation afoot in this extended video with an increasingly iconic and self-aware Suda 51 introducing the new features in Wii sequel No More Heroes 2. The most interesting thing you'll see within is that the new game's part-time-job side-missions now take place in faux 8-bit NES style, which pseudo-Suda claims is "on purpose."
I'd like to think what they meant is "deliberately", because no one should have to basically apologize for a touch of nostalgia, especially when it looks as good as this. [via TinyCartridge]
After anonymously teasing a series of images via its new explorethevoid.com site (and going so rapidfire that I can hardly keep up with the last), Bit.Trip creators Gaijin Games have announced the latest in the WiiWare series with Void.
As you can see via the new video above, Void is less blatantly rhythm based than Beat and Core before it, and this time seems to draw more inspiration from the dark/light bullet-hell interplay of, say, Ikaruga.
Your mission this time, as best as I can tell, is to grow and maintain your void by continually collecting black pixels, each one adding, Katamari-style, to your girth, putting you in greater risk of colliding with the white, which appear to deflate you near instantly.
Gaijin says their latest entry will include local four player co-op, and, mercifully, mid-level checkpoints, and will see chiptune maker Nullsleep pulling guest star duties in this episode. The game is due for WiiWare release this fall, and will be on display at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo for first public consumption.
Despite Hudson's claims that the character stars in one of its "most widely requested platformers", 'Bonk' still remains (unfortunately) not exactly the most household of franchise names. Although he did make side-quests from his native home on the ill-fated TurboGrafx-16 to the Super NES, GameBoy, and later an import-only (and minorly excellent) revival on GameCube and PS2, he's still played the sixth-or-seventh prehistoric fiddle to Nintendo and Sega's more iconic figures.
But after the Virtual Console re-releases of his earliest adventures, the company's giving him a new push with Brink of Extinction, a new downloadable adventure for WiiWare, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live Arcade due in Spring of 2010.
Sporting a much more cohesive look than the last aforementioned paper-cut and textured revival, the company says the new version will include online co-op play in its story mode, and will see his traditional meat-eaten powerups take him into one of eight different yet-undetailed forms (though I'm guessing the West still isn't quite ready for his effete kiss-blowing transformation from the import version of Bonk 2 [see 1:45 or so of this YouTube]).
Hit the jump for a better look into his new lovingly recreated world.
And the other fantastic news of the week (the impact of which was spoiled only slightly by paltry scraps leaked from the pages of the latest issue of Edge): Elite developer Frontier has announced Winter of the Melodias, a new sequel to its WiiWare debut game LostWinds.
Frontier says the game will continue to star tiny adventurer Toku and his wind-spirit guardian Enril, this time on a journey to investigate the disappearance of Toku's mother Magdi, this time aided by a new spirit that will give the two the power to change the seasons between summer and winter.
That new ability, the studio adds, will see "frozen Winter ponds and waterfalls become deep, teeming Summer pools and chambers in which to dive and unlock secrets," and that "enemies can be frozen or doused, and the very air itself used to form snowballs or moisture-laden clouds," while a new 'cyclone' ability can be used to "transport Toku, smash powerful enemies and even drill through the rocks of the Mistralis' diverse, richly interactive Chilling Peaks and Melodia City areas."
The original LostWinds -- one of Offworld's top 20 games of 2008 -- remains one of the best games WiiWare has to offer since the service first launched: a gorgeous and gentle puzzle/platformer that expertly exploited how the Wii Remote and Nunchuk could be used in tandem for mechanics exclusive to its platform.
Hit the jump for more screenshots and concept art from the new sequel.
A quick run-down to re-cap the flurry of colorful announcements from Nintendo this morning: the company will launching new models of the DSi this month -- adding pink and Japan's launch color white to the existing blue and black models -- and launching a new black Wii remote/MotionPlus and separate Nunchuk accessory this holiday season.
They've also announced that their updated fitness app Wii Fit Plus will be released October 4th at a lower price point of $19.99, for users that already own the Balance Board accessory.
Finally, the company says the Internet Channel -- a downloadable version of Opera that lets users browse the web via their Wii -- has just dropped its price from the usual 500 Points ($5) to free, and that all users that purchased the browser will be credited the 500 Points to be used on a Virtual Console NES game of their choice. The new, free browser has also been upgraded to support the latest version of Flash.
The North Austin office-park studios of Metroid Prime creators Retro -- should you be one of the few to make it past its reception area -- are a warehouse-sized web-work of narrow labyrinthine hallways, intersections temporarily roped off to ward against your catching any glimpses of current-project concept art.
Take that alongside first-hand tales of the original founders' predilection for near military-grade security systems, and it's not hard -- if you're actively forcing the metaphor -- to picture yourself inside the very game that put them on the map, and entertain the notion, at least privately, that maybe later, with the aid of some hard-won knowledge, you'll be able to loop back and gain access to those previously out of reach areas.
A peculiar mix of brushed steel and magenta-painted drywall, the hallways are lined with ephemera of the studios past decade of output: promotional Prime posters autographed in silver by the overseas internal team with which Retro partnered, but it's not until you hit the complex's cafeteria wall that the studio's true love for the franchise that fell in their lap becomes clear. There, you'll find a wall-sized rendering of the dread Metroid itself, just above the water-cooler refills, displayed in pixels made of hand-painted NES cartridges.
The story of Retro is the story of Metroid -- though that's not how its story began -- the two are now and forever fused. With the upcoming release of Metroid Prime Trilogy, all three of the GameCube and Wii Prime games collected on a single disc, what you're really receiving is a glimpse at a nearly a full decade of the company where I'm standing.
