Feb
22

Super Meat Boy Confirmed for XBLA: Beats Wii off the line.

by on

The much anticipated Super Meat Boy, developed by  Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat,  has been confirmed as an Xbox LIVE Arcade release.  The more interesting bit of the news is that it is beating the Nintendo Wii and PC releases out of the gate.

The XBLA version will also have online play, which the WiiWare version will be missing. Probably due to the craptacular nature of Nintendo’s online gaming platform, but that is pure speculation on my part. Well that and I never miss an opportunity to talk shit about Nintendo’s Online Gaming.

On a somewhat related note you can hear a lot more of Tommy Refenes talking about indie game development as a regular host of the TIGradio podcast/livecast at TIGradio.com.

Source: destructoid.com & ign

2 Replies

Bayonetta Chapter Dolls: I opted not to go with a butt joke.

by on

Guided by a mysterious hand to the world maps of our hearts, these Bayonetta chapter dolls showed up on flickr recently showing off the fine craftsmanship of flickr user “n‑moto”. He describes their construction as follows:

Anyone familiar with the game Bayonetta (by Platinum Games) will recognize these “chapter dolls”.

I sculpted these figures using Super Sculpey and finished them with acrylic paint, gold leaf, and assorted craft store finds.

The figures themselves derive from the actual game, in which they were used to mark world map locations. Below is some of the concept art n‑moto used to create these real world equivalents followed by some high res shots. Be sure to check out a ton more shots on the flickr page. Oh and play Bayonetta, it’s good.

1 Reply

Untimely Review: Alien Pyramid Challenge

by on

Alien Pyramid Challenge is a little pixel art platformer from developer Richard Peacock. You take on the role of a little green alien who has somehow become trapped in an ancient pyramid. Is there a mummy, you ask? You’re damn right there is a mummy. He doesn’t really chase you around the pyramid or anything, instead opting to give you the VIP Tour while talking about how he had “this”  or “that” created for his afterlife amusement. Unfortunately the tour also comes prepackaged with some of the worst comedic dialog ever which attempts to  thinly guise the real purpose  of giving hints and clues to the puzzles and their mechanics.

Gameplay

The gameplay is pretty traditional and doesn’t try to do anything new. You can jump one tile high and you can pick up stones and move them around. These are the fundamental mechanics of the game and are used to solve all the puzzles. Most of the other quintessential staples of the genre also make appearances like; moving platforms, spikes, and springs. All of which are combined in various ways to create a somewhat challanging set of puzzles.

The difficulty level of Alien Pyramid Challenge is one of the more obvious shortcomings of the game as it is fairly low. That isn’t to say that the difficulty isn’t scaled up well, rather the game just ends before it manages to get to a higher potential level of challenge. Which brings us to another shortcoming of the game; the game clocks in between about one and  two hours and could stand to be a little longer.

As far as bugs, the only real glitch I encountered had to do with collision of carried stones. If you carried one up the ladder off center and ran into a platform the stone would go right on through but you would collide with the platform and become stuck because the game would not allow you to realign yourself. You were then forced to back up until the stone is completely free of the platform and realign yourself to take another run at it.

Saving! Alien Pyramid Challenge lets you save progress during a puzzle. You simply hit your left shoulder button to create a new checkpoint instantly, and then if you screw the pooch and need to back it on up you can hit the right shoulder button and load the save. Some parts of the game would have been pretty frustrating without it and not like “challenging” frustrating but rather “I just put this stone in an obviously stupid place and now I have to restart the whole level” frustrating. This isn’t to say it is a total life saver, literally, if you fall on spikes and wind up dead you will have to start the whole level over irregardless of your check point.

Audio Visual

It’s a pixel art game and and you really don’t get the feeling it is intending to impress with visuals and as such, it doesn’t. But it does do what it needs to in order to communicate its mechanics and thus is adequate for the scope of this project. The sound effects are equally rudamentary and generic. That said, similarly to the visuals, they don’t really feel out of place in the game and don’t detract from the intended experience. The music of the game was retrieved from the public domain, it was created by an artist named Grey Johnson who may or may not have any idea that it is in the game and it isn’t bad.

Summary

I just randomly picked this game out of the pile on a whim Saturday, it actually went up on Xbox Indie Marketplace back in September 2009. The game is short, between one and two hours, and is visually nothing to write home about. That said, it is a pretty decent little platforming puzzle game and when its price, 80 Microsoft Points, is taken into consideration it is a fairly easy to recommend to fans of retro platforming puzzle games. The rest of you should check out the demo first.

Leave a reply