Broken Rules, the indie studio behind And Yet it Moves, is currently working on a game called Chasing Aurora. It looks lovely.
Calling it an "explorative 2D aerial action game about the dream of flight", anyone who perfected the "bombing" flight-and-glide technique from the Batman games should be at home with riding the wind across a level.
Chasing Aurora [Broken Rules]
Reader Adam has an idea. An idea for old-timey bottles of rum, bottled by Valve Corporation, and named for Admiral Kunkka, a hero from the DOTA series. It is a wonderful idea.
Those wondering, um, why rum, Kunkka's Rum is found in both the original and Valve's upcoming sequel, with units doused in it receiving a bonus.
Adam went completely over the top with this, even going to the trouble of buying a custom rubber stamp and actual bottling wax.
There are more pics on Adam's site.
YO-HO-HO…[adammcbeamish]
That's not a YouTube uploader's watermark, it's the name of the company that handled distribution of the console in India. And it's not an electronics firm. Shaw Wallace makes booze.
Primarily whisky and beer. So what was it doing moonlighting as a video game distributor? Well, in 1995, Indian authorities would slap an 80% tariff on anything like the Mega Drive being imported directly into the country, so Sega struck up a deal with Shaw Wallace to distribute to the consoles, which meant they could skip the tariff altogether.
Cheeky, but effective, and also technically legal. It also means I get to imagine the consoles being smuggled around the country in wooden whisky crates. And yes, I know it was all legal, but that's still way cooler than imagining regular delivery trucks.
Nothing will make you realise just how old this console generation is than today's Total Recall, which looks at the very first concept art ever put down on paper/computer for the project that would become Assassin's Creed.
It was put down in 2004.
That's eight years ago, and while a lot has changed for the series since then, a lot...hasn't! You can see in many images that they already had Altair down, a look that the first hero would then pass on to his descendants like Ezio and Connor.
The larger "portraits" were taken into the very first meeting about the project, while the image with a concealed blade was the first time the idea of the series' trademark weapon had ever been shown.
These images were so early that, at the time, the team wasn't even sure what they were making. In one image, with a boy on horseback, the artists thought they were rescuing the Prince of Persia as a boy, as it was their belief they were making a PoP spin-off.
There's even an image in here showing the main character as a female.
Every image you see here was drawn by artist Khai Nguyen, and every one of them was drawn in 2004. For reference, the first Assassin's Creed wasn't released until the end of 2007.
Assassin's Creed 1 Early Concept Art [Facebook]
That one's for you, Kotaku. Hope you're having a great Wednesday! Welcome to the open-thread.
If you've watched that video (and you should), here are some other things you might read and talk about.
And that's that. Have good chatting, y'all.
Just...look at this. LOOK AT IT.
The suit's not brand new, so you may have seen it before, at least in picture form, but seeing it in motion like this...wow.
UPDATE - Here's a longer video showing its creator, Anthony "Master" Le, putting the suit through its paces.
[thanks Chewy!]
You may not have heard of Electronic Arts, a boutique publishing label based in Redwood City, Calif. Well, I bet you will be raving about them once you pick up the "EA Indie Bundle" on Steam, the indie-friendly digital marketplace, unlike that Origin bullshit run by that place that screwed up the end of Mass Effect 3.
The Indie Game Magazine discovered the bundle was recently registered on Steam. It contains Shank, Shank 2, Deathspank, Deathspank: Thongs Of Virtue, Warp and Gatling Gears, and is currently live, for $20.98 (a savings of $13.96).
The offer ends May 9, so please, reach into those wallets and support independent games development. Thank you.
Excuse Me? EA Indie Bundle Registered on Steam [The Indie Game Magazine]
Here'sa a trio of official packshots for Hasbro's Transformers Generations Fall of Cybertron line, with Optimus Prime, Shockwave, and Jazz sporting the sexy Cybertronian forms they'll be wearing in Activision's next big bot game.
I was fully expecting the Optimus Prime to be the same one from War for Cybertron in a fancy new package. That would have been easy. Instead we get a whole new sculpt that's hopefully not as convoluted as the last one. And Jazz? Jazz is so awesome I could just tear him in half.
Want to see more? Check out Seibertron.com's gallery featuring the robots in display at last month's Botcon.
Guns were always a given for the next Call of Duty. Women? We really did not expect them.
And yet when I saw the game in action last week, there they were. Women. Two of them in the press demo alone! Ye gods.
I went down to Call of Duty: Black Ops II developer Treyarch's studio in Santa Monica to take a gander at the latest entry in the massively popular, multi-billion-dollar shooter franchise. (A franchise which has historically featured about as many female characters as you'd find in your average men's room.)
The demo the press was shown involved a protracted, exuberant bit of megadestruction in the city of Los Angeles. As our controller-wielding demonstrator shot and grenaded his way through the city, he was regularly rescued by a female pilot named Anderson who flew a high-tech VTOL aircraft. Sure, she got injured at one point and the player-character had to take control of her plane. But so what? That didn't make her any less female.
Then again, plenty of military shooters, from Modern Warfare to Battlefield 3, have featured female pilots. But how about a female Head of State?
"We have to escort the President to safety!" shouted a soldier early in the demo. And with that, the gruff, burly dudes started escorting... a woman in a pantsuit through the warzone. Wait: you mean the President in this game is a woman too? Yup.
After that, the developers showed us a demo of their facial-capture tech. In addition to showing a motion-captured male actor portraying a soldier in the game, they showed us… yet another woman, speaking lines and emoting and everything. She started fighting back tears at one point. "Look at me. I said I wasn't going to do this," she said.
Women everywhere! You'd almost think this wasn't a bro-tastic military shooter. (Almost.)
I asked Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia about the game's infusion of double-X-chromosomes. "There's a female character role in the game," he confirmed. "Not just the President and the fighter pilot; as we're working on characters and stories, it's something that we wanted to do. You saw the [motion capture] demo, and while that's not [her], there is a female character role in the game. We wanted to explore that part of storytelling. "
What part of storytelling is that you may ask? Why, the female part, of course. It's a whole other part. Of storytelling.
Call of Duty is known more for its popular multiplayer than its single-player stories. So, what about finally having playable female characters in multiplayer, a feature that the series has never included?
"We haven't talked about create-a-class in multiplayer yet."
Hmm. Results are inconclusive.
The first Black Ops bravely blazed a new path for women in games by casting Emmanuelle Chriqui as "The Numbers Lady." Specifically, they cast her lips and cigarette-holding hand, as she played a mostly faceless woman who read numbers into a microphone for about twenty seconds during the opening cinematic. This role earned her a Spike Video Game Award nomination in 2010.
It sure looks like Black Ops II is going to up the ante by including multiple female characters, giving them faces and names, and having them speak non-numerical dialogue.
Over at Grantland, the occasionally notorious but always thoughtful writer Tom Bissell has weighed in on The Witcher 2. He is… not impressed. In fact, after 6 hours with the game, he decided he'd seen enough.
"What?" you may blurt, spitting gravy flecks all over your laptop keyboard. "Six hours?? That's not nearly enough time to understand The Witcher 2!"
He explains his retreat via that pithy (and chuckle-inducing) quote up top. While I'm a big fan of the game, I can't say that I disagree with any one part of his review. It's almost as though it's possible to feel more than one way about something.
Clearly, The Witcher 2 managed to win me over in ways that it didn't win Bissell. As Jason and I discussed last week, the game gave me a "buy-in moment."
Tom clearly didn't have that moment. That quote made me laugh, though, since we've really all been there—if a game can't win you over in 6 hours, does it deserve another 6? Maybe not.
Colluding With Nilfgaard [Grantland]