The people at Bungie are famous for putting obscure Easter Eggs into their games. Halo's creators have packed the massive sci-fi shooter franchise with all sorts of references and secrets, and fans love finding them.
But sometimes, Halo's little secrets are so obscure, nobody ever sees them.
A tipster—who asked that we not use his name—pointed us to an Easter Egg in the special edition of Halo: Reach that we believe nobody has discovered yet. While it's possible that someone somewhere has stumbled upon it, of course, we couldn't find anyone talking about it on the web anywhere.
Halo spoilers follow.
The limited edition of Halo: Reach, released in 2010, came with an ID card for scientist Catherine Halsey, an important character in the world of Halo and the creator of the AI bot Cortana. While some people noticed that something was up with the image on the card, nobody noticed one strange secret: if you take a blacklight to it, you can see a strange photo that's sort of half-Halsey, half-Cortana that looks like a blue, Cortana-ish version of Halsey.
Here's the card:
Now take a black light to it and...
Blue Halsey! Looks like Cortana! Cool, right? We'll forgive you for not finding this one, because really, who owns a blacklight?
Music is enough of a puzzle already. You've got your parts, your sections, your structure. Then, you have to make those parts fit a into whole, and get them to make sense together. Say, wouldn't that make for a fun game?
As it turns out, it would. Enter Musaic Box HD, a game that's been out on PC for a couple years now as well as on Android, and was just released on iPad in a newly up-res'd version. The game won the Excellence in Design Award at the IGF in 2009, and it's no wonder—this is a well designed, lovely puzzle game, and one that's uniquely musical.
In the game, you're working your way through a book filled with music-box puzzles. Each puzzle lines up with a famous melody like "Yankee Doodle" or "Alouette." You're given a series of blocks, each of which correspond with either the melody, beat, countermelody or bassline. If you tap the piano roll at the bottom of the screen, you'll hear the melody. But you'll have to use that to determine where on the grid the piece should go.
This is cool for a number of reasons. For starters, the arrangements of the tunes are a lot of fun. Interesting countermelodies, kicky beats and fun basslines all give the classic tunes a sort of Hooked on Classics vibe that I really enjoyed. The puzzles are also a really cool mixture of sound puzzle and spatial puzzle. The pieces must fit together like Tetris pieces, so you'll have to get creative about how you re-arrange them to make sure they all fit. And once they do, the screen will glow and the full arrangement will play.
At first, I worried that Musaic Box would be too easy, but the pieces of music quickly became much more challenging. Long compositions like "Czárdás" will require you to keep track of a lengthy melody, but a puzzle-piece that's only, say, a bassline will require you to really use your ears to properly place.
As much as I'd like to laud the specific strengths of Musaic Box's design, when it comes down to it, it's just a lot of fun. Sure, this game is right up my alley—if you're not much of a music head or you don't like puzzles, this might not be the game for you. But the creative design, charming art, lovely musical rearrangements and head-scratching challenge make this one a winner. Plus, there's that low-low price of free. (Though you can buy significantly more songs for a one-time in-app purchase of $2.99.) This one's easy to recommend.
I loved Thomas Was Alone, the minimalist platformer released last year by Mike Bithell. The hilarious narration, memorable characters and awesome music defied my expectations I had after first hearing about the game and I was glad to see Thomas find a home on Steam. I'm never going to stop wanting for more people to play it. So it's great news that Thomas Was Alone will becoming to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.
The jumping-block game will support CrossBuy, meaning that you'll have it for both devices after buying it on one. The PlayStation edition will also feature a new director's commentary mode, and a new DLC episode with a new mechanic, voiceover by Danny Wallace and music by David Housden. Given that the voicework and music were both excellent in the original release, those are fantastic additions.
Thomas Was Alone joins indie darlings Super Crate Box and Retro City Rampage on the Vita. And Hotline Miami is on its way there, too. Say what you want about Sony's portable but it's turning into a great little avenue for indie games to reach wider audiences.
Sit back and watch two decades of video game graphics flash before your eyes. YouTube user drloser333 has uploaded a video from French site NoFrag that unfurls the graphics of more than a dozen first-person shooters, from 1992's Wolfenstein 3 to 2011's Battlefield 3.
Did the FPS get better-looking? They have at least become way more realistic, But maybe you're more of a fan of older, more abstract styles?
The call to action is the battle cry of the marketeers, a modest collection of words crafted to grab the potential customer's attention and send them charging their credit cards for whatever is being sold. I'm not sure if Butterscotch Shenanigans knows me or just stumbled upon this accidentally, but I will buy anything marketed with the phrase "Shoot Animals Out of Your Face." Anything.
Including Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny, now available for iOS and Android. It's an action adventure game in which your character, a suave Indian man and pug owner named Hardik, finds himself caught up in a battle between the gods. Somehow his monocle becomes imbued with the power to shoot animals out of it.
You aren't just shooting animals out of your face—you're shooting some 40 different animals out of your face, collecting items, fighting bosses, traipsing through endless procedurally-generated levels and pausing now and again to play with your pug, because pugs need attention. There's a challenging four to eight hour campaign here, and it's only $.99.
None of that extra stuff even matters though, because "Shoot Animals Out of Your Face."
This is Mars: War Logs, a game I had no idea was coming, but evidently was announced back in December. The fact this is a console downloadable (both XBLA and PSN, it'll also be available on PC) is intriguing to me because this trailer is promising a lot of stuff normally associated with boxed goods.
Some folks look on this as Rage meets Mass Effect, given the third-person perspective. I think the melee combat and countering calls up a little Assassin's Creed. Setting, of course invites Red Faction to the discussion. There's a perk/skill tree to give the game its RPG cred, too.
Mars: War Logs will come out some time this spring. Color me interested. The trailer doesn't say how long of a story you'll be given, but it does push what's commonly expected of console downloads. The game is by Spiders, published by Focus Home Interactive.
The odds should've been against Assassin's Creed III: Liberation. It starred a woman—specifically the half-black, half-French heroine Aveline du Grandpre. And it was an exclusive on the PlayStation Vita, a system that many people see as a sadly under-supported platform.
But Liberation shipped a very strong 600,000 units, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. Sure, that number doesn't amount to much when compared to the Call of Dutys or Halos of the world. But it puts the lie to the corporate reasoning given for the inexhaustible supply of square-jawed Central Casting white guys who wind up starring in most video games.
But, to me, Liberation's biggest success isn't sales. Right now, it's the best example of how to craft a character descended from African heritage in a video game. The game takes the historical moment where the action happens and finds ways to integrate the experience of being a mixed-race woman in 18th Century New Orleans into a playable adventure. Tricky but very well-done.
Curious about what went into making Aveline so great, I e-mailed Jill Murray, who worked with the Bulgaria-based Ubisoft Sofia dev studio as a writer on the portable Assassin's Creed. It's not just me who thinks Aveline's story was memorable. Murray, along with co-writer Richard Fareze, just won an award for Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing from the Writer's Guild of America. (It's got an award-winning soundtrack too.) In the interview below, she talks about the research that went into the game, why the attitudes keeping more games from having more diverse characters suck and how she wants to write herself out of a job.
Kotaku: At what point in the game's development was the decision made about Aveline's ethnic make-up? From the very beginning of design, or was it when the story was being fleshed out, presumably a bit later?
Jill Murray: Who Aveline is and where she was from were important to the team in Sofia from the very beginning, long before I or even Richard joined the project. They did their research and decided from the beginning that a woman Assassin of French and Haitian descent would be a compelling character. They were right!
Kotaku: I pointed out some of the historical tropes that show up in Liberation, like the tragic mulatto, slave revenge and the Back-to-Africa movement. Was it coincidence or was it a conscious decision by you and the other developers to work those elements in there? Did you and the team do any kind of research in the name of authenticity?
Jill Murray: Personally, I am unevenly read, and my academic background is in Theatre Production, not English or cultural studies. In theatre, our approach to text was with an eye for how to bring worlds and characters to life, rather than for the sake of analysis itself. Consequently I don't have a strong vocabulary of tropes and conventions, and continue to approach everything from a practical standpoint, looking for the best way to learn about people and understand life by making things.
It would have been a mistake to attempt to reflect the entire eighteenth century black experience in Aveline all by herself; she's an individual, not a people or an issue. So, we looked for other opportunities to represent different points of view through the characters she meets. The result is an array of men and women trying to survive and carve out their own destinies in diverse ways. The story of Jeanne's kidnapping and life as a placée is recounted in diary entries. Aveline helps abused slaves, meets a man who has no territory he feels he can call home, locks horns with a soldier who has opted to fight for the English in exchange for his freedom. Each of these characters speaks for him or herself.
The formal research Richard and I did was primarily into the official documents of the era that directly impacted life for our characters— particularly the Code Noir, the French legal document that lays out the rules of slavery in French territories at that time. I also read a lot of slave narratives from different eras to get a sense of the variety of experiences and reactions people had, as well as their use of written language.
Often, people will ask me "did you interview any actual black people?" This is a more complicated question than it seems on the surface. I think that people really want to know if we actually care what black people would think, or what their real experiences are, or what their ancestors went through, compared to how history is recorded. The simple answer is yes. We are aware that colonial history was recorded by colonizers, and that it is inadequate to the task of representing the genuine experience of slaves, native people, and a host of others denied a voice in recorded history. The more complicated reality is that there is no one living today who knows what it felt like, in their own body, to live in the eighteenth century. If you want to really delve into authenticity, we also don't have ready access to young women political Assassins. At some point, a character must be invented—a responsibility we approached with enthusiasm, curiosity and, I hope, compassion.
That said, of course we talk to people informally all the time! At work, at school, over drinks, as one does as an alert and social writer, friend and colleague, personally interested and professionally nosy about the lives of others. I also have people in my family of Haitian and French Canadian descent, and I cannot look into the eyes of these toddlers I love and do anything but try create something that in some small way might help build a world in which they can grow up not feeling like they need to stab something. All I can do is try to be an ally. I hope it's working.
Kotaku: If people were intrigued by what they experienced in Liberation's plot and characters, where would you direct them to get similar stories?
Jill Murray: Aveline's story is first and foremost an Assassin's Creed story, so I would invite them to play not only the other Assassin's Creed games, but also have a look at some of our other media, in particular the excellent comic books by Karl Kerschl and Cameron Stewart, The Chain and The Fall.
…The concept that we don't need to try to create diverse characters—that if it's right for the story, it will just happen. Of course it's not going to just happen.
Kotaku: There's been a lot of talk about diversifying the protagonists of video games along gender and racial lines. You've been part of a lot of such threads on Twitter. What frustrates you about the current state of racial and gender representation in the medium?
Jill Murray: Two things frustrate me, and together they frustrate me doubly by existing in parallel, when they should cancel each other out. I'm glad you asked this because I'll be addressing it in detail in my Twitter-frustration-inspired GDC talk, DIVERSE GAME CHARACTERS: WRITE THEM NOW!
Essential Frustration #1: The fear that "diverse" characters are risky and might offend or alienate players by their simple inclusion—that including them requires a magic touch, special bravery, a trembling sensitivity, or a mandate to ignore sales. (Liberation is selling very well, thanks for asking!) In fact, creating "diverse" characters is no different than creating any character, and I believe that those who struggle with it need to address deeper issues within their own creative process. A writer or designer needs to be able to dig deep, research, and find the humanity of the people they invent. It should be exactly the same process whether the character is white, black, comes from planet Krypton, lives in the future, or is a sea creature. (Sure, sea creatures aren't people, but they'd still need to be relatable.) I strongly believe that if an audience can't connect to such a character, it's not because women, brown people, old people, queer people, or any type of character at all doesn't belong at the helm of a game; it's because the creator didn't dig deep enough to find a way to connect with that character. A good writer should be able to make you weep for, laugh with, even aspire to be an amoeba if necessary. Blaming a character for failure is like blaming a hockey stick for losing the game—a hockey stick you made with your own hands, to use in a game of your own invention. I call shenanigans.
Essential Frustration #2: The concept that we don't need to try to create diverse characters—that if it's right for the story, it will just happen. Of course it's not going to just happen. If it did, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The reason it doesn't just happen is contained in my first frustration. It's necessary to fight these assumptions, and stand up for our characters. If we believe in them, we have to rise to the occasion and show ourselves and the people we work with how to bring them to life successfully. But this does not require magic, scary effort—it's effort anyone can put in. It's fun, it adds variety, and it makes a lot of players feel good. It's more than worthwhile and we should definitely try to do more of it.
Kotaku: What's your big takeaway from the experience? What do you wish there were more of?
Jill Murray: What I always want more of, are actual game mechanics used to communicate point of view and experience. I want to strip everything down to its mechanical essence and add back only the words necessary to round out the experience. This is the "show, don't tell" of video games—put as much of experience as possible in the hands of the player. Basically, I want to run myself out of business.
Just when you're ready to write off the Android gaming community's good taste, a game like ShockPanda's Cubes Vs. Spheres sneaks onto the charts, reminding us that there are discerning gamers on the platform.
Not that there's anything wrong with buying Ruzzle a couple million times, and heck—one of the top games for the past several months has been Minecraft Pocket Edition. Obviously there are Android gamers out there that look outside the Google Play splash page for their fix. It's just those Where's My Disney games have also been hanging around for quite a long time, and show no signs of leaving anytime soon.
Instagram, with all its hipster filters, can make anything look retro. But you know what, North Korea really doesn't need Instagram. It's already as retro as you can get.
Still, Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder is in Pyongyang, uploading photos to his Instagram page, points out TechInAsia.
Explains Guttenfelder on his Instagram page: "...the local service provider, Koryolink, is allowing foreigners to access the Internet on a data capable 3G connection on our mobile phones. In the past I could post geolocated phone photos to my Instagram feed by turning my online laptop into a hotspot to link my iPhone or iPod touch by wifi. But, today I'm posting this directly from my phone while riding in the back of a van in Pyongyang. The window onto North Korea has opened another crack. Meanwhile, for Koreans here who will not have access to the same service, the window remains shut."
Filters or not, Guttenfelder's photos are fantastic. They provide a look the world really hasn't seen at an extremely guarded country. Other press, such as AP'sJean Lee are also uploading to Instagram. If you're on Instagram, both are definitely worth following.
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Besides mecha anime, video games also feature some of the most awesomely-designed armoured fighting vehicles. Japanese games—mostly shooters—tend to dominate this field (sorry MechWarrior), so narrowing down our selection to Japenese mecha was an obvious decision from the beginning.
Deus (Xenogears)
Federation Assault Suit (Cybernator)
GEKKO (Metal Gear series)
The First Boss in Assault Suit Leynos II
YF-21 from Macross Plus (featured in various Macross and Super Robot Taisen games)
Prototype NEXT (Armored Core series)
Z-01Z Lancelot Albion from Code Geass (featured in Another Century's Episode: R)
Jehuty (Zone of the Enders 1-2)
So, which Japanese video games do you think have the best mecha? Tell us below, and don't forget the visuals!
Instagram, with all its hipster filters, can make anything look retro. But you know what, North Korea really doesn't need Instagram. It's already as retro as you can get.
