Last year, Super Mario 3D Land came out and turned the 3DS’ sales upside-down, assisting in the increase of units sold by miles. Many 3DS owners who have already played through both 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 have one question on their mind though, with that being “what’s next?”. Yes, it is the age of demand, and Nintendo have learned this the hard way.
During a recent Q & A session, Iwata finally enlightened us with news on DLC, and why both Mario Kart and 3D Land could have a bright future ahead.
we anticipate that “Super Mario 3D Land” and “Mario Kart 7” will bring in a substantial profit in the next fiscal year and the year after that. On the other hand, we will be able to do various things in the field of digital business. Up until now, once consumers who had bought a game got tired of it, they would never play it and it would never draw public attention again. Even if the game had the sales potential to other new consumers, they rarely actually bought it because the consumers who already had bought it would never talk about it again and the game would be considered an old one. Having said that, what if we could provide add-on content through the network? As I referred to before, for example, this is the idea of supplying new stages to Super Mario users who want to play the game more but have completed the game and lost interest in the existing stages. This will not only give us new profits but will lengthen the life of a product, in that it will never be out of fashion and can keep attracting public attention as long as many people play it.
We all knew that Nintendo would eventually jump on the DLC train, but it appears that Iwata wants add-ons to be handled with finesse. If you think about it, Nintendo already offer full games as it is, and that’s the way extra content should be handled. Give the consumer a full game, and have them pay for extras to keep interest high some time later, rather than locking away half the experience on release day. I’m sure we are still a while from seeing all of this take shape, but you have to admit that there is a lot of potential here, and it will be interesting to see if Nintendo stays on track with this type of plan in the future.
I’m usually pretty slow to get into things. I’ll dip my toe in, take a few tentative steps and test the water, but if I’m not grabbed soon enough, I’ll get out of the proverbial (or literal) pool, dry off and go find something else.
In the case of indie games, I fell asleep in a chair next to the pool, and woke up to find I’d fallen in somehow. And I liked it.
Clumsy analogies aside, I should have seen my sudden fascination with indie games coming: last year, I sunk a total of three hours into Dead Island, five into Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but Edmund McMillen’s side project, The Binding of Isaac, kept me going for more than 45 hours.
Circle of Snake (Dewald Hein, Duncan Little, Ryan Keable, Trevor Dikes)
Also going for more than 45 hours was this weekend’s Game Jam, a worldwide gathering of indie game devs who volunteer to be locked up for two days and powerhouse their way through the game development process. On Sunday, I went along to check out the unanimously-impressive fruits of the Melbourne chapter’s intensive labour.
Run by the Independent Game Developers Association, and taking place across 48 countries simultaneously, the Global Game Jam gives indie developers of all levels a chance to display their talents to the world. Participants are tasked with prototyping a game from scratch within 48 hours, built around a common theme. The Melbourne event saw 107 Jammers create 27 games over the weekend, at La Trobe University in Bundoora.
Ave Imperator (Andrew Sum, Dan Clayton, Guy Noble)
Feeling guilty for being well-rested, I arrived on Sunday afternoon to an atmosphere of post-deadline calm. The only evidence of the sugar and caffeine-fuelled chaos that I assume preceded the 3pm cutoff was the energy drink cans scattered around, the wearily proud looks on the faces of many a Jammer, and of course, the quality of the games themselves. I found myself pleasantly surprised at their level of polish, and the enduring good nature of the participants. I mean, I get the grumps after a single sleepless night.
But doing something you’re proud of can turn the sourest of moods around. Despite the condensed development time, the teams had plenty of reason to be proud of their creations – the old adage that diamonds are formed under pressure holds true.
This year’s theme was presented to the teams on Friday as this single image.
For those not in the know (including myself), this is an Ouroboros, an ancient symbol which signifies the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. So loaded with meaning is the symbol that it spawned games about phoenixes, zombie cows, bacteria fighting their way up the food chain and isometric shapes looking for love.
The interpretations of the theme were as diverse as the gameplay styles they were applied to. Whether you’re chasing an ever-higher score as a literal rolled-up snake, finding a suitable location to lay eggs as a platforming chicken, shanking ancient Roman Emperors in a side-scrolling brawler, or protecting baby turtles from dragons in a type of sliding puzzle game, there was no shortage of ingenious designs within the same confines.
Wondering how that simple image of a serpent eating its own tail could trigger so many wildly different games, I sat a couple of teams down and probed their sleep-deprived minds for some insight.
One team, calling themselves Magic Spatula, interpreted the Ouroboros somewhat literally – specifically, following the cannibalism angle.
Team member Jayelinda said that thinking about the consequences of animals eating their own kind led to a game about the notorious Mad Cow Disease – a result of cows being fed other cows.
In their game, aptly titled Mad Cows, players must click and drag healthy cows out of the way of the zombified mad cows looking to feast on them. Rubbing two cows against each other produces offspring, with the aim of reaching a target population of healthy cows.
Cruelly entertaining is the fact that the most effective strategy for keeping the mad cows at bay is to regularly throw them a sacrifice, while your herd busily breeds in another paddock. It’s suitably zany, and even at this early stage exhibits a scalable model that could conceivably expand into a downloadable, arcade-style game for platforms like Steam or XBLA.
Soul Mate (Pouya Aflatoun, Jennifer Sandercock, Clinton Shepherd, Michael Theiler)
Pursuing a more peaceful meaning of the same symbol, the game Soul Mate puts players in charge of that most basic of urges – the urge to find a mate. Characters in-game are shaped as squares, circles or triangles; coloured red, blue or green; and have one of three mating calls. As a character made up of these traits, players must find their perfect match amongst the other basic shapes out there, which you will have one trait in common with and two differences – after all, opposites attract. Finding your mate will extend your lineage, as you play as the child, whom you then have to find a mate for. Each generation, you have thirty seconds before your biological clock expires.
Soul Mate offers a quite complete interpretation of the Ouroboros: there’s the symbolic aspect of the cycle of life, but a more literal manifestation can be found in the level design – the game takes place inside a slowly-rotating, circular landscape, with environmental assets that indicate a day/night cycle.
With a theme based on cycles, it’s not surprising that the most famous of endless cycles – the “chicken and the egg” conundrum – raises its head. Omelette Boris tackles this with finesse, and its polish as a platformer/puzzle game led to it being voted Best Game of the Melbourne Jam by the panel of judges.
Omelette Boris (James Greenaway, Matt Scorah, Sean Affleck, Ivan Neeson, Tom Greenaway)
The game casts players as a chicken aiming to reach the perfect spot to lay her egg, which you then must guide safely back to the starting location. It’s not as easy as it sounds though. As the chicken, players must first set up a safe path for the egg, which can only roll around, and can’t fall very far without breaking.
Using similar ideas of spawning young, the game Hatch turns offspring into obstacles. As a turtle, players must move around a grid and throw eggs at dragons to clear the level. Each egg thrown spawns a new turtle, which follows the movements of the parent. The puzzle comes from working out how to maneuver around while protecting all the young at once.
Impressed with how far apart the final products branched from such a simple initial concept, I enquired with the team behind Hatch about how they developed their idea into a workable game in such a short time frame. Team member Sam says they played “Idea Ball”: throwing a ball around a circle, with whoever holding it pitching (quite literally) a basic idea, before passing it on. Then comes the task of narrowing it down to a few achievable concepts, and by Saturday morning – about fifteen hours into the Jam – have a basic prototype on which to iterate.
Hatch (Andrew Brophy, Harry Lee, Chad Toprak, Josh Platt, Sam Wong, Guy Noble)
To prepare for such an intense working environment, the group held a couple of practice Jams of their own, with around fifteen of the Game Jam participants. Those fifteen branched into several projects during the Jam, including Hatch, and an underwater shooter called Aqua Battle.
The “kill or be killed” mentality of the fight to climb the food chain was the basis for Aqua Battle, which its creators call “an evolutionary shooter”. As a microscopic organism, you swim around an open environment killing fellow life-forms for dominance of the little pond. Interestingly, your health/progress is measured by your creature’s size – a kill will make you grow, while taking damage shrinks you.
Aqua Battle (Derek Pritchard, Mike Blackney, Ariel Magnes, Benjamin McDonnell, Guy Noble)
The large team behind the two games won the award for Best Teamwork – not surprising, when they all insist the Jam is far more of a collaborative effort than a competitive one. Derek, working on Aqua Battle, says that during the first few hours there’s an air of secrecy over the projects, but once everyone is off and running with their own ideas, there is nothing to be gained from guarding the prototypes. Everyone has their own specialties, and sharing skills and knowledge between teams is encouraged.
It may be structured like a competition, but ultimately, the goal is collaboration. The real point of the Global Game Jam is to practice and demonstrate your skills, network with other professionals, indies and enthusiasts of the field, and while it sounds like a cliché, just have fun!
The universe of the xenomorph has had some less than stellar times as of late. The movies have plunged into oblivion thanks to the vs. Predator crossovers and despite the sneaky DS release of the critically praised Aliens: Infestation, most remember the series in gaming form in the same way as the films : Aliens vs Predator.
It seems that something of a return to form is on the horizon, as Gearbox Software and SEGA’s latest keeps pumping out promising trailers and news. Despite a delay pushing the game back from Spring to Fall 2012, Colonial Marines has got people excited about Aliens again.
In this CGI trailer we get an up close look at the marines and the xenomorphs coming into contact, all set to some highly atmospheric music (if you’re a bit of a film fan you may recognise the theme from Moon). Whilst there is no actual gameplay on show here it does bode well for the atmosphere of the game – here’s hoping that horrible claustrophobia and sense of impending doom will carry over into the actual gameplay.
It seems that there is no reason for fans to be ready to take out their wallets quite yet, because the rumors that have been circulating over the past few weeks about a new Xbox console being revealed at E3 this year are apparently false. Cedrick Delmas, marketing director of Microsoft France, shot down the rumors in an interview with CVG.
In the interview he simply said that he “is not convinced that things are happening this year,” and even went further to say that he is certain of one thing and that is “that there will be nothing new in 2012.”
He elaborated further stating “We are not here to deal with Nintendo and they are not there to fight against other manufacturers. Nintendo has placed itself in a different cycle, they advance at their own pace, successfully as we have seen with the Wii, and now it is their turn to present their innovation.” Now this doesn’t mean that Microsoft may not hint or tease something at E3 and expect to release something in 2013, which would technically make him correct by all accounts.
In a rather surprise acquisition, Sentai Filmworks has announced today that they have picked up the license for Zettai Karen Children, an anime which aired back in 2009. They plan on releasing the original 51 episodes as well as the OVA on DVD with subtitles only later this year.
While some may be disappointed that the release is being given subtitles only, at least the title is making its way overseas. For those who don’t know, Zettai Karen Children was originally a manga by Takashi Shiina and follows a group of three young girls with Esper powers that are among the strongest in the entire world and the intelligent Minamoto who must supervise as well as take care of them. The manga is currently still running in Japan but has not received further anime adaptations.
While the PlayStation Vita may be languishing with relatively slow sales in Japan, there is one game that would instantly sell a hundred thousand PlayStation Vita devices in the land of the rising sun and that title is Monster Hunter. In fact, a Sony official has even declared that a Monster Hunter Vita title would be released this year, despite there being no announcement from either Capcom nor officially from Sony.
In an interview with French Le Point, PlayStation France’s CEO Philippe Cardon said “The games available at launch in Japan do not correspond to the typology of the Japanese public. It lacks a particular game, Monster Hunter, scheduled for the coming months. Had it been there from the start in Japan, the story would have been different.” Could Monster Hunter revive the Vita in Japan? The answer is yes, considering how popular the series is in the country. Perhaps this is the best move for Sony to make at the moment, given their current situation.
It really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise at this point, but the new SSX title is going to be released with an online pass by Electronic Arts because that is just what they do nowadays. I mean, when you can stick them into single player games, ones with legitimate online gameplay are perfect to withhold.
Technically the online pass has not been announced by EA, but various videos of the game have been popping up on the internet, including one long video at Giant Bomb, that show the online pass mechanic is still in effect, staring at you from the bottom of the screen until you pay what you owe.
It appears that Square Enix fans may have a bit of a surprise waiting for them later this year. Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts producer Tetsuya Nomura was recently interviewed by Famitsu and in this interview he told the Japanese magazine that fans can expect a new Square Enix title sometime later this year.
He also teased at the end of the interview that “There is also a secret team working on an unannounced title, so there is a chance that some information about that will be announced this year too, please continue looking forward to these announcements.” For now that is all that has been said, but this is turning out to be a great looking year for Square Enix fans so far.
Over this last holiday season the Pearl Pink Nintendo 3DS was offered in North America as part of a bundle with Nintendogs, however those who still want to pick up this more feminine appearing device may still do so when it is released as a standalone package on February 10th for $169.99
Note that those who picked up the bundle a few months ago actually received a better deal, as the bundle was sold at the same price. Those in Europe and the UK will also be seeing the Pearl Pink 3DS on the same date as well as the Ice White version of the handheld which has yet to be announced for North America but one can assume that it will be announced in the coming weeks.
Fly With Me Developer: EA (Electronic Arts) Platform: iPhone (reviewed), iPad Release Date: 2nd February 2012 Price: $0.99
Overview
EA’s Fly With Me starts where games like Tiny Wings left off, using the core “tap to flap” gameplay and expanding on it to make a more rounded, fully-featured title.
Story
There is a short cutscene at the start of the game, describing the basic premise of the story. A hive of bees inexplicably attack a neighbouring birdhouse, bothering it’s feathered occupant, sunbathing in his garden.
This is where the game starts. In some sort of revenge, the bird decides to fly around eating said bees… and dodge obstacles… and trees… and pick up the golden stars and gears that float around each level, before flying through a vertical wall of stars and landing on your house’s perch. As you do.
Gameplay
As I mentioned, the controls consist of a very “tap to flap” mechanism. Each flap grinds down your stamina meter on the left of the screen, which you can replenish by eating bugs. If the stamina meter bottoms out you can no longer flap, and so plummet to your doom, and have to start the level over.
There’s a level progress meter displayed across the top which is useful for seeing how much farther you have to fly to complete the level, as well as seeing when a star is coming up. Stars are, of course, needed to unlock future stages.
There are obstacles that can stop you in your tracks, killing you instantly if you don’t avoid them or handle them correctly. There are also some helplful features, which are introduced as you progress through the levels, pushing you forwards and allowing you to conserve energy, or floating you upwards, giving you some more time to play with before falling to the ground.
You collect gears to eventually unlock a robotic bird, which makes the levels far easier, and the game also sports an in-app purchasing setup, offering to take your money if you fail a level a multiple times in a row.
There are 3 stages, each with 15 levels and numerous helpful and harmful features added as you go along. There’s also an infinite challenge level for each stage, and a purchasable “Kid Mode” which makes things easier for children; less baddies, that kind of thing.
The production quality of this game is off the charts, as I’ll explain below… that said, the game just isn’t that fun to play. With most arcade-stlye games, there’s a “feeling” they want to convey… with Tiny Wings, it was the feeling of soaring through the sky and keeping your speed up… with Angry Birds, it was seeing an entire structure demolish itself in a chain-reaction you set off. You get a feeling of being in control; your success or failure is all hanging on your skill at controlling your character on the screen.
In this game there isn’t any such “feeling” to draw you in. Most of the time you’re not soaring through the air, and even when you float into a gust of wind which carries you around the screen in loop-de-loops and such, there’s not any feeling of exhilaration, as it’s nothing to do with you. When you collect the stars and gears there’s no effect on the gameplay to reward you for it; if you happen to be going in the right route you’ll pick it up, and if not, then you’ll miss it completely.
And when you accidentally touch the screen when you didn’t mean to and smack into a tree or spiders web, then you instantly die. The same goes for running out of stamina. When the levels start to get longer, this can get real frustrating. Some levels require you to examine the placement of the various features and plan your flaps perfectly to even make it to the end. But this is a casual game… you don’t really want to be calculating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, here.
Audio & Visual
As flawed as the game design may be, the way it has been implemented has been top-notch! This is some of the best art, sound effects and music I’ve experienced in an iPhone game.
The pure liquid awesomeness of the vector art is a joy to behold. The backgrounds are detailed and atmospheric. The birds, bugs and obstacles are wonderfully rendered. All of the animations are solidly executed in a smooth, cartoony style, and really bring the game to life.
The music plays happily in the background, and the sound effects emphasize every action happening on-screen, making for a nice, pleasant overall experience. Even when you die, a nice little guitar riff introduces you to the “Level Failed” screen encouraging you to pick yourself up and give the level another go.
It’s just a shame the actual gameplay doesn’t fulfill all the joy and fuzzy-warm-feeling the production design promises. If I was rating this game based on Audio and Visuals alone, I would undoubtedly give it 10 / 10. Alas, audio and visuals alone does not a game make.
Overall
Some people may not mind the game’s flaws, or even forgive them considering the rest of the production is so wonderfully constructed. But for me, this game just doesn’t have anything to keep me interested. There’s no satisfaction in completing a level, picking up stars, or dodging the bad guys in this game, which, again, is a real shame considering the art and audio is so joyous.
The production values do their best to carry this game, but ultimately it’s hard to find a reason to keep playing.
