You may have missed this week’s episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon when Tim Schafer appeared to promote his new game, Brutal Legend, or you may have missed the entire week of Fallon’s show — no one could blame you for avoiding it. Either way, we’ve got you covered with the video above containing the segment (and nothing more!) with Schafer.
Schafer is, for those who are unaware, the head of Double Fine, developer of the upcoming Brutal Legend and the classic Psychonauts. Prior to founding Double Fine at the turn of the century, he had worked on both The Secret of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, among other things.
The appearance lasted only a scant five minute and hit on the subject of what inspired Schafer to come up with the concept for Brutal Legend and the process that led to the seeking of Jack Black to voice the main character.
Level 5 is a rising star in the world of Japanese RPGs with titles like White Knight Chronicles, but their foundations were built much earlier with games like the Dark Cloud series. Kotaku reports that the company is willing to return to their roots if they hear significant clamor from the fan community. “At this moment we don’t have a specific plan for a sequel in the Dark Cloud series,” said Yoshiaki Kusuda. “There are many staff members, including myself at Level 5, who have worked on the Dark Cloud series. There are some who decided to join Level 5 because they love the Dark Cloud series. So, if requests from users should increase in the future, we would seriously consider making it.”
Dark Cloud and its sequel were celebrated gems of the last generation that merged traditional RPG elements with city building game mechanics. Right now Level 5 is probably most known for the Professor Layton series in America, but bringing back old franchises seems to be a trend we’re seeing more of lately. Maybe Dark Cloud fans will see something on that front soon.
Squint your eyes, and the foursome of survivors in Zombie Apocalypse bear a more-than-passing resemblance to Louis, Zoey, and the rest of the gang from Left 4 Dead. And though it takes some cues from Valve’s co-operative first-person shooter, this downloadable game actually plays more like Smash T.V. — point the left analog stick to move, and the right one to unload on waves of reanimated corpses. Problem is, no amount of squinting can make this thing anywhere near as fun or addictive as the games that inspired it.
One of Zombie Apocalypse’s most readily apparent issues lies in the way it presents its action. Unlike other twin-stick shooters, the camera is positioned at an angle, which shows off the game’s decent 3D graphics, but the gameplay suffers as a result. Skirting around the zombie hordes is more of a pain than it should be, and things get really sketchy when dodging the countless airborne projectiles that pepper the game’s latter levels. Also problematic: the lack of contrast between the murky, harmless backgrounds and the stuff that will kill you — a major nuisance that brightly-colored, 2D games, like Everyday Shooter and Geometry Wars, avoid altogether.
If you managed to get a copy of Demon’s Souls ahead of time, you’re going to have to wait a bit to get the full experience. According to Atlus, the official servers won’t be going up until launch day.
That means you won’t be able to play cooperatively, see how other players have died, or force yourself into another player’s adventure and try to kill them. At least, not until next week.
Atlus passed along this information to ensure that “there’s as little worry, panic, confusion, mass hysteria, riots in the streets, armaggeddons, etc… as possible.” So now you know.
After two full games and nearly two years of weekly DLC, Queen remains one of the most glaring omissions from Rock Band‘s library of tracks. Sure, next week‘s DLC headliners Electric Six do an, uh, interesting cover of “Radio Ga Ga”, but they’re hardly a substitute for Freddy Mercury, Brian May, and the rest of the original Queen lineup.
It’s a good thing, then, that Queen fans won’t have to wait much longer for their time in the DLC spotlight. Harmonix announced in their community newsletter this morning that ten songs from Queen will be hitting the in-game music store the week of October 20. Included in the bundle will be the tracks below:
- “Another One Bites the Dust”
- “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”
- “One Vision”
- “Fat Bottomed Girls”
- “I Want It All”
- “I Want to Break Free”
- “Killer Queen”
- “Somebody to Love”
- “Tie Your Mother Down”
- “Under Pressure”
No word on how much the full pack will cost, but previous ten-song bundles generally ran around $15.99 (1280 Microsoft points). We’ll let you know once we’ve heard anything more from the developers at Harmonix.
The Boys of Summer
Why are worthwhile summer game releases so rare? We investigate.
By Jason Wilson
Batman: Arkham Asylum marked the end of gaming’s traditional annual summer drought. From now until sometime next year, a steady steam of major games should be available for hardcore gamers.
Gamers saw a flurry of major releases in June: Infamous, Prototype, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and others. But outside of a few download releases, such as Battlefield 1943 and Shadow Complex, the best option for gamers over the summer was to turn to their “piles of shame,” or to pick up games that they may have missed during last year’s busy fall months.
Gamers lament the summer. But does it have to be this way? Or is the market beginning to change?
DON’T GET TOO HYPED UP!
I had to give that warning before I began. Supposedly, Nintendo is going to hold a media briefing on Thursday in Japan (which means Wednesday night for everyone in the US). But will it be of any significance? Before you get hyped up, let me explain. Last year, this conference was announced in advance and was called their “Fall Conference”. There was a conference in Japan, followed by a US conference the next day which just gave us US release dates for things announced at the Japanese one. Thing is, Denise Kaigler from NOA said that they’re not having any conferences or anything this year. She works in Nintendo of America though, so who knows what is going on in Japan.
For all we know, this could be a small meeting or it could be the usual Fall Conference. We will just have to wait and see what happens. But once again, don’t get hyped up. Just forget about the Star Fox Wii rumors. Forget about the Zelda Wii trailer in October rumors. Forget about the Pokemon Wii console game. Forget about all of that, and don’t get hyped up. Great… now I’m hyped.
[Via Nintendo Everything]
You know what more games need to have? A hug button.
This inspiring innovation is introduced in the gameplay demonstration for A Boy and His Blob seen above. Okay, so maybe an “embrace command” wouldn’t pan out too well in, oh, say, Gears of War. Perhaps hugs are rarely appropriate in a video game context, requiring the presence of anthropomorphic gobs of slime to be considered acceptable. We don’t really care about all that stuff — all we know is that our hearts have been warmed to a point where eggs could be scrambled on our bare chests.
A Boy and His Blob gameplay video is remarkably huggable originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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