Brandon Boyer

Polytron officially announce Fez for 2010 Xbox Live Arcade release

After many months of (probably misguided, given its ever-clear XNA roots) speculation, Polytron has finally, officially announced that their space-warping 2D/3D debut Fez will be released for Xbox Live Arcade in early 2010.

Brandon Boyer

Oh, my darlin': Tim Schafer narrates the first 20 minutes of Brütal Legend

Tim Schafer gives IGN a full walk-through -- well, OK, of just the first seventeen minutes, really -- of Double Fine's forthcoming Brütal Legend (the second video is below the fold), but that's more than enough to fall for Eddie's Clementine: the guitar brought back with him to the Age of Rock which is now imbued with special powers.

Probably you'll want to hit that 'play hi-res': IGN's embeddables are annoyingly quite rigidly sized.

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Brandon Boyer

Hey, Montreal: see Bubblyfish, Aliceffeckt, more at the Toy Company 4 chiptune showcase

Coming July 11th to Montreal's Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT): Toy Company 4, an all-star chiptune lineup that will include formerly Boing Boing Video'd and Bit.Trip Core title-artist guest star Bubblyfish, the previously featured Aliceffeckt, and artists Mattfuzz, Cougarettes, Pero, with visuals by VJ Pocaille, DJ Erreur 404, and more.

Polytron's Phil Fish has also said that Kokoromi's early-Offworld featured game SUPERHYPERCUBE will also be on display, its full head-tracked stereoscopic form.

See the SAT's page for more information on the show and its lineup. [via Phil Fish]

Brandon Boyer

Video: Gamil Design's Donkey Kong, in post-its.

3M should really consider putting together dedicated pixel-kits for as well loved as they are as such. [via Blog Agog]

Brandon Boyer

TweetCraft: World of Warcraft's own in-game Twitter client

And then this happened: World of Warcraft got TweetCraft, its own dedicated Twitter client, available as a free download via codeplex, which lets you:

* Send/receive Tweets in-game (Immediate sending reloads your UI)
* Queue Tweets to send when it's more convenient for you
* Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
* AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement
* Extensible so that AddOn authors can register messages or events to AutoTweet

[via laughingsquid]

Brandon Boyer

Low-top, Hyrule: Kyozo Kicks' custom Legend of Zelda shoes

How do you follow the blog-hype over your own Noby Noby Boy and Grim Fandango custom painted shoes? With two pairs of Zelda shoes, one pair based on each particular shield from Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.

Creator Nicholas 'KyozoKicks' Tonks has gone a step further this time and is taking orders for either pair for any interested party: £125, available worldwide.

The Zelda Collection. [Kyozo Kicks]

Brandon Boyer

Train factor: chronicling the mis/uses of trains in games

The day's most awesomely cranky (and unfortunately several months silent) monomaniacally focused website: Torsten Kammer's Trains in Games, a website devoted solely to game developer rail mistakes, "partly because I like them very much, partly because no developer seems to care about them."

Examples? Crates in trains (nobody uses them), couplings on trains (they're frequently not modeled or otherwise missing), and tracks of the wrong width. Developers, consider yourself warned: you're doing it wrong, and the world is watching. [via Edge-Online]

Brandon Boyer

Benzido/Ryan Chisholm's space puzzler Evacuation released for iPhone

Long-time readers may recall Evacuation, Benzido/Ryan Chisholm's deceptively difficult airlock puzzle, as an early Gimme Indie Game entry in which your goal was to airlock-eject aliens by opening and closing color-coded airlock doors, while trying not to eject your own crew.

If you do remember the game, as I do, with fondness, you'll be happy to hear it's been ported to the iPhone, and is available now for a paltry 99 cents. [App Store link, via TIGSource]

Brandon Boyer

The War-driver's delight: WiFi treasure hunting in Aspyr's Treasure World

The most important thing you need to know about Treasure World -- the just-released DS game from developer Aspyr -- is that it, and by it I mean the actual DS cart that you snap in and execute -- is not the game, it is the tool. The game is out there, and by out there I mean the actual away-from-the-internet world, with your DS just the conduit that makes the magic happen.

The second most important thing you need to know is that it is essentially a little bit of magic -- which may come as less of a surprise when you remember that it's the brainchild of Justin Leingang, developer of the recently covered and similarly magical Glum Buster -- and one of the best prestidigitations we've seen someone conjure for the handheld, or any handheld, to date.

Here's the storybook premise: a Treasure Hunter -- he's the beardy one whose facial hair not coincidentally is teased into the shape of a star -- crash-lands onto Earth alongside his robo-sidekick the Wish Finder. In order to get the necessary fuel to re-power Halley, his starship, he needs you to help him collect star dust. In return, he'll trade you some of his vast collection of some 2500+ treasures, 20 star-dust-currency-units at a time.

How do you collect star-dust? By setting the Wish Finder to hunt for treasure by taking your DS out into the wild, where it can scan stars -- stars here meaning the thousands of now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals that canvas and cloud every major metropolitan city. The DS catalogs every signal it runs across, and will, at times, also find its own special Treasure locked away in that star, above and beyond the ones you can purchase from the Hunter.

That's the technical explanation: the practical one is where you flip your DS to scan and set out by car/bike/bus and hear it ping and clink like a slot machine jackpot as it wildly grabs signals out of the thin air around you, the Wish Finder's telescope swinging madly from new star to new star, unlocked treasure chests suddenly flinging open for a split second before moving on to the next.

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