Perhaps in penance for some past or future sin, I was made to languish in accursed Spokane for the weekend. Peals of grating static on the radio preceded a Tornado Warning as we entered the "city," conjuring images of the tin-roofed shanties so common there flung into the air, hopefully to land in some hospitable town. As I wove between biblically proportioned funnel clouds, it occurred to me that though I'd spent an entire post on games for the Cube I hadn't even discussed some of my favorites.
Fire Emblem is en route to the Cube in a form we'd actually recognize, i.e. tactical strategy, and has not been buried in some shallow grave while a hideous monster capers in its loosely draped, not-fooling-anybody skin. Starfox has returned in rail-shooter regalia plus co-op, overcoming fleets and spaceborne robots while his animal pals - rocked by precision enemy ordnance - burst into flames.
Paper Mario 2 was very nearly one of my top games, in a different mood or perhaps very late at night things might have been different. If you're already down with Paper Mario, or you're a recent inductee with the somewhat related Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, then I don't need to tell you that combining role-playing mechanics with straight-up platform gameplay basically rocks the fucking house. Screens of the game aren't bad, you can get a sense of the aesthetic, but if you'd like to see what it is to play a Saturday morning cartoon I really do recommend the video. The RPG style battles occur on a rudimentary set, something like a school play, and you can impress your audience to kick out special moves.
Tucked in the back left of the booth, on the side of a display facing away from their area, Nintendo hid a game called Odama. The genre given by the press kit is "military pinball," which is not actually a genre in any hierarchy I know about. You might be curious to know what that means, exactly. Coming across something like a pinball RTS, you have armies that exist in the playing field - these armies accomplish your will, excavating additional flippers and affecting the "board," i.e. the battlefield. Aside from the epic flippers and huge stone sphere - which I do not believe are drawn from historical Japan - the screen itself looks like actual terrain rather than a series of explicit targets. You have what amounts to a massive, magical pinball that can be used to crush enemy defenses and convert troops to your cause. What we were showed is probably a long way off, but as a concept it felt strong enough to belong in the booth.
They also announced their new console, although this didn't happen at the booth proper - it happened at some briefing thing before the show, which we typically don't attend. They called it Revolution, which as a word has been stripped of nearly all its power, ranking it somewhere between Wheat and Plastic. At any rate, all they said was that it was going to do something to the paradigm and that "if we thought of a console as something that hooked into a television and played games, we were in for a surprise."
The mind reels.
(CW)TB out.
infinitely late at night
(CW)TB
-Gabe out
Chronic Logic has a number of games, very fun games, you're probably familiar with their line of cult-status bridge building sims already - Bridge Construction Set, its predecessor Pontifex, maybe even their collaborate effort, the nVidia specific Bridge It. They did the intriguing puzzler Triptych as well as Word Peace, which matches their physics engine to word scramble gameplay. Rowrr.
The line you can trace through their catalogue is that they sew (what I believe is) a homegrown physics engine into different genres, and thus far the results validate the method. So, what about this - how about combining a full physical simulation with a platformer? It can be tricky to get a grip on your sentient little ball of tar at first - they recommend a gamepad for this purpose, and it's worth finding that old Sidewinder in the closet and dusting it off. A few minutes in, you'll have had an opportunity to see the game's unique character and see the surprisingly adept animation and foe design. They have a free demo and everything, you don't need to take my word for it. I'd really rather you didn't, actually. Just go download the Goddamn thing.
(CW)TB
Great post, you may or may not have had time to stop and take a look at Odama at the show. It was the one where you fight off an invading army via pinball. If you look in the rear ranks of the enemy army you'll see some big monstrosity with (you guessed it) a pair of bongos. Apparently when someone is playing this, player 2 will be able to hit the bongos in a rythmic fashion to spur on the morales of the enemy army.
Whoa, I hadn't heard that. I heard you'd be able to use the bongos to control the flippers, guess that shows how much I know.
(CW)TB
So, I went over to their site to find the good and proper link for it, only the game didn't come up in their list. Odd. I refreshed the page, and limited the list to only Cube games - still nothing. So I ran a search of the site, "Advance Wars," I see the older GBA titles which are dense with virtue, but not the new Cube title which burns with hatred for all life. To look at their site, it is as though the game never existed.
(CW)TB
