While The Biller’s latest pirate game, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, has already reached the northern shores of the adventure-loving Germany, those of us who would, erm, prefer the English version will have to wait for March 26th – that’s when the game is to be published by Mamba Games.
Rockstar Will Be Rockstar
The hot topic of the week was Rockstar’s Tiger-like, sudden fall from PR grace. The boulder started rolling downhill on the 7th, when a thick and elaborate blog entry, “Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees have collected themselves” was published at Gamasutra. The post was a call to arms by the wives of Rockstar employees seeking to highlight the workplace injustices perceived to exist at the studio. The post gained considerable momentum in the press and ultimately produced a circulated internal response on the 15th.
But that’s not really all: Springing up like mushrooms after the rain, we have actually received a barrage of various reports more or less in accordance with the Rockstar wives’ complaints. To recap, we have already discovered the dazzling Red Dead Dedemption (on the left), very much awaited here at The Slowdown, to have had an extremely arduous development path. We have also heard how there are other issues afoot at Rockstar San Diego and how Rockstar quietly settled a telling class action suit with over 100 employees the April of last year.
In addition, we have read subsequent allegations of how Max Payne 3, in development at Rockstar Vancouver, is being similarly mismanaged. We’ve written about Max’s questionable Brazilian wax before, so you can consider that more fuel for the fire. Be as it may, yesterday, Rockstar finally officially responded, though in veiled and indirect fashion, to the swirling sea of speculation above.
Their weapon of choice: A series of wallpapers.
Rocketbirds: Revolution! Review
A finalist in three categories (Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Visual Art and Excellence in Audio, with the amount of nominations shared only with Closure and Trauma) in this year’s IGF competition, Ratloop Asia’s Rocketbirds: Revolution! is looking to be the early bird that catches the worm this year.
At the end of its animated intro, “OBEY” reads imprinted in upper-case on the sides of two massive missiles standing upright, shining and erect, at once establishing a poignant scene of the promulgation of violence and power.
What Could Have Been: Irrational Games’ SWAT 4 Dead, AKA Division 9
Irrational Games (formerly known as 2K Boston) has come out of hiding with a new home, a revamped website with a glossy Web 2.0 sheen and a fully integrated community component. Not only are there new forums for fans to sign up on, but the member account features extend to rest of the site, allowing users to comment on news posts and interact with each other and the developers themselves. As well as the the social network aspects there is a meta-game leaderboards system, based on points and achievements that can be gained by doing things like befriending other people and posting on the forums. As predicted, the company celebrates its legacy with sections on all its previous titles and promises of new content to fill them in the future.
In the anticipation leading up to the site launch it was expected that the studio’s unannounced project would be revealed, but it seems that we will have to wait a little longer for that, as Creative Director Ken Levine explains in his blog post. Meanwhile, he speaks of “secrets”, and introduces the theme for the site’s content this month: discarded ideas. The following weeks will focus on the concepts and assets that were created for games but were ultimately left out of the final product. Starting things off is a new podcast series, Irrational Behaviour, lead by former games journalist Shawn Elliot. The first episode features the developers discussing various ideas that were cut from games, like dogs in wheelchairs in Bioshock, as well as a previously unrevealed project that never passed the prototyping phase, a game called Division 9.
Game Informer’s ongoing coverage of Irrational Games’ rebirth fills us in on how Division 9 came about. What started out as SWAT 5 became something that eerily resembles Valve’s Left 4 Dead, a tactical shooter with a co-op play and endless hordes of zombies to face. Irrational’s design included a more strategic layer, with base-building and resource management, and the project was deemed too ambitious and lacking in appeal. Fortunately for fans, the studio put together a trailer of sorts that demonstrates their concept. The video shows footage from the raw, unpolished prototype that was put together in a week to convey the premise to the suits.
VVVVVV Demo Avvvvvvailable Now
Terry Cavanagh, indie developer behind gems such as Judith and Don’t Look Back, has returned with a new, non-free quirky game. VVVVVV is an 8-bit-like platformer, and is hard as nails. In a nutshell, you navigate a strange spaceship to find your companions, and the only controls you have are left, right, and changing gravity. The concept is a little reminiscent of the mechanics in games like Shift and And Yet It Moves, but it’s kept extremely simple here: you’re either falling down or falling up. You have to switch between running along floors and ceilings to get across rooms. There are spiked floors and strange creatures to impede your progress – and impede they will. I wasn’t kidding about how difficult it is. As mentioned, the game is not free like Cavanagh’s previous titles, it is being sold for $15 directly from his site. That’s a hefty price for an indie game, so there’s a demo to give an idea of how it is, playable either on Kongregate or as a direct download for Windows and Mac.
The chiptune soundtrack is also available to buy, for $4 from composer Souleye’s site.