Brandon Boyer

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• Posted Please release me: <em>Mario, MinMe</em> & <em>Mini Squadron</em>s, <em>DigiDrive</em>s & <em>Captain Successor</em>s to Boing Boing
  It's a sure sign it's gearing up to the holidays when the games start pouring in thick and fast, and this week saw the high profile release of two just as highly-anticipated (and by all accounts excellent) sequels: the renaissance stealth of Assassin's Creed II to the dirty Delta zombie-slaughter of Left 4 Dead 2, but there's one return that's captured more of my time than all the above....
• Posted Please release me: <em>Modern Warfare, Spore Islands</em>, and <em>Half Minute Hero</em>es to Boing Boing
  For most, there will have been only one game released this week (and that most includes a number of major publishers, who, gun-shy from the competition, have pushed their own releases to Q1 of next year): Infinity Ward's return to the Modern Warfare franchise they laid down in 2007. Modern Warfare 2 [Infinity Ward, PC/PS3/Xbox 360] The developer has twice courted controversy in recent weeks, one for the very unfortunately devised viral video gag (for which IW has yet to offer a formal apology), and the second with early leaked video of what it surely intended as its most emotionally charged level -- a scene in which an agent embedded with an arms trafficker is present for a civilian massacre....
• Commented on The Running Man: behind the sketchbooks of Adam Saltsman's <em>Canabalt</em>
  Thanks for the correction madamluna! I tried tracking it down further, but you were as far as I could get!...
• Posted The Edge Case: Indies Rally To Raise Copyfight Awareness to Boing Boing
  The story of Tim Langdell's relentless and darkly fascinating trademark fight against any and all users of the name 'Edge' has been quietly storming under the surface for the better part of this year. In a nutshell: Langdell's Edge Games, a UK-based publisher in the earliest days of home computer games, has tirelessly struggled to maintain ownership over the word against any would-be competitor, regardless of discipline, growing more convoluted and ludicrous the farther down the rabbit hole you go (the Chaos Edge blog is the most damning at documenting just how bizarre it's become). For nearly two decades, it seemed to work. Edge Games successfully struck settlements with movie and comic book companies, further strengthening his grip on the four-letter word, but then Langdell attempted to swat down what should have been his easiest target: tiny French indie developer Mobigame, and their iPhone debut, titled, of course, Edge (pictured left). After successfully managing to get the game removed from the App Store, Langdell butted up against what could prove to be his downfall: the collective, unshakable 'might' of the indie game community, who've coalesced around the Mobigame struggle and mounted reams of evidence and circumstantial quotes about Langdell's business practices in his early days, seeking to shred the paper tiger and expose what little claim Edge Games has over the trademark. Now with the legal might of no less than Electronic Arts behind them (who recently filed this scathing suit against Edge Games after Langdell seemed to be targeting EA's Mirror's Edge, using much of the evidence gathered by the indies), and with Edge Games now having successfully convinced Apple to remove Killer Edge Racing from the App Store, the indie community has served its latest sardonic volley against Langdell, rallying together to show support for 'the fallen' by incorporating the name into their own games. Below, then, a gallery of all the participants' parodies. Whether the 'troll day' has any effect other than situation-awareness and to what end the community will take its efforts remains to be seen, but either way it's a heartening reminder of the size and solidarity of the indie games movement....
• Posted The Running Man: behind the sketchbooks of Adam Saltsman's <em>Canabalt</em> to Boing Boing
  Adam 'Atomic' Saltman's one-button action-opus Canabalt (covered earlier in a previous column) will likely go down as 2009's biggest viral surprise -- to no less even than Saltsman himself, who admitted at this year's Austin GDC Indie Games Fest to squandering and then scrambling to capitalize on the success the game near instantly saw (the first 120,000 players the game captured by its second day, and subsequent 650,000 by the week's end, saw none of the cross-indie/Twitter/iPhone port promotions subsequently rolled out as quickly as possible). But there's almost no one in the industry that hasn't taken serious note of its acclaim and wondered what magic formula there might be hidden in its design that can be replicated elsewhere. And so -- in service to fans, would-be devs and established designers alike -- Saltsman has provided us with his sketches and notes, illustrating each leap to logical leap he made in finishing that first version. Interestingly -- though maybe not so surprisingly, given that the game was created for the Experimental Gameplay's 'Bare Minimum' challenge -- the documents show a game more complex than what we eventually received, with its anonymous runner able to pull off sliding ducks on top of his now-singular jump, and 'edit' and 'profile' modes obviously stripped from the game (indeed, the entire game seems to now live inside what Saltsman originally had planned as a 'quick race' option). And so, what follows is the necessarily brief notes and calculations for a necessarily brief production, neither any less worse off for it: let us know if you crack Saltsman's magic code. [Canabalt fan art at top by Georgia 'garlicbug' Hurbgljjsa, via Pauli MadamLuna Kohberger's BBS, via Saltsman]...
• Posted Please release me: <em>Left 4</em> an IGF onslaught to Boing Boing
  Though for die-hard RPG nuts it'll have been a red letter week with the release of Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, it hasn't been enough to wean me off my daily regimen of pushing further into the Borderlands and compulsively playing through the two levels that make up the Left 4 Dead 2 demo (above, now fully released to the public) with each character, hoping for just one more scrap of rarely-triggered dialogue to more fully flesh out just who these characters are that I'll be spending most of the winter with. But it's without any facetiousness that I admit that there's one game release this week that's particularly pricked my ear:...
• Commented on The EXAMINE'd Life: Keeping Interactive Fiction Alive
  JJR & semiotix: like everything else, IF command parsers have come a long, long way in the past 25 years. You'd be surprised (as I was) at what you can try and succeed to do, and the shape of what...
• Posted The EXAMINE'd Life: Keeping Interactive Fiction Alive to Boing Boing
  As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure. It's a genre that -- if you grew up gaming -- probably makes up some of your earliest memories: my own definitely revolve around waiting impatiently for the TI99/4A's cassette deck to finish screeching its way through loading Scott Adams' Adventure series (now playable online here) and pondering the etymology of "pieces of eight", continuing through my teens to the unmistakably British worlds of Graham Cluely's Jacaranda Jim and Humbug (the games that first taught me the word 'whinge'). And it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition), and the tireless work of people like Emily Short, but it took an Indiecade finalist and an iPhone app to hook me back in, with a short-list of the top games to try included below the fold....
• Posted 15 Dots Enough: Alaskan Military School's low-res game demake videos to Boing Boing
  With gaming's current trend toward the nostalgic taking us on Bit.Trips and Extreme invasions, and with indies giving us de-made versions of modern classics, it more or less follows logically that we'd eventually see the imageat top. Recognize it? Likely not off the bat, but you'd be surprised what a little motion and original sound can do to a 15-pixel panorama. Below the fold, then, the answer to the riddle plus several handfuls more in the lowest-res high-res gallery you'll ever witness, courtesy UK animation group Alaskan Military School and their viral videos for just-completed British games festival GameCity....
• Posted Please release me: <em>Borderlands</em> and <em>Bomberlands</em>, <em>Hook Champ</em> and <em>Earth Dragon</em>s to Boing Boing
  Were it any other week I might be lamenting the lack of high profile retail releases, but as it happens, both the release of a demo for Valve's upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 and one other game have been eating up nearly all my spare time (and a good deal of non-spare-time as well), that game being: Borderlands [Gearbox, Xbox 360/PS3/PC] Gearbox's promise to deliver the first person, dungeon crawling shooter that Hellgate: London was panned for falling short of appears to have gone without a hitch -- the result is one of the most compulsive plays I've accidentally fallen into since I first thought I'd see what this whole 'Fallout 3' deal was. Take that game and add in a dash of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (for its less overtly emphasized narrative structure, though its own barren post-apocalyptic world is more Mad Max wildstyle to the former's dreary Chernobyl hot zone) and you've got a game that's split into a series of "one more go" pursuits, as you push yourself past that next hill and then the next, hoping to stumble across that next, procedurally generated, best-gun-ever, which in turn leads you to pushing on to just see what that one is capable of....
• Posted What the Alternative Press Expo Taught Me About Games to Boing Boing
  San Francisco's recent Alternative Press Expo was the last place I expected to turn up videogames, but it took less than a few minutes of circulating amongst the self-published sprawl until I stumbled on my first controller. I suppose it shouldn't have been as much a surprise as it was: the phoenix-like rise and return of indie/self-published and otherwise bedroom-coded gaming has followed near identical trajectories as indie music and publishing, it's just taken a bit longer to get here. But surprisingly, few indies have fully mastered the art of cross-media, whether by lack of interest, resources or knowledge, even though all of the necessary tools and channels are already directly in their hands....
• Posted Thrashing, mad, metal: the art of Double Fine's <em>Brütal Legend</em> to Boing Boing
  Though it's nearly impossible to find a tidy way to sum the work of LucasArts adventure vet and Double Fine head Tim Schafer -- with a catalog that ranges from de los Muertos noir to deep-psyche introspec-/explora-tion and now to a heavy metal heaven/hell (depending on your attitudes toward the genre's aesthetic) -- one undeniable trait rings consistently true through all. Schafer and his stellar team of artists and writers know character, and put character above all, a philosophy that lets players navigate some of gaming's most preposterous landscapes and peculiar conceits always feeling entirely grounded by the essential humanity around them. Nowhere is that more evident than in the ancient Rock realm to which you travel in Brütal Legend: an epically monumental world inspired by the stormily apocalyptic vistas of classic metal album covers, now fully explorable and brought fantastically to life by the Bay Area studio. And so, following the short trailer below that gives you a taste of how Legends's world would eventually form: a look at the original conceptual design behind those vistas, and especially the characters that inhabit them -- every bit as instantly recognizable (in their leather and spikes, worn-through denim and low-top All Stars) as they are awesomely ridiculous -- from Double Fine artists Scott C, Peter Chan, Nathan Stapley, Levi Ryken, Razmig Mavlian, and Mark Hamer....
• Posted Please release me: <em>Rock Band</em> iPhone, <em>Small Worlds, Eufloria, LostWinds, Space Invaders Extreme</em> to Boing Boing
  This week has seen a number of excellent and much publicized and high profile releases -- Rockstar's conversion of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars from DS to PSP and Gearbox's post-apocalyptic co-op sandbox shooter Borderlands -- but no game has eaten as much of my time this week than a downsized iPhone version of a rhythm favorite. Rock Band [Harmonix/EA Mobile, iPhone] EA Mobile's downsized port of Harmonix's rhythm-standard enters an App Store dominated by clones and competitors (the Tap Tap series chief among them), and what sets Rock Band apart from the rest is a subtle but massively important distinction. With Harmonix's access to a staggeringly large library of original masters, the iPhone game is able to do what none of the others can: make the music itself reactive to your play. By comparison, Tap Tap plays as a transparent overlay on top of any given track: keep your hands away from the screen and the music cheerily plays on, unperturbed by your quiet failing. That Rock Band gives you its now embarrassingly too-familiar skronk on every missed note is key to sustaining the illusion that you're participating in the performance, even just by slapping a thumb onto a glass sheet....
• Posted Like Ghibli Barfing Rainbows: the Art and Motion of Capybara's <em>Critter Crunch</em> to Boing Boing
  Even in their inauspicious mobile-focused beginnings, it was clear from the start that Toronto indie Cabybara Games had a keen eye for pushing the visual boundaries on whatever platform they were given. The pixels of the handset and later iPhone version of their original debut puzzler Critter Crunch popped aggressively with a pastel palette against its warmer autumnal backgrounds, an art direction that helped earn the game its fair share of mobile awards. More recently given the chance to bring that sensibility to the PlayStation 3, though, the team took the risk of not simply cheaply upscaling their vision to the wide-screen, but to give the game a top to toe graphic overhaul and create a full HD-res 2D animated game. The results -- put plainly -- are basically staggering, with the soft and surreal wonder of Studio Ghibli-esque backdrops underscoring the hectic hand-animated critter-bursts on top, and are even more impressive when you learn that they're not the work of (as you might assume) a field of tirelessly slaving outsourced animators. In fact, nearly all of what you see in the game is largely the output of just two compatriots (or -- as Capy co-founder and president Nathan Vella terms them -- '2 radical dudes'): Nick "Qiqo" Stephan and Sylvain "Sylve" Coutouly, respectively responsible for character animation and background/world map art. Documenting just what heights a tiny team can reach with vision and proper passion, then, posted here is a rare look into the conception and evolution of the world of Krunchatoa and its creatures within (and a special bonus look at main character Biggs invading other Sony/PlayStation classics), alongside the theatrical-quality animation produced by Capy to surround the launch of the game, available now on the PlayStation Network (with the launch of its free demo version due tomorrow, Oct. 22nd)....
• Commented on Keeping Point-and-Click Adventures Alive
  Matthew: I do plan to write a column on just that, if only because I keep meeting people that haven't yet played Photopia (or realize that they can quite easily on their iPhones through Frotz). Day Vexx: I can't be...
• Posted Keeping Point-and-Click Adventures Alive to Boing Boing
  As alluded to last week with the release of Amanita's hand-drawn opus Machinarium, the era of the point and click adventure -- which reached its pinnacle throughout the 90s thanks to genre-defining works by LucasArts, Sierra and Cyan -- seemed all but forever over in the decade following, as PC prowess pushed first- and third-person to the fore. But a new wave of adventures has recently arisen, ushered in by the re-introduction of more cursor-y consoles and handhelds (think: the literal pointing and touching of both the Wii and the iPhone), the proliferation of digital distribution channels (lowering the barrier away from gun-shy publishers unwilling to invest heavily in 'nostalgia'), and a dedicated core that's never let the classics die (via grey market ports of Lucas's SCUMM engine to basically every piece of hardware with a display device). And so, a brief introduction to those new adventurers, and a quick guide to re-playing the classics in new ways. Ben There, Dan That / Time Gentlemen, Please [Zombie Cow, PC] Apart from Amanita (covered exhaustively last week), the top team keeping the spirit of click alive is the UK's Zombie Cow -- founded by Dan Marshall and aided by a small crew of consultants, most notably co-writer and -designer Ben Ward. The pair are, as you might have guessed, the stars of Zombie Cow's first adventure outing, Ben There, Dan That, a game that manages to infuse the best of indie spirit (lean, economical, and highly stylized art and design) with the best of what LucasArts taught us made these journeys so great: razor-sharp wit and dialogue, self-aware and -referencing (and, here, Lucas-classics referencing as well) at every turn, never afraid to break the fourth wall and let the player in on the jokes. The duo have followed in that same tradition with the recently released Time Gentlemen, Please a sequel that can be demo'd and purchased either from Zombie Cow itself or via Valve's Steam (BT,DT remains a free download). Both come highly, highly recommended, and serve as a nice tide-over while you await the studio's third chronicle: Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican....
• Posted Please release me: <em>Brutal Legend, A Boy and his Blob, Machinarium, Gridrunner Revolution</em> to Boing Boing
  This week's great games
• Posted Everything but the Game: Behind the Sketchpad of Amanita's point and click <em>Machinarium</em> to Boing Boing
  Machinarium: point & click!
• Posted My generation: How Indie Game Makers are Embracing Controlled Chaos to Boing Boing
  Game devs take control of chaos
• Posted Everything but the Game: the Art and Motion of <em>The Beatles: Rock Band</em> to Boing Boing
  Art and Motion of The Beatles
• Posted Why I'm going to Indiecade (and you probably should, too): Pt. 3 to Offworld
  For my final entry this week on why I've decided to go to LA for the Oct. 1-4th Indiecade conference/festival (and why you should come, too): a quick and dirty run down of all the games that have been...
• Posted Touch me I'm slick: Daniel Johnston rolls toward Laurie in <em>Hi How Are You</em> to Offworld
  There's a certain segment of the population that'll will need no introduction to Daniel Johnston -- whether they came to him via the recently released Devil And... documentary, or (more likely) through the Kurt Cobain-sported T-shirt that broke Johnston...
• Posted HCUFS & VMACHIN: the unlikely combo that brought down <em>Scribblenauts</em> to Offworld
  'Brought down's obviously an overstatement, but the Occam's Razor trouble with creating a game in which players can do "anything" is that they'll use that anything to skirt the obstacles you place in their way. In Scribblenauts's case, it's...
• Posted Gimme Indie Game: the psycho/schizo puzzling of McMillen/Good/Karpel's <em>Time Fcuk</em> to Offworld
  I knew Time Fcuk was after my one true heart on hearing the first few melancholic melodica triplets in its title screen theme, which are nothing if not lovingly lifted from Carter Burwell's score for the Coen Bros.' Fargo,...
• Posted <em>Beatles</em> Hell: No Fun's quarter-note dodger <em>Norwegian Wood</em> to Offworld
  The new best Beatles game that isn't the other one: Montreal's No Fun Games has created Norwegian Wood, the world's first fab-four bullet-hell dodge 'em up. The point? Escape the synchronized notes escaping from each corner's guitar/bass/sitar/mic as the...
• Posted Offworld Gallery: Say Hello to Hello Games to Offworld
  Less than a week away from announcing their first game, a little introduction to Hello Games: you may have spotted -- especially if you were on the GDC Austin show floor -- Hello's recent appearance in Edge Magazine, where...
• Posted Formerly known as: <em>Dyson</em> opens pre-orders, ask for new name to Offworld
  IGF grand prize nominated strategy game Dyson has just partnered with digi-distro Digital2Drive to open preorders for the game ahead of its October 20th release, and at the same time are announcing a new contest to let fans give...
• Posted A little <em>Love</em>: Quel Solaar's impressionist MMO gets test client, character to Offworld
  The best news I've heard in quite some time: Eskil Steenberg's abstract painterly MMO Love is prepping a beta release possibly "just a matter of days" away, and has let loose a test client to gauge performance on various...
• Posted Retro Remakes: What Offworld readers want to Offworld
  No one emerged a clear winner in our straw poll to see which games Offworld readers would like to see remade, though a common thread did appear to emerge. System Shock was actually the first game to garner more...
• Posted Retro Remakes: Minter releases <em>Gridrunner Revolution</em>, <em>Space Giraffe</em> bundle to Offworld
  As promised, Llamasoft have just released their Gridrunner Revolution -- the latest iteration of the long-running psych-shooting classic -- alongside a new demo to experience it gratis. In celebration of the launch, the 'softies have also bundled together Revolution...