I spent most of this long (Canadian) weekend preparing for drinking, then drinking, then recovering from drinking, but in between I did manage to find some things of interest:

A really slick live-action Halo ODST commercial. This says lots about the skill of the ad agency and nothing about the actual game, but it’s a pretty cool ad nonetheless. I’m sure more than one fanboy watches this and dreams of the Halo movie that could-have-been. While I did not think that what they did with the “WWII memorial” ad was very smart, this walks the line much more deftly.

Jim @ The BBPS has a review of The Beatles: Rock Band. There are many others like it, but this one is his.

A mod on NeoGAF had a total meltdown over Game Sharing. The short version: “Amirox” picked up a PS3 slim and was canvassing the biomass for a suggested list of 15 PSN games to download. After mentioning in an offhand way that he “Game Shared” PixelJunk Monsters, Dylan Cuthbert of Q-games called him a “git” on Twitter. Amirox proceeded to flip out over 20+ posts, self-righteously declaring that he would Game Share all of Q-Games efforts now and forevermore for this horrible transgression; thus illustrating a classic case of Entitled Gamer Syndrome. While he is technically correct in that he doesn’t need to pay for PJM, by way of Sony’s sharing setup, he couldn’t have come off as a bigger asshole. Remember kids, NeoGAF is for lurking, never for posting. Because it is run in part by crazy people.

“You shall not take my steed, sir.” Threevue found a funny video of a guy who’s Prius was about to be reposessed… while he was LARPing. Ah yes.

Some freaky SnapDragon/GigaPan-style image zooming tech demonstrated by Sony to Engadget. You never know if Sony is planning on using this stuff they show in the near future or not, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. I’d like to see a Monkey Island-style adventure game developed with crazy zoom details.

Videogame name generator. I look forward to Remote Lego Encounter, Aquatic Juggalo Attack and NBA Ninja in Crazyland.

Oh and lastly, PAX ’09 happened this weekend. I didn’t go on account of this whole unfortunate having-a-regular-job situation. With the exception of the Giant Bombcast, I am unhappy with the dearth of podcasts that have leaked out. Maybe it’s just me, but very few folks in the videogame enthusiast press seem to have had their shit together for this one. ListenUp still hasn’t posted their Thursday night event.

(In North America, anyways – the patch already dropped in Japan and Yurop. Why do they stagger game patches like that?)

I’ve been waiting for this one myself, purposefully putting off playing Eden until this patch hits. Much like PixelJunk Monsters (and my attendant whining to the creators), I love the game, but find it a tiny bit on the difficult side.

Actually – strike that. Eden is really not all that hard compared to Monsters, but it really feels like it should be more relaxing. The nice floaty physics, deep house vibe, and trippy colour palette all scream “chill out game*”, but that damned timer oscillator keeps you moving in a slightly frantic way that mars the overall experience. If you’ve played Eden, you know what I’m talking about: you start to notice the thing blinking at you, so you begin looking for time crystals, miss a jump and fall 45 fucking screens down, cursing all the way. (In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’d like to see a no-timer mode, with trophies disabled. Like the no-fail party mode in Rock Band. I understand the point of the timer for gameplay reasons, but it’s just too short.)

What the patch released today does give us:

• slightly tweaked new control scheme (optional I think)
• new multiplayer camera (most welcome)
• new continue system to spawn at last collected Spectra (although this kills trophy awards, to “preserve the pride” of those who did it without the new system)
• large time crystals will now greatly replenish the oscillator (halfway)
• and probably some other stuff

Dylan Cuthbert also announced on the official PS.blog entry that there will also be an Eden “Encore” expansion forthcoming, in the same vein as Monsters.

*I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you are stoned, between this and stuff like Fl0w and Everyday Shooter, the PlayStation Network has you covered.

Hello Ryan,

Heheh, your mail almost made me lose my tea all over the PC keyboard.

You’ll be pleased to know that one thing we will add to Monsters in an upcoming patch is a difficulty setting menu – you won’t be able to use the online ranking (that wouldn’t be fair) but you can advance on any difficulty you like… even expert (which yes, is harder than the default setting). The patch will be free.

As for Eden, well… that’s way too easy a game to make it any easier, surely???!
At least in co-op you can reach out and catch your betrothed if she falls, the veritable juliet to your romeo so to speak.

However, we do have lots of ideas for the expansion pack as the controls are too much fun to waste on just one set of game rules. I’m sure we will try and add a more namby pamby mode for the “lighter” people out there.

Regards

Dylan

So there you have it. And now he has shamed me into improving my technique in Eden.

TO: dylan@q-games.com
FROM: nerfgun@citizengame.ca
SUBJECT: cores, soft and hard

Dear Dylan,

You are killing me slowly and ruining my relationship. Ok, maybe that’s a bit harsh. You are slightly maiming my psyche and irritating my fiancée.

The problem is your core. It is too hard. You take this core of hardness and apply it to whatever strange collection of superhip Japanese elves that you have within your employ. This results in fairly amazing games that are priced very low, and churned out within an extremely reasonable amount of time on the PSN. And I love you for it. But, you must realize that not all of us contain such a hard core; perhaps it is a firm core, or merely a non-squishy core. Surely you would like to cater to those who’s core is not a triple-latticed carbon arrangement, yes? I speak of PixelJunk Monsters and Eden.

You see, the aforementioned fiancée (oh how I hate that word – but you try and work the term “betrothed” into casual conversation, and see what looks it gets you) is quite hooked on Monsters. She still picks it up like a relay runner grabbing a baton in lap 5. Problem is, I’ve seen her try and conquer the same level, several dozen times, only to hear the now-familiar shriek of anguish quickly followed by that cute xylophonic arpeggio that accompanies abject failure. And then I have to go and console (no pun) her, and assure her that she is not stupid, but rather that the game is very hard, everyone says so, and she shouldn’t take it personally. I point out the word “hard” on-screen, which is the area she’s in, on the island – Toki or Tiki or whatever, I forget – but this is cold comfort. It’s just crushing her.

Another example. Eden. This game is rad. Yes, rad, totally radical gnarly awesomeness. It’s like a physical manifestation of what a graphic designer dreams about in the tub after popping a Xanax. But goddam, it’s also really hard! Betrothed won’t even go near it. When I mentioned that there was a new PixelJunk that had recently come out, she bolted from the room, panic-stricken, the way a horse does after hearing a gunshot. Such is the mental pain that has been inflicted.

Sure, Eden starts off nice and easy. You swing your weird little grimpy critter around on a tether and collect techno-pollen, sprout techno-plants, and acrobat your way higher to grab the techno-trophy. All fine and good. Things are explained in helpful little tooltips for the first one or two techno-gardens. But just when you feel like you’ve got a grimp on things, out comes an evil hexagon to cut your rope and send you plummeting 12 screens. Or an evil octagon with heatseeking missiles. Or a plant that fires you into the stratosphere. And the timer! Crikey! (Sorry, oscillator.) It makes sense on the levels with no enemies but, great ceaser’s ghost, that shit gets downright stressful later on.

All I’m saying is, there’s this feature I want you to look into. You may have seen it in other games. It goes like this:

CHOOSE DIFFICULTY

EASY
MEDIUM
HARD

Or in your case, you might consider something like:

EASY
MEDIUM
HARD
CUTHBERT

I’m not one to typically pick Easy. Like, at all. Being a longtime player of games with the video, choosing Easy is a shameful path that would haunt me to my grave. I’ll take my lumps. But Betrothed, she just wants to see the next island after a mild challenge, not be repeatedly crushed beneath the iron jackboot of your insidious notions of balanced and even gameplay. And I have to live with the consequences! After 15 stabs at Paku Paku, shit goes down. That’s all I’m saying. Just think about it.

Cordial postscript,
Nerfgun

p.s. I would encourage you to take advantage of the sixaxis motion sensing capabilities, and automatically enable a lower difficulty mode, should the game detect that the controller has in fact been hurled across the room shortly after losing.

Eden seems slightly less abstract now, by a micron. As it turns out you are playing a bit of pollen, sweeping through this 2D, procedurally-generated forest, making things grow. Except, your bit of pollen can swing around like Spider-man, and cause branches to grow ahead of it’s path. I think. Oh and it’s got co-op. Very smart. Looks like 3 players in the video above.

Q-Games has been pretty successful with their PlayStation Network experiment thus far. The mandate was, as I understand it, to build four games with 6-month development windows, 1080p graphics, and fresh gameplay. While PixelJunk Racers didn’t do anything for me personally (and yes I gave it a fair shot), Monsters was a sublime Tower Defence game, and one I still play all the time.

I wonder if Otograph is doing the music on Eden one as well.

The generation of the “leaves” and other structures looks almost like an animated postscript file; those shapes have a very flash/vector appearance about them. Some freaky Cell things going on there.

With the ridiculous amount of time I’ve put into Monsters, Eden will be an insta-buy for me, although I doubt right now that it has the same replay appeal. Nonetheless I am a sucker for trippy, peyote-induced visions of electronic entertainment, and PSN has got me more than covered in that particular regard.

Q-Games has done some really interesting stuff in the DLC space lately. PixelJunk Monsters is a huge hit, coming as the only credible “tower defence” type game on consoles that I know of. The art style of Monsters bugs me, it looks a little too much like bad CorelDraw art in places … although I’m told the game is highly addictive. PixelJunk Racers gets no such praise: that game exists just to see how tiny you can make cars in HD, near as I can tell.

Here’s a video of the latest in Q-Games PixelJunk series, called Eden:

Now this is my kind of thing. Bizarre, visually distinct pseudo-2D art with quirky gameplay, lots of procedural animation and trippy colour schemes. They say Eden makes extensive use of the Cell processor to generate these visuals – whatever, I’m just looking at that little dewdrop flinging himself hither and yon and I think, I want to try this.

Full write-up on Dylan Cuthbert’s presentation for Q-Games is at Gamasutra. He also mentions that DLC expansions are coming for Monsters, which should make the addicts happy.