Extend Every Extra is one of the simplest, most fun games ever. It's being made by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the man responsible for Space Channel 5, Rez, and the Trance Vibrator.
You play as a little pulsing dot and the goal is simple: blow yourself up and take a lot of targets with you. The longer the PSP gameplay buttons are held down, the more powerful the explosion. Add crazy backgrounds and some neat musical accompaniment, and Extra becomes a crazy little game that really deserves to be played.
Posted 7/27/06 12:58 pm EST by Greg Orlando in 3DS / DS, Interview, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360
Question: Do you use your whip around the house?
Answer: Mainly in the office. Actually, I?ve gotten whipped by my wife.
Now that is some quality interviewing right there.
Anyway, Play magazine recently packaged six of its interviews with game designers in one big feature on its Web site. Koji Igarashi (he of the whip fame, and also Castlevania); Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2; Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi; Earthworm Jim producer Benjamin ?BJ? Cholewinski; New Super Mario Bros. producer Takashi Tezuka; and Dead Rising's Kenji Inafune are all included here.
It's essential reading. So get thee to here.
It's always an interesting dilemma when game companies send out a preview copy of a game that is, clearly, a big piece of ... something ... on unbuttered toast.
Scarface: The World is Yours has been in development for a long time. So it seems odd and certainly problematic that the game's first previewable copy sent out to game critics has a lot of problems with it.
I'm not sure giving a game company a free pass is entirely the correct thing to do with a preview copy of a game. Yes, Scarface is unfinished (and any game developer will tell you that the final months before a game's release is often a time when magic happens), but it's disconcerting to note that a game more than two years in development still has enormous bugs in which players can take a newly hijacked car and drive it off a ledge, landing in a pool of water where the city of Miami floats overhead.
Remember this classic and very tasteful ad?
Well, apparently you can only call the marketing whizzes at Sony Europe insensitive cretins so many times before they issue their apologies and pull their ads from the market. "Whilst the images used in the campaign were intended solely to highlight the contrast between the different colors available for the PSP, we recognize that the subject matter of one specific image may have caused concern in some countries not directly affected by the advertising," Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe said in a press release. "As a result, we have now withdrawn the campaign."
WTF: Work Time Fun seems like one of those rather quirky Japanese-made games that was created by mental patients on a day when, sadly, no one received his medication.
The PSP game puts players to work -- literally. There are about 40 or minigames to play, some of which redefine fun, by which we mean they replace jubilance and excitement with tedium. For those who thought no developer would be crazy enough to make players put the caps on pens in an assembly line setting, we humbly present to you WTF.
Posted 7/11/06 12:30 pm EST by Greg Orlando in Games, PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360
Videogame makers share a strange sense of humor and possibly a hive mind, too. You might think it's odd that, say, THQ, Microsoft, LucasArts, and Electronic Arts are all having press events held in the San Francisco Bay Area in the same week, and you would be wrong. In the Bizarro World that is videogames, this is nothing out of the ordinary -- just like the lump you shouldn't have looked at because it's so normal or the e-mails you get from Nigerians offering you money because, well, it's their custom.
So. This week should be filled with many delights, new games, and surprises. Today, Microsoft will unveil some new Xbox 360 Live Arcade titles. Tomorrow, LucasArts and THQ are doing double duty at separate events, showing off such titles as Lego Star Wars II and Saint's Row (see below), respectively. Thursday, everybody is invited to Electronic Arts for a day of videogames and, possibly, sock puppetry. And by Friday, I think we'll all want to bask in videogames' pleasant warming glow while we prepare for at least one other event next week.
Someone at Sony's European advertising division had a bit too much of the "special" lemonade, it seems.
Here's an amusing story for a slow news week: Young man plays the very excellent game LocoRoco for the PSP, and notes that certain blob-like enemies are, in fact, black. He goes to his blog hosted on a videogame Web site and claims this is racism at play.
Other game Web sites pick this up, run with it. Commentary! Discussion! Debate!
Posted 6/30/06 1:33 pm EST by Greg Orlando in PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360
You could be heroes.
Activision is having a contest to find the perfect voice-alike for two of Marvel Comics' popular superheroes in Namor the Sub-Mariner and X-Men's Jean Grey. Winners of the contest will be flown to Los Angeles to voice their respective character and walk away with goodies including an Xbox 360, signed poster (by Marvel Comics' Stan "The Man" Lee), a copy of the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game, and playing cards.
Get surly, people...Namor is a horse's patoot in tiny green swimtrunks.
Posted 6/23/06 4:07 pm EST by Greg Orlando in 3DS / DS, GameCube, PC, PS2, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360
Perhaps the funnest game of this very minute, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy reminds us all that there's a small child inside of us, screaming to be let out. And, it need not be said, but this small child wants to stab a lot of Lego Stormtroopers in their coal black hearts with a lightsaber and then collect small widgets to redeem for unlockables.
As one of many Lego-style Star Wars characters, you can have a grand old time. The game is part adventure, part platformer, and pretty much all tongue-in-cheek. As Ben Kenobi, you can use your strange Force powers to disorient Stormtroopers by twisting their helmets so the eyepieces are facing the wrong way. As whiny farm boy Luke Skywalker, you can toss together Lego bricks to form an AT-ST walker to trample dunderheaded foes in your path.
