About Nick Santangelo

It didn’t rain in Seattle during PAX Prime earlier this month. It’s a little odd that the city didn’t get any of the precipitation for which it is so well-known. Stranger still, however, are the weather patterns in The Walking Dead that Telltale Designer Harrison Pink told Perry Jackson and I about when we caught up with him on the second day of the show. Zombie storm fronts, you see, are an accepted, regular occurrence in the game world. Unusual weather phenomena aside, Pink had plenty to share about the first Walking Dead season. So break out your shotgun umbrella and prepare to weather the storm.

You guys just recently released The Walking Dead: Episode 3. What has the reception of it been like? Are you happy with it?

Harrison Pink: Oh yeah, it’s been awesome. It’s blown me away. You know, you get so head-down on finishing an episode, after a while you get really myopic on it, and it just gets like all you can see are the flaws, like ‘Aww, we left that on the table. Awww, we really didn’t have time to fix that.’ So, I’m really glad that releasing to the world has been such an awesome reception. I’m really glad that everyone has been loving it slash hating it.

I felt like Episode 1 set up the story, Episode 2 kind of wanted to go for that shock value and Episode 3 really just wanted to hit it home to your heart. It felt like a nice middle moment to the whole series so far.

Pink: Yeah, that was kind of the idea. I mean, you know, Sean [Vanaman] and Jake [Rodkin], the leads on The Walking Dead had the story sort of planned out way in advance. Even before the first line of dialogue for The Walking Dead was written, they already knew how the story was going to end and sort of where the middle is and all the events that are going to happen.

So, these sort of events are the kind of thing you have in The Walking Dead. Right? Like these things happen in The Walking Dead, so people kind of knew going in what we could push it to, and so this is exactly where the halfway point makes sense in the story.

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It’s not a remake; it’s a reimagining, Majesco Entertainment Assistant Product Manager Pete Rosky told XBLA Fans at PAX Prime a moment before handing over the controller. Having taken a trip down memory lane with the original Double Dragon at Philadelphia’s Barcade only a month prior, I was in prime position to discover the truth behind that statement. As it turned out, Double Dragon: Neon plays remarkably like the game that launched the franchise a quarter of a century ago, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Wayforward Technology’s take on the series might have trouble impressing younger gamers, but the PAX demo was an enjoyable romp down memory lane.

Players take control of Billy and Jimmy, with their simultaneously awful and amazing hair and begin whomping on every street tough in site. There’s a fantastic new coat of paint on this aging ’80s muscle car, thus the subtitle, but every curve has that old familiar look and feel. The combat system has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve in the form of throws and special moves, but the kicks, punches and melee weapons are essentially ripped right out of the original. What is presumably either Billy or Jimmy’s girlfriend gets mercilessly slugged and kidnapped in the beginning and the duo brawl through those same old streets on a collision course with the original’s first boss, Abobo, who looks as if he’s sampled more than his fair share of steroids since his last showdown with the boys. And then you walk into a pagoda that turns out to be a spaceship that rockets Billy and Jimmy into space. That, as Rosky explained, is where Neon departs from the original. No kidding.

Bigger hair, bigger bosses, brighter colors and longer distance travel may or may not be enough to justify the reimagining label — you’ll have to wait for our forthcoming review of the full game for that ruling — but they certainly establish a new theme. It’s a completely silly and ridiculous theme, and that feels completely appropriate for an homage to an ’80s brawler that was a lot of things in its day, but never serious. That doesn’t mean the approach was an obvious one for the team to take, though.

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Alien Spidy is hard. I watched helplessly during PAX East as the game’s public relations representative repeatedly subjected himself to the rigors of a particularly nasty stretch of platforming in a cave level. He died. A lot. The level required the game’s space spider protagonist to fire off strands of webbing, which he can swing from to progress through the game world, at a series of stalactites with pinpoint accuracy. Missing the dripstones meant his webbing would uselessly hit a section of the cave ceiling that it wouldn’t stick to, sending the spider to his doom. Certainly this could be overcome by the simple act of slowing down and carefully lining up shots, no? No. The stalagmites begin to crumble and fall under the strain of Spidy’s weight.

It didn’t get any easier from there. Another portion of the same level required a deft hand to guide Spidy carefully through a narrow space flanked by rows of pink crystals that were as sharp as they were shiny. More dying ensued. There is no life bar in Alien Spidy; one careless brush with an environmental hazard or enemy results in death. The development team at Enigma Software have offset the high degree of difficulty by liberally sprinkling checkpoints throughout the game’s stages. As a result, death is less likely to inspire a controller throw than it is another go…and another one, and another one, and so on and so forth.

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When Konami’s legendary game designer Hideo Kojima shows up to discuss what he’s been up to and then proceeds to show it to the world for the first time, it tends to expose the fact that the event he’s showing it at has become a bit of a big deal. There was no need for Kojima’s traditionally obligatory exclamation points to suddenly appear over the heads of the PAX Prime enforcers to make that much clear. The Big Stealth Game, Metal Ground Solid: Ground Zeroes, was revealed on the big stage to the delight of seemingly everyone watching.

Not all eyes were glued on Kojima, however; back on the show floor PAX’s little stealth game was leaving everyone who found their way to Klei Entertainment’s little corner in the not-so-little Indie Megabooth equally impressed. The XBLA Fans team had previously gotten our hands on Mark of the Ninja back at PAX East, but that didn’t make us any less eager to take it for another spin or to speak with its lead designer, Nels Anderson.

On Friday the game will release on XBLA. Long before getting to that point, however, the studio had to commit to setting out in a completely different direction than it did with its previous work on the Shank franchise. Doing so meant forging a mostly new path, since very few 2D stealth-oriented games had come along over the years to lay down the groundwork. I asked Anderson if that meant Klei had some unique challenges to overcome while developing the game. Laughing, he rhetorically replied, “Um, all of them?”

“All of them, in fact!” the designer exclaimed, now seemingly convinced that it was in fact all of the systems that presented challenges. “Because no one’s ever really done one, right? Like there were a couple very, very small ones, but certainly nothing to this scope or magnitude — at all. So then it’s like, we just sort of had to like really look at 3D stealth games and sort of reconstruct them design-wise. Like, ‘Why did they make the kinds of decisions they made?’ And then take that up a level and translate it back down to 2D.

“I mean, there aren’t templates or schemes to drop in in this context — at all. Which is good, it just means we had to try a whole lot of stuff that didn’t work before we got to stuff that actually did work.”

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Twisted Pixel, the Austin, TX developer behind hit XBLA titles Ms. Splosion Man and The Gunstringer, today released the first gameplay footage of its next release, Lococycle. The game was first glimpsed in teaser form this past June during Microsoft’s pre-E3 2012 media briefing. At the time it was clear that Lococycle was a motorcycle racing game of sorts that featured a motorcycle named I.R.I.S. that appeared to have ridden right off of the set of Tron and onto XBLA. Twisted Pixel released a few scant details at the time betraying I.R.I.S.’s profession (assassin) and skill with weapons and hand-to-hand combat.

Today’s footage puts to rest any doubts in the minds of gamers that a motorcycle can in fact be an assassin. The wild video shows I.R.I.S. ripping down the asphalt at a blistering pace while dragging a rider behind her and spraying bullets all over the place. That’s not the wild part. Later in the trailer, the motorized killer leaves the confines of the road behind and leaps into the air to in hand-to-hand — or wheel-to-hand, to be more precise — combat against some jetpacking assailants. It looks mighty similar to the type of action game combat that has become commonplace in the years since Devil May Cry introduced it.

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Florida-based indie developer Moon Spider Studio has announced that its first project is a platformer-racer-puzzle hybrid named Harold. Players will guide Harold — who looks like he was …
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Developer Undead Labs has renamed its currently in development XBLA and PC zombie-survival game State of Decay. First announced a smidgen over a year and a half ago, …
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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, which hit XBLA just over a month ago for 1200 MSP, will get its first piece of DLC at some point next month. …
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Dust: An Elysian Tail was developed by Humble Hearts and published by Microsoft Studios. It was released on August 15, 2012 for 1200 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Dust: An Elysian Tail opens with a lone figure awakening in a forest with no memory of his past. The mystical, obviously powerful blade he comes into possession of assumes the dual roles of death-dealer and imparter of wisdom; its cagey words imply that it knows more about the main character and the quest he is destined to embark upon than it is willing to reveal just yet. A cutesy and somewhat annoying sidekick flies alongside, providing help and occasionally pointing out the obvious. Once the opening scene closes, players move left to right and merrily hammer away at face buttons to dispatch beasties marching towards them on a 2D plane, all of it accomplished in stunning effect thanks to gorgeous hand-drawn art. There are peaceful villages besieged by overpowering forces and inhabited by locals in need of a hero to carry out various quests, and it’s not long before the environment betrays the fact that the completionist player will be revisiting areas later on to accumulate all of the hidden goodies once more skills have been unlocked.

It all sounds fun, right? Of course it does, but it’s probably also sounding a bit familiar at this point. Here’s the good news: there is much more to Humble Hearts’ Dust: An Elysian Tail than can be summed up in a handful of broad sentences about its action-adventure game tropes. Yes, it shares much with other throwback side-scrollers, and the sole member of the game’s development studio, Dean Dodrill, is unlikely to hear any complaints about that fact. But his studio’s debut effort also establishes an excellent identity all its own. Dust is a joy to play and the star of Microsoft’s 2012 Summer of Arcade lineup. There are some issues with pacing, voice work and the framerate hiccup, but wonderfully charming artwork, a wealth of content and a combat system that just feels right will allow gamers to look past the issues and enjoy Dust for many hours.

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German video game publisher Kalypso Media has delayed the release of platformer Alien Spidy to the fall. Time had been running out on the game’s originally planned summer …
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