About Nick Santangelo

Haunted Temple Studios’ Skulls of the Shogun took me by surprise at last year’s PAX East. It was my first look at the game, and its attractive cartoon art style immediately drew me to it. Within a few minutes of playing, it was obvious that the developer had backed the visuals up with incredibly fun turn-based combat.

At this year’s show Haunted Temple CEO and Creative Director Jake Kazdal stated that many members of the crowds that had continually gathered around his studio’s booth throughout the weekend had followed a similar path of attraction to the inspired strategy game. “I think it’s a different dynamic for this kind of game, and people really seem to be digging it,” Kazdal said. “The art style sort of draws [convention attendees] in, and then they start thinking like ‘Wow, this is different than any other strategy game I’ve played.'” Although inspired by the Advance Wars and Fire Emblem games, Skulls of the Shogun definitely has a unique and wonderful vibe all its own.

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I almost missed it. I almost wearily shambled right out of the Boston Convention Center this past Easter Sunday without playing what just might have been the most gorgeous XBLA title on the show floor. Luckily, Kinect Fans Managing Editor Nick DePetris issued a last minute reminder that readers had been flooding the site with requests for coverage of developer Humble Hearts’ Dust: An Elysian Tail. So off the two of us went to Microsoft’s blessedly carpeted booth one final time before departing PAX East 2012.

Sandwiched between the 360s running four-player previews of Minecraft and Tequila’s Deadlight demo was the side-scrolling action title from the inspired mind of one Dean Dodrill. That a sole man could craft something so wonderfully creative is extraordinary. It’s almost impossible to believe that Dodrill is the only member of Humble Hearts given how excellent his work-in-progress is at this stage of development. He’s been working on it for several years (see its victory at Microsoft’s 2009 Dream.Build.Play Challenge for evidence of its lengthy development cycle), but there are still some months to go before its vague 2012 release date arrives.

The titular main character is an adorable-but-deadly anthropomorphic hero questing through the alluring world of Falana with a charming fairy sidekick in tow. Falana features dark and dreary caves with medieval castles looming in the background. Players will venture into at least one cavern that is darker still, but they’ll also emerge from the “it was a dark and stormy night” motif and find themselves in a gleaming, tranquil forest with cute woodland animals prancing about at some point in the adventure. I’m hardly the first to compare the aesthetics to the masterfully animated Disney films of old, and I am unlikely to be the last.

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Trials HD community member “FatShady” shared the many details behind a collection of Easter Eggs hidden in the title as part of a complex riddle left behind by developer RedLynx’ Creative Director, Antti Ilvessuo. By properly identifying and dissecting each and every puzzle piece, it was said that both a question and an answer could be ascertained. Both were revealed today in the video above featuring none other than FatShady, bringing several years of intense searching and debating by the game’s community to a head. The final revelation may not be in line with what gamers were hoping for, but the video’s still worth watching for anyone who has spent time trying to unlock the game’s mysteries these past years.

Antti Ilvessuo had this to say about the riddle’s origins and players’ undaunted pursuit of the truth of it all: “You could say I created the riddle,” said Ilvessuo, “but what I really did was set the rules out. The game was played by the players, the riddle was discovered by them. I just started it. That was one [sic] really the key here.”

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Tequila Works’ Deadlight is a game about zombies. They’re not mutants. They’re nothing like the aggressive “not-zombies” popularized in Resident Evil 4. And, while players will encounter variations on the basic zombie as they progress through the title’s six-hour campaign, they certainly won’t run into any of the tank-style baddies that are prevalent in Valve’s Left 4 Dead franchise. No, here is a game that instead proudly features classic zombies that Tequila CEO and Creative Director Raul Rubio described at PAX East as being “stupid as lemmings.”

Players need only push a heavy object off a platform and onto a section of weak flooring below in one of the game’s earliest areas for evidence of just how intellectually challenged these poor creatures are. A never-ending stream of “shadows,” as main character Randall Wayne calls the zombies, will mindlessly amble their way towards the gaping hole in the floor only to end up joining other dead zombies similarly lacking in brain power in a pile on the floor below. It’s a bit of comic relief waiting to be discovered by players in a game that tells a grim tale of post-apocalyptic survival painted primarily in black, gray and brown.

The creation of said zombie death trap is reliant on simple physics, as is a later trap that results in zombies being smashed to bits when a car resting on a lift is dropped on them at precisely the correct moment. It’s a rewarding feeling when the shadowy figures are flattened by the vehicle, and it’s said to be one of many such instances in the game. “All puzzles are physics-based,” explained Rubio. “Environments can be your biggest ally or your biggest enemy.”

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Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture have already shown the world that a developer in Hungary can work together with a studio in Japan to deliver a fantastic shoot ’em up with Sine Mora. Now they’re fast on their way to proving it was no fluke as the duo enter what Digital Reality Director of Publishing Balázs Horváth says are the final few months of development work on Black Knight Sword before it launches this summer. It likely won’t be the last time they team up, either. When asked if the two would work together on a game again in the future, Horváth smiled and said only: “Yes.”

As for Black Knight Sword, it’s something very different from their last collaborative work. The studios have left the bright blue skies behind and turned their attention to a dark and dreary fantasy setting. It’s the result of Grasshopper’s unique approach to story conceptualization being funneled through the creative minds over at Digital Reality. What that amounts to is an opening sequence with a man — a man hanging by his neck. His suicide attempt doesn’t quite come to fruition, however. Instead he ends up grabbing the hilt of a mysterious sword that transforms this sad and mysterious soul into the equally mysterious Black Knight.

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After spending the last four years releasing a multitude of sequels and spin-offs for its popular Rock Band and Dance Central franchises, Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems is scaling things back a bit with its next release. The next Harmonix-developed title the world will get is still part of the Rock Band series, but it will arrive at some point this summer sans the band. On Tuesday the developer unveiled Rock Band Blitz — a single-player XBLA and PSN game that rocks out without rock instruments, instead requiring the use of a regular controller for solo-jamming along all five instrumental tracks at once.

The simplicity of the concept isn’t exactly in line with what fans have come to expect from the company that popularized plastic instruments, so it’s understandable if there is some hesitation from the community to accept this new direction. Project Director Matthew Nordhaus explanation during my trip to the developer’s studio that the team’s goal is to release a product that removes the series’ high barriers of entry through a more simplistic approach probably won’t have plastic rock stars pumped for the big show either. Read a few quick-and-dirty details on the internet and watch a quick clip of Blitz‘ gameplay and you might get the impression that this is just another case of a developer dumbing its game down for modern gamers who are, supposedly, unable to process complexity in their video games. Well, guess what? It’s not.

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The XBLA port of Minecraft will be getting DLC and updates post-release, says Roger Carpenter, lead Xbox Live Arcade producer at Microsoft Studios Europe. Responding to an XBLA …
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A certain platform that became one of the homes of the original Orcs Must Die last fall was conspicuously absent from the recent press release announcing its sequel, Orcs Must Die 2. Realizing that a number of Xbox gamers who purchased and enjoyed the first game feel slighted by what they perceived to be Robot Entertainment turning its back on them, the developer posted an explanation on its official forums today.

Justin Korthof, a community manager at Robot, explained that the reasons are not personal, but monetary. Korthof reaffirmed that the Steam/PC community playing the first game is “significantly larger” (note the emphasis) than the audience for the tower-defense title on Microsoft’s console. That being said, he did note that “Both communities are very passionate and loyal. We appreciate that immensely.” So the small-scale developer is extremely grateful for the support of all of its fans, but game development is a business like any other; and business, as it turns out, is business.

This decision was entirely about spending our resources in the best ways possible. We won’t get into too many details because it’s been noted already by many indie developers, but it’s important to understand that developing and supporting games for XBLA brings with it several additional processes and costs above and beyond the core development of the game itself. This can make development increasingly expensive and time-consuming. As a small developer, we have to be as efficient as we can with our resource investments. We can make a better game and we can make it in a shorter period of time by focusing on PC for the sequel.

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Brain Slap Studio is looking to bring its debut title, Hexodius, to Xbox Live Arcade, according to a tweet by the indie developer. “We’re targetting [sic] XBLA,” reads the studio’s Twitter response to a question by XBLA Fans reader @lifelower as to whether the twin stick shooter is being developed for XBLIG or XBLA.

Responding to our inquiry about the PC and Xbox title’s progress towards an XBLA release, Brain Slap designer Pascal Biren said that the studio has yet to speak with any publishers. For now they are focusing on just making the game “in an indie spirit” and are planning to show it publicly before seeking out a publishing partner to help bring the title to Arcade.

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Microsoft recently stating on the record that the Xbox Durango/720 won’t be officially announced at E3, and likely not until next year, has done little to quell the constant stream of “insider sources” reporting this, that and the other about the next-generation console. The trend continued today. Tipsters informed VG 24/7 that Redmond-based Microsoft plans to launch the Xbox 360’s successor during the holiday 2013 season. That wasn’t all they had to say, either: the next Xbox will also feature a Blu-ray drive and two GPUs if these informants are to be believed.

Today’s release whispers are in line with what some previous industry canaries have been singing, but they fly in the face of the 2014 launch scuttlebutt that has arisen from other loose lips that sink ships, and they certainly don’t match up to the 2012 reports that some deep throats had falsely reported prior to the console-maker’s assertions to the contrary. The lesson here is that while game console rumors, while fun, are a bunch of bologna as often as they are legitimate leaks. On top of that, even legitimate leaks can end up being inaccurate down the road when the manufacturer in question changes its strategy in response to technology developments, movements by the competition, cost issues or any of a great number of other factors.

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