Features

It’s been exactly one year since RedLynx’s smash it Trials Evolution hit the digital store shelves. The game was released to universal acclaim. Our own review gushed …
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You’re stuck watching Steve play for most of the video. Feel free to heckle.
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What we are playing is a weekly column published on Sunday. Select members of the team talk about the games they’ve been playing over the past week and which they’re …
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As we mourn the loss of one of the greats, we find potential hope for the future as well.
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It beckons, and you respond. What else would you do? It’s not as if an abundance of other options manifest themselves, really. Your surroundings tell you it will be dangerous to go alone without it, and “it” even goes so far as to articulate its desire to become your traveling companion.

You seem to have just missed some sort of a skirmish, and at least one person ended up dead during the fighting. Someone, presumably the killer, has conveniently left the enormous techno-sword that felled the recently deceased implanted firmly in the poor fellow’s torso. The transistor speaks; it beckons, and you respond. What else would you do?

You relieve its most recent victim of the burden of bearing it any longer, and Supergiant Games’ Transistor begins proper. Red — the beautiful, slender former songstress who was introduced a moment ago in a cut-scene colored as much by her fiery hair as by her heavenly singing — seems a strange choice to wield something so powerful, so…cumbersome. If appearances are to be trusted, Red’s but a delicate thing, not suited to wield such a large weapon. But wield it she does. She hefts the blade with two hands, letting its considerable girth drag behind her as if she were auditioning for the role of leading man in a JRPG from a bygone era.

Swinging the thing reveals that its weight matches its size. Red arcs the chatty transistor over her head and brings it crashing down in front of her with considerable effort. You feel its weight as she does so. It slows Red, restricting her to trotting at only a moderate pace around this futuristic world that is somehow simultaneously flooded with artificial light and dark and foreboding. Her attacks feel deliberate and powerful as they smash the robotic aggressors that spawn before her to bits.

The robots are part of something known as “the Process,” and they want it back. They want the transistor that was so negligently left behind earlier. The transistor has much to say, but its (his?) words are cryptic, leaving you with many questions. What is the Process? What is the transistor? Who is Red, for that matter? Do she and the transistor know each other?

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Have fun in Rivendell with Wile E. Coyote.
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What we are playing is a weekly column published on Sunday. Select members  of the team talk about the games they’ve been playing over the past week and  which they’re …
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We’ve been talking all week about the turtles’ return to game form and the specifics of Red Fly Studio’s plan to unchain your inner turtle. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is trying to do a lot of interesting things. It’s attempting to merge the original spirit of the fiction with the appeal and accessibility of the new animated series. It’s injecting personality into the titular characters, not just in their dialogue, but their combat styles and mannerisms. It’s building a fighting scheme that’s trying to marry fast and fluid with balance and intuition and imbue elements of control and variety more closely at home in a fighting game than a brawler. It’s attempting to do all of this, but at the end of the day, it’s still a game – so let’s talk about gamification.

There’s no place like home

If Out of the Shadows excels anywhere, it’s in going the extra mile to incorporate all those little pieces of Turtles fiction that really drives home the experience. The game’s main menu structure, which could have been a series of colored rectangles: Campaign, Mission, Extras – has been smartly incorporated into the turtles’ interactive underground headquarters. You’ll roam the halls and visit the many facilities, each one with a unique purpose, as Frechette explains.

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It’s out now. For 1200 MSP, you can buy it and start playing it right away if you’d like. Funny thing about that, though — that should be old news. And it would be if The Behemoth had followed through with its plan to release BattleBlock Theater on XBLA back in 2010. Obviously, things didn’t quite work out that way, with the beat-em-up platformer having only just released yesterday. What happened? How could the developer have been so confident about 2010 that it was ready to tell the world that was the year and then ultimately be unable to finish BattleBlock Theater until three more calendar years passed it by?

Level Designer Ryan Horn has an explanation: the game wasn’t as fun as the team thought it was going to be. “I think we were hopeful about where the game was gonna be when we [planned] to release it,” he tells XBLAFans while sitting down for an interview at last month’s PAX East. “And then in between the time when we announced [the release window] and when we planned to release it at the time, we saw the game going in a direction that was fun, but we realized that we could take it in a slightly different direction that was going to be a lot more fun.”

With Horn having said his piece, studio President and co-founder John Baez expounds upon why The Behemoth felt its game could reach a state in 2010 that was up to The Behemoth’s considerably high standards of fun. Instead of going back to 2010, though, he looks a little deeper into his past. “The other component of [the delay] is that in our previous experience — I mean, Alien Hominid? Fifteen months, two consoles. Done out the door with an Xbox [version] following three months after that,” he begins. “And then Castle, it’s like, ‘OK, bigger game, three years.’” The prevailing feeling around The Behemoth’s San Diego office during the earlier development phase of Game #3, as BattleBlock was codenamed back then, was that it would not be as an ambitious of an undertaking as Castle Crashers.

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