Posted on: June 26th, 2009 Bleep, Bleep. Bloop Bloop. Video Games.

For the week of June 21-27: Red Faction, Original Goro Miniature, iPhone games and trying not to shit my pants.

NEW RELEASES:

A bit of a slow news week out thar’ in video game land, but one new release to make note of is Red Faction: Guerrilla. Moving from a first person game to third person, this, well, third entry into the franchise is getting a lot of good buzz.

You’re a dude on Mars leading an uprising for the people and you have to start some shit. What’s most notable about this game is that the great architecture has been constructed in such a way that it’s a truly destructible object.

It’s not that you hit the building and after a certain point, it rolls into an animation to show a predefined hole. No, there’s girders and beams and things that make a building stand and if you remove enough of them, the building will creak and shake and fall on your head. Even to the point where you can plan which direction you want the building to fall. And this is how video games generally progress as a medium. One game does one really cool thing, then the next time around, that tech is rolled into a new idea and built on and slowly things get better. If you think you might be interested, there’s a demo available on a console near you. Unless it’s a Wii.

NEWS:

Mr. Ed Boon, co-creator of the Mortal Kombat series tweeted out an old photograph of some behind the scenes stop motion action of the original Goro model. It’s incredible to see how simple their tools were for this stop motion fighter. They must have had a blast making that game, getting their hands dirty with the models and digitized actors.

This one picture seems to capture that feeling of the small team making use of what they have to realize their goals with all the desk lamps and tape keeping the stage together. It also furthers my beliefs of how we’re losing serendipitous moments like this by digitizing our letters, music and photographs, but this is a post about video games and I’m just fortunate we are treated to cool memories like this. Oh what I would do for another digitized character 2D Mortal Kombat…

There’s an entertaining interview over on the Playstation Blog with Yuu Miyake, the sound director on Katamari Damacy. If you haven’t yet heard the games soundtrack, you’re in for a treat. So many different musical genres represented with a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks. It’ll give you the jitter bug for sure.

Anyway, the interview talks about why the music turned out the way it did and how he’s approaching the music of the new Katamari game, Katamari Forever. The Katamari theme has popped up in my head while I’m milling about on more than one occasion and it makes everything 10x better, but personally it’s this song that makes me point my finger in the air and pretend I’m stepping out a cigarette when it comes up on shuffle.

And finally, if you’re one of the many shlubs that picked up that new iPhone 3GS (the ‘S’ stands for speed), you’re probably wondering what games you should be looking into. I don’t know, since I don’t have that problem, but there are lists coming out of people’s ears for recommendations. OffWorld recently make a post of the 15 Games You Need For Your iPhone (and 30 more to consider). Sounds like link bait to me… and it worked!!!

If I had to make some recommendations, I would suggest, Crayon Physics Deluxe (a puzzle/physics game), Peggle (a pachinko/plinko type game that makes you feel productive) and Field Runners (a tower defense game). Oh, and I noticed that Offworld also has Passage on their list which is one of the most thoughtful and beautiful games I’ve played in recent memory.

You don’t even need the iPhone to play. Go on over to his site for a one second download of the game. It only takes 5 minutes to play through and it’s fantastically well thought out. Actually it wasn’t until I read the artist’s explanation of the game that I fully understood what was going on. So please do yourself a favour and give it a try. I’d love to hear what others thought of the game.

And if you’re in the mood for game styles of yesteryear, check out the survival horror game Don’t Shit Your Pants. A text adventure in which every second counts. Play, open door, shit. Oh, I forgot to take my pants off!

Until next week.

Dale can also be found over at www.8bitcyclops.com, looking at design, photography and old video game magazines.