All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Bungie.net reports that Mega Man creator and Capcom R&D head, Keiji Inafune, stopped by the developer's office in the wake of PAX. Apart from getting his hands on Halo 3: ODST ahead of its launch, he told the site, "I wanted to come down to Bungie in order to see just how well our philosophies on game design matched up. If things clicked, I know it would be interesting to collaborate together on a title in the future." Inafune also said he was "curious about how they made their games in hopes of being up to add some of the flavor into Capcom games." Oh em gee Mega Man FPS confirmed! Master Chief, Arbiter and Cortana in Bungie vs. Capcom! All jokes (or are they?) aside, it's pretty smart for a Japanese dev that's seeking partnerships with Western developers to scope out one of the more popular teams.Plus: Mas-ter Chief. Me-ga Man. Think about it.

Following his panel about Gaijin Games' design process, we approached art director Mike Roush to try to get some more information about Bit.Trip: Void -- specifically, when we'll be able to download and play it. He wasn't entirely sure, because nobody is when it comes to downloadable Nintendo releases, but he told us, "If I were to guess, it would be mid-October. We wanted to push that release date back."Roush said that Gaijin is shooting for a simultaneous worldwide release for the Ikaruga-ish dot-absorbing game, after receiving some "flak" from impatient European fans. While we were chatting, we tried our wiliest interview techniques to try to extract some hints about the next Bit.Trip title -- which is to say we asked for hints about the next Bit. Trip title. "I will not give you a hint," Roush said. "However, it is the game we all wanted to make when we started Gaijin Games. It's the game we've been waiting for... I will give you a hint: it will be based off of an Atari game."And no, it isn't Warlords. We asked.

Capping off the "The New Indie Hotness" panel at Austin GDC, Polytron's Phil Fish played an early version of the multidimensional XBLA platformer, Fez, for the audience. Though there were a few issues related to the pre-release state of the game -- specifically, Fish claimed that some platforms were disappearing -- we saw enough to know that this is something to continue following!Fez plays sort of like Super Paper Mario, but with more of an emphasis on optical illusions. It appears as a 2D sidescrolling platformer most of the time, but at any time the player can rotate the entire world 90 degrees along a vertical axis. This allows the player to use optical illusions to navigate the game world. For example, Fish climbed a ladder up the side of one platform, and then rotated the world to reveal another identical platform several yards away. By rotating again, the perspective shifted such that it looked like the ladder was connected to the second platform -- and so it was, and Fish emerged atop the once-distant platform.In another example, Fish tossed a bomb onto a moving platform to expose the entrance to a cave. He walked to the entrance, and then rotated the world 180 degrees to reveal the other side of the rock structure into which the cave had been cut, granting him immediate access to the other side.When Fish paused, we noticed a "leaderboards" item in the pause menu. We don't know as yet what the leaderboards will compare, but at least they'll be there.

The IEEE recently standardized the 802.11n WiFi protocol, which has unofficially been appearing in consumer electronics products for over two years now. It seems that Microsoft is planning on keeping up with the times, as the Federal Communications Commission recently evaluated an "Xbox 360 Wireless N Networking Adapter" that adheres to the new WLAN standard. Using said protocol, this new adapter should afford users double the transfer speed they had using their previous dongles, and will also provide a massive boost in connection range to WiFi hotspots. Of course, none of this matters if the thing costs $200 -- an estimate we arrived at using the "double the antennas, double the price" principle. We've contacted Microsoft for comment on the new hardware's due date and price point, and to find out if the new model effectively means we'll never, ever, ever see built-in WiFi for the 360. [Via Engadget]

There's this part I love in the movie Ratatouille where a critic says, "The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends." It's something I always try to keep in mind and it's moved me to first, before we do anything else, celebrate what a staggering accomplishment Scribblenauts is. It's a game where you solve simple puzzles with almost any object you can dream up (as long as it's not libations, licensed or lascivious) and every item acts the way you'd expect: bears chase honey and dogs chase cats. It's a game where you can spend hours just messing around to see what creatures can beat God in a fight (zombies: no; vampires: yes). As a technical achievement and as a toy, it's really brilliant. Scribblenauts is a thing of wonder.