Retro City Rampage Message Board older than one year ago

Release Date: Summer 2012 Price: 1200 MSP, $14.99 Platforms: Xbox LIVE® Arcade, PlayStation 3 (PSN), PS Vita (Digital), WiiWare, PC/Steam/GOG ESRB: T (Blood, Crude Humor, Sexual Content, Use of Alcohol, Violence) PEGI: 12+ (violence) USK: 16+ FPB: 13+ (violence) GRB: 15+ (violence, drugs, and crime)
Developer: Vblank Entertainment Inc. (@VblankGames) Website: www.retrocityrampage.com (@RetroCR) Publisher: D3Publisher Contact: Brian Provinciano (brian.provinciano@vblank.com)
WHAT IS IT?
Retro City Rampage is an 8-bit send-up to '80s and '90s video games and pop-culture. Mashing up the old and the new, it drops you into an open-world where you can jump on civilians for coins, then steal their car and outrun the law!
THE RUNDOWN
Retro City Rampage includes a full Story Mode of open-world adventure and an Arcade Mode for quick pick-up-and-play action.
It's Multi-Award winning, IGF Nominated, a PAX 10 selection, and has already garnered much attention, being featured (by invitation) at over 15 events worldwide from E3 to PAX, Comic-Con and GDC, in over 25 magazines, in national newspapers and has appeared on TV over a half dozen times.
IT’S PACKED FULL OF CONTENT
 Over 50 Story Missions
o Missions span every genre, from driving and shooting to stealth, rhythm, swimming, questing and more – all seamlessly taking place in the interactive open-world filled with shops, arcades and casino games.
 Over 40 Arcade Challenges
o Quick pick-up-and-play action with leaderboard competition and replay sharing.
 Official Crossover Bonus Games
o 8-bit Splosion Man, BIT.TRIP Runner, and "Virtual Meat Boy" – a retro 3D game using red & blue 3D glasses.
 Over 50 Vehicles to Drive and Equip
o How about a skateboard with a rocket launcher or a shopping cart with nitro?
 Over 25 Weapons and Power-ups
o From a bionic arm to a light gun, a boomerang to a “ghost busting” proton beam.
 Playable Characters and Cameos!
o Play as characters from other games (Minecraft, Meat Boy, Splosion Man, CommanderVideo), as legendary game developers, TV personalities and a surprise Hollywood actor.
o Customize your character with one of over 200 styles.
 2.5 Hours of Music
o Critically acclaimed soundtrack by virt, Freaky DNA and Norrin Radd.
o It is available digitally, on CD and Vinyl.
THE DEVELOPERS
Retro City Rampage is a record breaking feat developed almost entirely by one man, Brian Provinciano.
It’s launching worldwide on five platforms and 11 SKUs. A challenge for any studio, never before has one man developed and released a title for this many platforms, let alone half this many. If that wasn’t impressive enough, Brian accomplished this while simultaneously developing the game itself, designing it, programming the engine, gameplay, tools and tech from scratch, doing art, the business, production, and PR, marketing and tradeshows. It’s taken three years of full time dedication and half a decade of part time work, but it’s finally reached the finish line.
Oh! I almost forgot! Make that 12 SKUs. It also has an arcade machine to be stationed at EXP Restaurant & Bar.
The rest of the team is comprised of artist Maxime Trépanier and composers Jake “virt” Kaufman, Leonard “Freaky DNA” Paul and Matt “Norrin Radd” Creamer.
Maxime Trépanier is a jack-of-all-trades artist, a master in pixel art, painting, sketching, animation, 3D modelling and even tattoos. If it can be called art, he can do it.
Jake Kaufman’s credits are too long to list and include every platform from the Game Boy to current consoles. Some notable titles include Contra IV, Batman: The Brave & The Bold, TMNT and Red Faction: Guerrilla.
Leonard Paul has been in the industry since the 16-bit days, working on classic hits such as NBA Live 95 to the more recent NBA Jam 2010 reboot. Jake and Leonard recently performed a live set of Retro City Rampage music during the Game Developer’s Conference 2012 at DNA Lounge.
Matt Creamer harnesses the ability to compose any genre thrown his way, most famously known bringing death metal to the 8-Bit Nintendo NES music scene with his album Anomaly. His music brings great variety to Retro City Rampage, ranging from bubbly sunshine and rainbows to gritty adrenaline pumping metal.

We’ve been waiting for Retro City Rampage for what seems like forever. I first saw the game at PAX 2010, the same year Supergiant Games’ Bastion was shown for the first time, and it’s still not here.

Retro City Rampage’s official release isn’t far off, however, and the game was just announced for even more platforms: Vita and PlayStation 3 (via PlayStation Network). It's also coming to Xbox Live Arcade, Steam and, WiiWare. Yep, it's still coming to WiiWare.

The open world parody is the brainchild of Brian Provinciano. With Retro City Rampage almost done, I reached out to Provinciano to ask him about his favorite game of all-time. It should come as no surprise his selections comes from the genre he’s lampooning.

When asked, Provinciano picked Rockstar Games’ beloved Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

I’m still tweaking the format of this feature, too. Suggestions welcome.

GB: Why is Vice City your favorite video game? What makes it stand above everything else?

Provinciano: Maybe it was the right game at the right time, but it evokes such great memories. While I love Super Mario and Tetris and so many others, the game mixed with its soundtrack and tone was just right. There's so much you can do, and you get great feedback satisfaction playing it, doing insane stunts and so forth. It really is the less is more, because while San Andreas expanded the world so much, and GTA IV expanded the detail, Vice City is still my favorite. It's funny though because everyone tells me to pick up Saints Row and that I'll love it, but I just haven't had the time. I played the first half hour of SR3 but need to play more to see if it can stack up.

GB: Do you know how old you were when you first played Vice City? What do you remember?

Provinciano: It feels weird that I'm not saying a game that game out when I was super young. I was 18 or something. I remember going to EB Games on launch day to find out they were sold out but were getting a shipment in the afternoon, so I was hanging around the mall for hours like Jay and Silent Bob until someone walked by and said that Toys R Us had gotten them in, so I rushed over there and nabbed one. I really should've just preordered.

GB: And do you return to Vice City every so often? How come? What changes when you go back?

Provinciano: I do. I even picked up a second copy, the Xbox version just to play it with slightly smoother visuals. It definitely felt weird going back to it after playing Crackdown and GTA IV. The driving felt like it was on rails, like there was a magnet keeping me onto the road. I guess the more realistic (and more difficult to control) physics in games today have made me that much more skilled, where driving in Vice City now seems too easy. At the same time, I'm a fan of fun over realism.

GB: Has Vice City influenced the way you make video games? In what ways?

Provinciano: Absolutely. I can't imagine that I would've created Retro City Ramapage in the first place had I not been such a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series.

GB: When you first played Vice City, you just played games for fun. Today, you make them. How does that color the experience?

Provinciano: It's definitely changed it, a lot. I see and appreciate the craftsman ship of games now more than blindly sit back and enjoy them. However, I still get just as inspired by that as I did my love for the games before that was the case.

GB: Can you point to any part of Retro City Rampage that was specifically influenced by Vice City?

Provinciano: Probably the tone of the game, both its humor and visuals. Although RCR’s humor is far wackier and over the top, Vice City’s humor in my opinion is the best in the series. It’s also unquestionably the most colorful and vibrant, evoking “feel good” vibes not really seen in the others with their gloomier, grittier atmosphere.

GB: Do you have a favorite moment in Vice City?

Provinciano: The game as a whole was great. The story arc worked very well and was the perfect length. When I reflect on my memories though, I see myself driving up and down the strip listening to the soundtrack, flooring the gas and and hitting jumps. In fact, I still pop the game in once and a while and usually just cruise for a bit.

GB: Part of the reason people so deeply love Vice City is the game's spectacular soundtrack. What're your highlights?

Provinciano: We all have our favorite songs, and man, when you’re playing for a while and they come on, it’s just the greatest. That could even be my actual favorite moment come to think of it. There’s some strong connection with the music, where I’d hear a song in real life and feel a strong urge to go and play the game more and vice versa. I felt this with the Midnight Club 2 soundtrack too, it just had that magic to it.

GB: Since you enjoyed Vice City so much, you must have loved Vice City Stories, right?

Provinciano: It’s so weird that I couldn’t get into Vice City Stories even though I like Vice City so much. Maybe the story was just right for me. I’m sure the chosen protagonist had a lot to do with it too, and I know he wouldn’t have been the same without Ray Liotta. It could just be that there are only so many you can do missions based around driving and shooting, so it just didn’t feel as new and exciting. Hard to say.

I know many people at the various Rockstar studios, and they’re all among the hardest working in the industry. They put their all into each game, which is why they’re always so polished and impressive. I’m sure the VCS team put just as much soul into it as the original studio did with Vice City. I’ve probably just had too many years to build up an unbreakable wall of nostalgia towards it, and nothing could ever compare. It makes me wonder if I’d rather have a proper sequel or a next gen remake, and my gut tells me a remake.

GB: In a single sentence, explain to anyone reading this why, if they haven't, they should play Vice City.

Provinciano: Vice City is perfect hit sweet spot, showing these days that less is more.

It seems like we’ve been waiting forever for Retro City Rampage, a ridiculous looking hodgepodge of throwbacks to classic video games all taking place in a Grand Theft Auto-style open world.

The end appears to be in sight, however, and that end includes two new platforms: PlayStation 3 and Vita.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog, designer Brian Provinciano was glowing about his experience working with Sony on bringing Retro City Rampage to the company’s platforms, especially Vita.

“The PS Vita has been a dream to develop for as well,” he said. “I’ve developed for every console and handheld from the past decade, and the PS Vita’s development system is the best I’ve ever used.”

Of course, we still don’t have a release date, but I’m told it’s finally, honestly not far off, and it’s still coming to a bunch of other platforms: WiiWare (!), Xbox Live Arcade, and PC (on Steam, naturally).

Currently getting owners of the PS Vitalite’s expensive knickers in a right old twist, parody open-world carnage game Retro City Rampage will also be careening wildly towards PC with a bloodythirsty look in its pseudo-8-bit eye. Essentially it’s GTA 1, if GTA 1 had happened five years earlier and was a mash-up of locales and abilities from assorted touchstones of the early console era.

See if you can name all the references in the video below! Or just impassively watch it and think ‘yes those are some videogames I recognise.’ It’s not for me to tell you whether to be enthusiastic or not. Unless you think I’m some sort of hideous emotional dictator, the Idi Amin of smiles and tears. Frankly, I’m offended by the suggestion.(more…)

Let’s get right to it — Retro City Rampage is coming to PS3 and PS Vita! I couldn’t be more excited to finally share the news. For those not familiar with RCR, it’s an over-the-top open-world crime game that combines everything you loved in classic games and mashes them up into a “toon town” of nostalgia and parody. Steal cars, and then jump on pedestrians for big shiny coins. Collect power-ups and outrun the law while rampaging the city, shooting a light gun or swinging your bionic arm.

Fans of Grand Theft Auto will feel right at home with RCR, but the missions extend far beyond driving and shooting. They fuse classic gaming and modern mechanics to span virtually every genre, from stealth to platforming, adventure, rhythm and more—there are even underwater levels. What I’m most proud of is that everything flows together using the same mechanics and visuals. Even missions inspired by ’80s coin-op games seamlessly take place in the open-world.

It really is a massive game with something for everyone. It boasts a full story mode with over 50 missions, taking place in extensive city with stores, buildings and activities to interact with. For those of you who just want to jump right into the action and rampage the town, there’s also an Arcade Mode. It’s packed with over 30 fast-paced, score-based challenges where you’ll use the 25+ weapons and power-ups available to rack up points. You’ll be able to share replays as you try to dethrone your friends!

Bringing RCR to PlayStation has been a fantastic experience. Sony’s been so supportive and great to work with, since the beginning. This will mark the seventh year since I began developing games for the PlayStation platforms, and I look forward to many more to come. With the ability to bring RCR to both the PS3 and PS Vita, you’ll be able to play the full game anywhere you go with the best possible visuals. The PS Vita is an incredible system, one look at the screen and you’ll be hooked too. It takes RCR’s colorful art direction to the next level.

The PS Vita has been a dream to develop for as well. I’ve developed for every console and handheld from the past decade, and the PS Vita’s development system is the best I’ve ever used. Sony’s simply gotten everything right, from the hardware to the tools and support. With such a great development system, teams are able to focus entirely on making the best possible game, and I can’t wait to see what’s to come from other developers in the future.

Remember when you were on the playground with your friends as a child, talking about your dream video game? The one that had EVERYTHING in it? Where you could go anywhere and do anything? Well, as you can see, this is my dream game. It’s taken a long time to build, but thanks to the amazing team including myself, Brian Provinciano, artist Maxime Trépanier and the composers Virt, Freaky DNA and Norrin Radd, it’s finally been fully realized and it’s even bigger and better than I first imagined.

So are you rad enough to outrun the law and carjack the ’80s? Then lock and load your LIGHTGUN and power up your POWER-UPS, because you’re about to go on a RETRO CITY RAMPAGE!

Get More: GameTrailers.com, Retro City Rampage - Launch Trailer, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Retro City Rampage - Biffman Trailer from Vblank on Vimeo.