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Titanfall is full of crazy, awesome, epic moments. Here are 78 of them in four minutes.

This is Making Time, a column about the games we've always wanted to play, and the games we've always wanted to play again.
The inspiration to whip up a new column about an old game can come from anywhere, even a sad loss for the video game industry. In February, upon hearing about the death of Kenji Eno, I scanned Amazon and eBay for copies of his games, thinking I might write them up in remembrance, but ultimately never pulled the trigger on a purchase.

Two months later, I walk into a recently-opened used game shop (named ThrillHouse, if you can believe it), and what should I see under the glass? A boxed Sega Saturn copy of Kenji Eno's D in great condition, the creepy cover just as effective now as it was seventeen years ago. I gladly paid $30 for it.

Having played it for the first time since I was thirteen, Kenji Eno's D isn't as scary as I remember. While it isn't a very good game, I still find myself enjoying the experience.

#kenjieno Last week, Japanese game designer Kenji Eno passed away at the age of 42. Eno was well known for his survival horror games, D, Enemy Zero, and D2, as well as his unique and sometimes eccentric opinions and behavior, like the development of the Sega Saturn game, Real Sound, a video game that features no video. More »

#rip Kenji Eno, musician and game designer, passed away yesterday in Tokyo at the age of 42. He died of heart failure, induced by high blood pressure, reports The Asahi Shimbun. More »

#indie You may not have heard of Electronic Arts, a boutique publishing label based in Redwood City, Calif. Well, I bet you will be raving about them once you pick up the "EA Indie Bundle" on Steam, the indie-friendly digital marketplace, unlike that Origin bullshit run by that place that screwed up the end of Mass Effect 3. More »

The EA Indie Bundle (yes, we assure you, it is barely-100-percent-mostly-ish possible for EA to have an indie bundle) is live on Steam, offering 70 percent off a package of six titles from four indie developers, or half off each individual game.

Included in the sale is Warp, Shank, Shank 2, DeathSpank, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue and Gatling Gears. The DeathSpank titles are $7.50 individually and are available on PC and Mac through Steamplay, while the rest of EA's indies cost $5 and are PC only.

Indie Game Magazine first spotted the bundle in the super-secret Steam registry files this morning. The sale is now officially on, set to disappear from Steam in one week on May 9.

Warp is now available on Steam!

A strategic stealth-action puzzler where gamers play as Zero, a loveable yet lethal, little orange alien with a big score to settle. Abducted by a villainous General from his home world and taken to an underwater research facility, Zero must plan his ultimate escape by relying on his arsenal of special abilities.

Several high-profile downloadable titles hit the PSN this week, with Journey being the can't-miss experience from thatgamecompany. Our Jordan Mallory was smitten by Journey, calling it a "beautiful, evocative and unequivocally transcendental experience." He may have used such words to describe a burrito he once had, but, in fairness, it was a really fabulous burrito.

If you're looking for a co-op, run-n'-gun shooter, it's worth trading a Hamilton for Shoot Many Robots. The oil splatter of blasted death machines is relentless in the game that teaches us a beer hat is your best friend when the robots rise up. For something a little more cerebral, stealth action puzzler Warp is also available. Head on over the PS Blog for all the details on this week's PSN update.

Video games usually cast us against the aliens. How refreshing, then, that Warp puts us in the skin of a visitor from outer space escaping the cruel experiments of callous humans. The gameplay is described by the title: you can warp through walls and, delightfully, into the bodies of the people hunting you down. Turning people inside out will be one of this year's great enjoyments...

The premise behind Warp is as easy to remember as its name. Captured by a group of scientists and their dimwitted security squadron, an adorable alien named Zero breaks free from his shackles to run amok throughout an underwater installation. How does he move about? He warps, of course, from one spot to the next and even into solid objects.

Warp borrows heavily from multiple sources to craft its world. It may be immediately compared to the puzzle propensity of Portal, the stealthy progression of Metal Gear Solid, and the chaotic tone of 'Splosion Man, but the game follows the longstanding blueprint we've all come to regard as Metroidvania. Zero uses his warp ability to get around, first through walls and then into objects.


It all looks innocent -- especially when Zero cutely chirps and animates his emotions -- but it's all a ruse. Zero eventually earns the ability to warp into humans, where a few liberal shakes of the left stick causes them to explode. Like the remnants of a popped water balloon, Zero's victims are splattered all over the laboratory's pristine interior. It goes from cute to horrifying very quickly -- in a good way.

Don't be fooled. This lovable little scamp's favorite thing is to possess people and make 'em explode.

The new downloadable stealth-action puzzler Warp starts with a great premise: You're a goofy little orange Martian whatsit trapped in an undersea research center, and your only hope of getting out is to teleport yourself through every obstacle that gets in your way. Considering everything about this facility's security system is built around preventing you from warping, that's not as easy as it sounds. Your ability to possess, displace, and disintegrate a wide range of objects and human beings gives the designers ample opportunity--which they mostly use wisely--to set up unique and mindbending puzzle scenarios, but clunky controls and some basic game flow issues undermine what's otherwise a pretty neat little game.

At the outset, you can only warp yourself forward into space and inside specific objects, mainly people and various kinds of barrels. But over the course of the game you'll pick up other new powers, like projecting a spectral version of yourself through walls, swapping places with distant objects, and flinging whatever thing you're inside forcefully in a specific direction. There's also a diverse set of upgrades you can buy that give you advanced versions of those basic abilities. The upgrades give you some interesting new tactical possibilities when stealthily dealing with the patrolling guards--at which times Warp, with its overhead perspective, feels a bit like the first Metal Gear Solid--but they aren't required for the puzzle-solving. Many of those puzzles incorporate all the tools of the alien-research trade--laser barricades, conveyor belts, exploding barrels, and switches placed inconveniently on the other side of large gaps--to make you stop and think hard about how to use all the mechanics at your disposal to move on.

If you aren't well upgraded, you aren't likely to get out of this situation.

Everything about Warp looks great on paper, but in practice I consistently found the act of playing it to be pretty frustrating. You can't move very fast by default, and there's a lag after every warp before you can move or warp again. It's understandable that your ability to warp is limited for balancing reasons, but by contrast, just about everything in the environment kills you instantly. Things like laser beams and explosions are one-hit kills, and if a guard spots you while you're out in the open, you're dead, period (and they'll sometimes shoot you from offscreen). The sluggish feel of your own movement and the ubiquitous lethality of the environment aren't a good mix, leading to a lot of deaths early on that you feel like you can't really avoid. If the game had load-free instant respawns a la Super Meat Boy, this really wouldn't be a problem. Instead you see a load screen every time you die, then you're returned to the last checkpoint you ran past in the game world, leaving you to repeat everything you did since you were there the last time. To be fair, the checkpoints are distributed liberally, but I was still discouraged from poking around in the environment much, since the constant risk of an unexpected death meant the tedium of reloading and playing back up to that part again.

Given all this, it's freeing to purchase the upgrades that increase your movement and warp speed, and the game gets a good bit more satisfying and pleasant once you do, but that fact makes you wonder if those should have just been the default speeds to begin with. I recommend saving all your grubs (the game's upgrade currency) for those two bonuses before you go for any other abilities. There are some other clumsy aspects to the gameplay that don't improve with upgrades, though. The aiming control for flinging objects and delicately warping around in tight spots feels squirrely and imprecise at times; it's downright maddening when you're trying to warp through a grid of laser beams and end up frying yourself because the margin for error seems to be only a few pixels in size. I also ran into a couple of instances of object physics going awry and keeping me from solving puzzles properly. And while the rest of the game feels pretty well put-together, the last 30 minutes doubles down on all of the game's problems and makes for a pretty miserable final sequence. The ambitions of the game's core gameplay are good ones, so it's a shame that it falters a bit on the execution.

There's a sizable chunk of good puzzlin' in here if you can overlook some basic issues.

Warp isn't just a linear series of discrete puzzle rooms like, say, Portal. Instead the undersea base is set up as a group of sprawling, interconnected facilities joined together by elevators, not at all unlike Shadow Complex or your favorite Metroidvania. And like those games, there are some areas you can't reach until later in the game when you've gotten the right powers. There are 66 upgrade-powering grubs scattered around the base, and there's also a smaller number of film canisters that are just there to be collectibles. You can get cheap upgrades to reveal the grubs and canisters on the map (and there are achievements attached to getting them all), so completionists will naturally be tempted to roam around and pick up all the items they missed. But I found the game to discourage backtracking, exploring, or really breaking from the critical path in any way. The maps of the different facilities don't line up when you flip between them, and the elevator icons don't indicate where you'll end up if you hop on them, so you don't have a good way of figuring out how to get where you want to go on different levels of the base.

More damningly, some of the puzzles depend on items being in specific places, but when I decided to head back and explore the map later in the game and then tried to return to my objective, I found the state of the rooms I'd already completed hadn't been reset, meaning I initially had no way to get through them again. In those two specific cases I eventually figured out a way to skirt the edges of the game mechanics and return things to an arrangement where I could progress, but it just feels sloppy that you would run into cases like this in a game that ostensibly wants you to go back and forth at random times. There's only one kind of puzzle--where you have to swap places with objects on the other side of barriers--that I had this issue with, so it's entirely possible that if you were to head back and explore at other points in the game, you'd have no such problems. But that doesn't make it any less annoying if you do run into this sort of thing. Lastly, the game is practically begging for a new-game-plus sort of option, letting you go through again with all your upgrades and getting the items you missed. But there is none, with is all the more unfortunate given the existing issues with moving around in the game world.

Despite its mechanical foibles, Warp has a lot of charm in its visual design, animations, and infrequent dialogue, and if you can tolerate some frustration, there's a good quantity of unique puzzle-solving to be had. With a lengthy main mode and a few external challenge levels, it's also a decent value at $10. The game is rougher around the edges than its excellent core premise deserves, but it's still a promising first effort from Trapdoor.

Warp will be the first title released during the 2012 XBLA House Party that starts this Wednesday, and from the looks of this latest gameplay trailer, it seems as though your 800 Microsoft Points will net you a lot of adorableness, as well as an unquenchable thirst for exploded human bodies.

#warp More »

There are a lot of games featuring aliens on the various download services, as well as a lot of action puzzlers. So for an alien-centric action puzzler to capture your attention these days means it's got to bring some style and personality to the table. From what I've seen, Warp - coming to PC, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live later this year - does just that...

Warp is one of those instances in which one "What if" question has blossomed into an entire game. In this case, the question is, "What if we had the power to teleport through objects at will? Wouldn't that be cool?"

Yes, I do think it's pretty cool, even if I'd rather be able to forgo the twelve hour flight to Europe than warp around my house. But then, I'm not in a Martian lab desperately trying to escape annihilation, in which case I imagine even short-range teleportation would be preferable to nothing at all. That's the premise of Warp, though that wasn't the case from the beginning.

"The inception point had nothing to do with stealth," Trapdoor founder Ken Schacter told me during the demo. "Our prototype was a cylinder where we just played around with warping."

Don't be fooled. This cuddly blob of space Jell-O will explode you without hesitation.

The debut of Warp may be reserved for the Xbox Live House Party next month, but PC and PS3 users won't have to wait too long to get their hands on the horribly violent (and bizarrely cute) action puzzler. Warp is headed to PSN and PC on March 13, according to a tweet from developer Trapdoor.

The PC version is currently up for pre-order on Origin, though Trapdoor promises it will be available on Steam as well.

As we all know, Microsoft has a real fondness for compartmentalizing its bigger swaths of Xbox Live Arcade releases into neat, tidy promotions that have catchy names. In the early goings of the year, the company has taken to placing its collection of big titles under the House Party banner, a moniker that implies a great deal of ruckus and tomfoolery, probably hilarious chaos and destruction, and also possibly the inclusion of Kid & Play.

Who wants to party?

Recently, Microsoft announced that titles like Warp, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and I Am Alive would be included in this year's House Party promotion. Today, Microsoft announced the prices and exact release dates of the four titles flying the House Party flag. They are...

• Warp - February 15 | 800 Microsoft Points
• Alan Wake's American Nightmare - February 22 | 1200 Microsoft Points
• Nexuiz - February 29 | 800 Microsoft Points
• I Am Alive - March 7 | 1200 Microsoft Points

While this makes it the third year in a row that Kid & Play were tragically left on the sidelines for the promotion, we can all take comfort that these are big, interesting games lots of us probably want to play, and that somewhere out there, Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin are probably having big, ridiculous Pajama Jammy Jams that Microsoft totally isn't invited to.

#warp Puzzle games over the past few years have focused around physics, and around playing with those physics to accomplish goals. Warp features a cute little alien who dies from one bullet and teleports a couple feet at a time. Yes, this is a video game, not an upcoming kids cartoon. More »

Microsoft plans to kick off the Xbox Live Arcade House Party for 2012 on February 15, releasing the four previously revealed titles back-to-back. At this time, Microsoft isn't revealing pricing nor the order in which it plans to release the titles. So, yeah, our definition of "House Party Details" varies greatly.

A company rep confirmed that the order listed on Xbox guru Major Nelson's site is simply alphabetized. So, beginning February 15, for some price and in some order, folks will be able to pick up Alan Wake's American Nightmare, the long-awaited I Am Alive, Nexuiz and EA's Warp.

#alanwakesamericannightmare The next Xbox 360 "House Party"—a promotional rush of a bunch of new downloadable games, probably released one a week—will be headlined by Alan Wake's American Nightmare, according to a trailer that's leaked through Xbox.com. Joystiq noticed it and we've watched it: It also includes the cool top-down body-hopping/barrel-possessing Warp, the disaster-survival game I Am Alive and the multiplayer shooter Nexuiz. More »

Microsoft is set to throw another House Party in 2012. In attendance will be Alan Wake's American Nightmare, EA's Warp, Nexuiz and the long-awaited I Am Alive.

The trailer for the XBLA House Party promotion, which was apparently posted by accident, does not reveal any release dates. Out best guesstimate, if history serves, would be late February like last time. We've contacted Microsoft for launch details.

[Thanks, Joey]

When someone plays Warp for the first time, they generally have one reaction: laugh at the volume of blood, then turn to me and say, “I didn’t expect that.” This is what happens when a cuddly alien makes a scientist explode from the inside out. With its sci-fi world, unique mechanics, and combination of adorable character meets extreme gore, Warp is the kind of game you might not expect to see – if it weren’t for the digital space, that is.

So what’s the game about, other than pulverizing scientists? Warp is a puzzle-based stealth action game where you play as Zero, an adorable alien trapped in a human testing facility. You’ve been captured and experimented on, and wake up from your ordeal with one ultimate goal: escape. Easier said than done but, lucky for us, cute little Zero isn’t really that helpless.

Warp is all about your alien powers, and the entire game was designed as a showcase for their many applications. We put a lot of work into making sure that, not only are these powers really fun, but players can combine them in many different ways for a completely unique play experience. The powers (we’ve revealed so far) are:

Warp: The game’s titular ability, warp is a short-distance teleport that lets Zero move through walls and into objects. Handy for ducking through walls and hiding inside objects, from barrels to human bodies.

Frag: Once inside an object, you can vigorously move the left stick to explode or “frag” your way out, often in a shower of blood and viscera.

Echo: Allows you to create a ghostly decoy of yourself or any object you’re currently warped into. Useful if you want to lure soldiers away from you, or just spook some scientists.

Swap: Acquiring swap allows you to place your echo over an object and instantly trade places with it. This power essentially gives you a much longer warping distance, and is a good way to move objects around. You can also swap objects inside of other objects … as seen in the trailer above.

Of course, though these abilities have some violent applications the game never has to turn into a bloodbath. As much as it’s a game about cool alien powers, Warp is also about rewarding individual playing styles. You can employ stealth and not kill a soul, or warp inside every human you see and turn them inside out: The choice is up to you. Throughout the campaign you can also purchase upgrades with the grubs you’ve collected. These powerful upgrades combine with your existing powers, making Zero a real force to be reckoned with. But choose wisely! Some grubs may be harder to spot than others, and to fully upgrade Zero you’ll need to nab them all.

While we’re big fans of a compelling single-player experience, we’re equally excited about are the social elements in Warp. Our programmers built an incredibly detailed stats-tracking system into the game, so obsessive gamers beware. With in-game stats popups comparing your scores with your friends or the global leaderboards in real time, you’ll always know how your Warp skills stack up.

For the perfectionists out there we have also included challenge rooms, accessible from the main menu if you want to hone your skills. Challenge rooms have online leaderboards for fastest time, but your competitive nature isn’t the only reason to play – the better you do in the challenge rooms the more grubs you get, allowing you to purchase more upgrades for Zero. The gold medal times, set by our development team, are no easy feat – we didn’t call them challenge rooms for nothing!

PlayStation has been a strong supporter of quirky, unique, and innovative games, and it is a great pleasure for us to bring Warp to the PlayStation Network this winter. If you want to keep on top of what’s happening with Warp, visit us on our website, Twitter, and Facebook. And don’t forget – if you have any questions for the team, post away in the comments below!

Hey, are you following Warp? No? How much nice stuff do we have to write before you -- what? You hate reading? How could you say that? ... You know it's FUNdamental, right? ... Fine, here's a new trailer and screens showing the Echo and Swap abilities to bring you into the fold. Lap it up, cro-mags.

#warp With the genius exhibited by Valve's Portal games, it wouldn't be entirely unfair to think that there's a conceptual no-fly zone around the use teleporting as a game mechanic. At the very least, if you're going to use the ability to pop in and out of reality in your game, then you need to make it demonstrably different than anything that happens inside of Aperture Science's testing chambers. More »

There's an odd juxtaposition at the heart of Warp. You play as a cute little orange alien, attempting to escape an underwater government facility. After crashing on Earth and being captured by the military, it would seem there's nothing but a lifetime of poking and prodding in store for the little it.

The ability to warp into and through things is the alien's only means of escape, and the central premise of the game. But with such a pleasant, cartoonish presentation, it's pretty jarring the first time he warps inside of a scientist and detonates the unsuspecting human in a shower of crimson blood, which then dries into a gross crust on the floor. It's a touch morbid in contrast with everything else.

Composed of cartoony animations, humorous style and a lovable protagonist, Warp appears clean cut and innocent. But Warp walks two roads: play as a pacifist, sneaking past guards and hiding in barrels...or kill every last living soul, leaving a bloody trail of dotted footprints. Warp is fun and as dark as you want it to be...

Give those meddling scientists a deservingly grisly end with your explosive powers in this downloadable title from Electronic Arts' rookie studio Trapdoor Games!

Last November Electronic Arts announced it would publish a game called Warp. We were told it was a "unique stealth action game featuring a top-down sci-fi world with a distinctive art style, addicting levels, hazardous traps, and challenging puzzles," but that was all EA had to say about it. There haven't been any screenshots or video released for Warp, so it has been a mystery these past four months...