Cobalt Message Board

Mojang may or may not be going forward with its plan to become some kind of indie developer/publisher mega-hybrid, but 2D robo-biffer Cobalt‘s still hopping, bopping, and blasting along in the background. Adam took the Oxeye-developed arena shooter for a spin many of our pitiful human days ago, but it’s come quite a long way since then. Or at least, I assume so. Otherwise, it’d be out of line with Nathan’s Grand Unified Theory Of Linear Chronological Progression – “When time passes, stuff happens” – and it hasn’t failed me yet. So now, for your obsessively dissecting pleasure, here’s a new video of Cobalt in action.

(more…)

When it comes to sweet questions like "why dodge an incoming missile if you can punch it back at the metal jerk that fired it at you in the first place," Cobalt has all the right answers. As the first third-party indie project published by Minecraft creators Mojang, this little battle-intensive platform shooter, with its wide-eyed and heavily-armed robots, is disarmingly cute for the brutal, cutthroat combat contained within...

Mojang said the Cobalt alpha would be released before Christmas and sure enough, tiny robots invaded the internet this weekend. I really wasn’t sure what to expect so I installed the blighter and had a quick go, all the better to share some brief impressions. There’s no campaign at the moment and no online multiplayer planned at all, so since I couldn’t tempt anyone to play I’ve had to make do with the tutorial, the survival map and a few team deathmatch games with bots. Not ideal but at least I know what it is now. There’s a new trailer and thoughts below.

(more…)

You already kinda sorta knew about Cobalt, Mojang's first game launch as a publisher, but did you know that it'd be totally out today in Alpha form? Oh, yeah, okay, you already kinda knew that too. Well now it's official, but beyond that, we've also got a whole mess of info about today's launch. For one, the game will only be available on Windows PC initially, with OS X and Linux support arriving in "Beta." Moreover, there is no "single-player" version of Cobalt, only multiplayer and co-op modes -- according to Mojang, "hot seat" multiplayer is available on the PC and it's "theoretically limited by the number of USB controllers you manage to forcefully plug in to your poor computer." We're gonna go ahead and suggest no more than four, just to be safe.

The game's Alpha also comes with a level editor, which Mojang hopes players will use to "create everything from single maps to whole campaigns from scratch." That isn't to say that the dev team at Oxeye Game Studio are sitting on their hands and waiting for the user-generated content to populate their game, however -- the announcement promises that the team "will continue adding their own maps and game modes to the game as well as continue work on the main campaign."

Like with Minecraft before it, purchasing Cobalt in Alpha (or "pre-ordering" the final build, if you will) nets you access to all future builds of the game, barring the possibility of console or mobile ports. While there is no timeframe for the completed game's launch, the devs set a handful of milestones for themselves, such as the main campaign not showing up until after the game goes "Gold" (read: finished). In the meantime, we'll be sure to let you know when people start creating incredible homages to things they love within Cobalt, as with Minecraft before it.

#cobalt Cobalt, the action game of "running, jumping, rolling, shooting, throwing, dancing, hacking, rolling, flying, sliding, climbing, looting, deflecting, racing, piñata-ing, passing, scoring… and even more rolling!" is now playable as a discounted Alpha version, developers Mojang and Oxeye tell Kotaku. More »

Mojang’s first foray into the world of being a publisher is about to happen. As developers OxEye told us back in August, Cobalt, the running, jumping, rolling, shooting, throwing, dancing, hacking, rolling, flying, sliding, climbing, looting, deflecting, racing, piñata-ing, passing, scoring-em-up was always aiming for its first public alpha to appear before the end of the year. And that, according to the EDGEBORG, is going to be this Friday, so long as Mojang can “tie up a few loose ends”. So, it may yet slip, but it’s clearly going to be soon.

Usually, we receive a bit of lead time when it comes to release date announcements. "Oh, that game you're looking forward to," it usually goes, "that one won't be out til Q3 2014." We all know that anything past next spring is practically forever away -- fortunately, Mojang has announced that the excellent-looking Cobalt is going to drop this coming Friday, God willing and the creek don't rise.

"We haven't told anyone [about the release date] yet because we're aiming for Friday, but we don't know if we can make it," managing director Carl Manneh told Edge Online in a recent interview, "but I think we can." We do too, Carl. We believe in you.

Mojang's first published game will use similar sales structure as Minecraft. At this year's MineCon Mojang's aannounced that Cobalt will have a paid Alpha before the end of the year. People who pay for the Alpha will get access to the future updates, the hope being that these hardcore early adop...

There's a lot going on in Cobalt. Like, a lot.

In fact, as much as I detest "it's like this but this," I feel like that's the best place to start. The best way I can describe Cobalt (the first third-party release from Minecraft's Mojang) is as a curious mix of John Woo, Super Meat Boy, Contra and (most prominently) Super Smash Brothers.

Like I said ... a lot going on.

Cobalt is deceptively cute. Watching a bunch of silly robots bouncing about on the screen from a few feet away I couldn't tell just how hardcore a multiplayer game it is. It looks simplistic, but once your hands are on the controller and you're blasting away at another player, you realize that this addictive little shooter is going to take some serious time to become a master...