It what sounds to be half serious and half joking, a new developer diary has come out for the upcoming indie title from Hothead Games called Swarm.  I had not heard of the title until I received this developer diary, but it does seem harken back to games like Lemmings and possibly Pikmin (never played it, so I am guessing).  In the video, we see our mindless swarm of blue blobs moving around, stacking, jumping, running and destroying obstacles as they work through each level in the game.

I am not doing it much justice with my write up, but we have the developer diary available for all to see so you too can try to figure out what is going on in Swarm.

If there is one thing that I can atest to life, it is that when Seth Green is producing something geeky, it will probably be badass.  Look at Robot Chicken.  Fantastic show that takes everything that is pop culture and relevant and make it hysterically funny.  And he has been a funny mainstay on Family Guy portraying the clueless Chris Griffen.

So I am not shocked at his latest funny video, with his troupe of girl geeks/gamers who go by the name Team Unicorn.  These gals live, drink and breathe all things geek culture and gaming.  It also helps that the video is full of great references, Stan Lee and some superb cosplay.  Psylocke?  Lara Croft?  Brilliant!  Also, I love their reasoning for calling themselves Team Unicorn – “Because like unicorns, geek girls are not supposed to exist”.

via MSNBC.com

What could be better than some zombie-brain-bashing fun with Left 4 Dead? How about some L4D zombie-brain-bashing in glorious retro 8-bit? Better yet, how about playing it for free?

Pixel Force: Left 4 Dead – a “retro de-make of Valve’s hit zombie killing masterpiece” that offers two difficulty levels and co-op – is now available to download from Eric Ruth Games. It’s worth a download for the kick-ass 8-bit soundtrack alone.

Via Joystiq

The extremely excellent Plants vs. Zombies is set to hit iPhones in January 2010 according to an update on developer PopCap’s Facebook page. So if you can’t get enough of the sleeper, aeropause-award-nominated hit of 2009 on your desktop, you can now kill stuff whilst you’re the move.

Awesome.

Via Thatvideogameblog.com

Each Space Invader is procedurally generated, corresponding to the files on your machine Shoot down the alien and the game wipes the attached file. And while the aliens will not shoot at you, if any of them touch your ship, then lose/lose deletes itself. Imagine putting this on an important PC and testing yourself to see how far you can get before permanently crippling your box. It’s like Namco’s version of Russian Roulette. Hardcore!

In the final analysis, lose/lose is more art project than game, foisting real world implications on your in-game actions. Creator Zach Gage asks “As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data?”

So how long until some idiot in the mainstream press catches wind of this and calls it a virus?

Source: GameSetWatch

In what can be properly described as a classic update to a classic furniture piece, online store meninos has a lamp shade for sale depicting those lovable aliens from Space Invaders. Two things: first at $60, that’s quite a stretch for a stinking lamp shade. I don’t think most lamps cost that much. (Yup, I was right.) And secondly, what .us-based site uses metric only for sizing. Sheesh. Now I definitely won’t be getting them; but, I will accept them if you order them for me. For the record, I need 5 for my kitchen chandelier.

Original link from geekologie.com.

Hot on the news that the full track listings of Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper will be available as DLC, today Game Informer have released more details about the 45-track setlist.

We’ve been forced to piece together the track listing from various trailers and previews, and the good news is that we were mostly right. The latest Game Informer’s cover feature about the game (seriously – how awesome is the cover art?!) lays out the full setlist … well, almost. It won’t give away what the final track is.

Want the full set-list? Join me after the jump …

Singles
I Want To Hold Your Hand
I Feel Fine
Day Tripper
Paperback Writer
Revolution
Don’t Let Me Down

Please Please Me (1963)
I Saw Her Standing There
Boys
Do You Want To Know A Secret
Twist and Shout

With the Beatles (1963)
I Wanna Be Your Man

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night
Can’t Buy Me Love

Beatles For Sale (1964)
Eight Days a Week

Help! (1965)
Ticket To Ride

Rubber Soul (1965)
Drive My Car
I’m Looking Through You
If I Needed Someone

Revolver (1966)
Taxman
Yellow Submarine
And Your Bird Can Sing

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
With a Little Help From My Friends
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Getting Better
Good Morning Good Morning

Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
I Am The Walrus
Hello Goodbye

The Beatles (White Album) (1968)
Dear Prudence
Back In the U.S.S.R.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Birthday
Helter Skelter

Yellow Submarine (1969)
Hey Bulldog

Abbey Road (1969)
Come Together
Something
Octopus’s Garden
I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Here Comes the Sun

Let It Be (1970)
Dig a Pony
I Me Mine
I Got a Feeling
Get Back

Love (2006)
Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows

Happy? Unhappy? Anything missing that you’d like to have seen? I’m stoked that we have the White Album featured, but the contributions from Revolver are pretty light. Surely one of the greatest albums of all-time should offer up more than three tracks? Hmm – they’re saving them for DLC perhaps?

So … your guesses for the final track? GO!

Edit: Ha! Jordan beat me to this article in the comments – nice work.

Source: Joystiq

If you happen not to know (and most gamers don’t, it would seem), League of Legends is an under the radar game developed by independent Riot Studios. A large portion of the team happened to have worked on the phenomenon known as DoTA, or Defense of the Ancients, likely the most well known and popular Warcraft 3 mod to ever exist.

League of Legends has been in development for quite some time and has been designed to rebuild DoTA from the ground up without the limitations of the Warcraft III engine. The game also offers many unique systems that add much needed depth to the game over DoTA, such as the Masteries System that appears to draw heavily from World of Warcraft’s Talent Trees:

There are many more customizations that add flavor to the gameplay, a large portion of them being bundled under the name of “Summoner System”. These features can range from selecting two unique spells chosen from a list you’ve earned, allowing your champion to be slightly different from another player’s character even if you’re playing the same champion, to adding runes to your Rune Book in order to customize your champion’s attributes. It’s all very polished and seemingly adds quite the bit of depth to the game.

Overall, the team seems to be doing an incredible job on the game despite the likelihood of League of Legends ending up as a sleeper hit for some time (DoTA was as well). Which is why I was surprised when Riot Studios announced that the game will be released completely free of charge, an unexpected bit of news that has caused quite the stir given that the dedicated and large fanbase of DoTA were eagerly waiting with $50 in hand.

That’s quite some greenbacks being missed out on. According to the team, they have decided that the best way to reach as much of the community as possible was to not place a price tag on the game. Instead, dedicated fans can “donate” to the game in the form of customizations purchased through “Riot Points” that can in turn be purchased with real cash.

So yes, that does mean the game will have a cash shop. However, according to Riot Studios it will only be for minor character customizations such as unique skins or effects and for what they call “boosts”. The boosts just make the process of reaching max summoner rank a little easier, which supposedly doesn’t take long to accomplish to begin with as it’s really designed as the learning curve for the game.

The team has sworn that they will not be charging for anything that affects competitive play and that it’s more than likely their best players won’t have payed a dime for the game. This design is by choice and the team hopes to instead earn money through “donations” and E-Sport events and tournaments.

Sounds promising, Riot Studios. I myself remember the days of DoTA and the unique form of player versus player action it brought with a mixture of glee and terror, but League of Legends seems to be a beast all of it’s own. I’ll be giving the game a look and a review whenever it’s released, which is currently projected to be sometime around September.

If you’re interested, give the game a look and sign up for the beta over at their official site.

And just for old time’s sake, I’ve included the infamous DoTA song below for your daily dose of amusement:

So, I’m sure everyone has heard all about the next-gen.biz interview with Marc Whitten (general manager of Xbox Live). This is the interview where he reveals there will be no spring update and also mentions delisting poorly performing XBLA titles.

I need to address both of these issues, because while a lot of people are foaming at the mouth over not having a spring update, people need to make special note of what Whitten actually said.

In response to a question about the spring update, he said the following:

We have taken a different approach this spring and spent a lot of our time and resources of building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service not just today but also into the future.

Remember the Xbox Live outages over the holidays? Well, sounds to me like Microsoft is focusing resources on reinforcing the Xbox Live backend instead of developing new UI tweaks. And rightly so, in my opinion. To build a network like Xbox Live really is a massive undertaking, and I personally don’t see a problem with MS spending some of that “spring update budget” on beefing up the network hardware.

It should also be noted that while there is no Spring Update coming, they are releasing a tool to transfer the DRM licenses for XBL content you’ve purchased to a different console. THANK YOU, Microsoft! This is something they should’ve had from the beginning, but better late then never. I still am curious about some of the details of this tool. For instance, will it be an all or nothing prospect? Will I be able to transfer content to a different gamertag? We’ll have to wait and see I suppose.

The other major component of this interview was the revelation that poorly performing titles will be delisted. First of all, I have a major issue with something that Marc Whitten said:

Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for.

So, allow me to translate for the marketing-speak impaired. They are getting rid of titles to make QUALITY titles easier to find. Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t you improve the interface so that better quality titles are easier to find from a UI perspective? Microsoft is going to use Metacritic and sales to determine when a title should be delisted. Why not have an option to sort the titles by popularity? or sort by Metacritic (like Steam allows)?

And another thing, I actually have a major problem with using Metacritic to decide whether a title is quality or not. Metacritic is only an average. And an average is only useful in the proper context. What was the standard deviation for this set of review scores? Which reviews were given what weight in the Metacritic weighted average? And I also personally believe that indie titles, that often eschew mainstream genres don’t always get the best review scores or have the best sales.

Take Wartech Senko no Ronde, for instance. If this were an XBLA title, it’s paltry 59 Metacritic score and lackluster sales would certainly place it on the delisting chopping block. It’s a strange game, being part fighting game and part shmup. It also happens to be one of my favorite games.

It’s a perfect example of one of the problems with the Metacritic paradigm. Titles that don’t neatly fit into pre-defined genres often get poor reviews. Hard-core fighting game fansites will hate the shmup aspects, and hard-core shmup fansites will hate the fighting game aspects. Thus, they end up getting lower review scores than a title that fits neatly into one genre or another.

It’s interesting to me that XBLA, the platform that Microsoft has been trying to tout as indie-developer friendly is implementing a very indie-UNfriendly policy of delisting previously released titles. This is extremely disappointing, because reducing the size of your catalog is a poor substitute for improving the way that the catalog is accessed.

An interesting multiplayer typing-based racing game recently became available on the internet. It seems an odd design choice, but it works really well. You speed your VW Beetle along a drag race by speedily typing quotes from books, movies, and songs. Whoever has the highest words per minute, wins. Not since Typing of the Dead have we seen a videogame that utilizes such a unique and awesome method of control. Playing this game makes me wish my school system had something like this for me to play as opposed to typing “SALAD,” “LAD,” and “FAD” eight million times on one of these.

Via: Kotaku