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PSA: Fez finally for really real available to buy and play and everything
Ready to get your Z-axis adventures on, all the while wearing an adorable (and potentially magical) hat? Polytron's Fez is finally (finally) available for you to do just that via Xbox Live Arcade. Better yet? It's just $10!But you haven't heard of Fez, you say? Well, frankly, that's kinda weird. We're saying we think you're kinda weird. If that is the case, however, there's a brand new launch trailer for Fez just above so you can learn all about it. Oh, and hey, we think it's pretty great, in case that wasn't already clear.
Fez review: Hats off
Whenever a game is hyped to stratospheric proportions, many times over a course of years, it enters a volatile realm of public reception.When a game has won numerous awards before its launch, is one half of an industry documentary, and is developed by an outspoken, opinionated man, it resides in a universe of its own and players are relegated to describe it in one of two ways: with blazing praise or incendiary criticism.Fez is on fire, and it burns with a brilliant, red-hot, yellow-tasseled flame.
Listen to the Fez soundtrack now for 3 dimensions of audible awesome
Fez is officially and finally coming out on Friday, April 13, but half of the highly anticipated experience is available now: The Fez soundtrack from Disasterpeace is available in its entirety via Spotify right now, or for pre-order and sampling on Bandcamp.Before anyone says, "Wutevs not every1 has been waiting 4 Fez for 5 yrs STFU u guise," the soundtrack is currently number one on Bandcamp, so it's not completely off the mainstream radar. Personally, we've been listening to the soundtrack all day and already we feel more well-rounded.
Fez hits XBLA on April 13 for 800 MSP
Xbox Live Arcade finally becomes a glorified Fez dispenser on Friday, April 13th. Polytron just blasted out the release date and ten-dollar price point for its perplexing play on perspective -- and we've decided that we now want all such announcements embedded inside exuberant and weirdly hypnotic graphics.The game's lengthy development time and subsequent trials in Microsoft certification have been dominant talking points until now, and they're joined by an unusual Friday launch date on Xbox Live Arcade. If you want to learn more about the man behind Fez, be sure to read about our afternoon spent with one Phil Fish.
Fezes are cool: An afternoon with Phil Fish
Amidst the gridlocked, city-wide pandemonium that is SXSW Interactive, I was able to rescue Fez's lead designer and artist Phil Fish from a pack of ravenous, business-card waving fans long enough for an interview. We set up at the quiet end of the Palmer Events Center's glass-lined second floor, standing at a chest high, sidewalk cafe-esque table overlooking Zilker Park. It had been raining for two days straight, but that morning the clouds had parted and festival attendees were treated to one of the few gorgeous spring afternoons Texas will get this year.Fez has missed its most recently announced release window of Q1 2012, but the fact that the game is undergoing Microsoft certification means that it'll be out relatively soon. "We almost made it to Q1," Fish said. "We entered certification like two weeks ago, but we actually just failed it, which is kinda standard. Pretty much everybody fails their first cert."Microsoft has a two-month window in which it can release Fez once it has gone gold, and Fish wants to make sure it happens as quickly as possible. "We're trying to put pressure on them to release it as soon as possible because the zeitgeist is really good right now, with the movie starting to get a lot of play and the award. And, also, it's been five years. I don't want to wait another two months after that."
Phil Fish's next game won't be on XBLA, might be Kickstarter'd
Fez may just now be undergoing the certification process at Microsoft, but that doesn't mean designer Phil Fish is resting on his laurels. Quite the contrary, in fact; Fish's next project is already in its formative stages, and he's so anxious to begin work that he may use Kickstarter to fund it. Whatever that project might be, however, it won't be an XBLA game."Well, our next project is going to be not for XBLA," Fish told us during SXSW Interactive, in response to a question regarding Fez's limited XBLA exclusivity, and the possibility of a similar arrangement for his next title. "I think it's unfortunate that Microsoft works that way, but like I said [during the panel] we gave them what they wanted and they've been backing us up the whole time. I'm sure you've heard many horror stories of people working with XBLA; they've been nothing but understanding and supporting of us this whole entire time."It's been three months since Fish's work on Fez ended; the game is still being debugged by other members of the team, but in his capacity as a designer he's finished. He hasn't quite known what to do with himself in the interim, and that restlessness has lead him and his team to heavily consider Kickstarter for their next project."It's going to take a while before we get money from Microsoft, and I want to get started on this project that I'm making with a couple people, a larger team than just me and another guy," Fish said. "We wouldn't need much and we wouldn't ask for much, but I assume we'll get more than we ask for, having just won the grand prize and Fez about to come out."The campaign wouldn't start until after the release of Fez, which Fish is concerned about: "I'm afraid people might take [the Kickstarter] the wrong way. Like, 'Why do you need a Kickstarter, you just made Fez?' Yeah, but it takes five months before we get paid, maybe, it's totally variable, but at least three months. The best case scenario is we get paid three months after the release. I don't want to wait three months."
One reason Fez has taken five years to make, has already won awards
Seeing Fez's technical postmortem directly before a screening of Indie Game: The Movie offered a jilted experience, one from developer Renaud Bedard, who presents the game's pitfalls in its most practical terms, and the other from a dramatic 15-foot projection of Phil Fish's muttonchops, who assure us that re-re-creating Fez was and continues to be a truly personal, life-altering experience.Fez has been in development for almost five years and is now officially undergoing Microsoft certification -- the most the public (or press) has played is in demo form, yet Fez has been widely anticipated since its IGF win in 2008, a scenario that Indie Game: The Movie explores on a deeply human level. Bedard explains it in more technical terms. Way more technical terms.Bedard and Fish created their own editor for Fez, called the Fezzer, and designed what they deemed "trixels," blocks like voxels but at 16x16x16, or as Bedard described it, four 2D views creating one 3D world. Instead of a standard 2D tile set, Bedard built 3D "triles" -- 302 of them -- in 17 trile sets. Fez will have 157 isolated levels, and these triles make up all of them.Fez stars Gomez, a 2D character wandering a 3D world, and it also features a 4D character, Dot the tesseract. Dot is a 4D hypercube fairy that Bedard created using faux 4D to 3D projections with 96 vertices and 144 triangles, lending her the feeling that she knows more about the Fez universe as a whole, which she does.Both Bedard and on-screen Fish agree that Fez has been a long time coming."The fact that Fez was such a long project means that we kept upgrading," Bedard said. "Fez is our first game, our first project. It's hard to manage the fact that you want the game to be perfect."
Indie Game: The Movie premieres tomorrow at Sundance, here's a Fish
Indie Game: The Movie is preparing for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins tomorrow in Park City, Utah, and runs through the 29th. Indie Game: The Movie has five screenings at Sundance, and it's offering a glimpse at developer Phil Fish's own premiere of Fez right here.
Fez rated in Europe, the four-year wait is almost over
Fez is finally showing signs of imminent birth, with this being the equivalent of "water breaking," as Europe's PEGI board recently classified the game for Xbox Live. XBLAfans took note of the rating, a step which has yet to occur with the Australian Board or the States' ESRB. The unreleased -- yet award-winning -- game currently has a release window of "early 2012." Now, if we all eat our vegetables and wash behind our ears every night, that launch window may actually stick.
Fez delayed (again) to early 2012
Fez creator Phil Fish has posted this video on Vimeo, a "long screenshot" showing off one of the game's intriguing 3D environments. As with everything else we've seen of the game, it looks pretty amazing, combining great colors and design work with the 2D/3D ... Wait, what? Oh crap. Fish just tweeted, buried in between parentheses of what we can only assume to be shame, that the game's been delayed yet again. It won't be out until at least 2012. So don't enjoy that video too much -- we're not sure if we can stand the wait that much longer.
Fez was inspired by Ico's minimalism and 'lonely isolation'
Polytron's Fez has been such a long time coming, designer Phil Fish explained at Fantastic Arcade this weekend (where Fez won the above Audience Choice award), because "we've had no points of reference for what our 2D/3D 'moment to moment' play is." While there are other games that involve moving from 2D into 3D space, like Echochrome and Crush, they "don't work like Fez at all," he said. As Fish has worked to figure out how Fez does work, he's removed a lot of features from the game that he began to see as cruft. "There used to be a billion different things in Fez that didn't have to do with the core mechanic of rotation," Fish said. "We used to have the concept of weight: objects had different weights; if a vase was empty you could fill it with water to trigger a switch ... It was nothing to do with flipping between 2D and 3D." Other lost concepts included health, which Fish resisted removing at first simply because he liked the classic look of a heart meter on the screen. But it wasn't necessary in a game with no enemies. Both the "design by subtraction" mindset and the lack of enemies are inspired by Ico, he said. Fumito Ueda's game design philosophy informed his, as did Ico's "nostalgic, lonely isolation." He also cites Mario, Zelda, and Myst games as inspirations.
Indie Game: The Movie has new trailer, new music, and new Kickstarter
The two-person team behind Indie Game: The Movie just released a new trailer for the increasingly epic project, featuring developers Team Meat, Phil Fish, and Jonathan Blow as they pour their lives into their games. If you want to see how a film can draw genuinely interesting visuals out of "people talking about making games," look no further than the trailer after the break. Those visuals will also be accompanied by interesting sounds: filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot announced today that Sword & Sworcery EP composer Jim Guthrie is creating the music for the film. Now, in order to finish that movie, the duo has initiated a second Kickstarter campaign. Basically, they need to bring more people in: "We're looking for help with the finishing costs of the feature film (audio, colour, and mastering) in order to make this movie the best possible version of itself." Available rewards for helping them reach the $35,000 goal include digital, DVD, or extended Special Edition copies of Indie Game: The Movie, t-shirts, and credits in the film. Go help out! We want to see this movie!
Indies react: PAX East as a showcase for small studios
Like so many PAX shows before it, this year's PAX East showcased a ton of indie games -- the gaming equivalent of a Williamsburg dubstep show, if you will. In our experience at this year's event, larger industry players like EA and Bethesda showed off their titles with hired hands and private theater viewings, choosing to exhibit older demos rather than new content. The indies and smaller studios, on the other hand, were out in force. Beyond bringing playable versions of their games to the show -- even Fez was playable, for the first time in several years of development -- the indie studios brought themselves. They continued the tradition of directly engaging with attendees and, often, solicited game-testing feedback on the fly. "I approached PAX East as a three-day playtest session. I learned so much about what works and what doesn't just from standing in the back and observing how people played the game," Fez co-developer Phil Fish told Joystiq. "It's also an amazing morale boost to be told by so many people that your game is great."
Fez preview: It's the little things
Fez is not just a platformer. Nor is it just a puzzle-platformer. Fez is an experience. A crazy experience that's clearly the product of some eccentric and passionate game developers -- two, in fact, who are all that comprise Polytron Corporation, the game's Montreal-based developer. Fez is what happens when you mix fancy, high-end modern consoles with 16-bit-era graphics, and put two guys with very serious detail obsession in control. In short, Fez is very, very impressive.
Fez shows off gameplay, still in development
Hey, remember Fez, the little mind- and dimension-twisting indie platformer that was due out in 2009 2010 sometime in the future? Apparently that's still true -- developer Phil Fish has shared a brand new gameplay video on Twitter today, and you can watch it right after the break. The lead character's name is Gomez, according to the video's description, and the game will take him "a voyage of discovery into the mysterious 3rd dimension." Sounds fun, but when's it out? Fish doesn't say that, but he does confirm that the game "does indeed appear not to be an elaborate prank." Cute. Normally we wouldn't allow ourselves to be strung along like this on so little information, but this video has changed our perspective just enough for us to stay patient for this one a little longer. Weird how that works.
Fez coming to XBLA in 2010
With just the simple image you see above, developer Polytron announced that its dimensional-shifting platformer Fez would arrive on the Xbox Live Arcade platform at some point next year. Though we've seen a date of 2009 in a previous trailer, the teaser image is the best indication we've had so far in terms of a concrete platform for the game.Though we can't say it's a huge surprise (we spotted an Xbox "A" button in the game back in March), it's nice to have it officially official.
