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'Splosion Man' developer Twisted Pixel is leaving Microsoft
Twisted Pixel may have gotten into Microsoft's good graces (and the company itself) through games like Splosion Man and The Maw, but it didn't stay there for very long. The developer has revealed that it's being spun out from Microsoft Studios roughly four years after it joined the fold. The reasons behind the departure aren't immediately apparent. However, it's safe to say that Twisted Pixel's most recent game, LocoCycle, didn't do it any favors -- the Xbox One launch title was so terrible that even the intro movie was hard to bear. Hopefully, the team's departure from Microsoft leads to bigger and better efforts.
LocoCycle burns rubber toward Xbox 360, Steam on Valentine's Day
Following an ignominious debut on the Xbox One, developer Twisted Pixel Games is bringing LocoCycle to the Xbox 360 and PC just in time for the most romantic day of the year. For those who missed our scathing review, Lococyle is a motorcycle combat game that mates intentionally campy full-motion video sequences with repetitive, simplistic gameplay. It stars a chatty motorcycle called "IRIS" who is on the lam from her creators with a hapless human mechanic along for the ride. High-speed violent racing is obviously the game's aim, but as Jess Conditt points out, LocoCycle's gameplay, "even when it does get frantic, offers no strategy or challenge." Despite our issues with LocoCycle, Twisted Pixel is soldiering on. Come February 14, LocoCycle will be available on both Steam and the Xbox 360 Marketplace for $10 - half the price of LocoCycle's Xbox One incarnation. In celebration of these new versions of the game, Twisted Pixel is also sponsoring a contest to award a custom LocoCycle-themed Xbox 360 to one random fan. To enter, you need only purchase LocoCycle for either the Xbox 360 or Xbox One at some point between February 14 and February 28. Full details can be found at the contest's official site.
LocoCycle review: Ay, caramba
We'll be rolling out Xbox One review coverage all the way through launch on November 22. Read all of our coverage right here! LocoCycle begins with a 10-minute live-action movie featuring hyperbolic world leaders in cheap costumes, surrounded by bad lighting and women in cocktail dresses, all attending a showcase from Big Arms, a fictional military manufacturer. The host of the event, a man drawing style inspiration from 'N Sync's Joey Fatone circa 1997, introduces IRIS and SPIKE, the game's two AI super-bikes, in a drawn-out, poorly acted melodrama that incites a mantra to repeat in my mind: "Oh my God, stop. Please, stop." As I watch the B-movie introduction to Lococyle, I wish the game would just start already. And then the game starts, and I take that last part back.
LocoCycle takes awkward live-action video on the road
It just wouldn't be a new Twisted Pixel game without full-motion video interludes. Video gaming's most earnest and awkward narrative relic will appear in LocoCycle, the developer's Xbox One launch game in which you hurtle down the freeway as a sentient, weaponized motorcycle. Named I.R.I.S., the voiced vehicle drags her hapless mechanic behind and sometimes wields him as a melee weapon in mid-air combat, because "sentient, weaponized motorcycle" just doesn't do it for us anymore. Forget violence - video games have desensitized us to the absurd. Though LocoCycle started as an Xbox 360 game (and is still set to arrive on the platform in the future), it's being wheeled out as one of Xbox One's odder launch companions. As a $20 action game, LocoCycle gets a lot of mileage out of its protagonist – you're always blasting forward, weaving through traffic and lining up targets for your on-board machine guns.
Xbox One launch game LocoCycle rated for 360, PC in Germany
Twisted Pixel's Xbox One debut release LocoCycle may also hit the Xbox 360 and PC platforms, according to recent German ratings classifications discovered by Xbox Live marketplace watchdog who goes by "@lifelower" on Twitter. The USK's ratings point to a multiplatform release alongside the game's previously-announced Xbox One launch. The USK ratings board recently outed a Vita release for Injustice: Gods Among Us ahead of its official unveiling earlier this week. LocoCycle is set to premiere on November 22 for $20.
LocoCycle priced $20, available via Xbox One marketplace at launch
Twisted Pixel's LocoCycle will set you back $20 when it wheels onto the Xbox One online store at launch. The first next-gen game from the Comic Jumper and 'Splosion Man studio is also due on Xbox 360, but we're waiting for details on that version to cycle through. In LocoCycle you play as a sentient superweapon motorcycle that's escaped the lab, on the run from another sentient motorcycle. I.R.I.S, the escaped super-bike, can jump into the air and use her tires to perform kung-fu style kicks against enemies, as well as use Pablo, the mechanic she drags around by her rear wheel, as a human sub-weapon. As the name and the studio's previous fare suggested it would be, LocoCycle looks all kinds of weird. If you're at PAX this weekend, you can find and check out LocoCycle on the show floor. For those stuck in front of screens, you can always read our summer preview.
LocoCycle's music is dead serious, won't include a 'silly song'
LocoCycle may continue developer Twisted Pixel's tradition of ridiculous premises – a sentient motorcycle on the run, in this case – but it will be following some very different musical cues. For the Xbox One launch game, Twisted Pixel's longtime composer Matt "Chainsaw" Chaney has switched up his typically humorous style for a dead serious, fully orchestrated score. Twisted Pixel CCO Josh Bear wanted to "approach the soundtrack from a very cinematic standpoint for this game," Chaney tells Joystiq. "You know, give it a Back to the Future Alan Silvestri treatment. Big themes and lush instrumentation with tons of dynamics." To create this feeling, Chaney worked directly with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. "I was terrified that I'd show up in Prague and the musicians would look at the sheet music and then up to me and just be like 'What the fuck is this shit?'" Chaney admits. "I mean, I had never written for a bassoon before. I wrote a part for the double bass section in a track that I particularly liked, and it was pretty awesome to look over at them and see the huge smiles on their faces while they were performing." Don't expect any spiritual successors to comedic songs like "Donuts, Go Nuts" either. "For the first time since 'Splosion Man, I've made a game devoid of goofy music. It just didn't feel like it was needed in this situation, and I didn't want to shoehorn something in just for the sake of having a silly song." For more on LocoCycle and Twisted Pixel's speeding jump to the next generation, be sure to read our recent preview.
Twisted Pixel breaks down LocoCycle's I.R.I.S. and S.P.I.K.E.
The main hero and villain of Twisted Pixel's LocoCycle have a couple of things in common. Both of them are sentient motorcycle superweapons, and both of them have acronyms for names – I.R.I.S. and S.P.I.K.E., respectively. We asked Twisted Pixel just what their names stand for, and studio head Mike Wilford shed some light on the mystery. I.R.I.S. stands for Intelligent Reactionary Infiltration System, ironic considering LocoCycle tells a story of exfiltration, namely her escape from her creators. S.P.I.K.E., meanwhile, stands for Sociopathic Predatory Intelligent Kill Experiment (no way that could backfire). I.R.I.S. will be voiced by Lisa Foiles, who previously voiced the tutorial in Ms. 'Splosion Man. The remorseless killing machine S.P.I.K.E. will be voiced by Robert Patrick, who we're told has some sort of relevant experience. You can read all about LocoCycle, and what it's like for Twisted Pixel to be entrusted with an Xbox One launch title, in our new preview.
Twisted Pixel on speeding to Xbox One's launch with LocoCycle
A man made of explosions breaks out of a lab as fleeing scientists burst into charred hams. A lame superhero's comic is canceled and he fights to get back on the shelves. An undead puppet fueled by demonic tacos rises from the grave to take revenge on his posse. If there's one thing you can count on from developer Twisted Pixel, it's an amusing premise. Its latest game, which will launch alongside Microsoft's Xbox One, is no different. LocoCycle tells the story of I.R.I.S. (Intelligent Reactionary Infiltration System), a top secret, sentient motorcycle that has escaped her makers and is on the run from S.P.I.K.E. (Sociopathic Predatory Intelligent Kill Experiment). In tow – literally – is her Spanish-speaking mechanic Pablo, forcefully dragged along as IRIS blasts her enemies. When she can't shoot baddies, she leaps into the air, "kicking" them with her tires and swinging Pablo around like a pair of giant, fleshy nunchaku.%Gallery-191154%
Microsoft Xbox One gaming roundup (hands-on)
It's a black set-top box. It's a media streamer. It's dependent on an internet connection. It's a living room hub. It wants to be your everything. But really, the Xbox One (or any new, next-gen console for that matter) is nothing without launch games. To get a real sense of that lean-in experience on the Xbox One, we spent some time in Microsoft's (very green) E3 booth playing the various available demos. So join us then, as we deliver some brief impressions of what to expect when you boot up that Day One edition console later this year.
Twisted Pixel's 'LocoCycle' an Xbox One launch title
Microsoft's Twisted Pixel studio (The Maw, 'Splosion Man) announced today that its upcoming LocoCycle will be an Xbox One launch title. An Xbox 360 version of the game is also under development, with a "not yet determined" release window. The game will be playable at E3, but here's a preview of the game from late last year.
Freddy Rodriguez is in Lococycle, wishes it was Call of Duty
We're starting to understand how Twisted Pixel managed to wrangle all the actors featured in LocoCycle.
Twisted Pixel's LocoCycle takes inspiration from some crazy places
You may think, after watching the initial trailer, that Twisted Pixel pulled LocoCycle (in which you control a renegade robotic motorcycle that shoots and karate-chops its way across the country) out of some loony creative cauldron of its own making. But that's not quite true, says studio director Michael Wilford, showing the game for the first time at PAX Prime 2012. There is a very clear inspiration, he says, and it's Ice Cube's 2004 motorcycle racing movie, Torque."It's a really shitty movie," Wilford tells us. "It tries to be Fast and the Furious on motorcycles." Twisted Pixel's art director gave a copy of Torque to the company's chief creative officer, Josh Bear, one day as a joke, and Bear was directly influenced by a viewing, especially a scene where two women battle with motorcycles. "Josh had a nightmare that night," says Wilford with complete sincerity, "and woke up the next day and said, 'We have to make a game about a fighting motorcycle.'"
First two LocoCycle trailers show off gameplay, voice talent, wackiness
Twisted Pixel just released the first two trailers for its latest jam, LocoCycle, and boy howdy does it look as trademark weird as we were hoping. The game focuses on a sentient three-wheeled motorcycle named I.R.I.S. (voiced by Lisa Foiles) who is on the run from her creators and, by extension, the bike they've sent to retrieve her: S.P.I.K.E., voiced by Robert Patrick.As shown in the gameplay trailer above, I.R.I.S. is armed with automatic weaponry and is capable of dramatic, in-air martial arts, ala Devil May Cry/Bayonetta. S.P.I.K.E., who can be seen in the behind-the-scenes voice-actor trailer after the break, has a decidedly more sinister Ghost Rider feel, as opposed to I.R.I.S.'s sophisticated Tron vibe. Well, as sophisticated as a motorcycle dragging a person while punching dudes with its tires can look, at any rate.LocoCycle's release window is still a painfully vague "2013."
Twisted Pixel's next game is LocoCycle [Update: Trailer and more details added!]
Since acquiring Twisted Pixel back in October, Microsoft has seemingly wasted no time putting the Texas studio to work. Announced today during Microsoft's E3 press conference, the outfit's new project has been revealed: LocoCycle, a game that is about a really advanced motorcycle.Update: We've got the trailer embedded in the post now, and there's a press release with some more information just past the break.
