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Revolutionary: Playing. Creating? Sharing!
Every (other) Tuesday, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities. Custom level creation in console games has come a long way. It used to be, if you wanted to share a track that you built in Excitebike, you had to invite friends over to play your creation on your cartridge, until you powered off your NES and the track was lost forever. Nowadays our levels can be saved to internal storage, and shared by removable media, or across the internet to survive for posterity. It's a feature that's fully supported by all consoles this generation, and big games are highlighting it amongst their bullet points. System sellers like Halo 3, LittleBigPlanet, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl are trojan-horsing the concept of custom level creation into the consciousness of the console-consuming collective. Former Sony exec Phil Harrison popularized the term "Game 3.0," but we'll be taking a look at how it is playing out on Nintendo's platform.
Blast Works media reveals more of editor, underwhelming boxart
For a game as inventive and unique as Budcat's Blast Works, that sure is some vanilla boxart. Okay, so it's functional in a Ronseal-kinda way, but it's also far from pretty or imaginative (like the game itself). Then again, sporting the kind of cover you'd expect to see on the blandest of Wii budget shovelware didn't harm Game Party's chances, so perhaps this will do the trick, and millions will get to sample Blast Works' original premise and amazing item editor. We can but hope.Speaking of the item editor, it's the center of attention in the fifteen new Blast Works shots in the gallery below. It looks as deep and as engrossing as ever, and there's some encouragingly weird ships being created in those screens.%Gallery-4821%
Joystiq impressions: Blast Works (Wii)
User-generated gaming is all the rage these days. PS3 has LittleBigPlanet and Unreal Tournament III; Xbox 360 has Xbox Live Community Games; Wii has Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Boom Blox, and now Blast Works.This upcoming Wii-exclusive shooter from Majesco is based on Kenta Cho's Tumiki Fighters. With your mega-powered spaceship, you can blast away at polygonal enemies, and incorporate them into your ship, Katamari-style. Fifteen levels are promised to ship in the final retail game, and each promises to be a unique experience. One level we saw on display had players taking control of a paper airplane, fighting other paper airplanes and origami enemies. The entire world was rendered in black and white, with the environment seemingly made of paper. Another level we saw featured a barrage of colorful, wacky enemies: ducks, frogs, bees, boats. The eclectic mix of enemies all had one purpose: to destroy us.While romping through the included stages may be fun, the most appealing aspect of the game had to be its creation content system. All the levels in Blast Works were created using the in-game tools. Players can create their own ships, enemies, bullets, levels -- and if they so choose, can create their own bullet and AI patterns as well.%Gallery-18355%
New Blast Works trailer highlights bonus games, creative design
Of all the neat stuff about Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy, the free bonus games get the least attention. Even if they are freeware, it's awesome that Majesco is putting four extra shooters on the disc, all of which are great. This latest trailer confirms that in addition to the original TUMIKI Fighters, Kenta Cho's rRootage, Gunroar, and Torus Trooper will be unlockable.Other awesome things in this trailer include: a very quick shot of a vertically-scrolling level, which would seem to indicate that it's possible to make vertical shooters in the game, and the black-and-white paper-airplane game. If that were a standalone game, we'd buy it. But it isn't. It's just something somebody put together in Blast Works.[Via NeoGAF]
Blast Works: it's also a shooter
Gametap's latest preview of Majesco's Blast Works focuses on the part of the game that has previously received the least attention: the game. A lot has been said about the editor, but, of course, building objects isn't all that much fun without anything to do with them. Luckily, Blast Works, like no other shooter, puts objects to great use.This is because the powerup system from TUMIKI Fighters is still present. When you shoot an enemy, it falls out of the sky. If it lands on you, it sticks to your ship, firing its own projectiles and acting as armor -- though, according to the preview, "because you're trying to quickly catch them any way and with any part of your ship you can, you wind up having little control over the actual direction that captured guns fire." If you take a hit, a piece of this "armor" falls off. It's quite easy to build up a giant Katamari-like clump of junk around your ship, but you then lose maneuverability and even start to have a hard time figuring out what's going on onscreen.
Wii Warm Up: New pew pew pew
If there's one thing the Wii has plenty of, it's scrolling shooters, vertical and horizontal. Thanks to the Virtual Console, the Wii has probably the best library of shmups in history. You can go play something like Lords of Thunder or Blazing Lazers right now without even having to go to a store first. That's pretty compelling. Which means that original disc-based shooters actually face a lot of competition from the VC. If you're just now discovering that you love shooters, you can get some of the best ones ever made for a few bucks. That could mean trouble for Castle of Shikigami III, Monkey King and Blast Works. If you like shooters, are you content with the vintage offerings? Do you feel that there's enough of a reason to continue checking out the new games, or have you been reveling in undiscovered classics?
Blast Works: I'm Lovin' It
Not convinced that Blast Works has been upgraded enough from the free Tumiki Fighters to be worth money? If so, watch this and learn. This is a totally unique game, unless you've been playing another Wii shooter about Mayor McCheese attaching downed lawn darts to his body to increase his firepower.Seriously, it would be hard to conceive of a more rigorous test of a game's item-creation utility than Mayor McCheese. Part man, part hamburger, all politician, Mayor McCheese is a big collection of crazy, disparate shapes. And that looks just like him. What you want is what you get in Blast Works. Whoever made that deserves a break today, because it certainly put a smile on. If kids like us were running the world, you could make Mayor McCheese in every game.Hey, it could happen.
Yes, you can build your own blocky TIE Fighter dragon monster thing
If you become skilled enough with Blast Works' item editor, there's no end to what you can do! Like this ... thing with what kind of looks like the sides of a TIE Fighter as ears! It's pink and spiky and shoots triangles at seaplanes! Then, when you've finished creating horrible monsters made out of neat-looking white-outlined blocks, you can take them on with up to three friends -- also flying around in homemade avatars.This set of four screens found at Wiiz doesn't just tease the multiplayer and the capabilities of the editor, but also shows the creation tool at work. Now we just have to find a way to become creative before the game comes out.
Blast Works developers on creating the game's creation engine
Blast Works: Build, Fuse, and Destroy developers Budcat Creations have started blogging on IGN about the process of remaking Kenta Cho's TUMIKI Fighters into something much more than the original free game. According to the blog, the remarkable item editing capability grew from a desire to create more complex ships than the original game engine would allow. So they built a more fully-featured Shape Editor.They then stipulated that the artists had to use the Shape Editor to create all the game's assets. The final Shape editor used to develop the levels and the Shape Editor on the disc differ in that "the limits to the maximum dimensions of an individual block and the total number of blocks were removed in the PC version for prototyping." Feedback from the artists then went into refining the engine. The results can be seen above, in this amazing video of a ship being constructed. We were excited enough when this was just a port of a free game. Now it's a completely new game, and one that looks like it absolutely should not be missed.[Via NeoGAF]
Anniversary aftermath: Next year's awesome games that you forgot about
We spent yesterday going through the big releases that've been announced for next year so far -- Smash Bros. Brawl and/or Wii Fit likely topping your personal "must get" list -- but what about the second-tier games that don't usually receive much press or attention? Though we haven't forgotten about the low-key releases, we've collected a selection of games and media to ensure that these titles stay on your mind too! Read on for our top ten list of awesome 2008 games that you totally forgot about!
Blast Works lets you build all kinds of stuff
For a while, all we've known about Blast Works's editor mode is that it was feature-rich and awesome. Gametap's Jared Rea (formerly of Joystiq!) got to mess with the editor during a hands-on preview, and found not only an edit mode, but an incredibly versatile shooter creation engine. Apparently, ships made of "over 100 pieces" are possible, and feature user-defined hitboxes and gun placements. Levels feature custom backgrounds, which can be layered for parallax effects, and populated with enemies designed and placed by the user, which shoot bullets that are also user-drawn. Any drawn element can be used for any other, so enemies can be placed in the background, or used as the protagonist's ship, or anything else.We really hope to see a community built up around trading custom ships and levels online, through which we could be shooting forever.
Blast Works delayed, for a decent reason
At one time, we dreamed of filling the period between now and the big holiday releases with lots of shooting, courtesy of Majesco's Blast Works. We most recently found it scheduled for an October 16 release, which was acceptable to us. But Majesco announced yesterday that Blast Works has been delayed until the first quarter of 2008. Our hopes for playing it this year have been exploded into blocks and caught to add firepower to the junk-composed spaceship of our disappointment. The good news is that, with the extra time, developer Budcat Creations will be adding the capability to share custom ships and levels, as well as high scores, over WiiConnect24. The bad news is that -- oh, right, the rest of the post was the bad news.[Via Game|Life]
Why not throw a bunch of freeware games in with Blast Works?
That's what Majesco and Budcat thought, anyway. They were already making a game based on a Kenta Cho freeware shooter, with no legal hoops to jump through. There's basically no reason for them not to throw a bunch more Cho games on there! It works out well for them, because it's bonus content, and it works out nicely for us, because we'll be able to play more great abstract shooters on our television, using our Wiimote!Siliconera played Blast Works at E3, and realized very quickly that they were just playing the original TUMIKI Fighters. The Budcat rep explained that it was an early build and that Blast Works would indeed be a new game. He also revealed that not only will TUMIKI Fighters be on the disc in its original form, but rRootage and possibly Gunroar and Torus Trooper will be bonus content as well.This means that you can go preview some Blast Works bonus content right now! It's like being at E3. Just like it. We recommend rRootage especially-- it's a parade of randomly-generated bosses.%Gallery-4821%
Majesco officially announces Tumiki Fighters as Blast Works
We had just about forgotten about the Gamefly-supplied rumor of a Wii port of Tumiki Fighters, and now we have confirmation from Majesco! They'll be releasing an upgraded port of Kenta Cho's freeware shooter, with the new title Blast Works, in the first quarter of next year-- in Europe. No US date has been announced.Not only will the game feature the same awesome mechanic the original had (grabbing parts from exploded enemies to upgrade your ship) but it'll include weapon, propulsion, armor, ship, enemy, and level editors. Grab the freeware version and give it a try, then join us in hoping for a US release-- it beats online petitions, at least.
