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DigiPen students launch multiplayer crossover bumper brawl, Ball-Stars
DigiPen Ball-Stars has a lot of DigiPen in it.DigiPen Institute of Technology students Corey Kay, Curtis McCoy, Jason Meisel, and Sean Reilly have banded together to release Barry's Magical Escape: DigiPen Ball-Stars Edition, a freeware indie crossover title for PC inspired by Mario Party's Bumper Balls minigame. (Unfortunately, Luigi isn't a playable character here, so you can't win by doing nothing.)Barry's Magical Escape offers a motley collection of characters and backdrops from many DigiPen standouts, including the survival racer Nitronic Rush, stealth-action game Deity and Portal's predecessor, Narbacular Drop. As in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series, random items drop throughout each battle, and each successful strike increases an enemy's bounce recoil, leading to some wildly chaotic possibilities. Be prepared to lose friendships over this one.Barry's Magical Escape supports up to eight simultaneous players in local and online multiplayer matches.%Gallery-186737%
Quantum Conundrum's Kim Swift gives us some cold, hard fluff
It's Saturday morning. You have a giant bowl of sugar-coated cereal, the comfiest slippers on your feet, and an entire day to spend watching talkative cartoon animals get comically mutilated in some of the most sadistic ways known to man. Quantum Conundrum is kind of like that -- sweet and fun, but with an inherent and surprising darkness, creative director Kim Swift told Joystiq in an exclusive interview."It has this very cartoony, dynamic feel to it with the gameplay," Swift said. "Tonality-wise, it came naturally that this game be slightly more lighthearted, slightly more on the slapstick, Looney Toons kind of a feel. But even Looney Toons has a darker element to it -- you're looking at these cartoon characters getting squished and all that stuff, so it's definitely not like we're watching PBS on a Saturday morning. More like Cartoon Network on a Saturday morning."Swift, known for her work on Portal and its student-project predecessor, Narbacular Drop, has been developing Quantum Conundrum for Airtight Games since 2009. While the title features the same first-person physics puzzle-style of her previous work, Swift said Quantum Conundrum operates in a completely separate universe and has a starkly different feel than anything she's done."With Quantum Conundrum, we're a little bit more slapstick and off the wall than Portal," Swift said. "And Narbacular Drop is Narbacular Drop."%Gallery-147497%
Portal 1 has sold four million, excluding Steam sales
With an auspicious beginning at the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase in 2006, a small game -- named Narbacular Drop -- from a group of DigiPen students went on to inspire an industry darling. Several oft-quoted lines of dialog and millions of "The cake is a lie" jokes later, Portal was a resounding critical success when it launched inside The Orange Box, also home to Half-Life 2, its two follow-ups, and Team Fortress 2. You knew about the acclaim, but you may not have known that it has moved approximately four million copies in the past four years. What's really surprising, however, is that Valve reached that sales mark without including the numbers for Steam -- numbers that would muddle the accuracy of that four million in terms of actual sales, given that Valve has offered the game free through Steam at various times. It's also unclear whether that number includes individual copies of Portal sold at retail, the Xbox Live Arcade release (Portal: Still Alive), or any other sales channels. We've reached out to Valve for clarity on the total sales of Portal, but for now, four million is nothing to sneeze at -- especially considering the game's humble origins.
Students snatched up to develop Portal
There's an interesting rags to finely rendered riches story to be found in an interview conducted with Valve's newest employees -- the DigiPen students responsible for Narbacular Drop, a crazy foray into transitive gameplay that now serves as the inspiration for Valve's mindbending Portal. Kim Swift, one of the developers on the project, notes how rapidly their run-in with Gabe Newell changed their careers and their lives:"Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes."The rest of the interview clarifies some issues regarding the Half-Life 2: Episode Two companion, ruling out multiplayer (for now) and firmly labeling the game as a level-based adventure of puzzles and experiments gone awry. Swift was slightly lethargic in sharing information with regards to where exactly Portal fits into the Half-Life universe, though we'd bet a headcrab or two that the protagonist will be a Black Mesa alumni. Perhaps Adrian Shepherd has become an unwitting test subject for the Aperture Science Laboratories? That suggestion isn't too outlandish, at least not to the same degree as this response from Swift when she seemingly misunderstands a question about EA potentially purchasing Valve:"As far as I know, Valve has no plans of purchasing EA."Win-win scenario in an alternate universe: Valve-EA releases a Half-Life game on time, every year.Previously: Half-Life 2 confirmed for Xbox 360, PS3 First trailer of Valve's Portal released Team Fortress 2 is so 'incredibles'
