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New Nintendo eShop releases: Mario Kart 8 DLC, Sonic Boom
Mario Kart 8's first major content pack is available now, and for $8 and 1GB of Wii U space you can fill your racing roster with the likes of Link, the Master Cycle, and a circuit based on F-Zero's Mute City. Or, to summarize for numerophiles, three characters, four karts and eight tracks. Don't forget, you can also get the DLC as part of the $12 package that bundles in a pre-order for the second pack, due in March 2015. The eShop's not just about Mario Kart 8 this week... 'cos Mario Kart: Super Circuit brings GBA racing to the Wii U Virtual Console. We josh, kartophobes, there's plenty of other stuff to download. There are the console and handheld editions of Sonic Boom, the Wii U port of pop-up beauty Tengami (check out our impressions of it on iOS), and the belated stateside arrival of Pokemon Trading Card Game on 3DS Virtual Console. Since it's November and another one of those content-packed weeks, our digestible list of new releases should prove handy. You'll find that below the break. and if you're after sales and permanent discounts, point your clicker here.
Apple Design Award sale discounts Threes, Monument Valley, and more
The iTunes App Store is hosting an unannounced sale on several Apple Design Award-winning apps, giving frugal players the opportunity to check out some of the best games to hit iOS devices this year. Featured games are Asher Vollmer's sliding number-cruncher Threes (99 cents), ustwo's perspective-shifting adventure game Monument Valley ($1.99), and Denis Mikan's touchscreen puzzler Blek (99 cents). Other award-nominated sale highlights include Tengami ($1.99), Eliss Infinity (99 cents), and Lost Toys ($1.99). There's no word as to when these app discounts will expire, so grab 'em while you can. [Image: ustwo]
Portabliss: Tengami
This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Days after having soaked in the culture of Tokyo's suburban streets, I played Tengami for the first time, and it was the perfect set up to blow me away. Nyamyam's point-and-click (or point-and-tap) adventure draws inspiration from Japanese fairy tales, and when you see it in action for the first time it certainly feels magical. Its papercraft world, glossed in subtle, flowing shades of red, green, and blue, folds in and out frame-by-frame through some meticulous 3D wizardry. Sliding to turn and fold the paper of its pop-up landscape is an elegant pleasure, and walking in its world and visiting its lovingly detailed shrines makes me wish I'd really taken the time to explore Tokyo's rich history, rather than spending all my hours and yen in Akihabara arcades – that was great too, but still. Tengami is the creation of a three-man team, which explains why it took more than three years to create. As Nyamyam's Jennifer Schneidereit told me in September, a good year or so was spent on the 3D digital editor that makes the game's pop-ups mirror the physics of paper. The technical aspects run even deeper, like how the book's look and feel is based on a natural Japanese paper that has watercolor-like gradients, or how its puzzling temples have their roots in the schematics of real Japanese shrines.
Open the book on pop-up papercraft adventure Tengami this week
Nyamnam's three-man team of former Rare devs is releasing its debut game, Tengami, on iOS this week. Styled as a pop-up adventure book deriving from Japanese arts and crafts, Tengami takes players through a fairytale story as they tug, slide, and fold its colorful world to unravel the puzzles within. Tengami is priced $5/£3/4.49 euros, and it's coming to iPhone and iPad on February 20. If you're interested but Apple-less, the good news is it's also due on Wii U, Windows PC, and Mac sometime this summer. [Image: Nyamyam]
Tengami trailer pops up, is gorgeous
Tengami has stayed beneath the covers for a while, but it's clearly benefited from all that beauty sleep. The brainchild of three-man indie team Nyamyam, Tengami takes a story drawn from Japanese fairy tales and transforms it into a pop-up puzzle rich in color. That said, you'll have to find your own forest and babbling brook to play it by. Tengami comes to iOS in early 2014, before turning the page onto Wii U, Windows PC and Mac later in the year.
Tengami is a beautiful journey through heavenly paper
Jennifer Schneidereit is one of three developers who worked with legendary game developers Rare on Kinect Sports. That same group of three later created their own company, Nyamyam games. They started work on their first title, Tengami, about two years ago. Since then, it has been honored with awards at Indiecade and the Tokyo Game Show. Now, it's finally coming to the Mac and iOS. Schneidereit kindly stopped by for a quick talk with me at GDC, to show off the game and say we can expect it this summer. Tengami is beautiful. It's moody and subtle, and felt like the kind of peaceful, quiet game that invites introspection (unfortunately the crowded room was too noisy for me to hear the game). Schneidereit told me that "Tengami" means something akin to "heavenly paper" in Japanese, and that's a fitting title for this one. The game takes place inside a pop-up book and tells a Japanese fairy tale through exploration and mood rather than written words. The game begins on just a book, and you drag across the screen to flip it open. Then turn the first page and, just like in a real pop-up book, the folded "paper" image slowly opens to reveal itself. In this case, it's a samurai sitting quietly beneath a small tree. Turn the page again (subtle glowing prompts to let you know when a transition is ready), and the scene changes slightly, as the samurai's tree slowly starts to fade away. Turn the page yet again and you're suddenly brought into a larger, rocky outcropping, where you can tap around to send the samurai exploring. There is some gameplay to Tengami. One section features a maze puzzle, where you needed to flip sections of the page up and down in exactly the right way to try and open a path for the samurai to continue through. But much of the game's charm is in its beauty. The team scanned real paper to use as textures in the 3D world they created, and the look turned out just great. The first chapter takes place in a forest (where you enter a Japanese temple by flipping a page), and the game's gorgeous art is dazzlingly implemented. The second chapter features a wide ocean environment, and the third is a mystery that players must solve for themselves. Schneidereit says that when development on Tengami started two years ago, she felt that "mobile games were treated like garbage." Nowadays, she admits that's changed a bit, but Nyamyam is out to prove that statement wrong completely. I'll be looking forward to seeing the fruits of their work when Tengami is finally ready later on this year.
Ex-Rare team pops up with paper-style adventure game Tengami
UK indie Nyamyam sent us this trailer for its upcoming iPad, PC and Mac game Tengami, and we endeavored to share it with you because look at it. Tengami is an "explorative adventure game" that takes place inside a pop-up-book, with a world made out of Japanese-style art.Nyamyam's team is made up of former Rare staff. "Before going indie we worked on games such as Starfox Adventures, Kameo, and [Perfect Dark Zero]," co-founder Jennifer Schneidereit told us. Now it has an IndieCade-nominated game that's due next summer.
