That Kaz Ayabe’s coming-of-age tale should arrive at the same time as Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim could either be considered fortuitous or unfortunate timing, depending on your perspective. Both game and film feature kaiju, the colossal creations popularised by the Japanese movie industry in the 1950s, though the two couldn’t be less alike. This tale of a rustic town visited weekly by monsters in ‘70s Japan eschews bombast and spectacle for an intimate fable that casts an electrifying spell.
It follows the ten-year-old Sohta, as he attempts to acclimatise to his new home. Like his schoolmates, he’s obsessed with the hero shows of the time, and bonds with his peers over games of monster cards. These challenges prompt simple, but disarmingly engaging rock-paper-scissors battles, where the loser becomes the winner’s servant. Succeed, and you can cast a spell (which can be customised from several commands and gibberish phrases) that makes your opponent fall over, whereupon you command them to “arise!” This delightful ritual is typical of the skill with which the game captures the patterns of childhood speech and behaviour, while the world is framed with a delicate, nostalgic beauty.
A Toyko Tale is brief and entirely linear – in the main, you’re simply walking between numbered waypoints, though you can unlock certain dialogues by losing your servant status – but Ayabe transports you so utterly to an unfamiliar time and place that it matters little. By the outlandish and oddly touching final act showdown, you’ll be a rapt spectator, cheering on the heroes alongside Sohta and his newfound friends.
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale is out now on 3DS.
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Titanfall is a comfortably brown military FPS backed by Microsoft, but it’s still a risk for Respawn. Not because gamers are due to give up on fetishising guns this gen, but in a world where every multiplayer shooter has an arbitrary campaign for the express purpose of cutting trailers and adding perceived value, Titanfall has none.
“In our game, multiplayer is the campaign,” says lead designer Mackey McCandlish. “Every level has a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You play as a Pilot – they’re soldiers with extra manoeuvrability – but the battlefield is also populated with AI grunts to fill out the scene, and talk, and bring Titanfall that grounded reality that AI characters have been bringing to singleplayer for a long time.”
Titanfall is the latest product of the sci-fi revival. As McCandlish points out, Saving Private Ryan kickstarted the early 2000s’ WWII obsession and Black Hawk Down helped spawn the modern military shooter, but Titanfall will thrive off the back of Prometheus and District 9 with its galaxy-spanning tale of mech (the titular Titans) war.
As players join the servers, they populate massive dropships. After a brief recruitment phase, these warp over the battlefield and disgorge Pilots from above. “Our game is still infantry-based; we’re not building colossal maps for tanks, but we have to build for big infantry and small infantry, and then we have to build so that the small infantry have useful spaces to get an advantage over the Titans. Every map is small enough to be lovingly hand-crafted [and] to take advantage of this scale disparity you get between the cat and mouse, the Titans and Pilots.”
And Titanfall’s Pilots are agile mice: they can scale buildings in seconds and walljump to mount Titans, tearing away their armoured housing and opening fire on the internal components. In a straight fight, a Pilot on foot is no match for a Titan, but Titans will quickly learn to be wary of elevated vantage points from which Pilots can board and crush the mechs. Far better, then, to pilot your Titan with a friend riding shotgun. Players can hitch a ride on passing friendly mechs as they wait for their own suits to fall into battle, and provide covering fire.
Respawn’s E3 demo is a showcase of moments you wouldn’t see in a current shooter, but it’s the studio’s history that makes Titanfall such a draw for Xbox One. Made up of members from 2015 Inc and Infinity Ward, this is the same team that under two different names has defined two generations of console gaming. If its trendsetting nature continues, it will kill the bolt-on singleplayer campaign as it defines this one.
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Mossmouth has revealed a new way to play Spelunky with its Steam-exclusive Daily Challenges.
From August 8 onwards, the Daily Challenges will randomly generate a new adventure, which will be the same for all players. Spelunky players will only get one attempt at the Daily, the results of which will be collated on new Daily leaderboards.
“One chance… each day. For guts… for glory,” reads the announcement. “No excuses! Since everyone plays the same adventure during the Daily, you’ll be able to know for certain who’s the top Spelunky player in your tribe – we’ve already been having a great time competing against one another behind the scenes!”
The Daily Challenges were conceived by fellow indies Douglas Wilson and Zach Gage, who will be streaming daily runs for a week starting July 28, alongside several Let’s Players from YouTube.
We awarded the game a 9 when it was released last year – you can read our Spelunky review through the link.
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The organiser of GDC 2014 is accepting proposals to speak at the event, from today up until Thursday August 29.
You can submit your offer to speak or host a roundtable to organiser UBM Tech Game Network within the main conference’s Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts tracks through the official GDC site now.
The 27th Game Developer’s Conference will take place March 17th-21st 2014 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.
The event’s organisers also confirmed that it has two new members on its advisory board, Light & Dark Arts’ Christina Coffin and TinyCo’s Chelsea Howe.
You can read all of our coverage from GDC 2013 through the link.
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