Hasta La Gadget!

You don’t often see a video game specifically designed for a 16-button bespoke controller and for a special one-time party, but that’s exactly what Keita Takahashi has done with Tenya Wanya Teens. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Takahashi is responsible for the enormously popular game franchise that is Katamari Damacy along with cult favorite Noby Noby Boy. Teens is his first foray as an independent creator under Uvula, a studio he formed with his wife Asuka Sakai, and is a result of a collaboration with event organizers Wild Rumpus and video game website Venus Patrol. As for the party in question, it’s one that is being held concurrently with the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which is where we saw the controllers and the game in action.

As you can see above, the controller looks a lot like a modified arcade stick. A hand-made effort by programmer George Buckenham, both boxes were built in about five days for around 200£ ($302.50) each. According to Buckenham, the easiest part was assembling the electronics; it was the plywood housing that took him awhile to master. As for the game, Tenya Wanya Teens is a highly whimsical affair that is described as “a coming-of-age tale about love, hygiene, monsters and finding discarded erotic magazines in the woods.” Tasks include peeing in the shower, punching monsters and taking on grizzly bears.

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GameStick is here … er, sort of. The development units are at least here at GDC 2013, quietly hanging out behind a nondescript computer monitor running a few Android games paired with a Nyko wireless controller. That’s right, it wasn’t running with the proprietary GameStick controller, but a third-party wireless — we’ll go hands-on with the company’s internally built controller later this evening, and thusly we didn’t want to offer a half-impression with the third-party units available on the show floor. Stay tuned for more, and take a gander at the gallery below for now.

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Kojima Productions head Hideo Kojima this morning announced that The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes combined is actually Metal Gear Solid V, the first next-gen game from Kojima Productions running on its powerful FOX Engine. The news was revealed today during a FOX Engine panel at the Game Developers Conference. Kojima announced the combination of the previously announced concepts in a dramatic fashion, with his head wrapped in bandages, presumably as his alter ego Joakim Mogren. They provided a sneak peek trailer at the game’s opening sequence, where Snake is attempting to escape from a hospital — the trailer previously teased in late 2012. As FOX Engine is a next-gen platform, we’re assuming that the game is heading to next-gen consoles, but Kojima’s not saying anything solid just yet.

Update: GamesHQMedia managed to snag a trailer of the game, which we’ve embedded below.

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Game Technologies, the Poland-based company behind the little electronic die that is DICE+, has just announced a $99 developer edition that bundles a transparent-cased model along with its software development kit. As a reminder, the DICE+ is an inch-sized rubberized cube packed with Bluetooth, an accelerometer and a rechargeable battery, with the aim of bringing human interaction to electronic board games and beyond.

We had a look at a demo DICE+ here at the 2013 Game Developers Conference and it looks relatively unchanged from the one we saw at E3 last year. However, the microUSB port is now revealed via a sliding mechanism instead of a pull-out flap, which should result in a more balanced roll. Marketing director David Gatti also told us that the cube’s internals have been revamped and simplified for more cost-effective production.

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Source: DICE+

Havok’s involved itself with mobile gaming for a few years and it’s now taken to this year’s GDC to announce Project Anarchy. This new cross-platform mobile dev engine will include access to its own physics, animation and AI tools — the same as those apparently used in notable series like Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed and, er, Skylanders. It will also integrate Havok’s Vision engine, adding in “game samples” and tutorials to ease mobile devs into crafting plenty of beautiful mobile games that hopefully involve less bird physics and approach something resembling our (admittedly zealous) mock-up above. We’re itching to see those beastly smartphone processors pushed to their limits.

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Software, Mobile

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Source: Project Anarchy