I guess metanet and Nick Waander’s “Beyond the Postmortem” interview (which was incidentally conducted by insert credit’s Brandon Sheffield) sparked some controversy, because they were so candid about some of the failings of the service. One of the biggest being that the ratio of good games (like N+) to bad (like Toyota Yaris Racing) is totally out of whack.
metanet has since clarified their position a bit by saying that the people they worked with at Microsoft were good, and that they weren’t complaining about their sales (N+ was released after the interview).
But overall, what they said was much less controversial than I thought it would be (natch). It’s obvious to anyone who follows XBLA that there are way too many crappy games on the system. I’m sure part of the reason is that legitimately good developers are put off by the service’s notoriously difficult certification process (Minter rant alert), and prohibitive cost (possibly upwards of $125,000). And, of course, there was the bomb dropped around GDC 2008 that royalty rates have since slipped from 70% to 35-45% (depending on your sales).
The obvious fallout from all this is that Sony and Nintendo can probably look forward to an exodus of developers to their systems in the coming months.
Nick Waanders, of Slick Entertainment, has released the slides for his and mare’s N+ postmortem. Slick did the development for N+ for XBLA.
Kotaku actually has a nice write-up of the game, where they laud, among other things, the excellent multiplayer co-op:
Single player is great and all, but the game really transforms itself in multiplayer mode. I’m not talking about the Survival Mode or the Race Mode here, but the four-player co-op. Teaming up with three other (good) players completely changes the experience. Playing over the same levels in single player mode the teams I have gotten with have come up with some truly innovative and entertaining ways to use our numbers to our advantage.
I’m seriously (srsly) sad that I’m nowhere near an Xbox 360 with Live support right now. Good co-op is so rare in games…
Here is the final trailer for N+, which is out now on Xbox LIVE Arcade (as Raigan would not let us forget). In the words of Jon Mak, “If you don’t buy N+... you’re not indie.”
But indie cred aside, it looks to be great and chock full of wonderful content. Check it out at the very least!
Metanet Software made an appearance at the Penny Arcade Expo last week with N+, demoing the XBox 360 version of the game. The DS/PSP versions, which are being produced by Atari, were also available. In their latest blog post, the intrepid duo lament the absence of online attention for the 360 version, since it’s the one they’re working on directly:
The handheld versions should of course be great — there aren’t very many good platformers available on DS/PSP, these days the only decent platformers seem to be coming from freeware developers — but we really feel like the XBLA version is much more ours.
I don’t think you can go wrong with either, but I’m personally amped for N+ 360! For the skinny on the DS version, however, Joystiq has a hands-on.
N temporary tattoos in the extended. Including Mare, and ninjas leaping from butt cracks (not in the same photo).
I’m back! What a wonderful break. Lorne gets brownie points for posting in my absence. During the Indie Rapture he, and he alone, will join me in the Indie Kingdom of Heaven. (It’s a cardboard box outside a warehouse in Hoboken.)
I want to point you fine folks today at the metablog, wherein discussions are taking place concerning Robotology, their current project, its history, and lots and lots of physics. Does “David Wu’s amazingly awesome implicit-Euler-based solver” sound amazingly awesome to you? Then you best be getting yo’self down to the metablog, post haste! (Get it? Post haste? Maybe not…)
Raigan and mare, collectively metanet, the Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker of independent game development, now have a shiny, minimalistic new blog. It’s only been up a week or so, but already it’s racking up some great content. Everything from information about their new game, Robotology:
The high-level direction for the game was “Umihara Kawase + parkour”, in a world where the environment was not just static platforms, but moving, mechanized, segmented “robots”. (Link)
...to a wonderful diatribe against casual gaming:
The casual games industry, and to a certain extent most of the commercial games industry, is in this way similar to the fast-food industry: churning out cost-effective products with an utter disregard for any factors beyond what will appeal to the greatest number of people. (Link)
I actually don’t find casual gaming to be too offensive. Of course, the rampant cloning is disgusting and I personally would never find much creative satisfaction in making such a game, but… well, as an example, I was at the bank a couple of weeks ago and I told a banker there that I was making a video game, and she got excited and told me that she like to play games in her free time. And what do you think she plays? Fucking Bejeweled! But the fact is that Bejeweled allowed me to have a connection with a middle-aged woman. And that sounds very wrong, but my point is that it was because of Bejeweled and not, well, Cave Story, that allowed this woman to appreciate what I did for a living, and so there has to be some kind of value there, right?
N, the physics-ey based platformer from metanet, is purportedly hitting Xbox Live Arcade this fall, along with the DS and the PSP. Dubbed N+, the game will remain faithful to the original, but the plan is to include some new features.
It’s cool to hear that the XBLA port is being facilitated by Klei Entertainment, the creators of Eets. Indies helping indies… it brings a tear to my eye.
Way to go, guys!
Edit: I mistakenly wrote that one of the new features will be a level editor, but N already has a built-in level editor. And I knew that! Why did I do that? Just another great mystery of the universe.
Microsoft recently announced ten new games planned for Xbox Live Arcade in 2007, including a few indie titles such as The Behemoth’s Alien Hominid HD, NinjaBee’s Band of Bugs, and Klei Entertainment’s previously-unannounced (big) update of Eets, Eets: Chowdown. But that’s not all!
Friends of TIGSource Metanet Software announced a couple days before this announcement an announcement of their own: In collaboration with aforementioned Klei Entertainment, they plan to bring an upgraded incarnation of N, called N+, to the Arcade as early as Fall this year. Hooray!
Now that I think about it, all these games probably deserve their own separate previews. So, erm… perhaps I’ll do that soon.
sorry my updates have been kind of sporadic lately – i’ve been busy with my weekly column at gamesetwatch! (warning: capitalization.)
i appealed to my bff raigan burns to give me something exclusive for my column on metanet software. he divulged some tidbits on his and mare’s new game.
tentatively titled “robotology”, the game stars a robot who swings from a wire and navigates a future robot world using parkour-inspired acrobatics. influences include “umihara kawase, commander keen, vectorman/rayman,
wirehang redux, gish, z-lock, lyle in cube sector, flashback/out of
this world.. and the usual suspects like mario and sonic.” the game’s story, inspired by phillip k. dick (among others), “will
hopefully be something different and interesting for jaded
indiegamers. and also probably sarcastic.”
he also told me they hope to have robots of varying proportions in the final game, and then slyly made an allusion to ueda’s shadow of the colossus. (!)
the game will, of course, have a level editor, just like its predecessor n (which metanet have spent most of their development history re-releasing). speaking of n, you might be seeing that game on the xbox live arcade in a little while! holy smokes!
