Costume Quest is cheap on Steam right now. I only beat the game yesterday, and my verdict is this: buy it. It's lovely. There's precious little time left on the sale, though, so hustle.
Quick clarification/correction to make here, as we have misled you. Apparently the "six products" that Double Fine was touting at their special press event on October 14th are all now known, as three of the most recent Double Fine releases were included among that number. For the record, as Tim explained on the Double Fine forums, the six things being referred to were:
1) Psychonauts Mac
2) Psychonauts Vault Viewer
3) Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster
4) Costume Quest PC
5) Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear
6) Double Fine Happy Action Theater
Some sites, including this one, mistakenly interpreted the "six products" thing to refer to six upcoming things, but that was not the case. Sorry for the confusion. To make it up to you, allow us to point you to these limited edition posters from the press event that you can buy.
Tim Schafer's Double Fine studio is working on Happy Theatre Time, a collection of eighteen minigames heading through XBLA and for your Kinect sometime this winter. Kotaku are enthusiastic about Happy Theatre Time, having played a little, and describe it as a party game that's best experienced with a sufficient amount of alcohol or number of children at hand. Eurogamer talk some more about the game here. Destructoid has videos.
This whole thing, though, has made me notice a certain pattern, and not for the first time. From the press release:
Created by famed developer Tim Shafer and Double Fine Productions Inc., “Double Fine Happy Action Theater” is a series of vibrant, exciting activities designed to activate gross motor skills, inspire imagination and entertain players of all ages, from preschoolers to grandparents.
Seriously, who is this "Tim Shafer" guy, and why does he always get mentioned alongside Tim Schafer? Is this a subtle way of telling us that Tim, much like Paul from The Beatles, isn't really Tim? Or is this guy's more involved in day-to-day Double Fine things than we know? Because - from the frequency of this mistake - it couldn't possibly be some sort of incompetence, could it?
I guess the various announcements that Double Fine announced during their event of announcements on Friday will be trickling out gradually depending on whatever embargo the press is bound by. Joystiq has confirmed one of them, it being DLC for TrenchedIron Brigade called "Rise of the Martian Bear."
The premise goes like this: nemesis and all-around poster boy for the evils of Monovision, Vlad, was defeated, but not before he had time to transfer his consciousness into his pet bear. And that did the obvious thing and ran to Mars in order to regroup and rebuild the forces of evil and what we presume is more red-tinged bad reality television.
Rise of the Martian Bear doesn't have a release date, though Double Fine told us it should be "soon." Like, really soon. Meanwhile, once you do get your hands on it, you'll bask in the wonder of new missions and an objective-oriented wave-based survival mode. Which is kind of hard, judging by the small bit we played last week.
So, apparently, sometime last week, Double Fine made it known that on October 14th (yesterday), they were going to host a press event to announce six new products - the PC version of Costume Quest being one.
It gets better. The press release, which is pretty funny, suggests that more PC ports aren't an impossibility. Interestingly, the funding for Double Fine's conversion of Costume Quest as well as the update of Psychonauts is due to funding from Dracogen, an investment company consisting of one dude that you would do well to keep your eye on.
And that's just one of the announcements Double Fine made at the event last night! We imagine any embargo on these new products - whether they be more PC ports, new DLC, or new games altogether (we've still a Ronzo game to become acquainted with) - will be lifted in a matter of days, so stay tuned, go buy all of Double Fine's new games, and sorry for not knowing any of this wonderful craziness was going on!
Thanks to Mojoer black_sheep for making us aware of this.
The last of Double Fine's four "Amnesia Fortnight" games, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, is out. It's been out for for four days, actually, as Jason notes in this other news-post about Costume Quest hitting the PC.
Has anyone been playing it? What do you think, if you have?
What the hey? Did Costume Quest, Double Fine's formerly console-exclusive RPG gem, suddenly become available on Steam out of nowhere as some sort of Halloween surprise? It sure seems that way! Grubbins on Ice comes included, and so terminates the complaints that the game isn't on PC. Go buy now and show why your voice was worth listening to!
In other Double Fines news, Once Upon a Monster was released earlier this week, and we totally forgot to mention it. Anyone play it?
As noted by Benny on the forums, some enterprising fellow has adapted the recent Psychonauts Steam update into a patch for all other PC versions of the games (meaning retail and digital versions from non-Steam vendors) so that we too may enjoy the enhancements.
Download the patch, which may or may not blow up your computer, here.
So, what has Ronzo "Ron" Gilbert been up to since he hooked up with Double Fine? Apparently he has co-create the "Psychonauts Vault Viewer!" for iOS, together with Lee Petty.
This is exactly what it says it is: It's a vault viewer running either on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Which is, you know, really quite awesome, particularly since it features commentary from Scott Campbell and Tim Schafer.
And as it's free you're still only out $75!
Double Fine: All about Apple! (Jason: All about posting about this in the comments as he's too lazy to create a news post!)
• A copy of the game in either Xbox 360 or Playstaion 3 platform
• The strategy guide
• The Brutal Legend 3/4 Raglan Tee
• Never before released promotional record
• 3 differnt Brutal Legend stickers
• 5 different Brutal Legend notecards
• Brutal Legend Onsie
• Mini-poster signed by Tim!
• Brutal Legend Zippo Lighter
Hey, what do you know? Europeans will be allowed to play Trenched too. Sort of. It'll be called Iron Brigade but should otherwise remain identical. Look for it "this September".
This week's selection is sort of a sequel to last week's: Tim Schafer's second appearance on Gamespot's web show "On the Spot" in March 2005, only a month and some change after the previous appearance and sans beard. With the imminent release of Psychonauts even more imminent, the hosts interrogate Tim about the game, Tim betrays murderous intentions for anyone who would dare to make a Full Throttle sequel, and footage of Tim's dad from the Psychonauts launch party is unspooled.
Note that this is the Edited for Mojo version of the episode, meaning we lopped off the parts that didn't have Tim in it,
This week's selection is another beefy one: Tim Schafer's first appearance on the web show "On the Spot" in February 2005. Observing that the studio where Gamespot taped the show was "really close to where I get my coffee," Tim dropped by unannounced and armed with a demo of Psychonauts. His beard was still in play at this point.
Note that this is the Edited for Mojo version of the episode, meaning we lopped off the parts that didn't have Tim in it, and also all the hardcore sex scenes. Boy, did we have our work cut out for us in deleting those.
That's the Spanish board game called 'Trench', which is a trademark. According to Eurogamer that trademark covers both board games and video games in Europe.
Consequently unless Microsoft either finds a way around the trademark, retitles the game, or points out "look they're completely separate words, you wouldn't ban Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Clue Bender Society because it has the word 'Clue' in it would you?" the game will remain unreleased.
I just want to play a tower assault game with mechanized trenches against a race of vicious TV monsters in a World War One scenario, is that so much to ask??
So even though we acknowledged the release of Double Fine's latest game purely by pointing out its delay in European territories, the fact is that Trenched has been out since Tuesday for at least one subset of the populace. They are quite grateful, or at least that's the conclusion I've arrived at after viewing the influx of positive reviews.
Those who, like me, are waiting for an Xbox to drop from the sky can still pass the time by checking out Tim's Twitter. Where else would I have learned about such things as the Trenched newsletter, the photographic proof of the team's launch day revelries, and the E3 Game Critics nominations that Double Fine has earned?
Double Fine's latest exciting-looking digital title, mech/tower assault game Trenched, was supposed to come out in Europe today but has been delayed.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Eurogamer: "Distribution of Trenched in select European regions will be slightly delayed. We're working to resolve the matter as soon as possible."
However, on Twitter Daniel Maher of Xbox UK said: "Official line on Trenched's delay is, 'Unexpected challenges with distribution in some European regions.' Shouldn't take long!"
"Challenges with distribution"? What, has the Big Red Release Button got some dirt stuck underneath it? I didn't realise non-physical items could be distributed.
Here's a story I'm surprised to see Gamasutra pick up on - the publishing rights to Psychonauts have reverted from Majesco to Double Fine. Since Double Fine always owned the IP itself, all this really means is that the studio will eventually be able to reap the full financial benefit from all future sales of the game. Nonetheless, Tim said this:
"It’s true the publishing rights have reverted to Double Fine, but there are some more deals that need to be worked out and contracts that need signing before that actually means anything, financially. After that’s all squared away, we will have some fun stuff to announce! (And no, it’s not Psychonauts 2.)"
There's really very little Tim can be referring to here other than a re-release of some sort. Since the game's already available from Steam, XBLA, and other digital outlets, are we looking at Psychonauts Kinect, Psychonauts Wii, or perhaps some sort of deluxe edition that actually includes a place to find rebrained Benny? We'll know as soon as the necessary dotted lines are stained, I guess.
Enough about the Star Wars Kinect game that Craig Derrick's producing just to confuse the management while secretly advancing that lofty goal of rejuvenating adventure games...let's talk about Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, the Double Fine Kinect game headed by Nathan Martz. There was a demo on display at E3 and a bit more info on how the game is going to play.
Like any other E3 story, a write-up can be found on like 500 game sites, but let's go with VentureBeat since they did a video interview with Nathan Martz and Tim that you can watch. And below from Youtube is the live presentation of the demo by guided by Schafer and co-played by some kid followed by a new trailer featuring gameplay:
