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• Derek Yu Loves/Hates You: Spelunky

  Written by Joe Bernardi About a month and a half ago, the independent gaming community went ape over Spelunky, a game that elegantly combines the gallivanting of a platformer with the randomness and infuriating difficulty of a roguelike. It looks simple enough. A little Indiana Jones-looking guy wanders around an Indiana Jones-looking setting populated with a thousand different things that can kill him in a million different ways. Saves girl, steals priceless treasure, escapes deadly cave. It seems pretty boilerplate. Then you realize you’ve been playing it for six hours, swearing at the top of your lungs at the tiny, pixelated shopkeeper who just murdered you with a shotgun for trying to steal a pair of climbing gloves from his store. Read More... Posted Feb 05 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: indiana jones, indie dev moment, aquaria, joe bernardi, spelunky, derek yu

• Get Your Tensor Bandage: Wii-Whip Action Comes With New Indiana Jones Game

  Lucasarts recently opened its mouth and spilled its guts on Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings for the Wii, the Playstation 2 and the current family of handheld systems. I feel like I'm in a brave new world: my brain's having a hard time remembering when Indiana Jones games didn't feature a squat, plastic yellow protagonist with pincer-hands and a primitive drawn-on smile. Not to say we're not old enough to remember such a time. Sigh. The Wii version of the game will (of course) feature waggle. The press release plays the gimmick up in the obvious manner: “Wield your Wii Remote™ like Indy's signature whip for a variety of uses — from combat to navigation to puzzle-solving.” Oh boy. I'll leave the light on for you, tendinitis. Read More... Posted Feb 03 2009, 10:32 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: wii, playstation 2, indiana jones, retro, nadia oxford, lego Indiana jones, indiana jones and the temple of doom, waggle, indiana jones and the staff of kings

• Videogames: Star Wars' Last Hope

  Around the time 61 Frames Per Second launched, George Lucas’ media empire started amassing its evil forces for a hype onslaught the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 2005. No free thinking nerd would escape its wrath across the summer of 2008. Everywhere you looked online, on television, or in print, there it was, assaulting your eyes with Harrison Ford’s dilapidated visage to hock Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or choking your brain with the impossible geometry of The Clone Wars’ computer animated caricatures. It was a harrowing time for all. The third-leg of the Lucas media tripod of destruction was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a brand coating a veritable canyon of products, from books to Pez dispensers. Of course, the Force Unleashed flagship was a videogame. It was literally everywhere. Of the many things written and said about Force Unleashed during this period, the most intriguing and lamentable came from Hooksexup’s own Peter Smith. After reading one of the countless articles on the multiple physics engines running Force Unleashed, Pete said, “This game is so cool looking that I actually wish it wasn’t Star Wars.” He was saying that Star Wars was so sullied, so diluted by oversaturation and truly, inescapably terrible movies, that the mere presence of the universe could tarnish otherwise good entertainment. Star Wars, as a foundation for story, as anything, sucked. It was no longer cool. And I was terrified to find myself agreeing with the man. Of course I came to my senses, shortly thereafter. No matter what, Star Wars will always, in some small way, be cool. Simplistic morality plays, idiotically fleshed out science fiction universes, and over-fetishized metallic swimwear may all be lame as hell. But humming swords made of light will always be awesome. And it’s mostly videogames that have kept Star Wars cool in recent years. Read More... Posted Jan 15 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, star wars, indiana jones, factor 5, free radical, bioware, george lucas, rogue squadron, knights of the old republic, kingdom of the crystal skull, clone wars, battlefront, Harrison ford, battlefront 3

• Indiana Jones, We Hardly Know Ye

  It is very, very strange that there are so few excellent Indiana Jones games. The characters and fantasy-20th-century that make up Henry Jones Jr’s world are uniquely suited to the tropes and traditions of game design. This isn’t to say that Indy hasn’t had some success in the medium. The arcade game of Temple of Doom is a memorably colorful quarter-muncher (though, the less said of its home ports, the better,) JVC’s Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures on Super Nintendo is the best platformer that studio produced, and Lucasarts’ point-and-click adventures, an adaptation of The Last Crusade and an original story called Fate of Atlantis, are rightfully beloved for both their branching stories and their taxing logic puzzles. The rest of Indy’s gaming oeuvre, however, ranges from tolerably mediocre, like Traveler’s Tales’ Lego Indiana Jones, to plain bad, like Windows/N64’s Infernal Machine. (Infernal Machine is especially notable because it’s the only game in the franchise that falls into the genre most-suited to Indiana Jones, the Tomb Raider-styled 3D platformer. Tomb Raider has always been modeled on Indiana Jones’ particular brand of archaeological adventuring. Raider’s spiritual successor, Uncharted, is even more explicitly inspired by Jones, right down to the sarcastic male lead of dubious morality with a heart of gold.) It’s true that officially licensed videogames have something of a history when it comes to sucking, but given Indiana Jones’ Lucasfilms/Lucasarts pedigree, you’d expect the franchise to have at least as good a track record as Star Wars. (By my calculations, you get one good Star Wars game for every three terrible ones. Luckily, that equates to a lot of good Star Wars games.) Today, the pertinent question is not why are there not more good Indiana Jones games, but why aren’t there more Indiana Jones games period? Read More... Posted Jan 12 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, xbox 360, indiana jones, lucasarts, nintendo 64, staff of moses, last crusade, lego Indiana jones, temple of doom, John constaninte, infernal machine, traveler’s tales, fat of atlantis, kingdom of the crystal skull

• Where Is the New Indiana Jones?

  Euphoria, a physics engine created by developer NaturalMotion, has been popping up all over the place lately. To clarify, a physics engine is a piece of software that simulates real-world physics in a game. Euphoria specifically creates realistic animation for game characters on the fly, as opposed to the hand crafted animations traditionally used for computer generated characters. Euphoria is used in Grand Theft Auto 4 - when you see Niko’s body getting thrown about in a sickeningly convincing way, it’s Euphoria at work. The engine is also featured prominently in the much publicized, poorly-titled upcoming Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed. It’s a little distressing, however, that Euphoria’s intended debut has gone AWOL. I’m referring of course to LucasArts’ untitled Indiana Jones project. Read More... Posted Jun 03 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, star wars, xbox 360, where is, PC, Grand theft auto 4, indiana jones, lucasarts, euphoria

• Fortune and Glory, SNES-Style

  So, we here at 61FPS had some YouTube clips bookmarked for a special occasion. The clips were an in-depth review of Indiana Jones Trilogy for SNES by a die-hard Indy fan who had some choice things to say about the game's faithfulness/lack-thereof to the films; the occasion was the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Well, the occasion has come (Crystal Skull is terrible, by the way), and, go figure, the clips are gone. The best we can do is offer you this, which at least gives a sense of the game's handsome treatment of the series: Read More... Posted May 20 2008, 02:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: peter smith, snes, indiana jones' greatest adventures, indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull, disappointments, indiana jones, indiana jones trilogy