Filmed and broadcast live from the Twitch booth at Penny Arcade Expo last weekend, this Game|Life show features three creators of new games that offer new takes on classic gameplay concepts.
Our first guest is Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. He’s coming back to traditional puzzle-based adventure games with The Cave , developed in conjunction with Double Fine and to be published by Sega in early 2013. The gameplay hearkens back to Maniac Mansion — you choose a team of three adventurers and take them down into a cave filled with item-based puzzles, which they must solve by working together. It’s a genre that’s long been neglected, and the PAX demo of The Cave showed that it was back in fighting form thanks to Gilbert’s efforts.
Next, we welcome Alex Neuse and Mike Roush of Gaijin Games to get hands-on with Runner 2 , the sequel to Bit.Trip Runner . The pixelated faux-retro graphics of the original are gone; in fact, Neuse tells us he made a conscious effort to remove any and all squares from the design to set it apart. What returns is the blazing-fast, hair-pulling challenge of the original game.
Finally, Brian Provinciano takes the stage to show us Retro City Rampage . Put simply, it’s Grand Theft Auto with an 8-bit overhaul. You can run around shooting cops, or you can jump on their heads and butt-stomp them instead. Many long years in the making (it started life as a homebrewed game that ran on the 8-bit NES), Retro City Rampage is full of references to and parodies of classic videogames and 1980s pop culture. It will be available for many platforms later this year.
