Soft Body is an action-puzzle game where you control two beautiful, gooey snakes at the same time. In the game, you paint the world with your body, and as you do so, the world changes around you revealing new obstacles and challenges.
The action is tense, but the mood is contemplative and calm. The game features 100 levels and four unique game modes. It’s a blend of quick-restart action games like Super Meat Boy and the mind-melting coordination of top-down shooters like Ikaruga.
To celebrate the upcoming release, I’d like to share a few of the game’s unique level designs with you all. At the heart of each level design is the desire to feature the fluid movement and tight controls of the snakes. From the shape of bullet patterns, to the sound of painting walls, Soft Body’s levels encourage motion. Fast and slow, hectic or careful. I want people to take tons of small risks, to push their luck, and to search for new approaches to each of the level’s
challenges.
Way of Life: This fast-paced level features a number of obstacles and enemies to keep players on their toes. The Sniper turret locks onto the player, the Spinner turret unleashes a constant stream of projectiles, and the Electric Circles force the player to keep moving — if you activate a Circle, you have to move away before they fire.
In Hard Game, a single-player controls both snakes (one with the left stick and one with the right stick), and if either snake is popped by a projectile, enemy, or obstacle, the level is failed and you have to restart from the beginning. It asks people to master the task of controlling two snakes at the same time.
Quoting Ourselves: This Hard Game level is a bit tricky on the brain. The snakes need to work together to untangle the mess of mines. This is a good example of Hard Game’s mind-splitting weirdness.
Inside Circles: This Hard Game level features two major obstacles: a large rotating line that keeps players moving and two circles that follow the Hot Pink Body as it moves around the level. The Blue Body is trapped within two circles and must avoid being popped by the rotating line or the circles. Only after the first layer is painted can the Blue Body move freely around the level.
This is only a small sampling of the game’s distinctive level designs. You can check out full playthroughs of more levels at the official site.
There’s almost no need for patience — Soft Body is due on May 17!
Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse comes with pieces of flair ⊟
Preorder and launch copies of Atlus’s RPG come with these rad metal emblem things, each about 3/4″ inch in diameter. They represent the paths of Peace or Anarchy, which is self-explanatory enough, but also the emblem of the in-game god Dagda.
You can wear it to show your appreciation to Dagda for resurrecting you!
The second annual Steam Anime Sale is on now - featuring discounts on over 100 Anime games and movies, including titles from the DRAGON BALL, GUILTY GEAR, NARUTO SHIPPUDEN, and DISGAEA franchises.
You should probably think about this Dracula X Chronicles deal ⊟
As usual, I don’t know your business or your life, so I’m not going to go so far as to pronounce that you need to buyCastlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles this weekend on PSN. But it’s $2.24, and comes with both a remake and the original version of the PC Engine Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, along with Castlevania; Symphony of the Night…. for $2.24.
That’s part of a Flash Sale on PSN that also includesCurses n’ Chaos for $4 and a lot of other action games!
I'm personally not a fan of embedding other people's code into the site, but when Liberty Games shared this infographic with me I thought it was too cool not to share. So you might need to give the iFrame (uh, hate those things) and JavaScript a few seconds to catch up. I never knew the Wii U had a higher GPU than the Xbox One. Now I do.
Internal debate on if I buying this or not wages on.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE limited edition ⊟
Out June 24 alongside the normal version, this #LE will be available at GameStop and Amazon, and includes an artbook, soundtrack, “song cards,” cute stickers, and codes for all five upcoming DLC packs (which cost $2 each separately).
And! You can play this at PAX East this week, along with Kirby: Planet Robobot, Star Fox Zero, Monster Hunter Generations, Metroid Prime Federation Force, and other games!
For the sake of full discosure, this is the most beautiful news I've seen all day today. I've been a commited fan to both Fire Emblem and XCOM since I was a lil rugrat catching that impressively long, epic Sacred Stones epilogue while the rest of the fam was doing things like eating dinner together.
I only ever dreamt we'd wake up in a world one day where a game might merge favorable elements from each differing game. This game is it, man, and all thanks to mods. The description reads:
“This mod puts a dash of Fire Emblem into your XCOM, leveraging a ‘squadmate score’ system to give small buffs for squads that trust in each other.”
I'm half tempted to back this, but I should probably focus on understanding perspective tricks and rules freehand first.
The LUCY is a drawing tool I wish I had in art school. The device has been around for 500 years and though it uses no electricity, it's able to project images from your environment onto your drawing pad. The LUCY will make you feel like you have special abilities by letting you look at two things at once – and have them converge in the same spot for you to draw on top of.
Essentially, the LUCY is an improved, simplified version of a camera lucida – below is a sketch and an explanation of how it works.
First - the object you want to draw sits anywhere in your environment with the LUCY angled toward it. The image of the object passes through a one-way mirror and reflects into a second mirror and then back again onto the first mirror.
When you look through the top of the device, you see not only straight through to the paper you’re drawing on, but you’ll also see the reflection of the object you want to draw.
The brighter the environment around the object, the brighter the object will be on the paper. Then it’s up to you to trace what you see.
By helping you quickly block in shapes for layout and proportion, your final drawings will naturally be improved - how many times have you sketched only to find your subject's body parts cut off because you miscalculated your starting position?
If your answer is zero you should stop reading now - because you’re kidding yourself. Even great artists fall into that trap from time to time.
Here’s a bit of art trivia I most certainly just made up: Sandro Botticelli was famous for having to paint his masterpiece The Birth of Venus a second time.
Why?
Because he started with her head and painted her legs last before realizing too late that he had cut off her feet! Imagine the time he could have saved if he had a LUCY of his own.
Again, I probably made that last part up - Moving right along.
The LUCY takes away the guesswork in the most important phase of drawing but I know what you're thinking - "Isn't this a cheaters tool?" and to me the answer is simple. If master painters used the camera lucida to help them with the under drawings of their own paintings, how can we say it’s cheating.
As a teaching tool, the LUCY is amazing and I have to admire the effort that Les Cookson has put into it. His simplified version of the camera lucida has come a long, long away from its predecessors.
If you like ancient technologies that enhance your artistic talents, you should definitely check out their Kickstarter and become the first kid on your block to own something that took over 500 years to perfect!
The new Netflix series Fuller House is really just about perfect. Discovering this show is like finding an Irish bar in some far-away city you don't know--the show offers you a comfortable, familiar spot to sit down and know more or less what you're gonna get.
Nintendo also published a flowchart to help you decide which to pick up. And USgamer put up a summary on their differences. Everyone’s got one of these to accompany the game’s launch today. We even made our own sign to help you choose which edition and Democratic presidential candidate is best for you.
Early mornings are always the bane of my existence.
New submitter Striek writes: Aggregated genome data from 23andme.com was analyzed and published in Nature magazine, and now further evidence has been added to the belief that being a morning person or a night owl is wired in our DNA. It's not the first time such research has been published, either. So those of us who work late into the night and prefer to rise at noon, much to the chagrin of our partners, can point to our DNA as the reason, not our lazy habits.
Remember how happy the ending to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was?
GAWRSH!!!
