Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Blast Works: Build, Trade, & Destroy will finally launch in North America next Tuesday, so now seems like a fitting time for Budcat Creations pair Marcus Brown and Matt Modaff to update their IGN blog and reflect on numerous aspects of the game's lengthy gestation. Fortunately for this post, that's exactly what they did!

Amongst other things, Brown and Modaff discuss the team's motivation for including the game's wonderful editor, the content sharing features that we adore so much, and how they'd like to see the game cultivate a modding community to rival those seen in many PC titles. They also reserve special praise for the Wiimote, noting how it "affords players a near mouse-like interface."

Most intriguingly of all, there's a list of features that didn't quite make the final cut, mainly due to time constraints. These include the ability to play through the Campaign Mode with four players (there's still a two-player function), a "Marathon Mode" (in which players blast their way through an infinite selection of levels randomly chosen from the campaign and rack up the highest score possible), a "Movement Editor" (for editing, yes, the movement of enemies), and the ability to trade high scores.

Despite all of that "missing" stuff, some of which sounds way cool, we'd still probably trade our closest family members in for a copy of Blast Works next week.

If you become skilled enough with Blast Works' item editor, there's no end to what you can do! Like this ... thing with what kind of looks like the sides of a TIE Fighter as ears! It's pink and spiky and shoots triangles at seaplanes! Then, when you've finished creating horrible monsters made out of neat-looking white-outlined blocks, you can take them on with up to three friends -- also flying around in homemade avatars.

This set of four screens found at Wiiz doesn't just tease the multiplayer and the capabilities of the editor, but also shows the creation tool at work. Now we just have to find a way to become creative before the game comes out.

Blast Works: Build, Fuse, and Destroy developers Budcat Creations have started blogging on IGN about the process of remaking Kenta Cho's TUMIKI Fighters into something much more than the original free game. According to the blog, the remarkable item editing capability grew from a desire to create more complex ships than the original game engine would allow. So they built a more fully-featured Shape Editor.

They then stipulated that the artists had to use the Shape Editor to create all the game's assets. The final Shape editor used to develop the levels and the Shape Editor on the disc differ in that "the limits to the maximum dimensions of an individual block and the total number of blocks were removed in the PC version for prototyping." Feedback from the artists then went into refining the engine.

The results can be seen above, in this amazing video of a ship being constructed. We were excited enough when this was just a port of a free game. Now it's a completely new game, and one that looks like it absolutely should not be missed.

[Via NeoGAF]

Crush, the PSP's 2D/3D puzzle platformer, may have waggling in its future, according to an interview with Paul Mottram, senior producer at Crush developer Zoë Mode. We're talking faint "may" and distant future, since this was all idle speculation on his part.

When asked the weirdly pointed question of why they made a PSP game instead of putting it on a Nintendo platform, Mottram responded, "There is no reason why it couldn't be transferred to multiple different platforms especially the Wii, DS and PS2 and this is something we are thinking about."

He went on to describe the level editor they wanted to include, but couldn't. That definitely sounds like something well-suited to the DS or Wii, right?

[Via Joystiq]

The British Gaming Blog recently conducted an interview with Lee Nutter, the Editor of the new Official Nintendo UK magazine, on the future of the magazine and the kind of Nintendo coverage the UK can expect. Naturally, there had to be something said about the Revolution, and much like everything else said about it, the content was vague and hinted at something great on the horizon.

"...In issue 03 there’s an exclusive interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. For issue 04 we’ve already secured a number of exclusive Revolution games. And that’s just the stuff I can tell you about now…"