The Newtonica games are now free

In honour of Kenji Eno’s life, his good friend and collaborator Kenichi Nishi has made all of the Newtonica games on iPhone free to purchase.

On his blog Nishi writes that Eno’s passing has encouraged a lot of people to play his games, and so he has made them free in order to make them more accessible. “With every game I think of him”, he says. “Please come play with us”.

You can find all of the Newtonica apps on the iTunes store, and I recommend that you play them all. Newtonica and its sequel are actually very different games – one an endless game of collection and avoidance using a touch-spun globe, the other a puzzler starring a rubber duck that kind of plays like pool in space. They’re both great games and well worth a go.

I didn’t realise until today either that there’s a short Newtonica soundtrack available on iTunes. Each of the two tracks was scored by Kenji Eno, so have a listen to those if you can.

Rest In Peace Kenji Eno

It takes a lot to motivate me to update this blog these days and it makes me especially sad that it takes something like a death to spur me into action. Tonight, I learned that Kenji Eno – best known as the designer of horror games D, D2 and Enemy Zero – died yesterday at the age of just 42. The news has been widely reported across the internet and is confirmed on the homepage of Eno’s development studio From Yellow To Orange.

Eno is only tangentially related to the Lovedelic school, having co-developed Newtonica with Kenichi Nishi, primarily creating the iPhone game’s soundtrack. He also went on to co-write a blog with Nishi over at one42.tumblr.com. But he’s a designer that fits right in with the likes of Skip, Vanpool et al. Existing on the fringes of the games industry, he always maintained an independent spirit that saw him move from esoteric horror games to quirky puzzlers like the recent WiiWare title You, Me And The Cubes.

I always felt as though Eno was a designer that defied expectation. You never knew what kind of game he would make next or if he would even return to game development at all – having left it a few times to pursue other art forms and disciplines. We have a definite answer, rather sadly.

Though Kenji Eno is perhaps best remembered for his brash and outspoken demeanor during the Sega Saturn era, I prefer to remember him as he was in recent years; a quietly creative designer who clearly had so much more to contribute to the medium. I honestly believe that You, Me And The Cubes was Eno’s best game yet and I was so looking forward to seeing what his unusual mind would think up next…

If you have the time, why not honour Eno’s life by playing one of his games?

Did you know Kenichi Nishi worked for Telenet? I didn’t.

While reading through this short 1UP piece on Captain Rainbow I noticed a reference to Kenichi Nishi working for Telenet Japan before he founded Lovedelic.

Now I know Nishi worked for Squaresoft pre-Moon but this is the first I’d heard about him working at Telenet. So I checked his Mobygames page and found that it was recently updated to include credits on the likes of Exile, Psycho Dream and Tenshi no Uta (pictured).

I’ve never played any of these games but I sure want to now, especially since the 1UP piece mentions Tenshi no Uta’s convention breaking ending. If you’ve played any of these games, let me know what you think of them.

Vanpool worked on Paper Mario: Sticker Star

This interview with the Paper Mario Sticker Star team reveals that Vanpool had some involvement in the development of the 3DS Mario RPG. Specifically, it was Taro Kudo (game designer on Moon) who wrote the story to Sticker Star.

Kudo worked on the Super Nintendo’s original Mario RPG while at Squaresoft and in this interview he talks about the similarities between the two while also claiming that “game’s certainly not aimed at children.” He may be right. In this Eurogamer review, writer Rich Stanton talks about a scene in Sticker Star in which “Birdo swings in and out of the screen while singing a little ditty about how it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman” which kind of ties Paper Mario: Sticker Star to Captain Rainbow.

Chibi-Robo comic by Zac Gorman

This is a little old now but still worth showing off. This lovely comic by Zac Gorman really captures the emotional undertone of Chibi-Robo. Zac says that he hopes the series makes a comeback on Wii U. Can’t disagree with him on that one…

Make sure you have a look at the rest of Zac’s comics by the way. There are a few more videogame themed strips including one inspired by Costume Quest and another by NiGHTS. I get the feeling Zac and I have very similar tastes.

New Twitter account

While my increasingly busy life means I can’t keep this blog as up to date as I’d like, I thought there’s no reason why I can’t post super fast and bite size news about Lovedeliccy things via Twitter. So I’ve started a proper Lovedelic Life Twitter account!
If you want to follow a feed that’s all Lovedelic all the time, point your faces towards @lovedeliclife
That is all.

“It’s pretty hard to find Kansai-ben to standard Japanese dictionaries online”

So says the team at Kirameki when talking about the difficulties of translating the comedy dialogue of Captain Rainbow’s Hikari into English. You can read the full interview with Kirameki over at gamestm.co.uk and learn more about the translation process behind Captain Rainbow.

Oh and while you’re at it, have a look at this round-up of the new Wii U games that were announced today. There’s an unlikely connection to Captain Rainbow right at the bottom.