Everything You Should Know About Professor Layton

Lucas M. Thomas is campaigning that all currency on the planet be replaced with Picarats. You can follow him on Twitter, @lucasmthomas.

Source : ign[dot]com

NYCC: Morrison and Del Toro Craft Legendary Comics

Legendary Comics is still new to the publishing scene, but they've already amassed an impressive lineup of talent. The company recently debuted The Tower Chronicles from creators Thomas Tull and Matt Wagner. Back at SDCC, they announced new books from creators like Max Brooks, Mark Waid, and J. Michael Straczynski.

That talent pool grew even bigger at NYCC this week. Legendary announced that both Grant Morrison and Guillermo del Toro are writing comics under their banner. Morrison is prepping an original graphic novel, while del Toro is working on a tie-in to his upcoming film The Pacific Rim.

Legendary's press release describes the premise of Annihilator, sugegsting it'll be a typically mind-bending Morrison tale. "Morrison brings to the pages a thrilling story starring wild-living screenwriter Ray Spass, who has one last chance to save his career as he struggles to write a new studio tent-pole movie, Annihilator.

The film centers around the incredible adventures of Max Nomax; a sci-fi rebel anti-hero who’s condemned to a haunted prison orbiting a supermassive black hole, following an epic struggle against the all-knowing, all–powerful artificial life form VADA and his squad of deadly Annihilators. Found guilty of the Greatest Crime in History, Nomax has vowed to clear his name by discovering a Cure for Death itself and resurrecting his lost love.

But with deadlines looming and a recently-diagnosed brain tumor, Spass is running out of time and inspiration – until the real Max Nomax mysteriously appears in the world of 21st century Los Angeles with no memory of how he got there, only a terrifying warning of imminent destruction and a mission for Ray Spass."

As for del Toro's Pacific Rim, the comic will serve as a prequel to the film. The script itself will be handled by Travis Beacham, who also wrote the film's script. The story will be divided into three sections and explore the time between the first alien attack on Earth and the events of the film. While various characters will be featured in the story, the character of Stacker Pentecost (played by Idris Elba in the film) will be a major focus throughout.

Legendary didn't reveal the artists for these books or specific release dates, though it's a safe bet that Pacific Rim will ship some time around movie's July 2013 release.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

New Super Mario Bros. U's Boxart Revealed

Here's what you'll be grabbing off store shelves to go along with your shiny new Wii U system this fall:

Lucas M. Thomas is IGN Nintendo's wise old sage, having worked to cover the worlds of Mario, Link, Samus and all the rest of the Big N's creations for over six years here. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Thomas Was Alone Review

Thomas Was Alone does an incredible thing: it makes you care about characters that are nothing more than coloured rectangles. It’s a great example of the way decent writing can elevate the simplest of games to something really memorable. As a puzzle-platformer, Thomas Was Alone is unique and entertaining, but it’s the confluence of art, sound, narrative texture and gameplay that makes it something more.

Narrated by Danny Wallace and made by Mike Bithell, Thomas Was Alone tells the story of the emergence of the first self-aware artificial intelligence. Each of its ten chapters begins with a fictional quote or two from newspapers, spokespeople and commentators at the time of the Event, but the narrative texture comes from the internal monologues of the cast of jumping rectangles as they navigate their way through minimalist, geometric levels.

You begin the game with a single red jumping quadrangle – Thomas – and pick up friends along the way, all of whom are different personalities with different abilities. One shape can float on water, one acts as a bouncy trampoline; smaller, nimbler rectangles can be stacked to create staircases for larger, more ungainly ones, many of whom have complexes about their size. Some are devious, some cantankerous, some mildly evil, but most are pleasant characters reacting with mild bemusement to their newfound consciousness. The aim, in every level, is to get every shape to a portal; once they’re all in place, they’re zapped to the next level.

Thomas Was Alone is only ever gently challenging, but it does quickly start bending your brain in ways it’s not supposed to bend, playing with gravity, perception and Portal-like ability-changing paints before it’s finished. Over the course of the game’s three or four hours, Bithell squeezes about as much novelty and variety out of its elegantly simple systems as humanly possible. Some levels are more tedious than others – the ones that involve a lot of precise staircasing and dangerous jumps will make you hammer your keyboard in rage more often than the more puzzle-orientated scenarios – but the pacing is clever enough to pull you through the game in just one or two sittings. Though it never exactly builds to a sense of urgency, your curiosity about the Event (and about what happens to Thomas and his friends) intensifies towards the end.

As any of the trailers will show you, Thomas Was Alone complements its simple gameplay with some beautifully minimalist music by David Housden – an ethereal piano score dotted with chiptune flourishes that evokes a kind of spaced-out loneliness, and works very well as a complement to your mental self-wrangling as you try to work out a level. Its use of colour and shadow, too, elevates it aesthetically from what you might expect of a one-man game at this price point. It’s a sophisticated disguise, in a way; Thomas Was Alone turns the enforced simplicity of a game made by one person into a design choice.

Thomas Was Alone never over-exploits any of its ideas, giving each the space it needs to breathe; if there’s a particular type of level that infuriates you, you can be happy in the knowledge that you won’t have to play through 20 near-identical ones.  This does lead to a relatively short run-time, but the £5.99 ($9) purchase price is still more than justified by the overall quality of the experience.

Source : ign[dot]com