Comedy espionage caper Jazzpunk [official site] has had its entrails extracted, altered, and re-inserted into its codey cadaver. By that I mean it has become Jazzpunk: Director’s Cut, gaining “an extended local multiplayer mode and a ton of additional story/joke content not found in the original game”, say developers Necrophone Games. There’s also a new piece of DLC, Jazzpunk: Flavour Nexus, which inserts special agent Polyblank into a supermarket to discover a hidden flavour, newly invented by scientists.
]]>Today's investigation into the hopes and dreams of the IGF Award finalists takes us deep into the cold war caper of Jazzpunk. We settled onto a whoopee cushion and called Luis Hernandez (graphics/sound) and Jess Brouse (programmer/animator) to discuss comedy, lounge music and pizza.
]]>Jazzpunk isn't an adventure game, it's an interactive sketch show. Its puzzles are slight and there's little incentive to advance the scrap of a plot until each area has been scoured and sucked dry. Leave no stone unturned. Despite the setting – a techno-retro, trenchcoat-clad Cold War – the levels aren't packed with clues, they're packed with gags. Occasionally, a sidequest emerges from an alleyway but the solution is a punchline rather than an insight. Here's wot I think.
]]>I first encountered comedy spy 'em up Jazzpunk at about 2am. I was on a merry jaunt through the IGF entries, and fell into it without knowing what I was about to encounter. I was spat out the other side, grinning and desperate to talk about it. I immediately informed John that he needed to play it and that I wanted to write about it, and he immediately retorted that Nathan had already covered it, and that I should read RPS more. He'll do anything for clicks. Well now it's my time to usurp that Nathan, who has the misfortune of being American and asleep. The trailer is below, and it is totally live-action.
]]>Last year, games like The Stanley Parable and Saints Row IV restored my faith in games' ability to be truly, tear-blastingly funny. I still think we can take things further, though. Much further. Jazzpunk may well be a step (followed by a slapstick banana peel slip) in the right direction. While it's littered with scraps of sharply written text, its main focus is on providing players with the tools to get a rise out of their own internal laughtracks. The world is basically a comedic powder keg just waiting to go off, and you, of course, are the match. I really enjoyed what I played of a demo version, and now the final version is set to come out next month.
]]>I've been quite enamored with Jazzpunk ever since I got the chance to try it out during GDC, and I'm pleased to report that it's still looking great. Also, gleefully, unrelentingly silly. The Airplane-inspired cyberpunk noir slapstick pizza survival horror comedy is basically a playground of gags and absurdities. Have a dumb idea? Odds are, the game will acknowledge it and fire back with something that will leave your ribs stinging from cannon-ball-like fits of laughter. It's a game whose first priority is humor. Everything else (for instance, logic and reason) come in distant second. Watch a trailer built around a rather, er, familiar structure below.
]]>Jazzpunk isn't like other games. I mean, I guess you could draw lines to old-school adventures and maaaaaybe Thirty Flights Of Loving and other Blendo works for visual stylings, but it doesn't really take any moment-to-moment cues from either. Instead, it's a vaguely noir retro cyberpunk romp whose goal is Airplane/Naked-Gun-esque humor first and foremost. All those things sound absolutely wonderful, of course, but games and comedy haven't really played nicely together ever since games sprouted interactive bits and decided to get all high and mighty about it. But why not make hilarity the focus of those interactions? And I mean for real - not, like, as a byproduct of solving a puzzle or in the interest of creating a black hole where all humor goes to die (also known as creating a Postal game). That's Jazzpunk's main aim, and at GDC, I got to find out whether or not it has any chance of achieving that goal.
]]>Jazzpunk looks special. Very, very special. First off, just, well, look at it. The art style seems like some mad mix of Thirty Flights Of Loving and colors un-glimpsed by human eyes for eons. The original concept art could've been drawn by a pterodactyl. Who knows? The concept, though, is what actually makes it worthy of your precious eyeball fluids. In short, it's retro cyberpunk adventure game that's strongly influenced by '80s spoof films like Airplane and Naked Gun. It's even being developed with its own proprietary Jokes-Per-Minute (JPM) measurement technology. Seriously!
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