New Sesame Street Game For Kinect

Here are some digital puppets in a very literal sense...Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster is a new game for Xbox Kinect by acclaimed games studio Double Fine. The family-friendly game promises to take players into a living storybook populated with famous Muppet characters like Elmo, Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. Gamasutra has an interview with Double Fine's Nathan Martz and Tim Schafer discussing the development of the game in depth.



The team at Double Fine is obviously having fun with this project (and who wouldn't?). Have a look at this video of Tim Schafer showing off some "fur rendering" technology.

Once Upon a Monster looks like it will be a lot of fun. It's due for release this fall.

Via Tough Pigs.

Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series

I haven't had time to check out Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series or the feature film from whence it sprung for that matter, but it certainly looks good. The six-part series serves as a prequel to the feature film and features Blair Williams, played in the film by Moon Bloodgood, who voices the character in the Machinima series.

The series was made entirely using in-game assets from the Terminator Salvation video game and was overseen by Terminator Salvation director McG, who's building an innovative little empire for himself in Hollywood these days. This is the first official studio-produced Machinima series and it's such a great example of cross-platform synergy that it's easy to foresee a lot more of these kinds of projects in the future.

Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series is available to download from iTunes and the X-Box Live Marketplace. Free recaps of each episode are available to watch on Machinima.com.

Gameplay Boogie

Gamers will be able to use the Wii's innovative controllers and some digital puppetry techniques to help an alien bust a move in Boogie.

EA regularly gets critiqued in the video game world for a lack of innovation. It's not hard to see why; the company seems to just churn out one relatively uninventive version of Madden Football after the other. That may finally be about to change though thanks to Boogie, one of their upcoming titles for the Wii.

On the surface Boogie sounds like another Dance Dance Revolution clone, but what makes it different is that instead of pushing buttons to make an onscreen character "dance", players have to make their character move in time with music using the Wii Remote and its Nunchuk attachment. The Nunchuk controls the character's body while the Wiimote controls its head. Players have to invent moves and dance routines with minimal guidance from the game and they succeed based on the variety of their moves and how "stylish" they are.

Sounds suspiciously like a digital puppetry game, doesn't it?