Fez jumping to other platforms this year
The joys of adventuring in a 3D world as a 2D chap, not to mention scrawling pages of notes in an attempt to decipher cryptic symbols, are coming to new audiences this year. Much-beloved spin-o-jump 'em up Fez is shedding its Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity and coming to unspecified "other platforms" in 2013, creator Phil Fish has announced.
The joys of adventuring in a 3D world as a 2D chap, not to mention scrawling pages of notes in an attempt to decipher cryptic symbols, are coming to new audiences this year. Much-beloved spin-o-jump 'em up Fez is shedding its Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity and coming to unspecified "other platforms" in 2013, creator Phil Fish has announced.
"Yes, I've heard you, dozens of people emailing me everyday telling me how much of an idiot I am for not porting FEZ to everything," Fish wrote in an end-of-year blog post.
Many people wanted to play Fez on their PC or PlayStation or whatnot, naturally, but Fez also had a nasty clash with XBLA policies. Polytron pulled the game's first patch after a save corruption bug was discovered, but later re-released it, bugs and all, to avoid paying Microsoft "tens of thousands of dollar" to recertify the patch. The developer reasoned, "For 99 percent of people, it makes Fez a better game" but it was an unpopular decision with many fans.
Polytron grumbled, "Had Fez been released on Steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away."
Fish said that Fez's XBLA sales "didn't break any records," but it "made more than enough to let me keep doing what I do. So I'm afraid you're stuck with me for a little while longer." He also noted that Polytron has "a couple of new games in the pipeline."
Reflecting on the past year, Fish wrote, "Between Sundance, [Indie Game: The Movie], winning the IGF, becoming a notorious racist, the game coming out, the patch incident, becoming a notorious asshole, travelling the world, battling a brutal post-partum depression and finding love, my ears are still ringing." Bless his little white cotton socks.
Polytron was curiously once approached by 'Ville magnate Zynga about a mobile port.
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replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Fez jumping to other platforms this year.
The joys of adventuring in a 3D world as a 2D chap, not to mention scrawling pages of notes in an attempt to decipher cryptic symbols, are coming to new audiences this year. Much-beloved spin-o-jump 'em up Fez is shedding its Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity and coming to unspecified "other platforms" in 2013, creator Phil Fish has announced.-
Better be PC. I wanna play it.
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My favorite comment on the Polytron site for the blog post would be the cheap-shot of:
"Brilliant, Fez gets to be broken on multiple platforms now." -
Considering the whole point of playing Fez is discovering the greater game which everyone knows about, what is the point of porting it to other platforms?
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A lot of people have no idea about that. Not everyone is plugged into the gamosphere 24/7.
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By "everyone" you mean "people who follow internet gaming forums" which is probably a smaller percentage of the game buying public than you think. There is still plenty of room for folks who haven't discovered the cool higher level secrest of Fez to do so on their own. Even those who don't go that far would probably still enjoy the game as a simple platformer which I know I did.
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Fez looks like a charming 2d turned 3d retro platformer, but that is just a front and a red herring. The actual game is a twisted hidden meta game. If you already know what that meta game is, there is no point in playing Fez and if you are playing it as a platformer, it still isn't worth playing it. The great part about Fez is playing it without knowing about the meta game.
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shut it down guys. there's no point to this game.
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The wife and I watched Indie Game the other night and immediately after bought Fez. We haven't discovered this secret truth yet, and we're having fun just playing it so far. Now granted I'm pretty goofy, but still... You're making a helluva leap.
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There is literally nothing else to appreciate about this beautiful video game!
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I almost don't want to explain too deeply because it could ruin you discovering things for yourself. I'll just say this:
The first half of Fez is a relatively easy platformer. It is fun, atmospheric and has some unique quirks but isn't anything that revolutionary. While you play this part of the game, there are lots of parts of the environment that look like they're just fluff and part of the atmosphere. As you get deeper into the game you may (or may not) realize that some of the atmospheric fluff is actually relevant to the game and hides a deeper layer with some much more complex puzzles.
Hopefully that doesn't spoil anything too much. Some of the stuff deep in the game is so complex and abstract that there were lots and lots of people on the web working together trying to solve it for the first few weeks the game was out.
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Nobody ever discovered all the secrets in Fez by themselves. They would be lucky to translate the language which is like the first step towards the meta stuff. What he's talking about is the community effort to figure this stuff out in those forums. People who are plugged in to that scene can just find everything in GameFAQs now - people who aren't just won't see that content at all.
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I am confuse by this?
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Minor spoilers: there are places in the game where you find a QR code drawn on the wall. If you use your phone to take a photo of one and translate it, you get a series of direction inputs. Pressing those inputs in-game gives you a reward.
Also, throughout the game there are all sorts of strange symbols and drawings with no apparent meaning. If you piece together a bunch of clues though you can decode them and they lead you to more secrets, often in cryptic ways that themselves need to be puzzled out. -
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I still think baron calamity is exagerating, sure there might be particular aspects to Fez that made being there at the beginning special, but thats true of most video game experiences these days.
Also there is a other stuff about that game that makes it really worth seeing. -
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You mean this metagame that was solved through bruteforce and no one still knows why the final answer came from?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/04/why-it-took-almost-a-week-for-the-world-to-completely-finish-fez/2/
That sounds like a pretty shitty metagame.-
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That mechanic is quite neat, I just wished it went into a more Metroidvania-ish direction of exploration/grinding/hidden items instead of the shitty QR code scanning / 3D first-person exploration alphabet deciphering.
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FEZ is a great game but, yeah, having to put down my controller to surf the internets for answers was a buzz kill.
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most won't/didn't care about the meta game.
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PC in a Humble Bundle pls
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Ro-fucking-l:
You're asking for Fish to do anything involving the word 'Humble'? Blood from a stone, man.
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its going to be pc and steam for sure, he made comments about mircosoft exclusivity running out soon, kept praising steam for its free patches (he complained about a game breaking bug he could not afford to fix because it would cost the company about 40k so they said that its affects so few people <1% that it was not a sound investment).
the game was developed an ran on pc when they showed/played it at pax (was shown in the indy game developer documentary).-
I'm sure you're right, especially since the other game in the documentary (Super Meat Boy) was released later on PC and made a shit ton of money even on the sale weekend ( http://www.shacknews.com/article/68036/super-meat-boy-sells-about )
That said, the fact that it was developed on the PC is not significant. All games are developed on the PC. All games that run on an Xbox 360 were at least ported to the PC. There's pretty much no such thing as a game that can run on the Xbox 360 that couldn't also be ported to run on the PC. Red Dead Redemption is running on a PC right now but they won't put it out retail for the PC.
That is the part that really chaps the ass of PC gamers - the fact that any 360 by definition would be somewhat trivial to get running on the PC, and any time it's not released for the PC is a pure business or marketing decision, not a technical one.
I understand why this is the case (piracy concerns, Microsoft exclusivity, console-focused genres, multiple hardware type concerns) but it's still annoying.
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Its funny, but when i saw the indy game documentary, I liked him. I didn't think he came off to douchey, but to be honest, that was the first time I had really seen anything about him.
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Were you asleep while watching it? He came off as a total twat
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I agree with daroach1414, he came across as a bit of a high strung, possibly too full of himself suffering artist type, perhaps even a tad autistic, but he didn't come across as a douchebag to me. And like daroach1414, I had never heard of this guy before the movie.
Part of it may be due to how they portray him - they don't mention his partner other than a pixellated photo and some blacked out legal documents. His comments like "I'll kill myself if the game doesn't ship" and the little meltdown over whether or not the guy will sign the document just sound like someone under stress. And the game itself seemed pretty cool, but I don't have a 360 so I've never played it. They do address how he's hated on the Internet but let's be honest the Internet is full of shitheads a lot of the time so whatever.
It probably didn't hurt that I watched the movie the night before I had a big technical demo/presentation at work and I've had those be in front of everyone and shit the bed before so I could sympathize with his situation of finding a major show stopping bug in the playable build minutes after setting it up at PAX. -
No, i was awake and i disagree. I saw him as a person putting his life/reputation on the line for a game that would make or break him. Also, a person dealing with incredible pressure to produce a product that was much more difficult than he originally thought that could be derailed by a former partner. I'm sure everyone would look at their best in that situation right?
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I totally agree. I don't understand all the hate he gets, he seemed like a totally normal and nice guy.
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I guess his not so well thought statements can be blamed for that. Japanese games suck, patching his own game is too expensive, and PCs are for spreadsheets, not for games.
Maybe he is not a douche, but just immature. But he surely knows how to piss off various groups of his potential customers.-
Its just because he's a one man team, there is no one else there to keep him away from the microphone. I'm sure he's a hot head, but I hate even more the internet's (and specifically the video game part of the internet) need to castrate and vilify anyone who says something vaguely questionable in public.
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It's my understanding that Linus Torvalds is much the same way - his public facing image as the smiling, meek father of the Linux kernel and humble FOSS legend is in conflict with his occasional complete dickhead yelling, complaining and bashing of people on the Internet that he doesn't agree with. Some have wondered if he's a high functioning autistic or has aspergers or whatever the term this week is for someone who's fucking brilliant and a bit unstable.
I would imagine that there's tons and tons of people like Phil Fish who find themselves in the same "bit off more than they could chew and circumstance isn't in their favor" situation and just bailed out. That he didn't says something about him, for better or for worse.-
I've never seen anyone really say that of Torvalds aside from some asinine slashdot commenters.
The public posts that are often referenced have never seemed particularly bad to me, especially if you're referring to the recent one kernel mailing list that recently made headlines. That deserved a public response and pretty much of the type that was given. He might have used softer language, but that's the worst you could really say.
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didn't bother you at all that he totally snubbed his partner on Fez, not giving him a voice at all in the indie game movie, and lied about asking him to participate?
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/07/the-competition-the-story-behind-the-igfs-critics/
OH, and winning a Indie Games contest in 2012 that you won 4 years ago, just because your game hadn't come out yet?
"Four of the people who have worked on Fez were jurors in the 2011 competition – Rich Vreeland, Paul Robertson, Renaud Bédard and Phil Fish himself."-
Yeah - that's such complete bullshit.
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Great article title. Alice does it again.
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PC please! Maybe even iOS, seems this might be good for the iPhone.
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But he said it was meant to be played with a controller sitting down in front of a large tv. Did he lie about that? Shocking.
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pc, meet steam big picture mode.
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I wouldn't hold my breath. Phil Fish promised FEZ, what, 3-4 years before it was actually launched?
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Yeah, I'd wait. Fish sounds like he's basically abandoning the 360 version, so if it gets released on Steam I bet it'd be all fully patched and fixed, and there might even be a bonus feature or two.
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PC and vita please
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