Rumor: Fez dev site hints at possible XBLA release

I've been waiting for news on this for a long time. This is a day one purchase for sure.

So this will be the Gamecube's last hurrah, eh? I thought everyone stopped developing for the Cube years ago...

nice 2010:TYWMC reference!

It was never a secret that Fez is built with Microsoft's XNA. XNA's gamepad support maps directly to the 360 controller.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16698

What sort of development tools are used to work on Fez?

RB: Microsoft Visual C# Express with XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh for all the coding. The level editor is home-made, using XNA as well. I ended up making a tool to compile volume maps (which are used for the sprite animations) and cubemaps (the trile textures) more easily too. There are no models in the game, all the geometry is generated by the engine, so the content tools were mostly Photoshop and the custom tools I developed.

http://www.destructoid.com/gdc-08-hands-on-with-fez-71624.phtml

Feb. 21, 2008

I played Fez using an Xbox 360 controller (although the game was originally created for the PC), leading me to believe that it will be an XNA game and therefore available on Xbox Live Arcade. When asked about this, the creators of the game (who I think are my new best friends) said XBLA seems like a strong possibility. Yup, my head pretty much exploded when I heard this amazing news.

And if you're hung up on the style of the A button, or think it was posted to implicitly confirm an XBLA release, where were you guys at GDC 08?

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/17594

It's on every text window that pops up.

Is... is that engrish?

Ben, thanks for e-mailing me, but... why? I'm not raising huge hell here, just wondering why it's a rumor now, and not in Feb. 2008, when the devs were saying they were going for an XBLA release.

Polytron posted this picture on Feb. 15, and most the other games blogs - including Offworld, which I know most the Joystiq editors read - that reported this that week reported it as a non-story (OW's Boyer: "we'd just be as well off trying to strip hints off the hieroglyphics hiding in the preview shot from earlier (in February)").

But what sets off my BS meter is that I now know you're a blogger for Geekadelphia, which you didn't disclaim in the post. All the Geekadelphia post links to is Infinite Lives... from back in February. I'm not complaining about this being old - it's not, really - but come on. What are you up to? This does more to drive traffic to Geekadelphia than it does report anything about Fez that wasn't already known.

EDIT: For full disclosure, yes, I (Ben) do write for Geekadelphia (though significantly less lately). I LEGITIMATELY saw the news there because, yes, I write for that site. And yes, they sourced another page. The way our "via" system works at Joystiq is we "via" wherever we saw it and source the original, which I did. In fact, to be completely clear, I even asked the editor on duty at the time if that's what I should do. I'm sorry if you thought I was just trying to drive traffic there but that's just not the truth.

1) So many PC games come with built-in support for the 360's gamepad, as obo mentioned.

2) I've never seen a game try so hard to shoehorn into another game's visual style and aesthetic ("Looks like a dumb Cave Story rip-off" if you want the dumbed-down version).

It's going to be on the gamecube obviously.