Brandon Boyer

LittleBigWatch: official Ico/LittleBigPlanet crossover art emerges

This is about all we know: an image surfaces on LittleBigPlanet Central's forums, purportedly from creator Media Molecule themselves. The studio confirms it to be official art. It is Ico with Sack-Yorda, it is beautiful, it is as muted and subtle as the original game itself, it is my new desktop. That's about all we really need to know for now, isn't it? [via VG247]

Brandon Boyer

Colossal find: the last Shadow of the Colossus art archive you'll ever need

This is a heads up simply to point out that there exists a fantastic Picasa gallery that's collected all things Shadow of the Colossus, from the stupefyingly hi-res screenshots like the above, to scans of its artbook and viral campaign images, and, oddly, a fan-made collectible card game based on Fumito Ueda's second PS2 masterpiece. [via Tom]

Brandon Boyer

galleryNES: open source pixel-art slideshow viewer for the NES

New from Don 'No Carrier' Miller, the oft-mentioned current king of NES programming and creator of software-circuit-bender glitchNES: galleryNES, an "an open source picture gallery for the Nintendo Entertainment System" that lets you "create your own pixel art and view it on a real NES in slideshow format." [via True Chip Till Death]

Brandon Boyer

Brique rock: first video teaser of Harmonix/TT's Lego Rock Band

Dredged up from the unknown depths at French gaming site JeuxVideo: the first video of TT Games and Harmonix's fantastically unlikely crossover Lego Rock Band. While it doesn't show off any gameplay, per se, since we've been playing Rock Band for the past two years, it shouldn't take too many guesses there as to what to expect.

What it does hint at is some of the environmental destruction detailed several weeks back, as well as the game's "fantasy locations" (ie. big yes to Lego pirate/castle stages), and, at the tail end, TT Games' propensity for slapstick bricks.

Brandon Boyer

Another dimension: Mega Man in 2.5D

Work in progress video from homebrew creator Peter Sjostrand, creating the Paper Mario, co-op version of Mega Man we had no idea we wanted until right now -- more wallpaper-sized screens are at Sjostrand's site. [Thanks, Torley!]

Brandon Boyer

Shadowplay: SaltyandSweet's Team Fortress mobile

One of Valve's most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they're instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.

And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and "extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze," and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow's jarate-tossing champs today.

Team Fortress mobile [Etsy, thanks Matt!]

Brandon Boyer

Rapid-shot: Mark Cooke creates 10 games in 10 hours

Put together for Tokyo's most recent Pecha Kucha Night (which, as inspired GDC's MicroTalks session this year, features a series of speakers given 20 seconds to narrate 20 auto-advancing slides), game developer Mark Cooke -- most recently programmer on Konami's Zombie Apocalypse, but whose resume stretches as far back as Grim Fandango -- challenged himself to create 10 games in as many hours.

As you'll see, not all managed to come in under the one-hour limit, and not all were necessarily successes, but he did manage a good dose of creativity for each, particularly the Shinjuku Shame 'homeless staring FPS' and the procedurally generated Surfing on Sine Waves.

Head over to the official Pecha Kucha Night page for another video of Cooke actually delivering the presentation to get a better sense of how well the games went over with the crowd, and for news that the Pecha Kucha organization will be working with Cooke to create an official iPhone app out of his Can You Say Pecha Kucha? rhythm game.

Mark Cooke's presentation [Pecha Kucha Daily, thanks Jean!]

Simon Parkin

Triple Rock: Famous or inFamous? Morality and choice in Sucker Punch's PS3 debut

Earlier this week Tom Chick, editor of the Sci-Fi television channel's videogame blog, Fidgit, was presented with something of a moral dilemma. Having posted his impressions of Sony's exclusive PlayStation 3 title, inFamous, in two easy-to-digest posts, one outlining ten great things about the game and the other ten 'poor' features, Sony explained that his scheduled interview with the game's development team would no longer be forthcoming.

According to the publisher the interview was "no longer appropriate" in the light of Chick's coverage of the game. Chick's dilemma? Whether to inform Fidgit's readership of the Sony PR team's apparent petulance, further antagonising its PR department, while reassuring the audience of the site's continued impartiality in the face of mild threat. Or, alternatively, whether to bite his tongue as a way of protecting future interviews and exclusives with the publisher's development teams (who, after all, had little to do with the snub) thus serving the readership's interests by safeguarding the site's continued relevance.

With convincing arguments on both sides it can't have been an easy decision to make, especially because the repercussions of either choice are unclear. But this is exactly the sort of grey moral or professional choice that human beings are routinely called upon to make: a cat's cradle of cause and effect with unpredictable outcomes and unfathomable implications. Life rarely presents black and white moral choices, even if our fables, parables and stories mainly deal in such extremities.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Tom Gauld's end of level boss

Your worst videogame nightmare, circa 1865. From Tom Gauld's forthcoming comic The Gigantic Robot. [via Creative Review]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Elliott Burford's posthumous regret

Eternity's a long time with no Mole Mania. From the sketchbook pages of Elliott Burford (who also has strong words for Tetris).

Brandon Boyer

From GoldenEye to gardening: the fantastic foliage of Bonsai Barber

You will be forgiven for overlooking the release of Zoonami's WiiWare debut Bonsai Barber several weeks back -- I might have too, if I didn't know firsthand the pedigree of the studio behind it. Zoonami is, as it turns out, the studio founded by former Rare designer Martin Hollis, one of the foundational design team behind Nintendo 64 Bond shooter GoldenEye 007, who left in the midst of Perfect Dark development to strike out at his own studio.

In the intervening years, Zoonami had thus far only eked out a single game, DS/PSP minigame/Sudoku mashup Zendoku (which, much to its credit, is the only Sudoku game that's actually managed to hold my attention for more than a round or two and is well worth investigating), with another two years passing until Barber's release.

Of course, there's nothing that overtly ties Goldeneye and Bonsai together to say that fans of one would be instantly drawn to the other, except to say that both are, truly, exceptional games.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Offworld PSA: Nintendo's Rhythm Heaven iTunes visualizer is amazing

I spent longer than I'd like to admit trying to put together the ultimate Hudson Mohawke - Polkadot Blues YouTube sample that would prove just what I mean, but for now you're going to just have to take my word and the image above.

Tiff sent me a heads up yesterday that tucked away in amongst the Flash navigation at Nintendo's website for DS favorite Rhythm Heaven was an official iTunes visualizer, and though it continually crashed her Mac, it runs beautifully on my PC.

As I would come to find out, what it proves beyond reasonable doubt is that nearly every piece of music is exponentially better when accompanied by: effete frogs, erlenmeyer flask-shaking lab partners, thick-lipped Moai heads, guitar wielding ghosts, and dogs done up in rocket-mech suits, all throbbing and pulsing to the beat.

Let the Rhythm Heaven site come to a complete load and check the left nav for the link. [Hope you get yours working, Tiff!]

Brandon Boyer

Palm-deep in the dead: Id details iPhone Doom port

Hot on the heels of their Wolfenstein 3D iPhone release, Id technical director John Carmack has posted a lengthy, and, well, technical, look at the work they've done on the soon-to-be-released port of Doom.

In contrast to Wolfenstein, which Carmack says was simply a "quickie project to satisfy my curiosity and test the iPhone waters," Id has undertaken an "honest development effort" to make the port "a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power."

The first version to be released will support WiFi multiplayer, with a later iPhone OS 3.x exclusive release that will also support bluetooth, but Carmack says latency issues keep the game from being playable online over 3G.

Most intriguingly, Carmack says that with the release and subsequent popularity of even very large iPhone apps, like the 700 meg-large Myst, he's considering taking the platform even more seriously:

The fact that people are downloading Myst on the iPhone is heartening -- I have ideas for leveraging our high end idTech-5 content creation pipeline for a future iPhone game, if people will go for a few hundred meg download.

iPhone Doom Classic Progress Report [iD]

Brandon Boyer

Gimme Indie Tools: 2D Boy unleash open-source rapid prototyping framework

Attn. would-be indie devs: World of Goo creators 2D Boy, as they gear up to develop their next game, have just released this simple open-source framework for rapid prototyping, a process which 2D Boy Kyle Gabler notably employed to create the original Tower of Goo at the Experimental Gameplay Project. The framework, they say, will:

1. Minimize the amount of code required to set up a new game

2. Provide all the basic facilities so as to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel (2D rendering, sound, input, persistence layer, and resource management)

While the 2D Boys won't be providing any support beyond the two included sample games, they have set up a new forum to discuss development on the framework. Let us know if you make something incredible!

Rapid Prototyping Framework [2D Boy]

Brandon Boyer

Reformat the Planet directors visit inFamous devs Sucker Punch

Speaking of studio visits, I might have entirely passed by this series of Sucker Punch video diaries describing the concept and development of just released PS3 exclusive action game inFamous if producer Paul Levering hadn't recently sent them in.

Levering is, as you might recall, one of the producers behind the ongoing BlipFest DVD series and chiptunes documentary Reformat The Planet, and 2 Player Productions' now-signature style manages to make beautiful shots out of even the simple talking-heads.

Part one is above, see part two and part three.

2 Player Productions [Thanks, Paul!]

Brandon Boyer

Land of the rising Sunny: Simon Parkin's NanaOn-Sha studio visit

Says UK journalist and Offworld contributor Simon Parkin of his latest upstart photo series WorkStation:

Offices are offices, whatever their location, but having visited a number of development studios across the world, I still find it interesting how diverse they can be in the details. You can tell so much about the minds and ideas that inhabit a desk just by looking at the detritus on and around it.

WorkStation aims to be an intermittent feature, offering a window into the development environments of studios around the world.

And he's started it off in as wonderful a place as I could imagine, Parappa dev NanaOn-Sha's Tokyo studio, with, as above, a full size figure of WonderSwan oddity Rhyme Rider Kerorican and more Parappa/UmJammer Lammy merch than you could ever fathom. Visit Parkin's Chewing Pixels blog for the whole set.

WorkStation #1: NanaOn-Sha [chewing pixels]

Brandon Boyer

Ghostwire: augmented reality game prepped as DSi downloadable

While it may not be the full blown environmentally-aware augmented reality game we've been promised for years now, Swedish studio A Different Game's Ghostwire -- just announced as in development for the DSi's downloadable DSiWare service -- is a fine step in the right direction.

Originally created for, as above, Nokia mobiles, A Different Game describes Ghostwire as a "collection and adventure game" that lets players use the camera, microphone, and on-screen frequency modulator to help unearth (un-aether?) spirits around you, who each have unique riddles to solve to bring their wandering souls to final peace.

The DSi version mockup, as above, includes a number of cute updates, most notably the use of its player-facing internal camera to catch yourself in the frightened act. A Different Game's official site has more info and video of the award winning mobile version.

Ghostwire [A Different Game]

Brandon Boyer

Mug shot: Capcom Korea's promotional Servbot coffee mugs

Apologies for the lack of updates lately -- I've been suffering from extreme under-the-weatherness for a few days now -- and for the brief catchup I'll be doing to get the site back up to speed.

As mea culpa, I offer another in a long line of objects to covet (and to keep your eyes peeled on eBay for): this set of Dead Rising Servbot mugs, meant to be served during your own dawn of the dead, and emblazoned with both series producer (and Mega Man creator) Keiji Inafune's john hancock and Mega Man sketch.

The don't-call-them-Lego-headed Servbots continue to be a Capcom series favorite, most notably for their appearance in what might have been the studio's top three shining moments of the PlayStation era: action/puzzler The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, a game I'd desperately like to see come to the PlayStation Network store for PS3/PSP play.

Say "Good Morning" with a Servbot Coffee Mug [Capcom-Unity]

Brandon Boyer

Listen: enso, No Carrier, Animal Style's latest Pulsewave NES flier

The latest NES flier (rom link) for The Tank's May 30th Pulsewave show, which will feature performances by minusbaby, Lutin, and Adams/Stern, and visuals by JYK, noteNdo and Paris. As usual, Enso provides the 8-bit cinematics, accompanied by chip musician Joey 'Animal Style' Mariano [MySpace].

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Scott C.'s Keeping Them at Bay

Devo as fearless Earth Defense Force, by Double Fine artist Scott C., part of Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight's ongoing 'Quiet Storm' exhibit (though my favorite may be Simon and Garfunkel's magical Friendship Trip).

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Fotologico's Invasión espacial en la capital de España

Madrid invaded, by Fotologico. [via GamOvr]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: LittleBigPlanet encounters a trouser malfunction

Happy I caught this when I did, as it's now been stricken from the record: Media Molecule's latest 2000AD crossover reveal was plagued by the dreaded trouser malfunction early this morning, but the Sack-Rogue Trooper has since been restored with pants stitched tight in place.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Ray Fenwick's Secret Codes

Ray Fenwick reveals that all my troubles were apparently just a slip of the Konami Code. [via Infinite Lives]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the evolution of BioShock 2's Big Sisters

Early concepts for BioShock 2's Big Sister by Colin Fix (and additional Little Sister concepts by wife Annie Fix). [via Super Punch]

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: "Dance Dance Revolution. With Flamethrowers. Pointed At You."

(Download / YouTube)

In today's episode of Boing Boing Video, we experience the funky flaming glory that is DANCE DANCE IMMOLATION, a pyro-parody of the popular arcade game in which one jumps around on touch-sensitive pads underfoot in rhythm with music. With DDI, you do this inside a flame-retardant suit. Miss a step, you get torched with a giant flamethrower.

Dance Dance Immolation combines video games, music, and propane. You play DDR. A good performance wins you acclaim from flamethrowers. A missed step gets you a face full of fire! Yes, the fire is real. Put on a fireproof suit and give it a try!

We hear they're next performing at the "Smukfest" art confab in Denmark.

CREW NOTE: About this episode's host, Aaron Muszalski (aka SFSlim): He's a Burning Man builder, visual effects artist and educator, and a wandering polyglamorous anarcho-Dada Buddhist biker punk. He's on Twitter. In this episode, you'll also see our delightful recurring guest host Charis Tobias, who is all of 18 years old if memory serves. And thanks to our SF-based shooter-producer Eddie Codel who did a fine job capturing the madness on this piece, yet again.

(Photo below by Kristen Ankiewicz, courtesty Interpretive Arson)

Sponsor shout-out

Brandon Boyer

The dogpile: six full minutes of Muscle March madness

With Namco's new still-buzzing import oddity Muscle March having just been released to WiiWare in Japan, the first full gameplay video has just been ripped from Nico Nico Douga to YouTube, shown above.

It's basically exactly what you were expecting (and, with the later-stage posing fakeouts, actually looks fairly challenging), and is all the more glorious for it.

Muscle March [Namco]

Brandon Boyer

Life on Mars: Noby Noby GIRL continues her galactic crawl

I did my damndest to capture Noby Noby GIRL's triumphant march to Mars via in-game video (you only get the one chance to see the victory-wrap), but my attempts were stymied by the video capability not going live until you actually exit your house.

Accept, then, this commemorative photo above as proof of Noby's ongoing popularity, even if Takahashi and co. are pulling out every trick in the book to lessen the dead time between planets, from the upcoming iPhone version, to the SynchroBOY trick which lets single players control multiple boys at a time, to the recent Lucky Week promotion, which saw submitted lengths randomly given various multipliers, which happened to be the final straw that pushed GIRL to her goal.

So what's life actually like on the red planet? Much the same, so far, though with the addition of new martian inhabitants, obviously, and, more intriguingly, the super-sized royalty unlocked when we reached the moon now making the rounds (on my back, as above).

I wolfram'd (are we allowed to say that yet?) the distance from Mars to Jupiter, GIRL's next step, which gave me an AU distance over double that from Earth to Mars, meaning, I suppose, that we should expect -- barring more of Namco's divine intervention -- at least another 6-7 months before we see the Jovian giant even starting to come into view.

o--o [Namco]

Brandon Boyer

Party monster: Rockstar announce new GTA IV episode, Ballad of Gay Tony

I'm reporting this one straight down the middle: Rockstar have sent word that the second Xbox 360 exclusive episode will shift Liberty City's perspective from bikers (as with the original Lost and the Damned episode) to balladeers, with the "fall" release of The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Rockstar say this episode will see players take the role of "Luis Lopez, part-time hoodlum and full-time assistant to legendary nightclub impresario Tony Prince (aka 'Gay Tony')," taking on a "struggle with the competing loyalties of family and friends, and with the uncertainty about who is real and who is fake in a world in which everyone has a price."

As a side note, for the the ragtag handful of people that don't already own the original Grand Theft Auto, both episodes will be combined on a retail disc at release called Episodes from Liberty City, which won't require the original game to complete.

Brandon Boyer

Mother merchandisers turn to Metal Gear T-shirts, buttons, bags

Oft-mentioned Earthbound/Mother merchandising clearinghouse Fangamer -- the company behind the fantastic fan-made Mother 3 guidebook -- has just made a surprising announcement: they've switched, erm, gears, and added a new game to their merch lineup, Metal Gear Solid.

And, unsurprisingly, it shows all the same attention to detail and phenomenal quality as their Mother merch: currently up for pre-order is an insignia T-shirt for the Big Boss led Les Enfants Terribles project, a shoulderbag emblazoned with a FOXHOUND patch, and a button set of Shadow Moses, Cyborg Ninja, etc. designs.

Head over to their Metal Gear subsite for more information on everything, and to place your pre-order before June 6th and secure one of their custom-stamped dog tags.

Les Enfants Terribles [Fangamer]

Brandon Boyer

Little monsters: Crayon Physics dev's creature creator prototype

The lead-up to the release of Crayon Physics Deluxe has kept creator Petri Purho out, for the most part, of his years-long rhythm of creating a steady stream of new game prototypes, but that, happily, is apparently now over.

Above, the first look at his latest prototype, about which nothing is known, and from which there's not much to glean, other than to notice that his 'creatures' are all being procedurally generated from a common set of facial and bodily elements.

To what end? I can't wait to find out.

Kloonigames home [Petri Purho]

Brandon Boyer

Love to Infinity: the latest look at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Scraping up the last of the long-weekend news, the trailer for Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4 followup, Modern Warfare 2. A game so flagrantly big-budget, realistically modeled, and combat-driven may seem an odd fit for the usual Offworld fare, but I'll let you in on a secret: Call of Duty 4 was one of the smartest games I played continually throughout 2008, and my vote for (no joke) MMO of the year.

Granted, its single player game didn't quite ring with emotional impact for me as it seemed to do for most (I'd already experienced a more lo-fi version of its desperate, crawling climax a year before in undersung PS2 gem Raw Danger), but the rank-rising, challenge-based and XP driven multiplayer game was the first online shooters since the earliest days of Half Life that would hook me so completely, a crown only stolen by Left 4 Dead.

What we don't get above, unfortunately, is any further details on how that half of the game will have evolved, but it's what I'm anticipating more than any other aspect.

Modern Warfare 2 [Infinity Ward]

Brandon Boyer

Fire fights: PixelJunk 1-4 becomes PixelJunk Shooter

With its previously mentioned naming contest now concluded, Q-games -- creator of the PS3 downloadable series Pixel Junk -- has officially donned its latest fluid mechanics/subterranean rescue game, simply, PixelJunk Shooter, from a body of entries that also included Depths, Atlantis, Caves, Blaster, and S.O.S.

Also unveiled, the game's logo above, which captures quite nicely the shifting interplay between its water, fire, and rock elements. See the last Offworld entry on the game for the first full trailer.

PixelJunk Shooter [Q-games, via PlayStation.Blog]

Brandon Boyer

Calavera Converse: KyozoKicks' Grim Fandango sneakers

The latest wearable art by Nicholas 'KyozoKicks' Tonks, creator of the previously featured Noby Noby shoes: this gorgeous set of Grim Fandango sneaks which reiterate that love is, sadly, for the living. [via Double Fine]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Die Gute Fabrik's swamp-opera concept, Mutatione

Concept art for Nils 'Die Gute Fabrik' Deneken's adventure/platformer/soap opera Mutatione, which takes place "in a mutant-inhabited swamp village with the same name."

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Media Molecule's LittleBig-Dredd comic cover

LittleBigPlanet creator Media Molecule's collaboration with and tribute to UK comics legend 2000AD will be released this week, and the studio's starting the daily reveal until then, beginning with the first shot of Sackboy Judge Dredd above (alongside Judge Anderson), and the more recently revealed Strontium Dog, Johnny Alpha.

Brandon Boyer

Lonely rolling ball: Kellbot's Katamari Damacy trackball controller mod

NYC Resistor collaborator Kelly Farrell shows off her latest project: a gazing-ball trackball controller that plays Katamari Damacy the way we should have realized it was meant to be played all along.

How does it work? Kelly explains:

It uses an optical mouse to track the ball. I gathered up some cheap PS2 controllers, ripped out the potentiometers on the analog sticks, and replaced it with a digital potentiometer and an arduino. The arduino takes signals from a PS/2 mouse and adjusts the potentiometer accordingly...

Originally I wanted to use one of those giant yoga balls, to really get the scale. But it turns out those don't roll very well on ball bearings. Luckily Adam had one of those mirror balls folks put in their gardens. Or at least I assume they do, no one I know has a big enough yard to put lawn ornaments in.

Life-Size Katamari Lives [Kellbot]

Mike Nowak

1-Bit Retro: Pixel Beard's Beard Snatchers, 1954

Here's a work in progress video of Will 'Pixel Beard' Faulds' Beard Snatchers, 1954. The Flash game with its 1-bit who-needs-colour aesthetic hearkens back to the original Mac OS System 1.

If this an aesthetic you enjoy, also be sure to check out Ace Team's (of ZenoClash renown) previously covered The Malstrums Mansion.

Pixel Beard [Will Faulds]

Brandon Boyer

James Kochalka's fever dreams: you fell asleep playing Noby Noby Boy

Offworld's Monster Mii and Superf*ckers Review creator James Kochalka has a youfellasleepwatchingadvd moment with his PlayStation 3 in this recent entry of his fantastic American Elf diary strips (one of my top two web-comic subscription recommendations).

Brandon Boyer

Mad Villainy: Trapdoor tease iPhone rhythm game Young Villain Academy

Montreal based creator of "extraordinary playthings & diversions" Trapdoor recently sent over this batch of screenshots of their upcoming iPhone game Young Villain Academy, about which they haven't revealed much, except to say that players will play as "an unwilling student of a once legendary super villain," who complete lessons by performing "a variety of dangerous trials using rhythm style game mechanics."

Trapdoor also note that the game's obvious 50s retro style extends beyond the fantastic artwork to the game's audio and gameplay. Hit the jump for three more screens, as we all patiently await the long-promised first video and new details.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Ashley Wood's Metal Gear Solid digital comic art

Snake ambushed by Liquid Snake, one of three pieces of original comic art in helloMuller's collection by Ashley Wood (currently collaborating with Age of Empires devs Newtoy on an original iPhone game) for Konami's intricate PSP Metal Gear digital comic. [via minusbaby]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the soulless, indifferent gaze of the NES R.O.B. Army

Detail of a promotional poster for the NES's automaton playmate R.O.B., recently sold on eBay. [via GamOver]

Brandon Boyer

Weekend Watching: our top Netflix instant-watching picks

It's been a few months since we last gave each other recommendations for Netflix on 360 weekend watching, and with things popping up and down on the service weekly, I think it's high time for an update, particularly for this extended three-day blowout.

Here's my quick rundown of the top things that shouldn't be missed:

Let the Right One In: Tomas Alfredson's take on John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel of the (basically) same name skyrocketed itself to one of my top movies of 2008 (landing it square next to Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York) for making a vampire horror movie that isn't a vampire horror movie (despite what its stateside trailer may tell you), one that I watched four times in the first two months after its release.

It's a coming of age story, it's a story of isolation (on everyone's part) and of broken, dependent relationships, that ends on a note of indistinguishably mixed hope and resolute sadness when you carry the story forward in your mind. It's also gawpingly gorgeous, and everyone's got good hair and wicked style. Do not miss this.

Party Down: With the first season coming to a close Friday night, you now have no excuse to not sit down and watch what I'm going to call right now as the first, best new American comedy series since.. maybe Curb Your Enthusiasm? It's not just the cast, though that helps, a lineup which includes former State member Ken Marino, Adam Scott (who you remember as the guy who saved it with his solo in the best part of Step Brothers), Freaks and Geeks/Adventureland's Martin Starr, and Lizzy Caplan (aka My Hollywood Girlfriend; you know her from Cloverfield and as The Only Real Reason To Watch True Blood).

The premise: each episode is a separate LA occasion worked by the titular catering service Party Down, staffed by former/fallen/would-be actors, which sounds like a perfect setup for easy hijinks, and often is, but always is always very smartly tempered with an undercurrent of life-reflection -- taking the easy, low road after being knocked down. Actual pathos, the kind that the American Office has been managing to scrape together each week since that brutally, Who's-Afraid-Of-Virgina-Woolf-ishly dark Dinner Party episode. But, also, it's very, very funny.

Those are my two top, but there's also, of course, the first season of Graham Linehan's IT Crowd (which I have intended to talk more about on Offworld for months, let's do that soon), Søren Larsen's documentary Lynch, which won't sell you on David Lynch if you're already a skeptic, but is an essential peek behind the transcendental curtain if you're a fanatic, and the Short Films from his box set also recently reared their head on the service, too.

Also from around the network, BBG's Joel has recommended this documentary on unsung music producer legend Tom Dowd and guest blogger Tiff Chow has had nothing but good things to say about CJ7, the Chinese 'E.T.' reimagining from Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle director Stephen Chow.

Anyone else dug up any diamonds or have anything to recommend? Let us all know via the comments!

Brandon Boyer

The Book Lovers: "Well Played 1.0", 22 essays on Bioshock, Ico, Mario, Portal, Zelda

Just published by Carnegie Mellon University professor Drew Davidson, and perfect for a long-weekend read (while we all wait for the Infinite Summer to arrive): Well Played 1.0, a collection of 22 essays from developers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers that investigate both the experience of playing particular games, as well as how well the game itself is designed and developed.

The games included in the 1.0 version:

Advance Wars, Bioshock, Bully, Civilization 4, Europa Universalis, Guitar Hero, Half-Life 2, Ico, Kingdom of Loathing, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid 4, Mines of Minos, Parappa the Rappa, Passage, Phoenix Wright, Portal, Secret of Monkey Island, Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill 2, Super Mario Bros., Tempest, Ultima Underworld, World of Goo, and Zork

From the following contributors:

Kirk Battle (L.B. Jeffries), Mia Consalvo, Greg Costikyan, Patrick Curry, Drew Davidson, Corvus Elrod, Noah Falstein, Clara Fernandez-Vara, Mary Flanagan, Nick Fortugno, James Paul Gee, Charles Herold, Clint Hocking, Katherine Isbister, Nick Montfort, Doris Rusch, Jesse Schell, Brett Shelton, Mark Sivak, Seth Sivak, Kurt Squire, Jason Vandenberghe

The book is available for free as an HTML text dump via the book's official site or as a free PDF download from Lulu; a print version can be ordered via Lulu as well.

Well Played 1.0: Video Game, Value and Meaning [ETC-Press, thanks Drew!]

Brandon Boyer

Just my type: TextAdventure blog celebrates the art of game typography

The latest design/game crossover blog well worth following (after BoxArt and PixelStyle): Offworld guest blogger Tiff Chow and Will 'brilliam' Mitchell are curating TextAdventure, a tumblr blog dedicated solely to fantastic examples of in-game and on-package typography.

TextAdventure [tumblr]

Brandon Boyer

First iPhone video of H.grenade's A/V synced shooter Circuit Strike.One

It's true, the first official trailer for H.grenade's upcoming iPhone node-hacking shooter Circuit Strike.One has toned down the graphical information overload of the debut trailer by just a touch (most easily noticed in the contrails now being significantly more spindley).

But, publisher Chillingo says the developer did manage to sneak in all of the audio/visual synced up effects promised but not implemented at the time, where "music, environments, vocal samples, and sound FX are mixed in real-time and triggered in sync with the music while playing," with "a dynamic, sliding time scale where audio speed and pitch are warped in real-time when using the bullet.time hack."

The game is expected to make its way to the App Store in a matter of weeks.

Circuit Strike.One [H.grenade]

Brandon Boyer

Wii getting Metroid Prime triple-shot with remade Trilogy

Just announced by Nintendo for a late August release: Metroid Prime Trilogy, a three-pack set bringing together the first two GameCube Metroid chapters remade with true widescreen and Wii-mote control support, alongside Corruption, the third game in the series already available on Wii, for the cost of one game.

Keep your eyes on the Prime Trilogy site for more information.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Lauren Gregg's quarter-pumping video game nerdimal

Part of illustrator Lauren Gregg's fantastic Nerdimal series (which also covers anthopomorphic Star Trek, Apple, comic book, skate, band nerds and more), and still available -- if you hurry! -- in a super-affordable limited edition print run of 100.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the neo-future laserlight pyramids of Introversion's Subversion

The latest look into the procedurally generated cities of indie dev Introversion's still-as-yet maddeningly undetailed upcoming game Subversion.

Brandon Boyer

Do you make chiptunes? Help us score these retro-videos.

Here's the deal: Boing Boing has come into possession of some wicked footage of an anonymous Atari Computer Camp excursion that has everything you could ever want from grainy stock video: namely, yellowed and over-saturated money shots of retro-tech, and a bevy of over-eager and still-innocent pre-teens banging out BASIC to make crossword crosses out of the words Van Halen (no joke!) and gawping at the awesome limitless power and future of computers.

Here's the catch: neither of the videos -- the first clocking in at about seven minutes, and the second coming in at seven and a half -- have any sound at all.

And so: given Offworld/Boing Boing's sizable audience of chiptune/junk-tech musicians, we thought we'd throw the score open to you. If you're interested in submitting some of your music for the videos, which will be broadcast on BBtv at a later date, send an email to brandon@offworld.com with the subject line "Atari Computer Camp" and we'll dig through and select our favorites from there. Bonus points awarded for (but certainly not limited to) composing on actual 8-bit Atari tech.

Hit the jump for more inspirational shots of the kids at work (and play).

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Labor struggle: the latest look at Flashbang's Crane Wars

Flashbang's previously posted Crane Wars prototype from Matt and Adam Mechtley is now officially the next game to come to Blurst -- the web-game portal that brought you Minotaur China Shop, Blush and Paper Moon -- and, from the extensive over-the-shoulder video above, it's picking up overtones of a union-versus-scab battle as well.

During the 14-ish minute video, you'll see that union worker concept image I posted a few weeks back come to life, actual gameplay after the 10ish minute mark, and a brief shot of Mary Roach's science of orgasm Ted talk.

Work in Progress: Crane Wars [Flashbang]

Brandon Boyer

More things Francis hates: pretty much everything you do, too

In our neverending search to discover everything Left 4 Dead's Francis hates, we hit a stumbling block at ihatevans.com, as it turns out Francis hates everything you've ever 'tweet'ed about hating too. [via the increasingly alarmingly L4D-obsessed Alice Taylor]

Brandon Boyer

Video: Street Fighter, deconstructed

The latest in Dylan Hayes' attempts to tear down Street Fighter to its constituent parts yields what I'm assuming is nothing more than low-bit collision boxes battling underneath an abstract sky. Only the dizzy birds, blood, and one lonely fish remain. [via Mike]

Brandon Boyer

Video: Tim Schafer meets Jack Black for Brütal Thoughts

In the first of what promises to be a viral series leading up to Brütal Legend's October release, LucasArts vet and Double Fine head Tim Schafer continues to prove his acting mettle by making this appearance alongside Jack Black and Steve Agee, a performance so tour de force that it makes Black puke.

Brütal Legend [EA/Double Fine]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: LittleBigPlanet's Famous Monsters of Gameland

A selection of the 90-odd stickers coming in today's LittleBigPlanet Monsters Kit.

Margaret Robertson

One More Go: Passage, or why I really should know better

I have a happy, long-running argument with one of the nicest game developers in the world about whether or not games can do subtle emotions. It's a familiar debate: games can deliver big, bold visceral emotions - fright, frustration, triumph - but are subtler sensations - regret, embarrassment, alienation - beyond their remit?

As ever, what puts the kibosh on this whole discussion is that games don't contain emotions at all. The emotions are supplied by each individual player, and since each individual player will respond to a game in a unique way, there's no empirical answer to be had. Our happy argument has been bubbling along for years, but all that's really happening is that he's saying 'here are the emotions I experience when gaming' and I'm saying 'and here are mine'.

So I shall not, in this column, be telling you about how Passage proves that games can somehow inject into their players the kind of oblique, mutating emotions we struggle to find words for. If that's a disappointment to you, then a quick Google will provide satisfaction: hundreds of people have written movingly about their experiences of this little game about the biggest of ideas. I went back to it this week, as I often have before, for a refill of the ammunition needed to convince yet another friendly, clever, skeptical non-gamer about the potential of the medium. It worked: after talking her through Bioshock, Bejewelled, World of Warcraft and Passage, it was Passage she wanted to play.

READ THE REST

Mike Nowak

Garth and Ginny's Pixel Films: 2500 Pixels is Enough

Garth and Ginny's "Pixel Films" are about as high resolution as you're likely to get from a 50x50 pixel square. The latest animation, coming by way of the Brighton Fringe Festival, follows up their first Pixel Film (below) which screened at the famed Pictoplasma festival last year.

Garth and Ginny [G&G blog]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the El Lissitzky-inspired game design of Protonaut

One of the upcoming indie games I'm looking forward to the most: Greg 'aeiowu' Wohlwend (designer of previously featured infographics game Effing Hail) and Andy Moore take what was originally a platformer modeled around chemical bonds, and suddenly morph their mockup into this grainy, constructivist El Lissitzky-inspired design.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Winona Nelson's hyper-real Super Mario Bros 2

A new perspective and a new style manages to make Shy-guys as gnarled and horrifying as maybe we should have seen them all along. Art by Winona Nelson, concept artist at Giants, MDK and Armed and Dangerous developer Planet Moon. Nelson offers offers prints for sale here, but released this image in ultra hi-res for you to print yourself, spotted by Infinite Lives.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the Dynamic Tension of Team Fortress 2's Sniper update

Valve channel vintage Charles Atlas for the latest in the continuing struggle between the Sniper and the Spy leading up to TF2's latest update. See the official page for an explanation of what's going on here, though it does honest to god boil down to new jar-of-pee weaponry, ala the team's April Fool's gag [via Valve].

Brandon Boyer

The Battlestations: Pacific Index: Eidos Hungary, by the numbers

The team behind just-released action game Battlestations: Pacific provide a crazy charming Harper's Index-style breakdown of their development process by the numbers. An excerpt:

Oldest member of the dev team: 49yrs
Youngest member of the dev team: 23yrs
Average age at Eidos Hungary: 31.41yrs
Official Eidos Hungary Parties: 5
Average number of coffee mugs left on the balcony overnight: 12
Number of devs playing guitar: 6
Number of monitors per developer: 1.5
Biggest TV screen in the office: 62 inch
Number of Imperial Japanese naval flags in the office: 3
Number of 48-star US flags in the office: 3
Number of British White Ensign flags in the office: 2
Amount of milk used for coffees during development: 3240 litres/856 US gallons
Amount of bottled water consumed in the office during development: 17680 litres/4670 US gallons
Number of developers who created all FMV's in the game: 6
Devs reading Battlestations.net & other forums at least once a day: 16

See the full breakdown for more, including a log of Total Gross Register Tonnage resulting from sunken ships during dev and testing.

Battlestations: Pacific - The Facts, The Stats, The Truth. [Battlestations.net, via Margaret]

Brandon Boyer

4-bit terror: Messhof's upcoming Thrill of Combat

Coming soon from indie dev Mark 'Messhof' Essen, The Thrill of Combat, a game that promises to mash-up an early 80's PC port of Choplifter, the glitched-up terror-core of GDFX, and every urban legend you've ever feared about waking up in a bathtub full of ice.

The story, explains Messhof? "You have quotas to meet. Use your helicopter to seek out donors and incapacitate them with your laser, then drop down and remove their organs."

Messhof's not a name I've brought up on the site yet, but, if you haven't guessed by now, he's one of the few indie devs that dabbles in a glorious fuck-you no-fi style that at times manages to make even Cactus's more recent output look like the safest idea Nintendo ever had (a high compliment to both).

Side note: if Thrill's dirty beats in the video at top strike your fancy, GDFX has the entire 28 minute ALTERED EGO piece it's ripped from available as a free download via his MySpace [direct sendspace link].

The Thrill of Combat [Messhof]

Brandon Boyer

Don't Listen, Make: 8 Bit Weapon/Sony's Chiptune Odyssey loop/sample pack

Also new on the 8-bit front: Seth and Michelle 'ComputeHer' Sternberger of 8-bit Weapon (who you'll recognize from Reset Generation's excellent score) have also written in with news that Sony has just officially released "8 Bit Weapon: A Chiptune Odyssey", their loop and sample sound library.

Says the Weapons:

The library contains real sounds from each of the following computers/consoles: Apple II, Commodore 64, NES, Gameboy, and the Atari 2600. Each system library has everything from drums, bass and synth to special effects. Both Michelle and I have featured song demos built into the collection to boot! The sound library works with ACID, Ableton Live, Cubase, Garage Band, Logic, Soundtrack, and more!

As a bonus, Sony's also throwing in MP3s of their Electric High EP, along with an exclusive track, for anyone who orders online. Listen to samples of the samples via Sony's product page, and drop me a note via that 'Send a Tip' button at the top of the page when you've finished your latest EP/album.

8 Bit Weapon: A Chiptune Odyssey [Sony Creative Software, 8-bit Weapon, ComputeHer]

Brandon Boyer

Listen: the chiptune/singing-synth techno-pop tribute, 8-BIT PROPHET

Japan's finest chiptune label (and accompanying 8-bit news network), VORC, has written in with word of their latest collection, 8-BIT PROPHET: a tribute to Japanese 80's "techno-pop"/new wave band TM Network, with a particular twist: rather than instrumental covers, all vocals on the album have been produced using Yamaha's singing speech-synth Vocaloid.

As noted earlier, Vocaloid's spawned its own personified singing idol named Hatsune Miku, made famous by endless versions of popular songs spread on Japan's YouTube equivalent, NicoNicoDouga (hear her version of Portal's 'Still Alive', though her pronunciation's obviously a bit stilted in English), and the combined style of her signature sound with 8-bit backing is actually not a half-step off of YMCK's own happy low-bit pop.

The album will be out June 3rd, with Posca handling the CDs and hearjapan handling worldwide digital distribution: they've currently got a two-song sampler available now.

While you're visiting VORC, also see: their Squarewave Surfers compilation, with 8-bit musicians worldwide covering songs like Tequila and Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini (!), and Holy 8bit Night+, which gives Octoroc's 8-bit Jesus a serious run for its holiday money.

「8-BIT PROPHET - TM Network Tribute Generated by Chiptune + Vocaloid」 [VORC Records, MySpace, YouTube]

Joel Johnson

Innex Retro Adapter updates your old controllers for active Wii duty

In June, videogame crapvendor Innex will start distributing this Retro Adapter by Komodo, a $20 (projected) dongle that will let you plug in and use your NES, Super Nintendno, or Nintendo 64 controllers on the Nintendo Wii, perfect for all those Virtual Console games.

Brandon Boyer

DM-Spectrum: where Unreal Tournament's killing floor meets the dance floor

Creator Matt Bradley totally gets it and submits this video of DM-Spectrum, his Unreal Tournament 3 deathmatch level that could easily be the best thing I've seen all week (Trico aside, of course).

Plus! It's not all for show: Bradley adds:

The cubes also serve a purpose. They help to keep the level paced. Each coloured cube represents a different area of the map. These areas are colour-co-ordinated to match the cubes. When a player is in one of these areas the corresponding cube lights up notifying other players. As one learns the map they should be able to find enemies without too much hardship.

Games industry: much more of this, please.

Brandon Boyer

Video: Space Invaders, the carnival game

Hit the UFO, win a giant stuffed Gloomy Bear invader. Created for Red Bull Music Academy's Guten Touch interactive art installation by Multitouch Barcelona, the group behind the recent 'Hi' human interface project, and who are chasing my one true heart by consistently using Lullatone as their video soundtracks.

Brandon Boyer

Your Bit.Trip:Core chiptune guest star: Bubblyfish

Bit.Trip creators Gaijin Games have just let slip that NYC chiptune star Haeyoung 'Bubblyfish' Kim will be bookending their latest WiiWare rhythm-pong game, Core, doing the same title- and end-screen musical duties that Bitshifter did for their debut game Beat.

Above: my video of Bubblyfish performing at Kokoromi's 2007 Gamma256 show in Montreal -- give it a minute or so to really hot up. To hear more, see Kim's home page and MySpace, and BBTV's BlipFest 2008 coverage and interview.

Special Guest Star for BIT.TRIP CORE! [Gaijin Games]

Brandon Boyer

Time-shifting platformer Braid released for the Mac

Console-less and PC-less Mac user still waiting for your chance to play Number None's time-shifting platformer Braid? The wait is over: Penny Arcade Adventure devs Hothead have just announced the release of the game to their digital download service Greenhouse, alongside a free demo.

Braid [Greenhouse, Number None]

Brandon Boyer

Two years later: new details on the long-dormant Katamari Damacy Online

Just when it'd almost fully receded from your memory (the last we heard of it was in January of 2007), andriasang notes a new article on the Korean-exclusive massively multiplayer Katamari Damacy Online.

Unfortunately, the update only goes so far as to profile two new playable cousin characters, and a vague storyline, as translated by andriasang, that concerns "a black hole that forms after the King decides to hold a picnic," which players will seal off with their rolled up katamari.

The game is apparently, though, due for release in Korea this year by local external developer Windysoft, with no word from anyone on when or how or if it might make it out of that country.

Katamari Damacy Online Resurfaces [andriasang]

Brandon Boyer

Samus Yarn: Deadcraft's Metroid amigurumi

Well spotted as usual by Jenn at Infinite Lives, this cocklewarming set of Metroid amigurumi, custom made by Deadcraft-er Nissie, deadlocked in a cute-war with karaimame's Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max crafts.

More games crafts (including an adorable Old Snake) via Nissie's flickr, and buy/commission your own via her Etsy account.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Duncan Harris's Fallout 3 photography

UK writer Duncan Harris (whose original postcard-pretty set I noted in Offworld's earliest days) returns to Fallout 3's Wasteland six months later and finds dangerous high school girls in trouble, and.. jesus christ.

View his entire set of images here for more from the apparent new master of in-game photography.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Tan Nuyen's Super Famicom intersection

"Just Super", part of Tan Nuyen's Nymphographics series [via TinyCartridge].

Brandon Boyer

Leaked: first video of Ico/Shadow of the Colossus creators' Trico

As you might've gathered over the past six months, I'm not normally one to jump on any old rumor, mockup, or grainy video oddity, even in the name of curiousity. Take that as you will as I post the video above, which -- until Sony officially announce it themselves -- I won't say is 100 percent legitimate, but suffice it to say jives with everything I know about the game so far.

Team ICO's Project Trico HD Trailer [PlayStation LifeStyle]

Brandon Boyer

PressPlay debut physicsy/scribbley WiiWare platformer Max and the Magic Marker

Somewhere in between WiiWare debut favorite LostWinds (for its vulnerable directly-controlled character and 2D platforming), Crayon Physics (for its elaborately pieced together machinery), iPhone scribbler Trace -- and, as always, a tip of the hat to the visionary Harold and the Purple Crayon -- Danish indies PressPlay have revealed the first video for their self-published WiiWare debut, Max and the Magic Marker.

While a platformer at heart, PressPlay have said that the Crayon Physics nod goes deeper than the paper surface: its physics go so far as to create heavier objects out of those made with more ink, a resource that can be returned by erasing earlier drawings. The best part, though: the way Max and the game's world pop in and out of marker-doodled outlines when you pause to draw your own additions.

The studio hasn't yet revealed too much further information on the official site, outside naming fellow Danish/Balkan/klezmer-y hip-hop group (!) Analogik as the composers of the game's soundtrack, who, on further streaming, turn out to be kind of awesome.

PressPlay say they hope to have the game out by this fall, "hopefully."

Max and the Magic Marker [PressPlay]

Brandon Boyer

LittleBigWatch: artist/celeb 'Originals' campaign debuts Joe Vaux level

Media Molecule recently mentioned that they'd be working more closely with artists to bring new sticker packs and content into LittleBigPlanet, but Sony is also extending that, they have announced, to levels themselves by "inspiring individuals and interesting personalities," under a new 'LittleBigPlanet Originals' campaign.

The first level, shown above, comes from studio artist and Family Guy affiliate Joe Vaux (who previously combined both undertakings at LA's "Family Guy C.R.A.P. (A Collection of Rare Art Pieces)" exhibit), and will continue with more levels by Sarah Burke (presumably the Canadian skier?), and Nathan Cabrera (profiled on the Mother Boing in 2003).

Play the levels by searching for PSN username 'LBPOriginals', read more about Vaux's thoughts on creating the level via the PlayStation blog, and see his original iam8-bit piece Reset below.

LittleBigPlanet "The Patch" - Family Guy's Joe Vaux [PlayStation.Blog]

Brandon Boyer

Game on Google Earth: PlanetInAction's Ships

PlanetInAction's web-game Ships obviously skews heavily toward the Flight Simulator X/Densha De Go! niche of the games sphere, and is therefore light on what we might call 'thrills' beyond taking in the scenery, but its premise is too keen to ignore: it's entirely built on top of Google Earth tech, letting you take the wheel of cruise ships (and zeppelins!) and travel along a true to life simulation of the globe.

I've noted a few games that use satellite imaging tech to bring in some semblance of realism and recognition to action games -- The Last Guy and Square Enix's 0 Day Attack on Earth, most notably -- but this is a much more robust beast, and tech that hopefully will evolve over coming years.

Ships [PlanetInAction, via Google Earth blog]

Brandon Boyer

Listen (Golden Oldies edition): Cabel Sasser's Buggy Saints Row: The Musical

Since I conjured his name in the last post without explaining any further, I suppose it's time to re-dredge up Cabel Sasser's video masterpiece from late 2006 for those that haven't seen it. It's not a bit stale two and a half years later, particularly that glorious soaring finale.

Sasser, a true 64-bit renaissance man, is co-founder of Mac software house Panic (creators of Transmit and Coda), and the -- publisher, I guess? -- responsible for bringing both the official Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy T-shirts to life, and -- as above (or over here, which has earwormed me for days, and I don't even fully understand the context) -- an ace composer when he sets his mind to it.

Oh, and he had a pixel-art infused wedding so tastefully and gorgeously designed that I swoon with the vapors just showing it off to people.

Brandon Boyer

Listen: Future Boy's 8-bit Megamix, the last chiptune mixtape you'll ever need

Created for Kokoromi's recent Live Game Sounds event I mentioned a few weeks back, Future Boy's 8-bit Megamix clocks in at nearly two whole hours of chiptune and low-bit excellence from Freezepop to Treewave to Glomag to Anamanaguchi to Goto80 and everyone else you've heard of before, and more you will wonder why you hadn't heard of yet.

Use it as a primer to the scene, use it as your Jetsons treadmill running mix, just don't not download it immediately. If it weren't 139 megs large, I'd embed it here.

While you're there, also grab A Maze of Death, his 'eclectro-pop' opera produced in collaboration with Johnny Cashpoint and based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, or his Strange Little World EP (both of which hover somewhere around Atom and His Package meets Magnetic Fields meets Cabel Sasser, when he can be bothered to compose), or any of the extra tracks and more traditional mixtapes he's posted to his blog.

BLOG.POST[156] - 8-Bit Megamix [Future Boy]

Brandon Boyer

Quarter sixth: the latest look at Edmund McMillen's 'Hitlers Must Die!'

Though progress on bringing Super Meat Boy to WiiWare has slowed Edmund McMillen somewhat on finishing off his "album" of retro inspired mashup games called No Quarter, he's just posted the latest look at the first of six "tracks" in the game, now called Hitlers Must Die! (though I have to admit I prefer Destroy All Hitlers).

Originally described as 'Mario + N + Wolfenstein', you now get the clearest view as to how that might work: a heavily physically modeled world with the protagonist running, jumping, and, of course, brutally defeating reams of Hitler clones.

It also strongly brings to mind early indie favorite tar-ball platformer Gish, a game which Edmund McMillen helped design, and which he says he'll be returning to soon, with "awesome Gish 2 news in the next month."

Brandon Boyer

GDC Austin gets Indie Games Summit, Offworld joins advisory board

Attn. all indies: GDC organizers Think Services have just officially announced that this year's GDC Austin will be including, for the first time, a two-day Independent Gaming Summit similar to the one that's been gaining big traction at GDC's conventional convention earlier in the year.

The call for submissions has just opened via GDC Austin's IGS site, noting that the summit hopes to bring together and "highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions surrounding business models and methods, promotion and marketing, deep game design techniques and inspirational case studies."

On a more personal note, I've joined IGF Chairman and Gamasutra director Simon Carless, Flashbang's Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink, and fellow Austinite Adam Saltsman (coincidentally the creator of the just-released Fathom) as one of the Austin IGS's advisors, and we'll be banding together over the coming months to make sure there's many excellent things happening both on-site and off- that week.

The Austin IGS will be held September 15th and 16th, 2009, with the main GDC Austin running through the 18th. More information on the GDC Austin proper can be found here.

GDC Austin Independent Gaming Summit [Think Services, via Gamasutra]

Brandon Boyer

Team Fortress team teaches how to faceplant with grace

Valve teaches the rest of the industry how best to deal with a PR flub (say, oh, I don't know, accidentally leaking your own video over the weekend): you own it with class and style by awarding yourself an unlockable achievement, and publicizing your internal HR rampage to hunt down and back stab the person responsible.

Team Fortress 2 [Valve, via Tom]

Brandon Boyer

Fōruauto Part-III: introducing Fallout 3, the 70s Japanese cop-drama

Today's other best Fallout 3 development: Japan's 'agoministrator' re-imagines the game as a 70s TV drama, with perfect pitch freeze-frame introductions of all its major players. The coup de grâce groupshot at 1:27-1:40 is a little bit mindblowing. [thanks much, Super Punch!]

Brandon Boyer

New Fallout 3 DLC: the Wasteland gets even wider still

Continuing, for now, to keep their promise of a game that never ends, Bethesda has just announced two more expansions to Fallout 3's Wasteland, with Point Lookout, a "massive new swampland area filled with new quests and content," due in June, and Mothership Zeta, in which players will "experience an alien abduction first hand and find out if they're tough enough to survive," coming in July.

At the same time Bethesda has announced that PlayStation 3 Vault 101-ers will finally be getting their chance to take advantage of the widened Wasteland with the last, first DLC package Operation: Anchorage, coming in late June, followed every 4-6 weeks thereafter by The Pitt and Broken Steel, the most recent pack that finally did away with the end-game and level cap.

And, finally, for those that have been waiting and don't want to fiddle with the content drip-feed, October will bring the release of a Game of the Year edition of the game that will include all five packs for the same price as the original release.

Fallout 3 [Bethesda]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Silent Hill in real, horrifying, life

Cosplay takes a lot of flack in the West, but sometimes, just sometimes, something comes along that forces you to re-evaluate: case in point, Judy Stephens' Silent Hill set, photographed at the recent AnimeCentral 2009. [via GSW]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Metroid by way of Miyazaki

I've mentioned Mikaël 'Orioto' Aguirre before for his excellent collaborative Gunstar Heroes HD PS3 themes, but since then he hasn't stopped creating hi-res painterly game-remakes, including this "Nausicaä take on Metroid." [via Jenn's always wonderful Infinite Lives]

Brandon Boyer

Gimme Indie Game: the hidden depths of Adam Atomic's Fathom (with bonus MP3!)

Like a number of the "less said, the better" indie games in recent months (see also: Gravity Bone, etc.), the best thing Adam 'Atomic' Saltsman's just-released web game Fathom has going for it is the one secret that it would be a letdown to reveal before you'd even had a chance to play.

Suffice it to say: there's considerable serenity packed deep within its outwardly militant core (a core guarded by, as you'll see, this decade's best flower-pot-security-bots), and a disquieting ending that its creator assures me shouldn't sink my heart as much as it does.

If Saltsman's name rings a bell it's because -- along with collaborators Infinite Ammo and Flashbang -- he had a hand in designing recent Blurst release Paper Moon, as well as physics grappler Gravity Hook, the recently mentioned Dr. Dobbs promotional game, and the iPhone's original word game best-seller Wurdle.

Saltsman's pixels are effortlessly charming, his underlying concept -- once you "get it" -- is genuinely quite brilliant (here's a hint, if you find yourself a little lost in the dark: the things around you? They're trying to tell you something), and the game's chiptune-prog score by Danny 'dB Soundworks' Baranowsky (previously featured for his work on Flashbang's Blush) works perfectly in concert with the rest to make a fantastic, thoughtful short-story of a game.

As a bonus, Saltsman and dB have given Offworld an exclusive track from Fathom's soundtrack, "Boss of Doooooom", which you'll recognize from the struggle pictured above. Stream it below, or download directly here.

Fathom [Adam Atomic, dB Soundworks]

Brandon Boyer

Ngmoco drop more iPhone FPS details, Halo connection

It's been some two months since ngmoco's online multiplayer iPhone arena shooter project codenamed LiveFire (which has now changed to something unrevealed) first made its debut at Apple's iPhone 3.0 conference, but the publisher has just added a new entry to its developer diary offering a few more details on how its in-game commerce will function.

There was a touch of nervousness with the announcement that the game would support in-game purchases to upgrade and equip your avatar, and it looks like this has been scaled back to some degree: ngmofo Chris notes that upgrades earned as you rise in the ranks will primarily be cosmetic ones (shifts in your armor's color), but that the in-game commerce could give entirely new thematic armor changes, which are coming, says Chris, from some of the original Halo artists.

But, he continues, they're sticking their first tenuous dips toes into the water to see how they might balance the game by giving each armor set (heavy armor, amphibious suit, stealth) unique properties:

We're also in the process of experimenting with gameplay-affecting attributes for purchasable armors. This feature is in the early stages of testing for balance and is something we may or may not ship with, but the design idea is to differentiate the armors sets by speed, protection, physics and other properties that align with the concept of a given armor. So a heavily armored combat suit would take more damage than base armor, but would also come with slower movement.

The intent is to give each a bonus and a trade-off, rather than a complete upgrade, to keep things in balance with the base armor set. Another idea we're discussing is giving each armor different modifiers to power-ups (either instead of or in addition to base stat modification), so a heavy battle suit might enjoy longer bonus from damage power-ups and shorter bonus from a jet-pack powerup.

Read the full run-down for more on their design, with additional entries on the weapons and actual name of the game promised soon.

IDENTITY & IN-APP COMMERCE IN FPS

Brandon Boyer

Read/watch/listen: Romanian mag Otaku Play includes indie/chiptune DVD, eBoy poster

Spotted by the TIGSource crowd earlier in the weekend and quickly ordered before its minuscule run of 350 copies ran dry is Okatu Play, the latest issue of a chapbook style magazine put out, as it happens, by the same Romanian organization that put together the Otaku festival Mike noted a week or two back.

The table of contents is a laundry list of unfamiliar or only hazily recognized names, but it's the included DVD that is more overtly the draw: in addition to a lineup of 2007 BlipFest videos (all taken, it would seem, from the earlier mentioned Vimeo uploads that included 6955 and Virt), the disc also features music by Nullsleep, Kaseo and she, trailers and info on a number of Offworld-regular indie games, and, to top it off, comes with a foldout poster by iso-pixel artists eBoy.

The magazine ran me just over $20, and still looks to be available as of now: see also some previews of their earlier issues via issuu.

OTAKU PLAY [via TIGSource]

Tom Armitage

Ready To Wear: Mario Gets A Fix

Spotted in this week's batch of Threadless updates: designer Ian Summers suggests that Mario's mushroom supply might not always have come from question-mark blocks...

Magic Mushrooms [Threadless]

Brandon Boyer

Left 4 Dead SDK/mod tools go into open beta

Just for those that hadn't seen: over the weekend, Valve released its official SDK/authoring tools to "create your own campaign maps, character skins, 3D models, sound effects, and music" for ever-green fave Left 4 Dead, which I mention here because if someone could make us the perfect 70s suburban shopping mall, I would be eternally indebted.

Authoring Tools/SDK (Left 4 Dead) [Valve, via shacknews]

Mike Nowak

Listen: Japanese synth legends YMO, done in DS-10

Following up on our previous Korg DS-10 related posts, here's a pair of DS covers of legendary Japanese synth-band YMO.

NATT021's dual-DS powered cover of "Rydeen", embedded above (original version), and PECG300's Korg DS-10 cover of "Technopolis" below (orginal version.)

Knowing of YMO's mid-70s electronic and computer game influences and their subsequent influences on videogame music composers like Hitoshi Sakimoto, there's something genuinely fitting about seeing their classic tunes played on a Nintendo DS.

YMO "RYDEEN" on Nintendo DS (KORG DS-10) [YouTube]

Brandon Boyer

Your stateside one more go: Virtual Console's Majora's Mask, DSi's PiCTOBiTS

As we'd hoped for since early April, Nintendo has added the Nintendo 64's time-looping Ocarina sequel The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask to the Wii's stateside Virtual Console this week, giving everyone inspired by Margaret Robertson's recent ode to the Zelda game too few have played the chance to give it their own One More Go.

Also of note this week and well worth picking up, the DSiWare release of Art Style: PiCTOBiTS, the stateside release of the Quarth-like picture puzzle/action game we've covered a number of times during its Japanese debut as PicoPict, with classic NES remixes by chipper chiptune band YMCK.

Brandon Boyer

Red vs. Blue: Valve's latest Team Fortress master-short, Meet the Spy

Leaked this weekend: the brilliant culmination to a series of Team Fortress 2 character updates that saw the focus on the Sniper abruptly backstabbed and turned to a focus on the Spy.

These guys need a feature-length, immediately.

Team Fortress [Valve]

Brandon Boyer

Zombie Snake: Medicom's latest Metal Gear Solid 3 vinyl

There's definitely a perpetual hint of Metal Gear in the air lately: after all the official and custom vinyl creations, pre-orders are opening around the net for Medicom's latest official Snake toy, this super-stylized Zombie-painted Naked Snake figure from Metal Gear Solid 3, due for release this fall. Find it variously here.

Brandon Boyer

The next 'next': three more days for more Kojima game teasing

As promised, the clouds have continued to gather on the website for Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima's next game, currently codenamed "Next", with a hint of thunder and lightning (雷電 [Raiden]), a flashing and fading '5', and a countdown timer with 3.5 days remaining on the clock.

Tom Armitage

Knit For Resale: Crochet Your Own BOY

We've always got time for more Noby Noby Boy love here at Offworld, and today's dose comes courtesy of Asia Bur-Min's Crochet Noby Noby BOY.

There's only one available to buy over at Etsy, but have no fear; Asia's also selling the pattern for the lovable 4ft-long scamp - so if you fancy a BOY of your own, there's never been a better time to take up crochet. Or, alternatively, make friends with someone who can already crochet.

[Pattern- crocheted Noby Noby Boy toy, via GameSetWatch]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the height of BeDazzled Darwinian fashion

Indie game dev rock star finery, spotted by negativegamer at Manchester's Videogame Nation museum exhibit [via GoNintendo].

Brandon Boyer

One shot: ORRANGE™'s Half Life Nova Prospekt, Lego edition

Inside ORRANGE™'s Combine facility, part of an ongoing Lego Half Life series, via benisadork.

Brandon Boyer

iOm: Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation comes to iPhone

In what he describes as the first ever simultaneous game release on both the Atari 2600 and iPhone, developer, author and researcher Ian Bogost (the producer behind the previously mentioned airport security game Jetset) has released Guru Meditation to the App Store, a portable version of his "zen meditation game."

The background: the game was originally developed for an obscure 'Joyboard' peripheral for the Atari 2600 -- the retro-tech equivalent of the Wii's Balance Board -- which, instead of using the controller for an action game, required the player to sit as still as possible on the board. Remain motionless and your guru score rises, move a muscle and you crash back to the ground and start again.

The iPhone version of the game does precisely the same, only requires the player to hold the device in both hands, and uses the mic as well: in this version, you have to remain silent as well as motionless.

It's a cute and clever idea for sure, but it is curiously effective to concentrate as hard as you can to remain still, and, Bogost notes, takes the one device that excels at distraction -- with email, texts, twitter, and calls -- and turns it into the precise opposite.

Learn more about the idea behind the game -- and its limited edition Atari 2600 equivalent, and find the game on the App Store here.

Guru Meditation -- a medititation game for Atari VCS and iPhone [Ian Bogost, iTunes link]

Brandon Boyer

EVILBLDG: Jim Rossignol on the game design's architecture of 'evil'

Over on the regularly wonderful BLDGBLOG, our Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol writes on the how designers architect the forms of "evil" in games from rote gothic constructions to cases where the environment is the enemy itself. Says Rossignol:

I suspect... the ways in which game designers architecturally represent evil are becoming too much a part of our everyday imaginative discourse to remain affecting. They've begun to lose their danger. The connection with the inhumanity that makes the enemy so thrilling has started to fade via over-familiarity.

Where the evil lair becomes a little more interesting is when its nature is ambiguous - but nevertheless disturbing. Half-Life 2's Citadel is an example of this. The brutal gunmetal skyscraper that looms over a nameless Eastern European city, below, appears deeply threatening. But, like everything else in the Half-Life 2 universe, it is unexplained. It does not seem inherently evil. The structure moves and groans; it is a machine of some kind. It is something constructed and mechanical, rather than the clear manifestation or emanation of an evil force. The Citadel is not a fire-rimmed portal to hell, nor a windswept ruin. Nor is it a volcano base. It could even be somehow utilitarian. In fact, it's reminiscent of the real Moscow's own television tower.

It is, perhaps, even incidental to the scourge that Half-Life's denizens face: alien infrastructure. It is only later, as the plot uncoils the inner architecture of the Citadel, that you come to realise that it is the enemy: the lair of an alien force that must, ultimately, be destroyed.

Click through for much more.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds [BLDGBLOG]

Mike Nowak

Video: Sims Trek

One of the biggest games of this summer takes on one of the biggest films: a Sims 3 powered homage to Star Trek. It's an epic trailer with green alien sex, dying red shirts, fight scenes, and dramatic Simlish voiceovers.

If even half of the tools used to create this video will be available to end-users when The Sims 3 is released next month, then you can bet on LittleBigPlanet levels of user-created content. This could be huge.

Return of the Trek Guys, The Sims 3 Parody [YouTube]

Mike Nowak

Yaris' Cross-Canadian Pixel Adventure

Here's a faux-retro game styled cinema spot for Toyota's Yaris by Toronto based Electric Company. This isn't the first time Toyota has gone after the gamer demographic, having released the first free advergame to grace Xbox Live, Yaris, back in 2007.

It must be a lucrative demographic, since it calls to mind last year's Spy Hunter inspired commercial from now-defunct Pontiac, for which there is a less seen Making Of video. The "Making Of" is notable for showing that an actual playable Spy Hunter simulator was built just for the ad.

Toyota Yaris [Electric Company]

Brandon Boyer

The glistening ecstacy of Namco's WiiWare Muscle March

Videogames are brilliant, aren't they? Namco brings a port of its original arcade game Muscle March to WiiWare in Japan on May 26th. The premise? If it's not abundantly clear above: after a pro football player steals the all-important protein powder, it's up to March's rippled stars to strike the pose of the wall-smasher in front of you to keep the march moving and bring the thief to justice.

The downside: there but for the grace of Namco do we ever see this leave Japan, and the various regions' WiiWare channels are hard-locked to each piece of hardware. Namco, if anyone's reading: of course we do want this. It worked for Katamari, right? And even partners-in-fitness Cho Aniki earned itself a Virtual Console release. Let's see what we can do.

Muscle March [Namco, thanks to Kotaku for the original video]

Brandon Boyer

Pilfering gold goblets: first footage of Id/EA's iPhone Wolfenstein RPG

The most frustrating demonstration video you might ever watch is still worth seeing for the first footage of Id/EA's Wolfenstein RPG iPhone port: the turn-based version of the PC classic that we've also recently officially learned will be headed to Xbox Live Arcade.

Though the DS version of Id's Orcs & Elves is as close as I've come to the studio's RPG engine (which was also used for the mobile's Doom RPG), I'm just going to go ahead and assume for now that in the right hands, it's not quite so wildly ineffective.

Wolfenstein RPG [Id/EA, via TA]

Brandon Boyer

New levels, new hope for PlayStation 3 underdog The Last Guy

As I've mentioned several times before (of note, in the turn of the year's Offworld 20 list), Sony's google-maps-enhanced top down superhero rescue game The Last Guy is one of the PlayStation 3's overlooked downloadable gems.

And just when I thought all hope would be lost at ever seeing an expansion to the game, andriasang brings news that not only will it be getting a full Blu-ray retail release in Japan, along with three new levels, previous purchasers of the downloadable version will also be getting a $5 add-on pack that includes those levels alongside a patch for now-requisite Trophys and "other features."

No word on where on earth the new levels will take us, but either way -- if you haven't already -- do yourself a favor and add it to your 'something for the weekend' list in anticipation.

The Last Guy [PlayStation, Sony Japan]

Brandon Boyer

Tony Hawk's would-be Skate-killer, Ride

So how will Activision, Tony Hawk, and upstart Chicago developer Robomodo reinvent the skating game to take on the heavyweight board-porn of EA's fantastic Skate franchise? As they've been hinting at for at least a year, it's all in the controls, and so, as above and below: the new board controller.

How does it work? Speculate for now and ask again after its official E3 debut, and watch Spike Jonze/Ty Evans/UNKLE's 'Heaven' video (which you see a few brief seconds of in the trailer) in the meantime to at least appreciate the art of the board while you wait.

Tony Hawk: Ride [Activision, Robomodo]

Brandon Boyer

Half-baked Snake: Rohby's Metal Gear custom vinyl

The limited edition of 10 sold out three days later, but it's not too late to at least gawk at Rohby's custom Metal Gear vinyl, and hold your breath for the next three in his tribute series to the game, starting with Sons of Liberty's Russian Soldiers. See more of his work (including a wicked Soundwave Decepticon Mad-L) via his Flickr and his bloHg [via toycutter].

Brandon Boyer

One shot: no-carrier's software-circuit-bending glitchNES

Want to create 8-bit glitch-art like Paris, outpt, nullsleep, enso, and the rest of the professionals do? Get No-Carrier's glitchNES (and see his presentation about it here).

Brandon Boyer

One shot: J.otto Seibold's mystery game sprites

Artist and children's book illustrator (and former star of my now-defunct record label) J.otto Seibold previews a mysterious set of video game sprites via his flickr. I'm sure I have no idea what's going on here...

Brandon Boyer

Monstrous cookie: more culinary Noby Noby Boy DIY

Another culinary update from Keita Takahashi and his Noby Noby Boy over at the game's official site, this time a super-stretched Noby GIRL cookie, which, frustratingly, doesn't come with an actual recipe to make our own. But maybe we can remedy that...

As a side note, we're still approximately 6-10 years from reaching Mars without Takahashi's planned iPhone intervention. [via GoodGameGet]

Brandon Boyer

One week only: download PS3's Rag Doll Kung Fu for free

If you've been holding off on downloading Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic, Tarsier's PS3 action-man remake of the original indie brawler (created by Media Molecule co-founder Mark Healey) you're in luck. For the next week, Sony is giving the game away via the PlayStation Network as the first ever sponsored promotional deal.

PlayStation Store Update [PlayStation.blog, original PC version home]

Brandon Boyer

Video: swimming in Ubik's low-bit pixel pool

Voxel, by motion graphics studio Ubik, music by Domino/Double Six's Jon Hopkins. [via Coudal]

Brandon Boyer

Video: Super Smash Bros: Team Fortress 2 edition

AyesDyef's Garry's Mod madness: a version of Nintendo's all-star brawler Super Smash Bros done up Team Fortress style. Click here for the comparison video. [via Valve]

Brandon Boyer

Big chaos, tiny planet: the latest look at Coin App's Max Blastronaut

It's been a few months since we last heard from Coin App and their Mario Galaxy-cum-arena-shooter Max Blastronaut (you might remember it as the one that promised to give players the ability to 'ghostride' its lunar rovers), but the studio's just written in with this latest trailer.

As you can see, the co-op count's gone up from two to four, and the combat's gone far more Smash Bros type chaotic, particular with that gravity gun: check Coin App's site for more screenshots of the game's mechs and moon buggies, and see if you can't sniff out their target platform, which they still haven't announced, but is strongly hinted at.

Max Blastronaut [Coin App]

Brandon Boyer

Sidhe announces PS3 Breakout/shooter crossover Shatter

New Zealand studio Sidhe has just announced their next PlayStation Network game, Shatter, which, if it were just a Breakout clone or just another dual-analog arena shooter might be completely unremarkable. The fact that it's shaping up to be the best of both has put it square on my watch list.

The other reason to take note? Sidhe's the studio behind GripShift, the Xbox Live Arcade nee PlayStation Network nee PSP racing puzzler that's one of the smartest games on wheels created in the past several years.

Shatter [Sidhe, GripShift]

Brandon Boyer

T-shirt: Game Paused's Sackboy Cosplay

Just added by UK game culture shop Game Paused, the studio behind the Exploded Game Boy shirt: the Sackboy Cosplay shirt, allowing you to stumble through your own private LittleBigPlanet (in both chocolate and blue, £16 + £3.50 P&P Worldwide).

Brandon Boyer

Mario paper: the fully-detailed paper Mario 64 head

And your last paper project for the day, NintendoPapercraft's custom-commissioned Mario 64 Mario head, which, sadly, does not respond well to stretching. (Has anyone actually ever assembled any of the papercraft I've linked here? I'll cop to still never dragging my printer out of the garage, even for as brilliant as the Toshio Iwai was.)

Super Mario 64 Head [nintendopapercraft]

Brandon Boyer

Heroes and villains: paperfoldables' official Fable foldables

Apparently actually published around the game's launch, but spotted by Tiff yesterday and new to me as well: this set of Fable II paper-creatures from print-out master Bryan 'paperfoldables' Green, most notably the trunk-topped Swampy the Troll (direct pdf link).

If you haven't been following Green's work, there's a number of other treats on his own site (and blog), including a five part (so far!) tribute series of pixelated papers based on ultra-underdog NES/arcade series Kid Niki (a childhood favorite of mine, as well), some of Tim and Eric's more sublimely grotesque characters, and, yep, even a Free Williamsburg-commissioned model of Gawker-made minor-celeb the Hipster Grifter.

Fable II Foldables [Lionhead, paperfoldables, PF blog]

Brandon Boyer

Watch this space: the quiet before Hideo Kojima's next storm

If you haven't been following the low rumble rumors this week, Metal Gear producer Hideo Kojima is due to make an announcement on his next project Friday the 18th, at the section of the Kojima Productions website titled, appropriately, /kojima_pro/next/. For now? It's just an approaching storm.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Paul Robertson's Pokemon Apocalypse, slowbrokingkingking...

The least potentially offensive illustration Paul 'Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006/Kings of Power 4 Billion %' Robertson has published since Cakedogg and Presentcat. View his otherwise blindingly excellent ongoing livejournal portfolio at your peril.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Andy Helms' Metal Gear, through the years

Metal Gear Solid chapters one through four, as illustrated by Andy 'dude-a-day' Helms [via GSW].

Brandon Boyer

One shot: surround's sexy psych-pop Space Invaders

Mike Nowak manages to dig up the first version of this illustration I've seen that isn't a chroma-shifting animation. The most work safe of surround's otherwise not-so-much "ATARI is Hot.. series" that also includes Breakout and Pac-Man (which actually requires a DA account, click here to break the rules [it's not that bad]).

Brandon Boyer

Leaving Rapture: Nine minutes of BioShock 2

Jordan Thomas, the self-same former Thief designer mentioned by Jim earlier this morning, dons a Big Daddy suit and walks you through nine minutes of hunting one of BioShock 2's Big Sisters in this extended preview video.

Brandon Boyer

Ancient Pixels: 8-bit game icons meet Andean textile art

Alongside Data Spills is another ITP-NYU Thesis well worth mentioning: José Olivares Ancient Pixels, which makes the very logical leap in crossing low-bit game iconography (read: Atari 2600-esque graphics) with traditional Andean textile art for an installation backed by psych-pop visuals.

For the proposed installation, Olivares created three Andean "rugs" with projected animations that blur the line between outsider and pixel art, each with their own specific symbology.

Olivares -- who, as Balún, is also part of the NYC Pulsewave/chiptune scene -- has collected all of his research materials on his Ancient Pixels tumblr, where you can see a mockup of the entire 'temple' installation and a video of his presentation.

Ancient Pixels [tumblr, Balún, Olivares' portfolio]

Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Thief 4, Eidos, and An Uncertain American Legacy

This week's announcement that Eidos Montreal was planning to revive the Thief franchise with Thief 4 might have been overshadowed by the reaction to the ridiculous nomenclature of the logo, but there's something far more significant at stake: the legacy of two of the most important American game design studios, Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm Inc.

These two studios, both now dismantled by their commercial failure, created games which staked out vital territory for gamers. The experiences these games provided were crucial to the evolution of contemporary gaming. The design work of Looking Glass and Ion Storm often expanded what games were deemed capable of, and made the medium as a whole seem bolder, braver and more interesting.

In terms of pure invention, Thief was probably the most important of these games. Its influence on modern gaming remains enormous, effectively introducing the idea of stealth and non-violent first-person action. It also remains a singular experience: none of its imitators have come close. For many people, there is only Thief.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Pixel puns: Steven Lefcourt's Space In-vader T-shirt

I haven't mentioned Duoform Network's UK fashion label Super Combo since Offworld's earliest days, but the group's just released a fresh design: guest artist (and frequent shirt.woot/threadless designer) Steven Lefcourt's Darth-punny Space In-vader.

I've used the least lascivious shot of the shirt above, click through to aeiko to see it all sexed up.

Space In-vader shirt [Super Combo, via aeiko]

Brandon Boyer

The Munny shot: saaio's Zelda: Twilight Princess Midna Munny

The latest best custom vinyl, following Kitt Walker's Grim Fandango Munny Calavera and Reactor88's Dr. Mario viruses: saaio's Midna Munny, from, of course, the Wii's Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, part of a larger Twilight Princess set. [via Toycutter]

Brandon Boyer

Listen: Nullsleep's Data Spills chiptune afterparty

Following the previously mentioned Data Spills show, Jeremiah 'nullsleep' Johnson played this afterparty, with graphics by outpt and Paris, the same glitch-duo behind Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours's recently mentioned Pulsewave show. [via nullsleep]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Jeremiah Johnson's torn-code Data Spills

What happens when one slashes a program or piece of software? Code does not tear like a stretched canvas, but it does break in its own visually unique way.

Jeremiah 'nullsleep' Johnson conjures Lucio Fontana's 'slash paintings' via the NES in his NYU Data Spills show. [via pixelstyle, I want one of the posters]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: John Freeborn's 3 Color Joystick Repeat Drawing

Meticulously colored in like an Atari-obsessed dropout's bubble-form exam. Part of a new series, available on Etsy, alongside Freeborn's laser cut charms featuring a pink scorpion from Pitfall! [via .Tiff]

Brandon Boyer

Video: hack lets you control Super Mario with singing, guitar and drums

In Offworld's effort to become the official repository for every oddball Super Mario Bros hack in existence: inconceivably named artists Marc Sciglimpaglia and Phoenix Toews created this Mario remix that lets you control on-screen action with "claps, singing, guitar and drums."

The hack was made with Sciglimpaglia's "nin.reflux" software that can manipulate NES roms as a Max/MSP plugin, and apparently (though I couldn't dig up any video footage!) was also used at Sciglimpaglia's 2008 exhibit for:

"Marble Meditation", an installation where participants can control the game Marble Madness collectively with sound, and "Nightmare Mario", a fully playable version of Super Mario Brothers with a reworked audiovisual structure, portraying the game world filtered through a vivid post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Marc Sciglimpaglia at the Frank Perrigrino Memorial Gallery [UCSC, via Waxy]

Brandon Boyer

Show-case: every imaginary 8-bit Famicase game ever designed

Continuing my coverage of Tokyo hipster retro/game store Meteor's Famicase art exhibit, in which designers and artists create label artwork for their best 8-bit NES games never made, the store has just put together Famicase Chronicle, an interactive Flash piece that showcases all 140 artists and 216 cases from all of the past years of Meteor's exhibit.

It's a slow load to bring in thumbnails of all 200+ cases, and a relatively fiddly piece to navigate: my suggestion is to scroll down to the tiny 'Auto View' text button at bottom, sit back and enjoy the show, with its corrupted-ambient 8-bit soundtrack provided by Polytron's Jason '6955' DeGroot.

Also noteworthy: next to the Auto View button is a link called Video Report, which will load an episode of Points -- DeGroot's short-lived (but very Offworld-ian) video series dedicated to art/game culture -- that covered a previous Famicase exhibit live.

Famicase Chronicle [Meteor]

Brandon Boyer

Decap-attack: Konami's Contra ReBirth WiiWare revival in motion

IGN contributor Anoop Gantayat has uploaded video of the just released Contra revival Konami recently surprise-announced as a WiiWare downloadable, and it took no more than seeing the robo-decapitation in the first 10 seconds of the video above for me to decide that I'm going to need this game soon.

See Gantaya's andriasang blog for a full breakdown of what the game entails.

Contra ReBirth Impressions [andriasang]

Brandon Boyer

(Kickstart to) Listen: 8-bit Miles Davis tribute, Kind of Bloop

Over at upstart web initiative Kickstarter -- a patronage system that lets users propose projects to find interested backers, who can then set their own level of payment based on what they'd like to receive in return -- Andy 'Waxy' Baio has set up a new project to fund Kind of Bloop, an all-star chiptune cover album of Miles Davis's jazz classic Kind of Blue.

Baio explains:

What would the pioneers of jazz sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga? For years, I've wondered what "chiptune jazz" would sound like, but there are only a tiny handful of jazz covers ever made.

To satisfy my curiosity -- and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" -- I've asked five brilliant chiptune musicians to collaborate and reinvent the entire album in the 8-bit sound.

The lineup, in alphabetical order:
Ast0r (Chris J. Hampton)
Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland)
Sergeeo (Sergio de Prado)
Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss)
Virt (Jake Kaufman)

Just launched earlier today, the project is already well on its way to being fully funded at the $2000 level, with donations of $5 getting you an early download when the project is complete, and donations of $30 or more getting a limited edition CD version of the album.

I've done my part to back the project, and suggest you hurry to get your donation in while you still can via its project page.

Kind of Bloop [kickstarter, via waxy]

Mike Nowak

Gotta name them all: Otaku Festival's game referencing promo video

The above promo for Romania's just-ended Otaku Festival shows further proof that Japanese geek culture crosses all borders, featuring a hodge-podge of classic videogame references from Frogger to Galaga to Super Mario World.

Otaku Festival 2009 [Otaku Entertainment]

Brandon Boyer

Queasy game: Capybara's rainbow engorged Critter Crunch coming to PlayStation 3

If you've been following the indie mobile scene for long, Toronto area dev Capybara Games' excellent puzzler Critter Crunch probably hasn't escaped your attention: the original Java game took home the top prize at the 2008 IGF Mobile awards, which was followed soon afterward by an excellent iPhone port of the same.

Excellent pixels aside, the tiny screens have never quite done Critter's characters and soft vaguely-Miyazaki-esque woods justice, but, as witnessed above or as the embedded screenshots below the fold will tell, the upcoming full HD hand-animated PlayStation 3 downloadable version absolutely will.

As you might be able to suss out from the trailer, Critter's grid and pull/push gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of classic Neo-Geo puzzler Magical Drop, but with a key difference: rather than simply lining up like colors, the object here is to build food-chain, well, chains, with smaller critters eaten by the next size up, and to collect the crystals that fall when exploding critters clear out their similar neighbors.

Capybara say the game is due for release on the PSN this summer, with both co-op and versus local/network multiplayer modes, as well as Story, Puzzle, Challenge and Survival single-player modes. Hit the jump for more gently eye-searingly gorgeous full-res screenshots as above.

Critter Crunch PSN [Capybara]

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Wayfarer: Ben Hemmendinger's dangerously addictive Processing rogue-like

Full disclosure: I'm about as far from an aficionado of Rogue and its various -likes as they come, certainly compared to the ongoing work of people like Andrew Doull and John Harris, but maybe it's to Wayfarer's credit, then, that one quick "oh, what's this Processing-built game all about, then" test click turned into an entirely lost hour.

Ben Hemmendinger's take on the genre (still in alpha) is just the perfect amount removed from the ASCII-abstractions of usual rogue-likes to make it both accessible (especially with that 3D tilt-shift) and still hold retro charm, has just the right amount of humor and subtle touches (the pixel-blood-trails of escaping wounded beasts), and is just kind enough at its lowest levels (read: I didn't instantly die) to very easily make it my new favorite web-time-sink, and the latest of its kind to hook me since I first discovered DND in my innocent youth.

Wayfarer (alpha) [Benhem, via Wiley Wiggins]

Brandon Boyer

Beam rider: the latest look at Gaijin's Bit.Trip: Core

Gaijin Games shows off the latest video of their next WiiWare retro-future rhythm game, Bit.Trip: Core, this time adding a touch more intrigue with the first mention of its multi-beam powerup, which doesn't look helpful so much as downright necessary in fending off the constant omni-directional onslaught of pixels.

Brandon Boyer

Blaster Master meets Bionic Commando in Nathan Fouts' Grapple Buggy

In the many months that've passed, I still haven't managed to dig up many gems in Xbox 360's Community Games section that have instantly hooked me quite as much as Mommy's Best's previously previewed Weapon of Choice, and I've just become as quickly intrigued by one-man-team Nathan Fouts' Grapple Buggy, his next game due on the console by the end of the year.

As the name implies, Buggy promises to take all of the fantastically grotesque alien landscapes of Weapon and combine it with both physics enhanced vehicular platforming ala underdog NES game Blaster Master and a Bionic Commando-esque dual-grappling hook, in some dual-punch combo of under-utilized mechanical excellence.

Here's Fouts' again-perfectly ludicrous sci-fi pitch:

Take control of the prototype Grapple Buggy piloted by Nova Commander Javeya, and her alien co-pilot Drozo to explore the newly discovered VALD-END 317.

The distant planet seems to house massive amounts of Tetravaldisae, known to its harvesters as 'Vald'. Used to create fuel for faster-than-light travel, Vald is the single most valuable commodity in the known universe. The New Homeworld Armada and the Drozo Empire have formed a strained alliance to confirm these portentous readings sending the Grapple Buggy and its team into action for the first time.

Can the Drozo Empire be trusted? Has Javeya's government thrust her into a compromised situation? Will VALD-END thwart both species schemes? Swing into action with Grapple Buggy!

Fouts has set up a site for the game here, and you can follow his progress via the Mommy's Best devblog here.

Grapple Buggy [Mommy's Best, devblog, via XNAplay]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Mirage's C64 pixel montage, 1 UP - 1 DEAD

C64 pixel art by Mirage of demoscene group Focus. [via pixelstyle]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: the sad sight of a middle aged Mario

Don't get him started about his glory days at a liquid lunch. Part of Grupo Novel's Dotter-esque print campaign that also included Donkey Kong gone carjacker, and DK damsel Pauline turned lady of the night. [via GamOvr]

Brandon Boyer

Headbanger Hero: PainStation creator's new MoshPit Amp

From the creators of the Painstation -- the multiplayer arcade cabinet that delivers heat, shocks, and a wire whip as you lose a point in Pong (video preview here) -- //////////fur////'s MoshPit Amp, which admittedly isn't much of a game, per se, but should be.

fur explains:

You simply approach the MoshPit to activate the amp. The music will instantly begin and lights will create a stagelike setting. If you are a true metalhead you can't resist and will start headbanging - and the music will instantly turn up. As you mosh on, you can change the individual volume levels of the four instruments through your headbanging style and intensity.

You can see how far you have pushed the level of each instrument on the four MoshMeters. Mosh the volume of one or more channels to the max, and you can trigger new musical patterns like another guitar riff, diabolic vocals or a different drum track. If you mosh really hard you can unlock a guitar solo supported by light effects, smoke and pyrotechnics.

There are four MoshMeters, one for each of the four instruments, and if you look really close at them you can see that this amp goes to eleven.

Double Fine -- I'm almost positive there's crossover peripheral potential here.

MoshPit: Metal Head Orgasmatron, 2009 [//////////fur////]

Brandon Boyer

Mountain game: Craig Adams' Kurosawa-inspired Artsy design, Alpinist

The folks at Artsy Games Incubator have been doing a wonderful job recapping Toronto's recent indie-all-star Artsy Game meetup, but it wasn't until today's entry that my ears perked up in a big way.

While Craig 'superbrothers' Adams' demoed his parodic and metaphorical A Hit Videogame on day three (the premise: a one-button baseball game that quickly devolves further away from predictable -- like game development itself -- at the cheering of industry executives), his day four game took a more serious turn.

Known for now as Alpinist, Adams' game design takes its inspiration from 'The Blizzard', one section of Kurosawa's multi-part film Dreams. The game would see one player making an agonizing climb up a mountain during a blizzard, with, AGI notes, Prince of Persia-like precision jumping that takes into account gale force winds, and meters for your "body temperature, alertness and coherence."

Adams is, of course, the artist behind the previously blogged Dot Matrix Revolution video and upstart the1console blog and the DESIGN REBOOT HD video which animated Braid creator Jonathan Blow's provocative Montreal Game Summit lecture for futher discussion.

Alpinist currently still exists in design only, but hopefully we'll see much more of it some time soon.

Round 4, Session 4 Recap [Artsy Games Incubator, superbrothers, the1console]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Brown Box creator Baer's Bit.Trip

How confident is Odyssey/'ping-pong'/videogame grandfather Ralph Baer at his own game? When he recently took on 'pong's neo-retro WiiWare remake Bit.Trip:Beat, he did it (and quite well, by the looks of the screen) holding the controller upside down. [via GaiijnGames]

Brandon Boyer

Manny Munny: Kitt Walker's custom Grim Fandango vinyl

Giving Iain Reekie's custom Grim Fandango sculpey figures a serious run for their money, Kitt Walker has posted a few glamor shots of the Manny Calavera Munny made lovingly as a birthday gift by his "beautiful and gifted girlfriend."

See the full set of three shots here.

Munny Calavera [flickr, via Toycutter]

Brandon Boyer

Priced to move: last chance to pick up Alien Hominid on GameCube/PS2

A note as quick as theirs: The Behemoth has announced via their Twitter that the direct-sale GameCube and PS2 copies of their debut shooter Alien Hominid are the last available for good, so if -- for some reason -- you haven't already made the jump to Xbox Live Arcade's HD version, the Wii/mostly-PS3 playable versions are just $10 away.

The same goes for the fantastic vinyl toy five-pack, which comes as highly recommended.

The Behemoth store [via Twitter]

Brandon Boyer

Stomping ground: Klei's upcoming brawler Shank in motion

Klei Entertainment -- creators of original Xbox Live Arcade game Eets and the studio that helped bring Metanet's N to Live Arcade -- calls this footage of their next console game, Shank, "pre-pre-pre-alpha", but it's hard to see how much better it can get.

Done up in traditional animation style, it's already promising some seriously weighty and solid brawler mechanics: check the official Shank blog for more concept, character and storyboard art (and a hat-tip to Wolverine) from the team.

Shank [Klei Entertainment]

Joel Johnson

Sure, Xbox 360 controller soap; But what is "Mountain Dew fragrance oil"?

Etsy crafter Digital Soap's Xbox 360 controller soap is a fine thing (and a bargain at just $12), but the addition of a claimed "Mountain Dew fragrance oil" is intriguing. Does someone sell the distilled essence of dorkdom's stereotypical beverage?

Mike Nowak

Nerd Music: Il Creatore's vocoded SID-pop

Rome's Il Creatore produces music using a Commodore 64, SIDStation, talk-box, and a vocoder. Owing to an early 80s italdisco and synthpop influence (the artist's page cites Kraftwerk, Telex, and Rob Hubbard), it's all very catchy stuff.

More lo-fi (faked) pixel videos can be found on his YouTube channel.

Il Creatore [iperuranoaddizioni, YouTube]

Brandon Boyer

Sheeeeit: Punch-Out!! viral doc stars Clay Davis as Doc

There's a lot of things Nintendo's done right in this viral documentary for the upcoming Wii remake of its classic Punch-Out!! -- not least the overstuffed King Hippo-dressed punching bag [belly button 'x' and all] and bike scene re-creation. But casting Isiah Whitlock, Jr., now forever known as The Wire's Clay 'sheeeeit' Davis, as coach Doc? That's the TKO.

Follow the official WVBA Championship Circuit twitter account here, and fund Clay Davis's re-election campaign with Mule Design's T-shirt, available here.

Punch-Out!! [Nintendo]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Brütal Legend's ultra-vivid concept art horrorshow

Not gonna lie: I was big gunning to feature Brütal Legend in an upcoming installment of Concept Album since this GDC session, and was quite disappointed to be beat to the punch by remorseless rapscallions ripping half-blurry mid-res versions of the art from the GDC-stored PowerPoint. Anyway, this one was the most brilliant bit, by the inimitable Scott C., who has his own Action Comic here.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Harvard College founder, UNSC soldier, Halo destroyer

MIT's 2007 volley in their long prank war tradition transformed the statue of Harvard founder John Harvard into an MA5 series-wielding UNSC Spartan. Photo via a recent recap of MIT hacks at the Boston Globe.

Rob Beschizza

Space Harrier Theme Performed on Ukulele

Download MP3s and hear more Zelda, Katamari, Metal Gear tracks at Tanguy Ukulele Orchestra's site, whose motto is 'CHIPTUNE IS NOT DIGITAL.'

Brandon Boyer

Mob rule: my night with the Xbox 360 premiere of 1 vs. 100

Tonight, I snuck across the border. As the hour reached vodka-rocks-o'clock, I went under cover of a hotmail.ca and freshly created Canadian Xbox Live account (meet the mild-mannered, balding middle-aged 'powerpi11') to spend a quiet night in seeing what Microsoft and Endemol had in store for their Xbox 360 massively multiplayer real-prize game show initiative, 'Primetime'.

First announced at last year's E3 and currently only 'airing' in Canada, tonight was the beta premiere of its version of NBC game show 1 vs. 100.

Here's the premise, for those that haven't seen the TV version (as I hadn't!): a titular 'one' is chosen from the viewing audience (players have a higher chance of getting chosen, apparently, by doing well at the game playing along at home) to go up against a 'mob' of 100 other players -- though I'm less clear on how this is doled out, as there seemed to have been at least 10,000 players connected, and I always seemed to be in the mob (sharded, presumably?).

Then begins the trivia questions: topics in the opening night ranged from who first reached a million followers on Twitter (A: you know this) to what members of an audience were doing to make Morrissey abruptly shut down a recent performance (A: eating meat).

If a player answers correctly, they move on to the next round, and any mob member that chooses incorrectly is taken out of the prize running, but still continues to play. And here's the crux: the more mob members taken out, the higher the one's prize winnings rise on a tiered structure -- 160, 300, 600, 800, 1200, 2000, 3000+ Microsoft Points, which begins to quickly add up to an un-sniff-worthy amount of Xbox Live Arcade money for a free, online game (that above range roughly equates to between $3-50+).

After a certain number of rounds, the player's asked each time -- in true fomulaic gambler's dilemma game-show tradition -- if they want to take the Points they've earned so far, or continue on. If a player continues and loses, that amount of Points is distributed to the mob members remaining. On average, that amounted to somewhere between 80-160 points ($1.50-3 per player). At left above -- the 'one' deciding whether to take their 3000/$50 of Points, or try to eliminate even more of the 23 remaining mob.

So what did I learn from my hour and 15 minutes of play, before being ingloriously booted from the proceedings for not actually having an Xbox Live Gold account (was that about to be my chance to be the one?):

* Just that slightest amount of interaction instantly turned an activity I'd rarely consider taking part in passively to one that legitimately and repeatedly made my heart fractionally tighten. Suddenly, the thrill of game/reality TV that inexplicably seems to captivate howevermany millions of viewers cut through me like a hot knife.

Even with absolutely nothing at stake (no prizes are being awarded during the beta), I played for 80 minutes, non-stop, dead simply in some semi-sad anticipation that I might be the next 'one.'

With 'commercial breaks' lasting some 20-30 seconds -- never nearly enough for kitchen or bathroom runs -- that is a captive audience, and that is a Tivo-era marketer's dream come true (ads shown in the beta: manga.com, UFC [above], and, natch, Microsoft/MSN).

* I am unstoppably quick on the answer-button draw (sorry, rza145), and even when you've been disqualified from the prize running, the sub-competition of playing against your small group of four other local or Xbox Live users for point (not cashable Point) prowess is stimulating enough to keep the controller in hand.

* Like any true corn-fed American, I know next to nothing about Canada. Not even, embarrassingly enough, when pressed, what 'Nova Scotia' means (I'm sorry), or that Vancouver's nickname is 'Hollywood North' (why?), or what a Tim Hortons 'timbit' is (also: what is a Tim Horton). But, if nothing else, what this showed was the lengths Microsoft is willing to go to to custom tailor its questions.

* At least 5 people out of 100 in Canada think that either Marilyn Manson or Marilyn Monroe died recently (A: Marilyn Chambers).

* At least 1 person out of 100 in Canada thinks you can get a temporary tummy tuck or a nipple ring in a box of Cracker Jack (A: tattoo).

* I would very much like to live in a world where network TV shows broadcast billboard ads for indie games like Metanet's N+ (the Toronto developer presumably chosen here representin' the Great White North?).

Will I play again? Are you joking: come May 12th, I'll be donning that 'powerpi11' skin an hour ahead of time, just to see if I can again make it through the digital RCMP's mindful watch (whose uniforms, I now and forevermore will remember after tonight, also go by the nickname 'Red Serge.')

1 vs. 100 [xbox.com]

Brandon Boyer

One shot, circa 2000 AD: LittleBigPlanet about to get Dredd-ful

Remember that off-hand bit about Media Molecule's plans to team up with UK comics legend 2000 AD for official LittleBigPlanet downloadable content? That appears to be happening sooner than later. [via MM]

Brandon Boyer

Wave of dedication: one week in with ngmoco/Rough Cookie's Star Defense

As followers of the Twitter account and my semi-exasperated Facebook friends will already be well aware, I've spent the better part of the week taking part in a cross-blog challenge with ngmoco and developer Rough Cookie's upcoming tower defense game Star Defense.

The task was one of simple survival: we were given an early build of the game with a single planet and asked to last as many rounds as we could, which, in my case, started in the low 20s and built to a bedtime-last-night high of 49, which, it turns out, fell far less than half short of PocketGamer Tracy Erickson's minorly-staggering winning 132 rounds.

But, public embarrassment aside (I blame my lightly smashed-up screen [which I'm holding out on fixing/replacing until June's alleged 3.0 model (you'd really better not hold out on me, Apple)]), what the challenge has done is both familiarize me with Star's setup, and, I have to admit, almost entirely win me over.

Like Tom mentioned earlier in talking about Plants Vs. Zombies, I'm not the most fanatical tower defense player: I wasn't one of the forward-thinkers who called Desktop Tower Defense their top game of 2007 (c'mon, it was a dead heat between Phase, Earth Defense Force 2017, and Raw Danger), and the last TD game that really grabbed my attention at all (PvZ aside) was Studio Eres' gorgeously abstract Immortal Defense -- watch its demo trailer and the appeal is clear.

That's nothing against the Fieldrunners and the Elemental Monster TDs, per se, it's more about the heart of the mechanics themselves, which derive a large part of their underlying tension from the essential 'waiting game' of setting your positions and sitting idly by to see the effect they'll have, and finding out 10 or 15 waves later that you'd been thinking wrong since the beginning. I'm not a fan of lost time.

And that's something that Star Defense -- or rather, the one level I've played -- seems to have minimized. I've completely forgotten now where I've heard this, but Nokia designer Scott Foe -- the main man behind the N-gage's excellent flagship mobile/PC crossover game Reset Generation -- said somewhere that one of the ways they'd got past the inescapable lag inherent in a multiplayer game running over slow mobile networks was to design the playfield to be larger than the mobile screen itself, which they then ported directly to the PC, even though a standard monitor could have easily displayed it whole.

The reason? In that 7+ seconds between every player's turn, users would constantly scroll around the playfield looking for their next move and exploitable opportunity, which meant zero seconds of staring at a static screen.

So, here's another mea culpa: all the times I'd expressed some skepticism about Star Defense's spherical -- and thus 70% obscured at any moment -- playfields, it turns out I was thinking wrong here, too, and one of the game's strengths is that once you've placed your initial barriers that can ably destroy any earlier weaker waves, you're then completely free to scout out the rest of the planet for deeper strategies.

Add to that a button that -- and maybe I've just overlooked this in every other TD game? -- forgoes the auto-timer and immediately sends out the next wave of enemies, and Star Defense is the first game of its type I've played that actively avoids any of that dead time that's got under my skin, and one in which I'm never not directly interacting with its world [as a side note, this is something Plants Vs. Zombies does very smartly, too, by requiring you to click on randomly popped up bits of sunshine].

Star Defense should be landing on the App Store quite soon, and, with some several hours already happily put into Groundhog Day repeating just 1/7th of its galaxy, could easily be the game that has finally taught me to stop worrying and love the tower.

Star Defense [ngmoco, Rough Cookie]

Tom Armitage

Something For The Weekend: Plants Vs Zombies

This weekend, I will mostly be playing Popcap's excellent new Plants vs Zombies.

That's not what I'm planning to play. What I'm planning is: ploughing on through the excellent Chronicles of Riddick; having just acquired a Wii after all this time, I'm hoping to dive back into Metroid Prime 3 and the sublime Super Mario Galaxy; and checking out Tale of Tales' The Path, now that a Mac port is available (as previously reported on Offworld).

Things won't go according to plan, though: the siren song of zombies, clamouring for brains, will lure me back to my garden.

It's hard not to have escaped the casual-games juggernaut that is Popcap, following the success of their previous titles, such as Bejeweled, Zuma, and Peggle. Plants Vs Zombies continues their tradition of making finely crafted, perfectly balanced, and maddeningly addictive games.

Plants Vs Zombies is Popcap's take on Tower Defence. I am not the greatest fan of Tower Defence games - even the delightful Fieldrunners. They're fiddly, require a great deal of information to be processed at once, and demand increasingly precise interactions as the playing field fills with tiny turrets. For something that is supposedly strategic, they seem to descend into motor-control tests all too quickly.

Popcap take all that and throw it away, reducing the genre to a skeleton: defending a house against zombie attackers, with limited resources and limited space on your lawn. No building mazes of little turrets here; there are up to five "rows' for enemies to walk down and you to build on. The play-field clears after every level. There's only one resource -- sunlight -- and it has to be gathered by hand. The various plants at your disposal are, like all the game's graphics, large, clear, and beautifully drawn. There's no "upgrading" of turrets; each plant has a unique function to perform, and all have strengths and weaknesses, which usually come down to balancing power against the cost to build and the time it takes before you can build another.

New plants and capabilities are added very slowly - one per level at most. You're never overwhelmed with choice. Even once your repertoire of plants is bulging, the game keeps that in check by limiting you to taking six different types of seeds to battle. And then, just when you think you've got the whole thing sussed... it throws night levels into the mix, where there's no sunlight to restock your supplies, but where fungi come into their own (as they don't have any need for sunlight). There's a lot more depth to Plants Vs Zombies than you might expect from a casual game, but that depth is meted out slowly and carefully. It has to be, given how useful the help screen is:

Popcap are well-known for their attention to their craft; Plants Vs Zombies has been in the pipeline for quite a while, but it's clearly not been released until it's absolutely ready, and the Popcap attention to detail shows. Plants Vs Zombies is really, really good. Like all Tower Defence games, it can get repetitive, but it's not designed for long periods of play. It's much better suited to frequent short bursts, and the charming character design and inventive array of zombies ensures that it's never long after a play-session before you're double-clicking on it again.

Plants Vs Zombies is available now for PC and Mac as direct download from Popcap, as well as on Steam and other services; it's currently only $9.99 on Steam, which is a steal. If you're anything like me, you'll be stumping up the second the hour-long free trial is up. And then not playing very much else. Whatever you choose to play, have a fun weekend, Offworlders; what's in your gaming future for the next two days?

Plants Vs Zombies [PopCap]

Brandon Boyer

Tap revolution? Sonic creator's Let's Tap in motion

There was a certain amount of understandable skepticism when Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka announced that his new games company, Prope, had moved on to create a game that took all of the reductivist complaints about the Wii and its controls -- that it'd reduced gaming to wild flailing -- and reduced it even further.

His Let's Tap asks players instead to not even hold the controller, instead placing it on a box (included with the game) and rap their hands against it, which, in a sense, isn't as crazy as it sounds, as it flips the rhythm-gaming staple of costly peripherals on its head.

And, as it turns out, it may have been a step in just the right direction, with no less than Edge magazine giving the collection of five games very high marks, and above is the just released trailer for the Tap Runner segment of the game, which is due for U.S. release this Summer.

Let's Tap [Sega]

Brandon Boyer

From Driller to digits: Sony's PS3/PSP number puzzler Qruton

In other new overseas surprise announcement: after creating Namco's original Offworld favorite action/puzzler Mr. Driller and moving on to Sony to work on that company's own excellent Ape Escape series, director Yasuhito Nagaoka has been reunited with Driller designer Kaori Shinozaki for Qruton, a new puzzle game coming in June for both PSP and the PS3.

Beneath its cute-goth exterior lies an interesting take on number puzzling, with grouped digits rolling forward (or, with fours, back to one) and marked to explode if they lie next to similar digits, with a minorly brain-bending entire-screen combo viewable in the trailer above.

Sony's been less consistent with bringing PlayStation Network exclusives to all territories, or at least in a consistently timed manner, so it'll be a waiting game to see if Qruton makes the jump to the U.S. and UK stores.

Qruton [Sony, via andreasang]

Brandon Boyer

The soul still burns: Konami announces new WiiWare Contra

In a parallel universe, all the rampant Konami-Coded sites would have been viral prelude to this: Konami has just made the surprise announcement of a new WiiWare version of its venerable Contra series -- the very game that made the Konami Code famous -- due to be released in Japan next Tuesday, and, surely, the Western world not long after.

Konami offers few details other than saying the game will maintain its run/jump/shoot 'guerrilla tactic' core, which you can see in style -- along with at least one larger-than-full-screen boss, via the developer's newly opened site.

Contra Rebirth [Konami, google translated]

Brandon Boyer

Exile in Simsville: the comic book SimCity Maxis never made

Maxis art director Ocean Quigley shows off this prototype for a post-SimCity 4 game eventually cancelled, then known as Simsville. Quigley explains the process, known as "impostering", would have allowed for a freely moving camera around the city and much more detailed models than previously utilized, as the process renders out complex 3D objects as simple sprites.

And, of course, gives the game that wonderfully soft-shaded illustrative style.

Impostering in Simsville [Ocean Quigley]

Brandon Boyer

Listen: Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours's chiptune Pulsewave performance

Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours do digital hardcore with a backdrop of glitched out pixel lovelies at the previously previewed Pulsewave show at NYC's The Tank. Vimeo uploader Gideon captured most of the night's performance, including several of the open-mic performers -- see also: 8BK-ok's 8-bit Rocky Horror show, and also: JDDJ3J's MySpace, where he's got the best low-bit version of Plastic Bertrand's Ca Plane Pour Moi I've ever heard.

Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours [MySpace, Gideon on Vimeo]

Brandon Boyer

The Sinclair Solution: BioShock 2's first multiplayer details

In its ongoing drip-feed of BioShock 2 details, 2K has let loose the first details of the game's multiplayer campaign. For such a deliberately single-starring narrative experience as the original game was, multiplayer might have seemed an odd choice, but developer Unreal co-developer Digital Extremes are promising something entirely uniquely modeled to capitalize on the game's fiction -- thankfully not simply giving us a Big Daddy Arena.

2K says the multiplayer segment of the game will work in parallel with the single player experience that will be set "during the fall of Rapture," prior to 'Jack's arrival in the first game, with users taking the role of test subjects for the then-experimental bio-enhancing Plasmids.

There, players will explore pre-wreckage environments seen in the first game like Kashmir Restaurant and Mercury Suites, and, taking a page from Call of Duty 4's multiplayer playbook, they'll earn experience points that will grant access to better weapons, Plasmids and Tonics to be recombined to fit your style of play.

BioShock 2 is due for release in October for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

There's something in the sea [2K]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Snow fall, and Space Invader's 763rd space invader

Space Invader's space invader, January, Paris's A3 motorway. See the invasion in progress here.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Machinarium's rusted ironworks decayed arcade

From Jakub 'Amanita' Dvorský's forthcoming adventure game, Machinarium.

Brandon Boyer

Listen: preview Alex Mauer's Vegavox II NES cart album

Above, a preview of the title screen and first song from Alex Mauer's second Vegavox album, his third LP to be released on an actual NES cart. Mauer's been previously mentioned for his musical work both on the NES ROM flier for April's Pulsewave show and the PlayPower organization's work on a cheap 8-bit computer for developing worlds.

The album will be out soon on Pause Records (previously noted for their +Plus series of free indie game soundtrack downloads), and while his second collaborative NES cart album, Color Caves (preview), is out of print, you can still get his first Vegavox album (preview) via his headlessbarbie site.

headlessbarbie [Alex Mauer, Pause Records, via Daniel Rehn]

Brandon Boyer

Pizza City: PixelJam's retro-modern style comes to Adult Swim

In a move entirely coincidental with my tip of the hat to Rich Grillotti earlier in the morning, Adult Swim has released its latest web game, Pizza City, which so happens to have been created by Grillotti and PixelJam partner Miles Tilmann.

The game's the Atari 2600 version of Grand Theft Auto we never got, if the game had necessarily been limited to GTA's delivery side missions and been stripped of all its violence (minus, that is, that toward clowns and mimes), but with all its hidden bonuses sprinkled around its open world.

If it seems at first glance that its pace and expansion are too time consuming for quick-shot web play, that's because they are: though it's not immediately apparent (it wasn't to me, anyway), pressing 'S' inside the pizza shop will save your progress, meaning I can (and will) come back to grind my way to those better cars teased just outside your starting point.

Pizza City [adult swim, PixelJam]

Brandon Boyer

Bread and cream: Tale of Tales' The Path hits Macs

So it's been some weeks since Tale of Tales' Red-Riding-Hood-via-coming-of-age-horror game The Path first hit the digital marketplace, and I haven't said a word about it since my IGF roundup, based on a build from a year earlier.

That's not an intentional snub, it's simply logistics, with my main PC now so horribly outdated it suffers under the weight of a Plants Vs. Zombies or a Today I Die, let alone anything taxingly 3D.

But those days might now be behind me, as Tale of Tales has just announced that The Path has just been released for the Mac -- which hopefully will keep the MacBook happy -- and alongside it, they've released their lengthiest and most 'traditional' trailer to date, which gives you just about everything you need to see to understand why it's quickly become such a critical darling.

The Path for Mac is NOW available! [Tale of Tales]

Brandon Boyer

LittleBigWatch: Hymanator's Out of this World/Another World tribute

LittleBigPlanet creativity seems to be on the rise lately: following yesterday's electro-mega-mix, PSN user 'Hymanator' has done up Eric Chahi's classic Another World/Out of This World in style, with the full intro sequence, shadow-beast, cage-breaking sequence and all.

Hymanator (where he's got more Robocop, Back to the Future tribute vids) [Synthasite, thanks Malcolm]

Brandon Boyer

Code warrior: cataloging the internet's use of Konami Code easter eggs

After ESPN's recently discovered (and since removed) hack created a firestorm of blog attention, one new site is doing its duty to catalog the rest of the uses around the internet of hidden Konami Code easter eggs.

The one hitch, you'll need to know the code to access it. Figure it via Dueling Analog's image above, or I'm sure it's hanging around Offworld somewhere as well.

The best/worst use? jQuery's hack leads you to a hidden site with a fully playable YouTube-linked version of Keyboard Hero, which is amazing until you realize it's actually almost fully un-playable.

konamicodesites [via Tom]

Brandon Boyer

LittleBigWatch: Media Molecule to offer sticker packs from Jon Burgerman, more

Back in Offworld's earliest days I noted (with some amount of congratulatory jealousy that I didn't think of it first) the excellent work of LittleBigPlanetoid in bringing artist-designed sticker packs to LittleBigPlanet from illustrators Matt Buchanan and Will Scobie.

There's been a bit of a lull in the packs since then, but for good reason: LittleBigPlanetoid operators James Spafford and Tom Kiss have since made the jump to Media Molecule itself, hired on as community managers.

So it's not too much of a surprise (but a very happy one!) to hear via the newly refreshed Edge Online of a now officially-sanctioned campaign to bring artists and designers on board for new sticker packs in coming months.

The first confirmed pack, reports Edge, will come from Offworld favorite Jon Burgerman (previously mentioned for his fantastic work in creating a new level for the PSP's Wipeout Pure), with plans to approach Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and artist Claire Wendling for future packs.

See the full interview with LittleBigPlanet art director Kareem Ettouney for more on Media Molecule's other DLC plans, including a crossover content pack with legendary UK comic house 2000AD.

Graphic Artists Jump On To LittleBigPlanet [Edge Online]

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: John Gaeta on "Ninja Assassin," and Hybrid Entertainment Merging Film and Games.

In today's episode of Boing Boing Video (sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus), Academy Award winning visual effects guru John Gaeta (Matrix, Speed Racer) offers a sneak peek inside his newest project, Ninja Assassin.

Along the way, we explore a broader realm of questions about the future of games, movies, and interactive entertainment. Will movies become more like games, offering new ways for us to insert ourselves inside the stories? Who will create them, using what tools, and how will the experience be different? Will computer-generated actors replace human actors, or stunt persons -- or will the two realms overlap in ways we can't yet predict? All of this we ask of the guy who invented "bullet time."

Due in theaters this fall, director James McTeigue's Ninja Assassin follows the story of Raizo (played by Asian mega-popstar Rain), one of the world's most deadly assassins. As Gaeta explains in this video, the movie merges blindingly badass Bruce-Lee-esque martial arts stunt work with tastefully integrated post processing work.

Below, and after the jump, a partial transcription of the longer conversation we had about the future of interactivity and "hybrid entertainment" -- and why Hollywood is, in Gaeta's words, "like a mule."

This interview took place during our live coverage of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, and many of the questions I pose were taken directly from our live chat audience.

Xeni Jardin: John, your involvement in "Ninja Assassin" was a little different than in "Speed Racer" and the "Matrix" films, where you were the lead visual effects designer.

John Gaeta: Ninja Assassin was directed by James McTeigue, who directed "V for Vendetta." It's sort of a family tradition of the Wachowskis to help James in parallel with other odd films. After "Speed Racer" was completed, we went back to Berlin and decided to make this super psycho horror ninja movie. Supremo stunts and martial arts. We're friends with the action design firm 87eleven, they've worked alongside Wu Ping for many years, after the "Matrix" Trilogy they did "Kill Bill," "300," they're fantastic. It was really their show. They were told they could be very creative and so they were. Lots of inventions!

Xeni: What was your role?

Gaeta: I didn't want to miss it because it seemed like it would be very fun. I was only helping out with some special unit directing, but no visual effects for me personally.

"Ninja" is surprisingly invisible on effects work, and intentionally so. No virtual humans in this one. The only real post processing comes from heavily stylistic color grading, think graphic tones like "Se7en," compositing and some CG weapons and blood augmentation. But this film shines brightest for the martial arts team. To put it another way -- it's old school.

There is far more going on in this movie with respect to "stunts technology" and innovation with respect to specialized and "next gen" rigs and flying machines.

Xeni: You are known for visual effects in motion pictures, but every time you and I have spoken, there's this idea of hybrid entertainment that comes up. Can you tell me more about what you're doing there?

Gaeta: I'm curious about possible destinations where there's crossover with regard to simulation cinema, "sim cinema," ways of creating elaborate trapdoors and portals between different mediums. Also, over the years, there are strange subgroups from the visual world like Douglas Trumbull -- I used to work for him many years ago -- their passion went beyond cinema to immersive content. Virtual reality, perhaps games, are a step toward that -- so are other methods of surrounding people with an experience. There are a lot of interesting progressions going on with immersive cinema, immersive entertainment, hybridizing the two.

(Interview continues after the jump)

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Rich Grillotti's Pixel Venus

Hi-res low-res Botticelli, part of the Pixel Models series by Rich Grillotti: PixelJam co-founder, Gamma Bros and Dino Run art director, occasional talking rat, and previously featured for his similarly fantastic sub2600 art series. [via pixelstyle]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: Dan Schoening's 'Screw Attack' Metroid montage

"Screw Attack," from Dan 'traditionaldanimatio' Schoening, who's got many more Nintendo and other games-related illustrations in his gallery.

Margaret Robertson

One More Go: God Hand, or why hardcore games ring my bell

Videogames are sometimes disparagingly described as mere wish fulfillment power fantasies. If we accept that for a moment, then here's what I learned about my psyche today. Sometimes, you have days bad enough and journeys home stupid enough that all you want is to be able to boot someone in the nuts so hard that they ring like a bell. Hrwah! Pow! DING!

Thankfully, since videogames are all just wish fulfillment power fantasies, I can do exactly that. And, while I'm at it, sate my secret, Freud-perplexing lust for midgets, cigars, chihuahuas and robots. Capcom's majestic God Hand (pronounced, gloriously, 'Goddohando' in Japanese, preferably in a screaming crescendo of plosives) is a game designed purely to meet the needs of your inner unreconstructed badass, the part of you that calls people douchebags under its breath and gravitates naturally towards leather overcoats.

It's not as if beat'em ups have ever in their history been a source of mundane, minimal restraint, but God Hand takes all the excesses of the genre and amps them up to eleven, dresses them in spandex and spanks them on the arse.

It's a game that does a lot of things that we often think games are bad at, and does them brilliantly. It's funny - properly funny - in all kind of ways. It surreal, satirical and self-aware, and full of elegantly conceived jokes: musical, verbal and visual. It is, on its own terms, a credible romance, as Gene's feelings for Olivia morph between adoration and exasperation, with occasional bouts of flat-out terror. But it's a game with a secret - a very surprising secret for a game conceived from the off as a purely hardcore experience.

It gets harder the better you are at it.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Gimme Indie Game: the playable poetry of Daniel Benmergui's Today I Die

If you've played Daniel Benmergui's I Wish I Were The Moon -- one of Offworld's first top-shelf recommended indie games -- then you know generally what to expect from his just-released Today I Die.

Hushed and humbly poetic, Moon gave players a small time-based sandbox with which to manipulate variables in an effort to discover one of several outcomes, but Moon's only part of Benmergui's evolution that brought him to this point.

His Storyteller, released shortly after Moon is the other key to that puzzle. Like Moon, it's an exercise in variable outcomes, but in contrast, it's one in which all of your decisions are made at your leisure, and where all outcomes are shown on the fly in real-time.

Somewhere in between, then, is Today I Die: like Storyteller, you're free to experiment with your variables -- here both represented by the actors and the very words themselves -- to shift and morph your surroundings, but, unlike either of the earlier games, these lead to sudden shifts that demand faster attention. Nothing, though, is outright undo-able, until the very last moments of the game (so far as I've found in a number of repeat plays) but it is the most 'action-oriented' of the three, for as much as you can call it that.

The most fascinating part of Benmergui's indie output is watching him work at ideas in which he's essentially alone, or at least on this digestible a scale: it's all the volumes of open-world and meaningfully-consequential design challenges that Deus Ex and Far Cry 2 have tried to tackle reduced to one delicate little pamphlet.

As above, it's a game that demands replayability, though not necessarily to explore parallel realities (as with Storyteller), or to tick off X amount of endings (as with Moon -- though I am curious if there are more than the two I found, I could easily be wildly underestimating the options), but more to reflect on what the variable flickers are trying to say, rather than the rote mechanical meaning of how you do them -- to dive further into its poetry rather than its playability.

Today I Die [ludomancy]

[As a sidenote, Benmergui is experimenting with a patronage system, with an anonymous donor helping him keep the game on a "quiet, ad-free website", but in return, he's set up this page to accept donations of three dollars and up for a downloadable package of all games mentioned above, with special bonuses to those that donate even more -- do him the favor of at least making the minimal donation: he's a voice in games we definitely want to support.]

Brandon Boyer

LittleBigWatch: danteneverdies channels Prodigy, Justice, LittleFlatEric in mega-electro-montage

Expanding on his original Little Daft Punk video, DanteNeverDies takes LittleBigPlanet on a wider journey through the electro-sphere with new parodies of Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Justice, Moloko and more.

But nothing, really, beats that first few seconds of LittleFlatEric from Mr. Oizo's Flat Beat.

MTBig Planet [YouTube, DND blog, via Fidgit]

Brandon Boyer

Geo-physical graffiti: Vicente Montelongo's Atari 2600 GPS art

Seemingly apropos of nothing other than the pursuit of excellence, Vicente 'mexist' Montelongo sends in these works of "8bit geografitti" created over the past few weeks in San Francisco's Sunset District with nothing more than an iPhone 3G and a car stereo "blasting dub."

Above, Atari 2600's Pac-Man and ghost, and below, the same console's Berzerk bot -- both soon to be followed by, says Montelongo, a Pitfall! pastiche.

Pac-Man / Berzerk [Everytrail, via Mexist]

Brandon Boyer

Plagued: jalonso's retro-meets-Bosch faux Game Boy game

Nearly every entry in the latest weekly-challenge from artist-forum PixelJoint (the site housing the previously linked Katamari meets Colossus) -- which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy with by restricting participants to the original GB's four-color palette -- has something to offer, but jalonso's Plagued seems the clear shoe-in.

The faux-game's a cute RPG based on Hieronymus Bosch's renowned triptych 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (you can see the carved out man battle card at middle-left) -- as ripe and perfectly surreal a world for games to visit as any I've ever seen.

See more of jalonso's work via his bugpixel blog, and create a PixelJoint account to see all 50+ entries, which don't necessarily come up in the accompanying forum thread.

CHALLENGE: Game Boy Turns 20 [PixelJoint, bugpixel blog, via digitaltools]

Brandon Boyer

Display case: see the imaginary 8-bit games of Famicase 2009

As previously mentioned, Japan's finest hipster retro/game culture store Meteor recently opened its latest Famicase art exhibit with some 58 designers and artists imagining their ultimate games never created.

While the show lacks some of the visual punch that typified its 2008 entries (by which I mean, no repeat of last year's fantastic Vector Planet and Whale of noise, both of which do need to be turned into working games), there's still some fantastic stuff in the mix.

The one game most after my one true heart is Cap's vino-red King Drunk (which appears to serve dual purpose as pun on the shop name, Meteor [Mei Tei Oh]), in which players are given several attempts to clear stages "while enjoying the state of drunkenness," and which prides itself on its "inability to control game action":

But also excellent are:

Oh, and -- whoops! Hawken King's ultra-subtle Bush Jr (published by GWBSOFT, natch) in which you must simply "save NYC!"

See the rest of the exhibit via the official Famicase 2009 site.

Brandon Boyer

The new world: Hand Circus/ngmoco's Rolando 2 in motion

Just unveiled by ngmoco and developer Hand Circus: the fantastic first trailer for Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid, which, from even the too-few seconds of gameplay shown, is delivering on all promises made so far.

Rather than a simple colonial re-skin, Hand Circus' sequel looks to have significantly revamped the core idea with new rolling attacks (after the utter vulnerability of the Rolandos in the first), flying mechanics, and, most obviously, new literal depth -- the playfield now having popped to '2.5D'.

Rolando 2 home [ngmoco, Hand Circus]

Brandon Boyer

One shot: David Mauro's Deus Ex Machina Puniat Arkouseus

David Mauro's Deus Ex Machina Puniat Arkouseus, via pixelstyle.

Brandon Boyer

One shot: real-life Mirror's Edge

Savage Land Pictures' real-life Mirror's Edge series, via flickr, via GamOvr.