GIANT ROBOT, ARTXGAME ANNOUNCES GAME OVER/CONTINUE? EXHIBIT
First mentioned exclusively on Offworld in early February, art/culture organization Giant Robot has officially announced Game Over/Continue? — its games-inspired art exhibition opening in San Francisco on March 27th, the final night of the Game Developers Conference.
In addition to the lineup of illustrator and indie developer crossover games being created for the show, Giant Robot has also announced a stellar list of designers and artists doing more traditional games-inspired artwork, including:
APAK, Robert Bellm, Christopher Bettig, Bigfoot, Blinky, Sean Boyles, William Buzzell, Scott Carl, Ako Castuera, Ethan Hayes-Chute, CUPCO, Liam Devowski, Elayne Dixon, Everybody Get Up, Matt Furie, Pete Glover, Tim Gough, Jay Howell, Yellena James, Jeremyville, Heisuke “PCP” Kitazawa, Chris Kline, Matt Lock, Aaron Martinez, Bill McRight, Mike Perry, Sidney Pink, Albert Reyes, Brian Ralph, RONDO, Brian Rush, Johnny Ryan, Robert Sato, Scrappers, Caleb Sheridan, Snaggs, Jim Stoten, Kaz Strzepek, Team Macho, Joe To, Lawrence Yang
Most intriguingly, the press release has also quietly announced the formation of artxgame, a formal collaboration between Giant Robot and upstart game/art collective Attract Mode, hinting that the four games being created for this show (Hellen Jo/Derek Yu, Saelee Oh/Anna Anthropy, Souther Salazar/Petri Purho, and Deth P. Sun/Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom) are just the first volleys in an upcoming series.
For more information on the artists and games being developed for the show — including a sneak preview of Oh/Anthropy’s collaboration — check Offworld’s original post on the exhibition. The opening reception for Game Over/Continue? will be held from 6:30 – 10:00 on Friday, March 27 at Giant Robot’s GRSF gallery at 618 Shrader St., San Francisco CA 94117.
Previously:
Only on Offworld: indie game and artist all-stars collide at Giant …
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GIMME INDIE GAME: POLYGON ★ GMEN’S TRANSMOVER
Take one part classic 8-bit platformer (somewhere between Lode Runner and Solomon’s Key) and one part cerebral space-shifter (not exactly Portal, but close enough to tweak precisely the same logic centers of the brain), and you get Polygon ★ Gmen’s Transmover: instantly accessible, instantly recommendable, infinitely customizable, and completely unquittable.
Transmover [Polygon ★ Gmen, via hermitgames]
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2D BOY, INFINITE AMMO, OCREMIX MUSICIANS CONTRIBUTE TO CANCER CHARITY CD
Heroes & Villains and Aquaria designer Alec Holowka has tipped us off to Relay for Life, a new charity CD being put together to raise money for the American Cancer Society. A $10 donation gets you a digital download — and a $25 donation will also net you a CD version — of a compilation of these indie games/music artists:
Mustin of OCRemix.org fame and head of Mustin Productions,
Jimmy Hinson, talented composer and arranger for OCRemix.org (big giant circles),
Kyle Gabler, fantastic composer from 2D-Boy and for World of Goo,
Alec Holowka, composer for the successful independent game Aquaria,
David Saulesco, super talented Swedish composer known for the Eternal Daughter soundtrack,
Inez S. deDeugd-McComas, ultra-gifted composer from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music,
Vincent Parrish, composer featured on thesixtyone.com,
Jay Tholen, talented and multi-faceted musician leading a successful solo career,
Barry van Oudtshoorn, Australian Composer Extraordinaire!
Josh Whelchel from The Spirit Engine 2 and Bonesaw: The Game,and several others, including:
Jussi Nieminen,
David Thatcher,
James Starkey,
Shane Lu, and
David “Warrior Bob” H.!
Find out more via the official site, and hear a preview of Holowka’s track via the Infinite Ammo blog.
Relay for Life [Syntesis, via Infinite Ammo]
Previously:
The latest look at Infinite Ammo's iPhone puzzler Heroes …
Infinite Ammo teases their Marian-ette – Offworld
Listen: 2D Boy's free World of Goo soundtrack – Offworld
Bit Blot's Aquaria hits Steam – Offworld
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SXSWI REWIND: FACEBOOK INVADES IPHONE GAMES
With SXSW Interactive now winding to a close, a quick recap: though now diminished somewhat by Apple’s just-announced iPhone 3.0 updates — bringing push notifications, in-game content purchases and voice chat, local bluetooth multiplayer and the opening of the device’s SDK to 3rd party hardware peripherals — the biggest news out of the conference for the iPhone was its newly established connectivity to the Facebook platform.
With the untimely demise of Trism dev Demiforce’s Xbox-Live-like Onyx Online, this might do quite nicely for socializing the device, and threatens to immediately overshadow the work that the Aurora Feint devs have underway — a plan that allowed for avatars, friends, wall chat, and news, all features currently in place at Facebook, and now more publicly accessible, should users choose.
Currently, the features are limited to a handful of games: Who has the Biggest Brain, iBowl, Agency Wars, Tap Tap Revenge 2, Live Poker and Binary Game, and, having now investigated the seamless integration of even just the rudimentary personalized leaderboard in Playfish’s excellent logic/minigame collection Biggest Brain [iTunes link], it’s clear that there’s big potential to tap into the even bigger audience with something more tightly woven around the mobile/social experience.
Facebook Connect for iPhone [Facebook]
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GOOD SHOW: HENRY HATSWORTH’S PAPER MOON AT SXSWI
Spotted at Screenburn’s Into the Pixel exhibit at SXSW: Jay Epperson’s epic landscape print from EA’s just-released DS puzzler/platformer Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, which looks even better in real life, and I intensely covet for my own wall. See it up close and personal here.
Henry Hatsworth home [EA]
Previously:
Tea Time TV: EA's new Henry Hatsworth trailer – Offworld
Henry Hatsworth: The Pompous Adventurer's Theme Tunes – Offworld
Nintendo's Wii/DS outlook: The Offworld view – Offworld
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LISTEN: YOUR TIME IS WELL SPENT LISTENING TO A LIFE WELL WASTED
A confession and a high, high recommendation: for as thorough a radio junkie as I am (it was, in fact, my teenage career choice before veering wildly off onto the path that led me here), I find it almost impossible to get into a podcast groove.
Part of that is the nature of the beast itself: the usual podcast fare is limited to people I don’t know having a conversation I can’t participate in, making for an experience about as compelling as watching two amateurs gracelessly toss a frisbee back and forth for an hour.
Here’s where everything changed: the recent sale of Ziff Davis’s former games press unit to Hearst let loose one Robert Ashley, who took the opportunity to pursue his own radio journalist leanings and create his new podcast, A Life Well Wasted.
Really, podcast’s not the right term — it’s never been more apt to call something “internet radio,” because, despite the format, Ashley’s clearly a graduate of the Ira Glass school of production, and has put together as close to gaming’s version of This American Life as we’ll likely ever get.
The two episodes put together so far (the production work involved for a one-man team is so heavy that Ashley isn’t committing to more than an episode a month) aren’t about gamers and their opinions, it’s about the personal stories of This Gaming Life: the first episode introspectively devoted to the aforementioned Ziff Davis sale and the closing of U.S. games mag legacy EGM, and the second to “collectors and archivists” obsessively devoted to games.
And it’s that second in particular where you should start — near the end, Ashley pitch perfectly calls forth one of those fabled NPR ‘driveway moments’ with a tearful farewell from a game developer about to pull the final plug on an MMO server. Right there is where I knew Ashley got “it,” and where he set the high watermark for both games radio and for his own future episodes — I can’t wait to see where he goes next.
A Life Well Wasted [episode links, see also: the accompanying blog]
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NGMOCO RELEASE FIRST FREE ROLANDO LEVEL PACK
If you haven’t already, be sure to check your iPhone updates for version 1.1 of ngmoco and Hand Circus’s Offworld favorite platformer Rolando [iTunes link, Lite version], which adds the promised rainbow road of five new secret levels on top of performance updates.
In its now hallowed tradition, ngmoco has also announced via twitter that the level pack is just the first in a series of additions to the game as Hand Circus continue work on Rolando 2.
Rolando home [ngmoco, iTunes link, Lite version]
Previously:
Touch me I'm slick: ngmoco/Hand Circus's Rolando – Offworld
How Rolando creator Simon Oliver caught the big fish – Offworld
Ngmoco: Rolando sequel coming, Touch Pets Dogs announced – Offworld
Rolando gets papered – Offworld
Ready for their closeup: Mikko Walamies' Rolando art – Offworld
See more posts about: Hand Circus, Offworld Originals, Rolando
MICHAEL LAU UNVEILS METAL GEAR CROSSOVER TOY SNAKE SQUARE
Urban toy progenitor Michael Lau has officially revealed the secret lineup he teased last week, and, as expected, of particular note is Snake Square, his vinyl nod to the Metal Gear series: a squat Gardener figure decked out in an awesomely cubic/off-kilter alligator mask camo.
The fine print notes that he’s priced at HK$650 (~$80): keep your eyes on the usual suspect outlets — Rotofugi, ToyTokyo, MyPlasticHeart — for him to pop up in coming months.
Michael Lau – CSBOOTH16 – Gardener Still. [crazytoyz]
Previously:
Vinyl artist Michael Lau doing Metal Gear crossover? – Offworld
Offworld: Toys Archives
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LISTEN: GHOSTFACE/DOOM’S GRAND THEFT AUTO: CHINATOWN WARS THEME
For the hip-hop heads, the Rappcats blog has posted both the full version and a remix of Ghostface and DOOM’s ‘CTW’, better known as the exclusive trailer music for Grand Theft Auto‘s DS debut, Chinatown Wars (due at retail in just a few short days).
Of particular note: the full version contains 100% more DOOM than the cut featured in the trailer. Now, about that full album…
GHOSTFACE & DOOM – CTW [Rappcats, thanks to Stones Throw, DOOM MySpace]
Previously:
DS DOOM: Rockstar's first GTA: Chinatown Wars trailer – Offworld
Offworld: Music Archives
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LOOSE CHANGE: MORE WORK IN PROGRESS LOOKS AT NO QUARTER
Gish and Pontifex programmer Alex Austin has uploaded a new work in progress look at No Quarter, the retro-game-mashup compilation album he’s creating with Super Meat Boy‘s Edmund McMillen.
The video shows good physical progress in ‘gun’, the platformer section of the game previously described as ‘Mario + N + Wolfenstein‘ (and apparently now codenamed Red Alpha), and the first look at the ‘art game + sim’ section, codenamed ‘tree’. Austin explains:
The first part is a test I’ve been doing for walking/running on moving platforms. As you can see in the video, by running left it pushes the platform in the opposite direction, causing the wheel to rotate. This sounds simple, but actually takes quite a bit of balancing to get the right movement while still being physically simulated…
The second part of the video is what I do when I get tired of running in a wheel: kill Hitler clones.
The third part is some early video of the tree game we’re working on, it’s taken a while to get the prototype going but it’s starting to feel like something now.
I do have to admit, that John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat power slide at 30 seconds looks satisfying. Check back here for the game’s full track listing, and direct all ire at Warner Music Group for removing the original YouTube video that showed off the rest of the games.
No Quarter update [Cryptic Sea]
Previously:
Edmund McMillen gives us No Quarter – Offworld
The dynamic fluids of Chronic Logic's Gish – Offworld
Savory new details of Edmund McMillen's Meat Boy – OffworldEdmund McMillen's Meat Boy getting revamped for Wii, PC – Offworld
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