I legitimately sometimes worry that I’m quickly devolving into a parody of myself, and it sure doesn’t help when this happens: EA Montreal have announced new partnerships for their upcoming Wii and DS-bound racer Need for Speed Nitro, and, having paid almost no mind to the game in previous months, it’s suddenly squarely on my radar.
Why? Because those partnerships are with: Italian vinyl toy/design studio Tokidoki (whose car you see above), SF art brand Upper Playground — a collective that includes the respective bunny-skulled and heavy-handed art of Offworld faves Jeremy Fish and Sam Flores — and, finally, all the artists behind the past few years of I-am-8bit shows.
EA says each have “created custom skins for a wide variety of vehicles including the Lamborghini Gallardo, Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger R/T, Volkswagen Type 2 and Subaru Impreza WRX,” and have “provided over 140 stylistic brushes that players can use to paint and personalize their ride,” and now my lifelong dream to make a car with a CactusPup or sad/cute/hardcore rabbit on it go really really fast can finally be fulfilled.
In the second Offworld Gallery for the day, we look at the games-inspired pieces by Melbourne artist Ghostpatrol. Above and below are two of his most recent works, from a series called “me playing the video games that changed my life”, both fantastically fragile and delicately rendered — a trait, it turns out that carries through all of his pieces.
Below the fold you’ll find the rest of the “changed my life” series, and a selection of older, Mario, Mega Man and Zelda-inspired pieces from the past several years, all used with permission of the artist and taken from the Ghostpatrol website, where you’ll find even more pop-culture related pieces, including more or less the most adorable He-Men and Skeletors outside of DoubleFine artist Scott C’s own collection. (more…)
Following the recent mix-down of his post Prince of Persia adventure game The Last Express to more quickly-digestible video form, Jordan Mechner has just dug up and released Red Serpent — the unfinished first draft script of what would have become a prequel to Express.
Set 10 years before Express and starring that game’s main character Robert Cath, Mechner notes that “the plot bears a more-than-slight resemblance to The Da Vinci Code, which would be published the following year,” and says “I’d guess that Dan Brown and I had been reading the same pseudo-historical “research,” including Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent and Leigh (who did, in fact, sue Brown for plagiarism, and lost).”
The 48 page script [direct PDF link] was dropped quickly after it had begun in 2002, as his involvement on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time took up the majority of his time. Says Mechner: “It was the right decision.”
In a relatively surprise release (the European version was meant to be added to DSiWare before the Americans received it), Nintendo have officially unleashed FlipNote Studio, the same web-sharable flipbook animation system originally covered here back in December as Ugoku Memo Chou (Moving Memo Book).
The app is available for free on the DSiWare store, and, as above, the underlying web service is currently live at flipnote.hatena.com, where you can browse, rate, favorite and embed animations uploaded from the DSi itself. As mentioned before, users can embed their own recorded sounds, or use monochromatic stills captured from the DS’s camera in their animations as well as painting them by hand.
Don’t judge me too hard on my debut flick — it’s a work in progress, alright! And, it goes without saying, I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.
Finally, after months of conjecture, Castle Crashers devs The Behemoth have officially begun the process of revealing the inner workings of Game 3, the fantastically and adorably chaotic multiplayer arena game we’ve seen hints and traces of a few times before.
Included here: the first guided look at the “soul mode” section, a directly competitive mode where players use their customized offensive/defensive weapons — there’s a strong emphasis being placed on customization of all aspects of your avatar here, dev Dan Paladin explains — to knock the souls from others and hold on to them as long as you can.
Still to be revealed in later updates: the Zelda 4 Swords-ish reluctant ‘co-opertition’ we’ve previously some of its other modes, any hint at what Behemoth promise is a ‘wonderful’ underlying story, and just why, exactly, the jewel makes the little guys cry.
I don’t have much to add to this highlight reel of Skate 2 dev EA Black Box’s favorite user-created videos, other than it works better with the sound turned down, the number one video is as amazing as it ever was, and I’ve been neglecting to return to this game for far too long.
The latest round of updates for Team Fortress 2 have just started to leak from Valve HQ, and they’re more interesting than first meets the eye. Though they’ve made public their promise to keep this update classless — that is, not updating mechanics for individual classes, instead focusing on bringing a new community-built map and, err, a collection of hats, to each — it’s the hidden updates that are the most intriguing.
Your guess truly is as good as mine, and I’m interested to hear what those guesses might be: already it’s being bandied, based on the last of those pages, that hats could be rewards for pre-game bets on the outcome, but the rest are coming up truly blank.
The latest in resident favorite artist 9 0 0 0’s rustic pixels, with a meditation on goal-reaching from Ninja Gaiden‘s Ryu Hayabusa. 9 0 0 0’s alluded to his main flickr gallery being cut short in the near future, though a donated Pro account may have delayed that decision: either way, it may be time to privately archive your favorite of his Plan 9.002 updates, though stealing them to sell low-res prints on eBay is obviously strongly discouraged.
