It’s a tranquil scene: a herd of gentle creatures gambol by a pool. They chirrup and neigh as they drink. When a predator thunders down towards them they scatter, but one is too startled, too slow. The beast’s massive jaws close on its back legs, breaking them.
The creature shrieks and flails, but already blood is fountaining from its wounds. With a twist of its neck the beast pulls the shattered limb free, the sudden wrench sending the dying animal through the air in an arc of gore, to fall in a helpless heap.
Animal Leader is a game all about – and only about – fighting and fucking, and it’s made by Nintendo. Not just any Nintendo, mind. Early GameCube Nintendo. Nintendo at its most cartoony and saccharine. Wind Waker Nintendo. Super Mario Sunshine Nintendo. Animal Crossing Nintendo.
Is the upcoming Autumn Society show going to trump I Am 8-bit and Game Over for the games/art crown? If the submissions keep coming in as strong as we’ve seen so far, it’s got a very good chance. The latest, from our oft-featured Jude Buffum, is “Mushroom Recession” (tying in nicely with this earlier post), is intended to reflect, he says, “the current state of the economy.”
The most interesting part, though, is its double-play on Super Mario Bros. itself, showing what’s actually happening in the pits below the game’s screen.
Phillie chiptune megagroup Chromelodeon taps artist Johnny ‘New Jedi Order‘ Rogers for their Polygon Sun video, which must be the fastest ticket to a mouth-foaming seizure I’ve ever narrowly avoided. If you survive, though, they’ll land you on a glorious glitch-landscape, and it doesn’t hurt that the music’s good, too. [via Nerd Music]
As Joystiq notes, the glaring omission? A Treasure of Mêlée Island tee that apparently Lucas was handing out at this year’s E3, as submitted by one of their readers. We hope, as Joystiq does, that the company will see the light and offer it to the public in the future, especially because our only alternatives are artless Cafe Press and Zazzle clones.
Resident favorite pixel-videographers Garth + Ginny effortlessly sink the third installment of their fantastically expressive < 30 second video series, particularly with that teeeentative gator bite near the end. Someone please get them a deal to keep cranking these out more regularly. See also, if you haven't already, their animation for sensitive comic artist Jeffrey Brown.
A surprise firmware update went live last night for Japanese DSi owners: the Facebook Connect functionality Nintendo announced at their E3 conference — let’s have a quick poke around how it works.
First, as above, as you browse through your album of various photos — say, for example, of your 4:30am (adjusted for PST) drunk-Denny’s visit on the second-longest night of the Game Developer’s Conference — you’ll notice a new Facebook icon next to the standard card-suit flags.
Tapping this then leads you to the e-mail/password entry menu. Your email address is saved by default, but you’ll have to enter your password again each time, which lights up the Login box at bottom. Tap that, and the magic unfolds:
Like your ‘mobile uploads’ album, when sending photos via txt or mobile email, the DSi automatically creates a new “Nintendo DSi’s Photos” album, which all subsequent photos are uploaded to. Currently, there are no additional prompts for photo captions.
The DSi’s cameras are decidedly an as-yet underutilized hardware upgrade — the DS too large and un-connected to replace your cell as the snapshot tool of choice — but this brings us one step closer to bridging that gap, however incrementally. Expect it to have the side-effect of flooding the service with WindWaker-Link-eyed/pig-nosed/kaleidoscopic close-ups when the firmware update propagates out west-ward in the coming weeks.
All 5th Cell have to do at this point is sit back and let the hype for their upcoming say-anything DS puzzle game Scribblenauts generate itself. G4TV gave the game a whirl at this year’s Comic-Con, and, apart from re-confirming Keyboard Cat’s presence, proved its amazingly broad vocabulary best by summoning a treasure, and then — and I honestly didn’t believe it was going to work — a ‘kleptomaniac’, who rightly and dutifully appeared to steal the treasure and steal away.
I always feel a certain twinge of sadness when art and images leak ahead of official release, and try and keep Offworld clear of speculation (except in exceedingly rare cases), but now that the mecha-zombie-Goofy is officially out of his bottle and can’t be shoved back in, and because they’re such a particularly glorious and exciting spectacle to behold (and seemingly hand-crafted for BB’s own Cory Doctorow), the full story:
The project — a trip through a fantastical dystopian Magic Kingdom — is being headed by former Deus Ex designer Warren Spector, whose studio was acquired by Disney in 2007 (and who explained why this was such a perfect match in an interview with me at the time). The game was first confirmed to exist last December, when similar images were discovered by artist Gary Glover, including the ‘beach attack’ above, with its unbelievable Seven Dwarves tea-cup diggers.
Behind the fold, then, more images from both Gambino and Glover, covering rotted Epcots, foreboding Cinderella castles, terrifying scorpion-like mecha-Country Bears, and more — all of which come with the obvious caveat that they may or may not reflect anything of the current state of the project. (more…)
