Inspired by Roburky‘s touching father/daughter tale Alice and Kev — storytelling as generated by Maxis’s Sims 3 — Ben Borthwick brings us this: Left 4 Sims, the domestic serenity/toils of Left 4 Dead‘s survivors.
Borthwick promises future episodes will see the group take on “their toughest and most terrifying challenge ever: living with each other,” but even just at one chapter in, I’m already forever scarred by the indelible image of Bill prepping dinner in the buff.
Jeff Atwood’s already done a nice piece on the evolution of the ubiquitous and increasingly intrusive bosoms bulging from banner ads for free-to-play game Evony, a campaign he says illustrates how to “take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom … then dig a sub-basement under that, and keep on digging until you reach the white-hot molten core of the Earth.”
While we wait for a scathing expose on the game itself from someone in the media (I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach to let it be from me), this temporary antidote from PopCap, perfectly parodying the banners — if, My Lord, I do say so myself — for its certifiable hit tower defense game Plants Vs. Zombies. [via Bruce Everiss]
This was going to be, at first sight, the first thing that made me immediately jump back into Second Life since those long, lonely stretches several years back wandering vast empty expanses of its virtual space and wondering where, exactly, the party at.
Then I realized it’d never got off the ground. But, either way, cheerfully obsessive fan-site Doodlesplatter — dedicated to all things Jon Burgerman (he of the recent LittleBigPlanet sticker pack) — features a gallery of this gallery: a “quarter square mile” art space with “a solid chunk of real estate devoted to Burgerman” that was being officially developed by London-ite Cris Rose.
Above are a selection of Burgerman’s prints and, even more wonderfully, larger-than-life-sized models of his Burgerminos toy series from a year or two back, and, at very top, at far back, you can spy an additional print by also-Offworld-favorite design duo Tado.
Doodlesplatter has many, many more images of the gallery that apparently wasn’t able to launch before “third-party funding… fell through” (from Kidrobot, perhaps?), though Rose himself left a chin-up “maybe in the future!” response to the post earlier today.
Programmer Christian Whitehead has been working on various iterations of his ‘Retro Engine’ — a 2D engine he says currently supports PC, Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch — for some time now, nearly always under the auspices of creating the perfect bit of Sonic the Hedgehog fan-kit, and now he wants to lend it to Sega.
In what he says was under a month, he’s put together the above video showing a version of Sonic CD ported through his engine to the device, rather than Sega’s internal emulator used for the original Sonic release, which was criticized for widespread performance issues.
Whitehead’s video is an open plea for gamers to tell Sega (at this recent blog post) that they’d like to see Retro Engine used for a new version of the game, which — though admittedly, from a corporate perspective, is as powerful any given internet petition — seems to already be gathering some steam.
See more about Whitehead’s work on the Sonic CD version above at his blog. [via TAF]
There is something so perfectly Wareheim-ian about this video from last weekend’s Brooklyn chiptunes dance party at The Brick that I can’t help but post it: it’s got an amazingly un-contrived 80’s public access feel, with what looks like an attendance I can count on both hands (maybe the rest were all at the Mario Kart kiosk?), all doing awkward Charlie Brown Xmas drunk-dancing to what is honestly a wicked set by both Kurisu Bearcub and especially OxygenStar, in the wig, on the drums.
Just don’t get me wrong: this is totally my idea of a good time, and was a far better Saturday night than I had down here. [via TCTD]
From the “where you least expect them” dept.: McSweeney’s offshoot DVD magazine Wholphin is currently screening the first episode of The Adventures of Ledo & Ix online — a low-tech/high-brow five minute faux-16-bit short by Emily ‘Kid Can Drive‘ Carmichael.
I won’t over-explain the purpose of the short (the teaser trailer is above), except to excerpt this bit of the subsequent interview with Carmichael:
I wanted that sense of lieu vague, a term that Wikipedia has just told me describes the “nonspecific setting” of Waiting for Godot. Even the vagueness is vague, no one says, for instance: “It’s weird we don’t know where we’re going, and we should perhaps consult some sort of reference material”… One of the main things Ledo and Ix are up against is a world which is anti-climactic at every turn.
Watch the episode in its entirety via Wholphin — and consider a subscription, it’s one of the consistently best curated video collections in recent years.
Ubisoft have officially announced our previously mentioned Comic-Con news that they’re developing a game based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic series Scott Pilgrim — and have subsequently added absolutely no further details. As mentioned late last week, IGN and /Film reported from O’Malley’s panel which dropped news that the game would be “a side-scrolling brawler that will retain the look of the comic” — and IGN went further with now-apparently-rescinded details that the game would be a PS3/Xbox 360 downloadable.
O’Malley himself has said that any platform news was overstated, and Ubisoft’s press release offers nothing more of note apart from a flurry of background details on Edgar Wright’s film adaptation, and licensing VP Christian Salomon promising the game will “provide a fun and unique experience to players and combine all the important elements seen in the film–action, romance, irreverent pop culture references and rock-n-roll.”
But, the most heartening news out of all the non-news, a presser quote from O’Malley (who is otherwise remaining mum on the project) that at least generically hints that he’s “work[ing] closely” with Ubisoft on the game.
Even with all the hard work gone into creating real live working Pip-Boys, the devil’s in the details, and Weekly Geek‘s Chris Furniss provides templates for and hints on creating your own Fallout 3 Buffout, Med-X syringes and Nuka Cola caps, which I believe are the official currency of PAX, for which these cosplay accoutrements are being created.
It’s wholly atypical graphic and level design is actually not quite as surprising when you realize Wohlwend’s one of the designers behind Effing Hail, the previously covered game that played as an interactive version of a retro-textbook infographic.
