Dear games industry, a homework assignment: inspired by this recently discovered Odyssey2 ad, please make us a game about the financial system. It’s got inherent drama, preset rules and goals, a topical crisis, and you’ll get massive bonus points if you can design it to even vaguely resemble this.
Wall Street Kid didn’t quite get there. Ping me when you’re done. Ready? Go. [via OFP]
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Strong words when your back’s against the wall, by resident favorite artist 9 0 0 0.
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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the original Mother‘s Japanese release — the 8-bit original game that would set the foundation for Earthbound‘s later cult craze — and the Earthbound Central blog is celebrating in style, with a one-page clearinghouse of music, videos of franchise director Shigesato Itoi (and the tribute above), links to its various fan-translations and more.
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An 8-bit architectural terror by Octopounce creator Anna Anthropy, done up in dead simple 3D pixel modeling kit Cube Kingdom. For something completely different, try her neo-text-adventures created in interactive story-maker Twine.
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From the pixel artist behind the previously featured mockup of a Hieronymus Bosch Game Boy game: Ledali II, the Crystal Egg, an imagined Game Boy Advance game starring Salvador Dali, whose spindle-legged elephants at top right actually lead you circuitously straight back to Bosch. Optimally viewed in its native resolution. [via Zen Albatross]
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From the patchwork workshop of Louisa Giffard: a collection of characters from Hand Circus’s Rolando 2:
From left to right; the Floating Friend, Lord Derby Disraeli (royal treasurer), the King rolando, Major James Cardigan (royal spiky commando), Turgut Reiss (reformed pirate) and Mr Scruff, the DJ who made the music for the game.
I believe an Etsy outlet is in order. [via Mikko Walamies]
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It’s been too long since our last round of Netflix Instant Watching picks, so let’s rectify that now, with the help of the as-usual invaluable instantwatcher.com, alongside a bonus non-Netflix essential to follow (which, hit the jump for the rest of those). Be sure to let us know what you’ve dug up and been digging via the comments, and don’t miss our two previous / discussions for past recommendations from everyone.
A quick aside: with the preview version of the next round of Xbox 360 dashboard updates currently making the press rounds, it’s clear that the console’s Netflix functionality is about to become even more essential: I’m really looking forward to seeing its ‘party’ feature propagating outward and hopefully hosting and attending pre-scheduled mini-watching-parties, and having the ability to browse new releases from the 360 itself is far more useful than I expected (even if I’m not positive yet that it’s tailoring suggestions specifically to me). But enough about that:
Visioneers [imdb, longest trailer ever]
The first and most enthusiastic pick is Jared and Brandon Blake’s debut feature Visioneers, filmed well before comedian Zach Galifanakis would break into mainstream consciousness with his appearance in The Hangover. While it’s not quite the typecast-reversing performance that Adam Sandler pulled off in P.T. Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, it’s damned close.
The movie’s a dystopian narrative darkly satirizing all aspects of a not-entirely-unimaginable near-future: a metered, rationed oppressive culture of grey, windowless workplace bureaucracy, mass-market consumerism in bed with all levels of government, and marriages defined by network TV self-help twaddle.
The problem? Widespread outbreaks of explosions: people so overwhelmingly institutionally understimulated and underwhelmed that they literally explode, and we follow Galifanakis as George Washington Winsterhammerman as he himself tries to keep from following suit.
It’s a quieter and more subtle movie than I ever would have expected, but punctuated perfectly with the profane (see also, in this respect: the comics of Chris Ware), and more a love story than you’d imagine, with all actors involved (including Judy Greer, who you remember as Arrested Development’s Kitty) pulling off incredible performances within their individual, soul-sapped restraint (Galifanakis spends 70 percent of the movie not saying a word and simply quietly attempting to keep all emotions in strict check).
And it’s got Polyphonic Spree’s Tim DeLaughter working the score, and it’s as hilarious as it is touching, and it’s one of the best films I’ll see this year.
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Super Meat Boy and No Quarter dev Edmund McMillen gives us the first look at his apparently “super Lynch-ian” upcoming game Time Ufck, about which he cryptically hints:
Time Fcku is a puzzle platformer about finding logic in irrelevance, it’s a 1+1=2 formula that will ask more from you after you leave it alone, it’s a community experience about communication with people who you don’t like.
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Known best for their debut mouse-controlled sword battler Determinance, UK indie Mode7 has just sent on new information on their second game, coming as a PC downloadable later this year.
Called Frozen Synapse — and looking quite pleasingly like.. — Rainbow Six, maybe? — by way of Introversion’s early node-hacker Uplink, Mode7 says the game is a “a top-down simultaneous-turn-based tactical game set in the near-future.”
Though details are still light, the studio says the game will feature “bite-sized hardcore strategy” in multi- or single-player matches of “quick, intense battles of wits rather than slow-burn strategic epics.” Above is the first released concept shot of the game — follow its progress via the official site.
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There’s almost nothing it can’t do, and almost nothing that doesn’t up my desire a thousand fold with every new look: the latest trailer for 5th Cell’s DS game Scribblenauts offers giant crab battles (in tribute, surely, to you know what), restoring sight to the aged via glasses, eyeball, or sniper rifle, Medusan stone attacks, and — seemingly there just to make the ESRB clench up with worry — at least the vague threat of baby violence.
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