There’s something in the water over there at Harmonix that’s causing widespread wicked home-stitch/crochet madness: first it was Milo Martinez’s Left 4 Dead Sackboys (more on those in a second), and now creative director Josh Randall drops a note that playtest coordinator Jyllian Thibodeau has been quietly at work on her own plush tribute: the first third of Rhythm Heaven‘s Glee Club.
My only hope is that the other two, when completed, will be looking on this one with that signature “you’re screwing the whole thing up” scorn. And, unsurprising side note, Thibodeau also has a wicked desk, where I spy not only a pair of Daniel Danger BUDs but at least one member of Peskimo’s Bamboozoo.
After receiving what he calls “an inordinate amount of attention in the last few weeks” after his ‘fauxvist’ Fallout 3, Half-Life and Team Fortress landscape paintings were featured on sites like, well, here, artist James Barnett has set up a new project on Kickstarter — the same crowd-funded site fueling Andy Baio’s Miles Davis chiptune cover album Kind of Bloop — to get prints of the art made for everyone who “blanched when I told ’em the prices” of buying an original.
$20 will net you one of the eventual prints of your choice (have a look at Offworld’s own high-res gallery for some of your options), $10 will net you a smaller original watercolor (“to be painted while listening to your choice of audio file(s)”, and $200-400 will get you an original oil painting (un-framed or framed, respectively).
If art’s not really your deal, but you still want to support the artist, Barnett’s also offering a home-cooked meatball meal for anyone in the Scottsdale, AZ area for a paltry $75, and, for $2400, you can buy the artist’s car, complete with “burned-CD collection of impeccable taste and hideous fake-fur seats.”
I haven’t had near enough time in the past few days to give this a proper go, so let’s explore it together. The gist? University of Central Florida’s Evolutionary Complexity Research Group describes their free PC game Galactic Arms Race as “‘Space Diablo‘, with real-time combat, cool particle system weapons, and RPG-style leveling and skill trees.”
Which is all well and good, but what we’re really interested in here is that second bit, about the cool particle system weapons, because what’s actually happening here, as seen in the video above, is that every projectile pattern is being automatically, systematically and generatively evolved by AI based on player behavior — hence its genesis in an “evolutionary complexity” lab.
The evolutionary algorithm, very cutely called ‘NEAT’ (and it is), has come up with some gorgeous and novel solutions to problems — I’m looking specifically at the ‘tunnel maker’ and ‘wall making’ abilities here — which, as the video will repeatedly hammer home, were entirely AI designed, by aggregating player behavior over the whole system.
The game’s currently available as a free download via UCF’s site, and, being as it’s apparently developed in XNA, could potentially mean an Xbox 360 port at some date, we should hope.
As you dig into it further, let us know what you think via the comments, this could end up being something that bears revisiting over the course of the year as it evolves further. [via slashdot]
So, after posting yesterday’s One Shot tribute to Harmonix staffer Milo Martinez’s Left 4 Dead Sackboys, Milo Himself showed up to let us know that those self-same-sacks were available for purchase via his site Sack-Planet.
Those, or any others from basic brown on up, apparently: Martinez has a handy customizable order sheet that’s something like Build-a-LittleBigBear, with a 2-3 week turnaround time, and optional tongues thrown in at no additional charge, which I think I’ll be ticking my way through in very short order.
Kudos to Tiny Cartridge for noticing that Fangamer — the company behind the staggering range of Earthbound/Mother-themed fashion & merch, as well as the newly established Metal Gear line — have reprinted and restocked these ‘Chronometer’ T-shirts based on Square’s 16-bit classic RPG Chrono Trigger, which also come with a separate chrono-themed 1″ pin (extra themed pin packs sold separately).
Remember in April when PopCap and Blizzard partnered to bring you exclusive Peggle levels playable inside World of Warcraft? This is a simple note to say that if you’re on a PC, you can now download the 10-level-pack as a free standalone game. And one to say that you should do so.
There are times when the obscure corners of gaming seem to fade away and leave us with nothing but mainstream titles to chomp our way through. But not this month, and certainly not with the arrival of the awkwardly shambling simulatory behemoth that is Arma II. This is a soldier sim that pretty much defines how far the combat simulation end of gaming now is from the shooter roots of Doom.
Layers of controls, and clunky contextual UI, vast AI systems fighting across hundreds of miles of terrain: it’s about as close as we’ve come to modeling real war. And as a consequence it should come with a sticker on the box that says “this probably isn’t for you”. Arma II is as independently crafted as anything else out there, but your typical indie game it is not.
Bohemia Interactive Software, the Czech developer behind Operation Flashpoint, Arma, and the recently released Arma II, are one of the most singular and driven development studios you could name. Their energy and enthusiasm for creating an all-encompassing soldier sim – a game type that is barely imagined by other studios – seems to defy sense.
Why would you even begin a project of this scale, unless you were richer than Bill Gates? Understand this, and you’ll understand that their project is valuable simply by its uniqueness. In fact, I’d go further than that, and say that they are arguably one of the most important developers in the world today. Not because of accomplishment, because that always seems to fall short in their games. Rather, what is significant is their ambition. (more…)
