In Offworld’s effort to become the official repository for every oddball Super Mario Bros hack in existence: inconceivably named artists Marc Sciglimpaglia and Phoenix Toews created this Mario remix that lets you control on-screen action with “claps, singing, guitar and drums.”
The hack was made with Sciglimpaglia’s “nin.reflux” software that can manipulate NES roms as a Max/MSP plugin, and apparently (though I couldn’t dig up any video footage!) was also used at Sciglimpaglia’s 2008 exhibit for:
“Marble Meditation”, an installation where participants can control the game Marble Madness collectively with sound, and “Nightmare Mario”, a fully playable version of Super Mario Brothers with a reworked audiovisual structure, portraying the game world filtered through a vivid post-apocalyptic nightmare.
Over at upstart web initiative Kickstarter — a patronage system that lets users propose projects to find interested backers, who can then set their own level of payment based on what they’d like to receive in return — Andy ‘Waxy‘ Baio has set up a new project to fund Kind of Bloop, an all-star chiptune cover album of Miles Davis’s jazz classic Kind of Blue.
Baio explains:
What would the pioneers of jazz sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga? For years, I’ve wondered what “chiptune jazz” would sound like, but there are only a tiny handful of jazz covers ever made.
To satisfy my curiosity — and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” — I’ve asked five brilliant chiptune musicians to collaborate and reinvent the entire album in the 8-bit sound.
The lineup, in alphabetical order:
Ast0r (Chris J. Hampton)
Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland)
Sergeeo (Sergio de Prado)
Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss)
Virt (Jake Kaufman)
Just launched earlier today, the project is already well on its way to being fully funded at the $2000 level, with donations of $5 getting you an early download when the project is complete, and donations of $30 or more getting a limited edition CD version of the album.
I’ve done my part to back the project, and suggest you hurry to get your donation in while you still can via its project page.
If you’ve been following the indie mobile scene for long, Toronto area dev Capybara Games‘ excellent puzzler Critter Crunch probably hasn’t escaped your attention: the original Java game took home the top prize at the 2008 IGF Mobile awards, which was followed soon afterward by an excellent iPhone port of the same.
Excellent pixels aside, the tiny screens have never quite done Critter‘s characters and soft vaguely-Miyazaki-esque woods justice, but, as witnessed above or as the embedded screenshots below the fold will tell, the upcoming full HD hand-animated PlayStation 3 downloadable version absolutely will.
As you might be able to suss out from the trailer, Critter‘s grid and pull/push gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of classic Neo-Geo puzzler Magical Drop, but with a key difference: rather than simply lining up like colors, the object here is to build food-chain, well, chains, with smaller critters eaten by the next size up, and to collect the crystals that fall when exploding critters clear out their similar neighbors.
Capybara say the game is due for release on the PSN this summer, with both co-op and versus local/network multiplayer modes, as well as Story, Puzzle, Challenge and Survival single-player modes. Hit the jump for more gently eye-searingly gorgeous full-res screenshots as above.
The above promo for Romania’s just-ended Otaku Festival shows further proof that Japanese geek culture crosses all borders, featuring a hodge-podge of classic videogame references from Frogger to Galaga to Super Mario World.
In the many months that’ve passed, I still haven’t managed to dig up many gems in Xbox 360’s Community Games section that have instantly hooked me quite as much as Mommy’s Best’s previously previewedWeapon of Choice, and I’ve just become as quickly intrigued by one-man-team Nathan Fouts’ Grapple Buggy, his next game due on the console by the end of the year.
As the name implies, Buggy promises to take all of the fantastically grotesque alien landscapes of Weapon and combine it with both physics enhanced vehicular platforming ala underdog NES game Blaster Masterand a Bionic Commando-esque dual-grappling hook, in some dual-punch combo of under-utilized mechanical excellence.
Take control of the prototype Grapple Buggy piloted by Nova Commander Javeya, and her alien co-pilot Drozo to explore the newly discovered VALD-END 317.
The distant planet seems to house massive amounts of Tetravaldisae, known to its harvesters as ‘Vald’. Used to create fuel for faster-than-light travel, Vald is the single most valuable commodity in the known universe. The New Homeworld Armada and the Drozo Empire have formed a strained alliance to confirm these portentous readings sending the Grapple Buggy and its team into action for the first time.
Can the Drozo Empire be trusted? Has Javeya’s government thrust her into a compromised situation? Will VALD-END thwart both species schemes? Swing into action with Grapple Buggy!
Continuing my coverage of Tokyo hipster retro/game store Meteor’s Famicase art exhibit, in which designers and artists create label artwork for their best 8-bit NES games never made, the store has just put together Famicase Chronicle, an interactive Flash piece that showcases all 140 artists and 216 cases from all of the past years of Meteor’s exhibit.
It’s a slow load to bring in thumbnails of all 200+ cases, and a relatively fiddly piece to navigate: my suggestion is to scroll down to the tiny ‘Auto View’ text button at bottom, sit back and enjoy the show, with its corrupted-ambient 8-bit soundtrack provided by Polytron’s Jason ‘6955’ DeGroot.
Also noteworthy: next to the Auto View button is a link called Video Report, which will load an episode of Points — DeGroot’s short-lived (but very Offworld-ian) video series dedicated to art/game culture — that covered a previous Famicase exhibit live.
IGN contributor Anoop Gantayat has uploaded video of the just released Contra revival Konami recently surprise-announced as a WiiWare downloadable, and it took no more than seeing the robo-decapitation in the first 10 seconds of the video above for me to decide that I’m going to need this game soon.
What happens when one slashes a program or piece of software? Code does not tear like a stretched canvas, but it does break in its own visually unique way.
Alongside Data Spills is another ITP-NYU Thesis well worth mentioning: José Olivares Ancient Pixels, which makes the very logical leap in crossing low-bit game iconography (read: Atari 2600-esque graphics) with traditional Andean textile art for an installation backed by psych-pop visuals.
For the proposed installation, Olivares created three Andean “rugs” with projected animations that blur the line between outsider and pixel art, each with their own specific symbology.
