Back in Offworld’s earliest days I noted (with some amount of congratulatory jealousy that I didn’t think of it first) the excellent work of LittleBigPlanetoid in bringing artist-designed sticker packs to LittleBigPlanet from illustrators Matt Buchanan and Will Scobie.
There’s been a bit of a lull in the packs since then, but for good reason: LittleBigPlanetoid operators James Spafford and Tom Kiss have since made the jump to Media Molecule itself, hired on as community managers.
So it’s not too much of a surprise (but a very happy one!) to hear via the newly refreshed Edge Online of a now officially-sanctioned campaign to bring artists and designers on board for new sticker packs in coming months.
The first confirmed pack, reports Edge, will come from Offworld favorite Jon Burgerman (previously mentioned for his fantastic work in creating a new level for the PSP’s Wipeout Pure), with plans to approach Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and artist Claire Wendling for future packs.
See the full interview with LittleBigPlanet art director Kareem Ettouney for more on Media Molecule’s other DLC plans, including a crossover content pack with legendary UK comic house 2000AD.
Graphic Artists Jump On To LittleBigPlanet [Edge Online]
Videogames are sometimes disparagingly described as mere wish fulfillment power fantasies. If we accept that for a moment, then here’s what I learned about my psyche today. Sometimes, you have days bad enough and journeys home stupid enough that all you want is to be able to boot someone in the nuts so hard that they ring like a bell. Hrwah! Pow! DING!
Thankfully, since videogames are all just wish fulfillment power fantasies, I can do exactly that. And, while I’m at it, sate my secret, Freud-perplexing lust for midgets, cigars, chihuahuas and robots. Capcom’s majestic God Hand (pronounced, gloriously, ‘Goddohando‘ in Japanese, preferably in a screaming crescendo of plosives) is a game designed purely to meet the needs of your inner unreconstructed badass, the part of you that calls people douchebags under its breath and gravitates naturally towards leather overcoats.
It’s not as if beat’em ups have ever in their history been a source of mundane, minimal restraint, but God Hand takes all the excesses of the genre and amps them up to eleven, dresses them in spandex and spanks them on the arse.
It’s a game that does a lot of things that we often think games are bad at, and does them brilliantly. It’s funny – properly funny – in all kind of ways. It surreal, satirical and self-aware, and full of elegantly conceived jokes: musical, verbal and visual. It is, on its own terms, a credible romance, as Gene’s feelings for Olivia morph between adoration and exasperation, with occasional bouts of flat-out terror. But it’s a game with a secret – a very surprising secret for a game conceived from the off as a purely hardcore experience.
It gets harder the better you are at it. (more…)
If you’ve played Daniel Benmergui’s I Wish I Were The Moon — one of Offworld’s first top-shelf recommended indie games — then you know generally what to expect from his just-released Today I Die.
Hushed and humbly poetic, Moon gave players a small time-based sandbox with which to manipulate variables in an effort to discover one of several outcomes, but Moon‘s only part of Benmergui’s evolution that brought him to this point.
His Storyteller, released shortly after Moon is the other key to that puzzle. Like Moon, it’s an exercise in variable outcomes, but in contrast, it’s one in which all of your decisions are made at your leisure, and where all outcomes are shown on the fly in real-time.
Somewhere in between, then, is Today I Die: like Storyteller, you’re free to experiment with your variables — here both represented by the actors and the very words themselves — to shift and morph your surroundings, but, unlike either of the earlier games, these lead to sudden shifts that demand faster attention. Nothing, though, is outright undo-able, until the very last moments of the game (so far as I’ve found in a number of repeat plays) but it is the most ‘action-oriented’ of the three, for as much as you can call it that.
The most fascinating part of Benmergui’s indie output is watching him work at ideas in which he’s essentially alone, or at least on this digestible a scale: it’s all the volumes of open-world and meaningfully-consequential design challenges that Deus Ex and Far Cry 2 have tried to tackle reduced to one delicate little pamphlet.
As above, it’s a game that demands replayability, though not necessarily to explore parallel realities (as with Storyteller), or to tick off X amount of endings (as with Moon — though I am curious if there are more than the two I found, I could easily be wildly underestimating the options), but more to reflect on what the variable flickers are trying to say, rather than the rote mechanical meaning of how you do them — to dive further into its poetry rather than its playability.
Today I Die [ludomancy]
[As a sidenote, Benmergui is experimenting with a patronage system, with an anonymous donor helping him keep the game on a “quiet, ad-free website”, but in return, he’s set up this page to accept donations of three dollars and up for a downloadable package of all games mentioned above, with special bonuses to those that donate even more — do him the favor of at least making the minimal donation: he’s a voice in games we definitely want to support.]
“Screw Attack,” from Dan ‘traditionaldanimatio‘ Schoening, who’s got many more Nintendo and other games-related illustrations in his gallery.
Space Invader‘s space invader, January, Paris’s A3 motorway. See the invasion in progress here.
Hi-res low-res Botticelli, part of the Pixel Models series by Rich Grillotti: PixelJam co-founder, Gamma Bros and Dino Run art director, occasional talking rat, and previously featured for his similarly fantastic sub2600 art series. [via pixelstyle]
MIT’s 2007 volley in their long prank war tradition transformed the statue of Harvard founder John Harvard into an MA5 series-wielding UNSC Spartan. Photo via a recent recap of MIT hacks at the Boston Globe.
Expanding on his original Little Daft Punk video, DanteNeverDies takes LittleBigPlanet on a wider journey through the electro-sphere with new parodies of Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Justice, Moloko and more.
But nothing, really, beats that first few seconds of LittleFlatEric from Mr. Oizo’s Flat Beat.
MTBig Planet [YouTube, DND blog, via Fidgit]
Just unveiled by ngmoco and developer Hand Circus: the fantastic first trailer for Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid, which, from even the too-few seconds of gameplay shown, is delivering on all promises made so far.
Rather than a simple colonial re-skin, Hand Circus’ sequel looks to have significantly revamped the core idea with new rolling attacks (after the utter vulnerability of the Rolandos in the first), flying mechanics, and, most obviously, new literal depth — the playfield now having popped to ‘2.5D’.
Rolando 2 home [ngmoco, Hand Circus]
Nearly every entry in the latest weekly-challenge from artist-forum PixelJoint (the site housing the previously linked Katamari meets Colossus) — which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy with by restricting participants to the original GB’s four-color palette — has something to offer, but jalonso’s Plagued seems the clear shoe-in.
The faux-game’s a cute RPG based on Hieronymus Bosch’s renowned triptych ‘Garden of Earthly Delights‘ (you can see the carved out man battle card at middle-left) — as ripe and perfectly surreal a world for games to visit as any I’ve ever seen.
See more of jalonso’s work via his bugpixel blog, and create a PixelJoint account to see all 50+ entries, which don’t necessarily come up in the accompanying forum thread.
CHALLENGE: Game Boy Turns 20 [PixelJoint, bugpixel blog, via digitaltools]
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