As previously mentioned, Japan’s finest hipster retro/game culture store Meteor recently opened its latest Famicase art exhibit with some 58 designers and artists imagining their ultimate games never created.
While the show lacks some of the visual punch that typified its 2008 entries (by which I mean, no repeat of last year’s fantastic Vector Planet and Whale of noise, both of which do need to be turned into working games), there’s still some fantastic stuff in the mix.
The one game most after my one true heart is Cap’s vino-red King Drunk (which appears to serve dual purpose as pun on the shop name, Meteor [Mei Tei Oh]), in which players are given several attempts to clear stages “while enjoying the state of drunkenness,” and which prides itself on its “inability to control game action”:
But also excellent are:
argon’s Look at the Rainbow
Meteor’s own A Bit of Garden
Oh, and — whoops! Hawken King‘s ultra-subtle Bush Jr (published by GWBSOFT, natch) in which you must simply “save NYC!”
See the rest of the exhibit via the official Famicase 2009 site.
From a Game Artist forums’ “Scene from a Movie” competition, two winning entries created in Crytek’s CryENGINE 2, as sniffed out by fansite inCrysis. Happy to see that, under the new tutelage of Phil Harrison, Atari survives well into the next decade. [via Tom]
Every step that Wolverine takes toward you is the coiling of spring. His is a menacing swagger, but until the schnick, a sort of calm cloaks the danger. For his foes, his approach is that moment after you’ve leapt from the cliff top, before you’ve dashed your head on the rocks below; the holding of your breath in the second before the world explodes. Wolverine twitches a beat then boom, the spring is sprung and nobody is left standing.
This sense of tension and release is ably communicated by current videogame blockbuster X-men Origins: Wolverine. Its developer, Raven, has relished the chance to illustrate, in unflinching detail, the more gruesome results of the mutant’s cloudy disposition.
This Wolverine brings with him a typhoon of bloodletting, which starts with a 500-foot fall from a helicopter onto a cushioning jungle rebel, and ends fifteen hours and close to 2000 kills later. This is a Wolverine who pulls the head clean from the sunken neck of an ancient stony monster; who punches through a windshield, in one motion hauling and eviscerating the blanching driver from his seat. This is a Wolverine who repairs his own bullet wounds like Master Chief recharges his shields.
But for all his schnickity bombast, Wolverine is a character that lacks the crucial tool in any action game hero’s arsenal: a gun. Videogaming’s critics mistakenly suppose that the medium’s obsession with guns is through choice and not necessity, that it’s the boyhood fixation of an adolescent industry infatuated with tits and cars and bullets. But that’s only a half-truth. Shooting has been our lot ever since Space War fired its first missile across the PDP-1’s highlighter pen green solar system. If shooting stuff were gaming’s primary theme merely because of immaturity, surely we would have grown out of it, forty-seven years on? (more…)
Fresh dug out of the spam folder deep in my underground lair: this invaluable advert for a money-back-guaranteed Villain Enhancement, courtesy Offworld favorite Henry Hatsworth.
Continuing the ongoing supermadness at Namco’s official Noby Noby Boy website, o–o, the latest entry in their DIY Boy series (which charts the team’s progress at building real-world in-game objects) sees Takahashi & co. beating Anna The Red at her own culinary game and creating the above BOY sushi rolls.
The site unfortunately doesn’t give overt instructions beyond the second photo, opting instead to just convey their hunger. Check the official site for more close-up shots.
o–o home [Namco]
A lovely photoset on Flickr from “Reintji”, in which he combines his work – as an X-Ray technician – with his love of games. The results are fascinating, and, in places beautiful. (It’s been around a bit, but still worth a look if you’ve not already seen it.)
X-Ray Funnies [Flickr]
In a frankly legitimately exciting announcement that seems to have gone almost entirely unnoticed, studio CEO Paul Bettner has written with news that Newtoy, the iPhone developer behind the cult hit free multiplayer game Chess with Friends, has teamed up with artist Ashley Wood, the illustrator behind the PSP’s Metal Gear Solid digital comic, to create a new game based on Wood’s graphic novel World War Robot.
Bettner and his brother David cut their teeth at Ensemble Studios, where they worked on games ranging from the original Age of Empires series to Halo Wars — the last game Ensemble produced before shuttering the studio — before going on to found Newtoy, where they’ve got a happily Offworld-ian sounding “new dream” charter to bring in outside talent not normally found in games to collaborate on new projects.
Newtoy hasn’t released many details of the World War Robot game quite yet, apart from a selection of Wood’s artwork and this synopsis:
In World War Robot, the human race is split by religion and politics as they wage a savage war between Earth and Mars. Giant robots augment the destruction with incredible battles, intense human/robot drama, a little black humor and some political intrigue thrown into the mix in this epic story.
Coming from a real-time strategy pedigree and creators of one of the most seamless online iPhone multiplayer experiences, though, hopes are high for something along the lines of a stylized portable Front Mission.
Volume one of World War Robot is currently available at Amazon (and rightfully already ordered), and Wood’s just published some previews of WWR2. Hong Kong vinyl toy producer 3A has also recently released these first images of apparently quite big (!) WWR figures (above), who want to roll up all our happiness and smoke it.
World War Robot home [Newtoy, Ashley Wood]
Officially sanctioned by the GDC powers that be, Toronto author, game maker and founder of the local Artsy Game Incubator Jim Munroe took his experience at the conference this year and channeled it into GDC: The Game, an Interactive Fiction game (read: text adventure) that manages to capture quite accurately the collaborative, socially supportive and intellectually curious aspects of what it’s like to actually be there.
Rather than wandering the halls and finding hidden stores of swag, though, the object of the game is to foster relationships based on your own interests and the harmonious interests of others enough to put together a dream team of designers, coders, and promoters and make the next indie hit.
Play GDC: The Game online here, and remember to REMEMBER the advice your conference vets gave you before you left.
GDC: The Game [GameSetWatch]
The time is now: after a long procession of teases and trailers, there’s less than 24 hours left until PopCap officially unleashes the zombie throngs on your unsuspecting plants, and the company has opened downloads for the demo version of the game, alongside a discount code for those that order directly through PopCap themselves.
Sign up for the demo download location through PopCap’s official game home for the Mac/PC demo and code.
Plants vs. Zombies home [PopCap]
