After teasing you with the first look at PopCap’s parodic tower defense game, its sing-along music video premiere and its sublimely bizarre viral followup, now, finally: the first gameplay footage of Plants Vs Zombies.
Plants Vs. Zombies home [PopCap, thanks Kevin!]
The second urban-pixel landscape we’ll scroll through today: You’ve previously seen pixel magician Myk Dawg do his 16-bit dirty work for DJ I-Dee and DJ Shadow, now he turns his attention to Kanye West’s “Robocop”. The video’s uncommissioned, but it’s “simply [his] favorite song on the album, and one day I figured why not make a badass music video for it” — and so he has.
Kanye West – Robocop (1988 import version) [Myk Dawg]
What’s your favourite console ever? Mine’s grey, regular in shape, weighs about three pounds. Graphically, it’s a bit underpowered by modern standards – great colours, lousy detail – but it’s got a killer game library. The one I’ve got is showing its age a bit, but it’s still my most precious possession in the whole world.
It isn’t, as you’ve already guessed, the Dreamcast. It’s my brain. My spongey, stupid, sloppy, saturated brain. The thing that makes it the best console ever made is that it’s 100% compatible. It’s like the ultimate emulator. Using it, I can replay ever game I’ve ever played. I can even, thanks to its remarkable ‘Imagination’ engine (watch Sony nick that for PS4), play games that haven’t even been made yet. It’s portable, never needs batteries, never needs upgrading, boots instantaneously. There are no carts to lose, no discs to scratch, no controller wires to unsnarl.
The last thing I played on it was Wipeout, which I dug out last night when I couldn’t sleep thanks to a head full of rather shampoo-y white wine and a three hour argument about the future of game distribution. Proper Wipeout, mind. Original, clunky, exacting Wipeout. Nearly 15 years on, it plays as well in my mind as it used to on my trusty 14″ Trinitron. I can still nail the boost start every time, still feel the flow and flex of every camber and turn as I loop endlessly under the specked ink of Altima’s sky. Some insomniacs count sheep; I count zip pads. (more…)
NYC artist Satre Stuelke’s radiologyart project takes cat scans of every day objects that “hold unique cultural importance in modern society… to plant a seed of scientific creativity in the minds of all those inclined to participate.”
Above, the ghostly skeleton of a PS3 DualShock controller, also available in video form.
Coming soon to Stuelke’s project, “the PlayStation 3 box, and a de/re-construction movie.”
DualShock radiologyart [Satre Stuelke, via zillionmonkey]
An NES trailer for this month’s upcoming Pulsewave performance at NYC’s The Tank.
Music by Alex Mauer, creator of the previously mentioned Vegavox NES music cart, code by oft-mentioned NES hacker No Carrier, graphics by Enso of the recently hyped pixelstyle tumblr blog.
Pulsewave warns of the gig itself:
This show contains high-energy musics, eye-popping visuals, and what can only be described as wondersexapalooza and is not intended for the boring, loveless, and whiny.
Download the intro as a NES rom here.
March [sic] Pulsewave NES ROM Flier [enso]
The video accompanying Keita Takahashi’s latest official transmission to the PlayStation.Blog about the upcoming addition of offline multiplayer holds a tiny secret that seems to have gone over most collective heads.
True, for a video alleging to show how swallowing the split tail of another player’s Noby will create a new fused BOY — with one player controlling the first half and the other player the second — it comes up basically entirely short, what it does do is make BOY’s previously mentioned dream of new music come true, even if it does have a conspicuous lack of castinets.
Head over to the official post for Takahashi’s diary about the run-up to his GDC session, and see how high we can collectively push Japanese film Yureru’s IMDB Moviemeter quotient investigating why it might have put him in a depressive funk.
Noby Noby Boy Multiplayer Update [PlayStation.Blog]
Your good-things-in-the-most-unlikely-of-places dose for the day: after the integration of casual staple Bejeweled into the game last September, PopCap has announced a free downloadable addon to World of Warcraft that lets you play their popular pachinko/pinball/plinko mashup Peggle entirely inside the MMO itself.
The addon is more than a simple UI enhancement, though, PopCap and Blizzard have tied the two games together by adding a new /peggleloot command that lets players “roll” for loot by taking their best Peggle shot.
PopCap’s also fully themed the addon with new unlockable ‘talent trees’ with special abilities that give your shots a chance to ‘crit’ on peg hits, unique ‘Peggle master’ characters, and twelve levels based on Azerothian locations.
See more screenshots and download the free addon here.
Bejeweled, Peggle World of Warcraft addons [PopCap]
One more reason to wish you were in LA (or to celebrate for being there): coming just one day after Poketo’s excellent sounding Her Space Holiday/PCP art/music exhibit is Gallery Nucleus’s Jab Strong Fierce.
Put together in collaboration with Capcom and art/game crossover mainstay iam8bit, the free exhibit brings together 40-plus designers and illustrators doing Street Fighter themed interpretations, alongside an official EVO-sponsored Street Fighter 4 tournament.
The full list of artists includes:
Adam Alaniz,
Angry Woebots,
Anthony Wu,
Becky Cloonan,
Ben Zhu,
Bill Pressing,
Bobby Chiu,
Brianne Drouhard,
Carlo Arellano,
Christian Ward,
Clement Hanami,
David Jien,
David Lee Duong,
Derek Yu,
Eric Fortune,
Francis Vallejo,
Israel Sanchez,
j. shea,
Jackson Sze,
Jim Mahfood,
Jeremy Enecio,
Jo Chen,
John Pham,
John Wu,
Jorge R. Gutierrez,
Kei Acedera,
Kevin Dart,
Khang Le,
Khylov,
Kinman Chan,
Leo Eguiarte,
Leong Wankok,
Luke Chueh,
Mari Inukai,
Martin Hsu,
Mike Alvarez,
Mindy Lee,
Nanospore,
Patrick Leger,
Robert Kondo,
Rhode Montijo,
Roland Tamayo,
Rodney Fuentebella,
Scott Gandell,
T & A,
Tang Kheng Heng and
Wayne Johnson
Bonus points to anyone that returns with a nice photo gallery of the art for Offworld to print up in the future.
The show opener will take place April 25th from 7:00PM – 11:00PM at Nucleus’s 210 East Main St location in Alhambra, and will continue through May 11th. See Nucleus’s site for more details and tournament specifics/prizes.
JAB STRONG FIERCE (STREET FIGHTER TRIBUTE SHOW) [Nucleus/iam8bit]
Slowly, slowly, the lid peels back: as more members join Q-games’ previously mentioned Facebook campaign to get one million people to buy their next PS3 downloadable PixelJunk game on launch day, the studio has kept its promise of teasing more images. At right, the first full frame photo of the game’s subterranean domain, with the first hints of liquid dynamics.
Also added, the first vehicular shot making its way through the fluid. Head over to (and join) the event page, or the PixelJunk 1-4 fan page for more information.
PixelJunk home [Q-games]
Via Ian Bogost (author of the recently mentioned book Racing the Beam, chronicling the life and times of the Atari 2600), a new project to make Atari 2600 emulation more authentic by re-introducing the ‘undesirable’ qualities of CRT televisions that have since been stripped away, qualities like color bleed and flicker that programmers purposefully relied on.
Above, one of the five solutions by Georgia Tech Computer Science students which will eventually be worked into 2600 emulator Stella as a configurable option to bring that razor sharpness back into its proper fuzzy un-focus.
See more about the ongoing project at Bogost’s site.
A TELEVISION SIMULATOR – CRT Emulation for the Atari VCS [Ian Bogost, via grandtextauto, via waxy]
