If you’ve only got one hour for an indie game this week, make that game Terry Cavanagh and Stephen “increpare” Lavelle’s Judith.
Like Gravity Bone, it’s a game where less up-front explanation is better, but I’ll give away this much: imagine a parallel universe where Id had used its cutting edge 1992 technology not to create a game about escaping a Nazi prison and hunting down a robotic Hitler, but instead to tell a simple story through shifting narratives and timelines, each shift peeling away one more narrative layer and giving you subtle hints about where you’ll be headed in the next.
It’s heady, atmospheric stuff, and, like last week’s Enviro-bear 2000, probably a very early winner of the week’s best indie development.
A cheap gimmick to be sure, but also undeniably kind of awesomely charming. Also available, a bit more sadly, as a single shirt and transmitter pack that can be placed near a more inanimate love.
Richard Lemarchand’s microtalks turned out to be one of the finest and most inspiring sessions of GDC, and the one session archetype I hope will turn into a new long-lasting tradition. Taking its cues from the Pecha Kucha tradition of ’20 slides auto-advancing every 20 seconds’, it was a rapidfire series of speakers giving rapidfire ideas on the concept of “play.”
Of all the speeches, perhaps the most practically focused was Boom Blox producer Robin Hunicke’s series on “Simple Game Mechanics for Real and Virtual Play Spaces,” or, put more simply (and reduced maybe a bit unfairly), what Sony can do to fix their PS3 virtual world Home.
Hunicke was disappointed to learn, she said, that her assumptions about the space — that, coming from a game publisher, this virtual world would “blend the best of free expression, openess and structured activity” — were quickly stymied when she found that by and large the most prevalent pastime in Home was “dudes… harassing any female avatar,” and attempting to create their own emergent “fun” by exploiting collision physics to do things like standing on benches and sitting on railings and other avatar’s shoulders.
So, imagining herself as queen of Home for a day, she came up with easy ideas to bring her overarching “4 C’s” of game design — Creativity, Collection, Competition, Community — to the space and imagined new ways for people to interact. (more…)
Following the previously blogged LSDJ/LGPT dub ep from Simon Mattison, the latest album from netlabel mp3death is Cheap Dirt from Rutger ‘DS-10 Dominator’ Muller.
As you might expect from his alias, Muller’s album was composed entirely on a single copy of Korg’s DS-10 synthesizer, and, he adds:
No post-processing of the audio has been done. All sounds are synthesized, there’s no sampling involved. Genres covered are: minimal, techno, electro, acid, dubstep, uk garage, drum n bass, ambient, etc.
mp3death add, in their own typical quasi-poetical fashion:
Enchanted with drum & A computer on
and jupiter is cut everything else,
turn the Most synthesizer preset
bass and then boost that notoriously famous
sessions by soundsystems
no midi control so your beat can offer
that paradoxically mix primitivistic
lo-fi and comfortable again.
Listen to the stream below, particularly the standout downtempo track “Sea Son” (skip to track six) or download the entire album via archive.org.
I was entirely set on passing off PopCap’s new viral video for their oft-blogged Plants vs. Zombies as little more than cutely disposable, but then, 30 seconds in, it suddenly turns so inexplicably and sublimely bizarre that I can’t stop hitting replay.
As Xbox Live Arcade flagship title Braid makes its PC debut (or mostly, anyway, the Steam release seems to have been delayed to tomorrow, check Impulse, Greenhouse and Gamersgate for the download and demo), artist David Hellman updates to note that an “official” soundtrack has been put together for sale with all of the tracks licensed for the game.
With contributions from Jami Sieber, Shira Kammen, Cheryl Ann Fulton and two remixes by Jon Schatz, the album is being offered for download at a variable rate — set your own price between $5 to $18 — or on CD for an extra $6 on top of that (UK and Euro prices also available).
While it’s clear that not everyone has the same grasp on what makes a Criterion cover a Criterion cover, there are enough that do in this latest collective burst of creativity from the NeoGAF forum that makes it very worth mentioning.
My favorites? See above, especially the Eric Carle-ish open question of Noby Noby Boy and pointillist death-burst of Killer 7.
Keeping up a media “blitz” as understated as the game itself, IGN has posted an extended look at Night Game, the forthcoming original WiiWare title from Nicalis, the same studio behind the WiiWare remake of cult indie hit Cave Story.
