Move into the archive more deeply, though and Gil-Fournier attempts to take on much headier and more timely subjects: Venezuelan constitutional amendments as pachinko, the movement of money through tax havens as a rhythm game, and a reflection on the bombed home of Palestinian astrophysicist Suleiman Baraka as a constellation making game.
The latest trailer for ngmoco’s upcoming 3D spherical tower defense game Star Defense might not show off any overt gameplay, but I bring it up here because it may be the highest/first near-console quality cinematic we’ve seen for any iPhone game thus far, don’t you think?
With their hand seemingly forced by One More Go’s recent ode to the Zelda game too few have played, Nintendo have updated their European Virtual Console lineup with the surprise addition of the Nintendo 64’s time-travelling sequel Majora’s Mask.
Much of the subsequent discussion around the column was centered on finding a way to play through the game, so hopefully this is a signal that it’ll be coming stateside in the next few weeks as well.
I’m not sure how many in the games sphere have been paying attention to Coudal Partners’ game of Layer Tennis, so if you’re not familiar, the gist is that two competitors (read: designers) volley a single file (read: PhotoShop doc) back and forth every 15 minutes, adding, subtracting, and generally modifying each other’s work.
Time for another fireside chat with a developer. This time it’s a programmer named Chris Delay, the man who is the algorithmic heart of independent developer/publisher Introversion. These British independents are just a couple of years younger than me, and they started out when I started out as a journalist. As a result I’ve followed their progress quite closely.
They’ve gone from making a quietly clever hacking game through to talking about procedural generation of urban landscapes as the key theme to their latest, unrevealed game, Subversion. What follows is a perspective that is neither that of a fundamentally “indie” team like 2D Boy, nor that of a mainstream developer. Introversion have, somehow, cut their own path. It’s a fascinating story that promises to get even more interesting in the years to come.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be familiar with the world of Introversion “Last Of The Bedroom Programmers” Software, so let’s look back at what you’ve been doing over the past eight years. Chris, what have you been doing?
Chris Delay: Well, we’re quite a small developer, and we started out in 2001 with a hacking game called Uplink. That was basically a game I made while I was at university. We launched that from our website, and got it into high-streets in the UK. That did quite well, really, and then we spent about three years making our second game, Darwinia. That was a strange game, which won awards and got good reviews, but it took so long to make that we had to troll along for nine months with zero income. Eventually, finally, we got the game out on Steam, and it was the Steam deal which finally brought us a little big of financial security. Darwinia hadn’t sold well on launch, so having the Steam guys put it on their system got us a comparatively huge number of sales.
I’m still processing that bit about retail in the UK. You got your indie game about hacking on shelves in the UK?
CD: Yeah, it was a pretty major coup for us. It was about 2002, and so the game had been sale on our website. None of us knew anything about how this stuff worked. Mark and Tom went into HMV on the highstreet and asked a guy behind the counter how to get a game on their shelves. This guy said they had to speak to the manager, and he told them to speak to a distributor. We ended up speaking to Pinnacle Software and made a deal to have the units distributed to shops. We produced all the units, so we were acting as publisher and developer. It gave us a huge amount of confidence, we felt we could genuinely operate as an indie publisher and developer. It was a different market then, however. (more…)
Proof positive you can never predict where the next meme will spring from: collected via “There Will Be No Animated Gifs In This Blog”, an apparent glitch in Nintendo 64 classic Goldeneye that causes in game characters to just plain freak out when you so little as tilt the cart has spawned a new video craze on Japanese viral video site Nico Nico Douga.
Below, my favorite:
Hit the link below for other examples, or search “ゲッダン” (‘gets down’).
You may recall reading about the WiiSpray virtual graffitti project about a year ago — when all designer Martin Lihs had to show was his prototype WiiMote spray can — but now he’s created this teaser video showing the project in motion, with virtual stencils and all.
Adds Lihs: “Remember – this is only Nintendo Wii technics and Flash!”
Someone please bring this to the next GDC so we can all have a go.
The results are half magical, half vaguely disturbing, and just a teeny, tiny, wee bit luridly anatomically correct (which Wired was, of course, far too proper to let slip into their pages).
