One part Donkey Konga, two parts of Toshio Iwai’s studio art, and a hint of super clean Swiss design: UCLA game design work shop student George Michael Brower’s Rhythm Game I is a little bit retro-rhythm and a little bit future-cool.
Rhythm Game I post mortem [George Michael Brower, via Attract Mode]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
Spotted — and then quickly snapped up by — Gamasutra’s Simon Carless, this fantastic etsy find in which loudxmouse enhances thrift store junk paintings by adding a rolling katamari into the landscape.
Note to the artist: Please, please make this an ongoing series so I can grab the next?
custom katamari painting by loudxmouse [etsy, via Simon]
Previously:
Beautiful Star: Katamari Damacy Tribute coming to PS3 – Offworld
Katamari Damacy coming to DSi as… a block puzzle game? – Offworld
iPhone Katamari gets Exquisite addition – Offworld
Katasushi Damacy in a Bento Box – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
Following their ‘modern classics’ work in 2008 on an Atari 2600 demake’d cover series, the Minus World returns with NES-ized covers of modern favorites like Fallout 3, Animal Crossing, LittleBigPlanet and Call of Duty.
NES Modern Classics [The -Minus World]
Previously:
Olly Moss's Penguin-inspired Videogame Classics covers – Offworld
UUDDLRLRBA-Rock: 8-bit Guitar Hero comes to the NES – Offworld
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 2600) – Offworld
The Venture Brothers goes 2600 – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
This is several months old, but I’ve just run across and was very taken with this Volkswagen-esque Street Fighter image by Cleveland based illustrator and designer Oliver Barrett.
It was designed for flickr-favorite-meme Make Something Cool Every Day, the same undertaking that has brought us the game-covers-as-Penguin-Classics-books of Olly Moss, and the I Can Read Movies artwork of Mitch ‘Spacesick’ Ansara (as well as Mz. Kat’s engrish children’s book illustrations).
Coincidentally, Barrett’s also the designer behind the excellently nostalgic illo at left, which I’d neglected to mention here at the time.
oliveroliverbarrett [flickr, via Augusto Daniele]
Previously:
Moss gets modern: GTA's most wanted America – Offworld
The meme in motion: Spacesick's It's a Dig, Dig, Dig, Dig Dug …
Engrish.com t-shirts re-imagined as Mary Blair-style children’s book illos – Boing Boing
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
Right, well, there’s my week made: every once in a while there’s a game that seems to know exactly which of your buttons to press and before you know it you’re smitten. This time it’s Kimi to Boku to Rittai (You, Me and the Shapes), a new WiiWare game from former D2 creator and Newtonica collaborator Kenji Eno.
The gameplay? Deceptively simple: drop helpless and unpredictable people onto a series of ever-more-complex interconnected cubes and attempt to maintain some semblance of balance and harmony.
The hook? God, just look at that retro-future shiny vector style that sits so perfectly next to Newtonica‘s star-spheres. The game is expected to hit stateside WiiWare in coming months, and appears that it’ll give Nintendo and Skip’s own ArtStyle series a serious run for their money.
Kimi to Boku to Rittai home [Nintendo]
Previously:
The Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie & Overlooked (pg. 3)
Touch me I'm slick: the iPhone's top Lite versions you shouldn't …
DSi getting more downloadable Art Style, Tetris Attack – Offworld
DSiWare getting double cubic Art Style games, Animal Crossing …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
Last month I pointed to a fantastic “true stories” promotional video showing the curious inspiration for Hudson’s iPhone tower defense game Elemental Monster TD [iTunes link], in which a low-poly company director Takahashi Meijin berated underlings for not being able to top the success of competitor Fieldrunners.
Now, the studio has created a brilliant second episode that genuinely makes you wonder why you never noticed the mechanical similarities between ‘sushi-go-round‘ restaurants and the unceasing onslaught of tower defense enemies.
ElementalMonster TD home [DoTheHudson!, iTunes link]
Previously:
Tower defense mechanisms: Hudson call out Fieldrunners in …
Watermelons beware: Hudson's Shooting Watch comes to the iPhone …
New towers loom: Fieldrunners update imminent – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
It’s not clear how or when the meme started, but I’m happy it did: DarkZero has stumbled across San Francisco designer David Cole’s TwitéDex, a complete guide to all Pokemon currently utilizing Twitter, with “privilege given to accounts written in-character.”
For better or worse, I suppose, the majority of the conversational traffic is about on the level of your average 4chan post, but Cole (who appears to run the appropriate Professor Oak account) does find the occasional gem.
Chart detailing Pokémon presence on Twitter with privilege given to accounts written in-character [David Cole, via DarkZero]
Previously:
Left 4 Dead: the twits don't stand a chance – Offworld
Call of Duty creators Infinity Ward launch their Twitter …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
The game that’s getting the biggest buzz from this year’s GDC Experimental Gameplay Sessions? Christopher Hazard and Michael Resnick’s Achron, which — contrary to (my) first impression — isn’t a typo of the classic EA board/strategy game, but is instead a “meta-time strategy game.”
That is to say it makes Braid‘s back-and-forth-scrubbing time manipulations look like baby business next to its own essentially asynchronous (in every respect) multiplayer strategy. The video above gives a general idea how a multiplayer game might operate — with the ability to manipulate your troops within a window of each time-wave and erase potential mistakes — and is the only gameplay instruction in which you’ll hear a developer refer to “when your enemy is” without skipping a beat.
More info on and more videos of the game are available at the official Achron site.
Achron – Time Travel is Coming [Hazardous Software]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
Lazy web request time: thatgirlssite doesn’t know where the above iPhone case comes from, but it’s out there in the wilds of Japan somewhere, and would go so perfectly with Rob Sheridan’s iGameboy Springboard theme that we need to put our collective heads together to find a source to buy it.
Cool Iphone Case [thatgirlssite, roundabout via LuciferJackass]
Previously:
iGameboy: Gameboy custom theme for iPhone – Boing Boing Gadgets
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
Cactus is a name I haven’t mentioned nearly enough on Offworld (in fact, the last time I gave him his due was in 2007 when his Clean Asia and Protoganda: Strings topped my top 5 freeware games list).
Apart from being one-eighth of last week’s Game Over/Continue indie dev/art crossover team, he’s one of the indie scene’s… well, prolific is too tame a word, and attention deficient sounds far too pejorative: let’s just say that Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho’s PC desktop is a photo of Cactus saying “while you were slacking off I made three more games,” and realize that it’s funny because it’s true.
From the grain-filtered 8mm stylings of his shooters to the terrifying Lynch-ian void of his Mondo series to the candy striped sunburst pixels of his upcoming games, he possesses one of the most singular and distinct visions in the scene, and manages to keep that consistent despite the jackrabbit pace with which he takes on new projects.
That’s why I was so disappointed to have missed the first half of his over-capacity Indie Games Summit session (until I convinced a volunteer I’d just stepped out for a bathroom break), though what I did see was every bit as uniquely him as I’d expected. Managing to make all the sweat and tears of game creation look like melodramatic trifles, his dual underlying message of keeping-it-simple and going-with-instinct was one of the most inspiring of the two days.
And now, though it doesn’t have the narration to match (there is a bootleg video torrent making its way around the internet, however), you can play through his fantastic presentation slides (created, of course, in GameMaker software itself) by downloading his just-uploaded executable (.zip here) and get a taste of his flavor before moving on to tackling his prodigious back-library. Get more of a sense of the surrounding lecture by flipping through TIGSource’s write-up here.
[As a further bonus, at the end of the lecture Cactus played through a series of games he found inspiring, which indiegames has helpfully cataloged here — see especially I Was In The War.]
Cactus 4 Hour Game Presentation [zip, via CactusSquid]
Previously:
Indie Games Summit: 2D Boy/Polytron's top 10 ways to market your …
Indie Games Summit: Ron Carmel explains 2D Boy by the numbers …Indie Games Summit: Polytron debut new Fez trailer – Offworld
Giant Robot, artxgame announces Game Over/Continue? exhibit – Offworld
Only on Offworld: indie game and artist all-stars collide at Giant …
See more posts about: Cactus, Offworld Originals
