If the thought of having to track down his work from street corner to street corner fatigues you: Milan’s The Don Gallery is currently exhibiting the work of three French street/guerrilla artists, most notably Offworld favorite Space Invader.
From the opening night snapshots by French blog Guillotine, he’s showing off both his more traditional pixel/invader mosaics and his more recently devised ‘Rubikism’ series, pixel portraits by reshuffled and re-stuck sides of Rubik’s Cubes.
The exhibition runs through the 20th of April, just enough time for a post-GDC jetset jaunt to Italy.
After a few scarce quick teased photos earlier this month, ngmoco have uploaded the first video of their 3D spherical tower defense game Star Defense, and it wasn’t until just this moment that I realized how much the tower defense genre rests on your ability to size up the entire play-field at once, and how much more hectic having most of it obscured will be. Luckily, the multi-touch/zoom mechanics in place look like they’ll fit the bill quite nicely.
My travels to San Francisco for GDC have delayed me from mentioning this, but for the rest of the weekend, Valve’s Steam service has put all its indie selection on discount, from Darwinia to Gish to World of Goo.
Also of note, Tale of Tales’ art/horror game The Path, above, has just been released on the service and comes recommended. Though I haven’t yet had the chance to play through the full version (and, frustratingly, won’t be able to until I’m back home in a week), but the short time I spent with its protagonist Ruby in last year’s GDC demo has had it high on my anticipated list since.
If you’ve played through their IGF nominated game The Graveyard, you’ll know generally what to expect: a similarly unconventional experience that, in contrast to the end-of-life reflection in that game, retells the Little Red Riding Hood story and approaches horror from a coming-of-age perspective of six young girls — the big bad wolf here represented by predatory men.
I’m sitting in a hotel room with a girl I barely know. She is beautiful, but sad and close to tears. The man she loves has deserted her, and she feels like her world has ended. I know she’s wrong, but don’t seem to have the words to tell her why. Her world hasn’t ended. She is still loved, will still be loved, if only she would save herself. But she won’t. Consumed by the past, bereaved by her loss, she’s paralysed. Oblivious to the fact that a very different horror – concrete, violent, terminal – is threatening to end not just her world, but that of her family, her absent lover and everyone she’s ever cared about. Me too, now I come to think of it. But the words won’t come, and so I stand here, counting down to the end of the world one tear at a time. And then, at the last sad second, time loops backwards and everything begins again.
I’m sitting in a hotel room with a man I barely know. He isn’t beautiful, or sad, or paralysed, but he is oblivious. Not oblivious to the end of the world, however. He’s oblivious to a game called The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and that means he’s also oblivious to the unbearably bittersweet experience of sharing the end of the world with Anju as she sits in her bedroom in Clock Town’s hotel, mourning the disappearance of her fiance. And so I tell him about it, trying to condense dozens of hours of brave, benevolent adventuring into five short minutes. And then, at the last frustrating second, time loops backwards and everything begins again. (more…)
Here’s what I know for sure: as mentioned back in December, Square-Go broke the first news of what will be the Xbox Live Arcade debut for Scotland’s Denki (headed by Crackdown designer Gary Penn), Quarrel. The site described the game as ‘Scrabble x Risk x Countdown’, where strategic territorial control was hard won by word-game battles between warring areas.
At the time, it looked quite nice, in Denki’s traditional primary colored way (see also: Denki Blocks / Go Go Beckham), but my eyes did bug out slightly when the studio sent over these new work-in-progress shots of the game, seeing that tradition now amped up gorgeously.
Here’s what I’m still not sure of: well, how it plays, other than in the vaguest terms, with Denki continuing to evolve the game over the past several months, but! Denki’s own David Thomson is currently in my own city of Austin, and is apparently carrying on his person a paper prototype of the game which, with any luck, I’ll have in my hands in less than a day from now, and can update accordingly. For now, rest your weary eyes on these for a jolt of that Denki spirit.
Knowing you’re curious how its faux-dual-analog controls will operate and how robust its net-code will be, and knowing you probably haven’t clicked through to the streamable Apple conference tape, ngmoco have helpfully directly uploaded new footage of its newly announced multiplayer iPhone FPS LiveFire.
Touch-screen FPSs are a hard sell, but their thumb solution is looking very viable — plus, the physical interaction needed to jump (a shake of the iPhone) could finally mean an end to the usual bunny-hopping madness of most online shooters.
Designer and papercraft artist Jason Harlan packages his ‘boxpunx’ paper productions as “albums,” the latest of which — a 24 track double album called My Virtual Memory — documents Harlan’s favorite games from throughout the years as ‘3D fanart.’
After starting with the obvious — Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Silent Hill, Resident Evil — Harlan quickly diversifies in a number of directions from Hideo Kojima’s Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk thriller Snatcher (possibly my favorite of the bunch), to recent hardcore RPG releases like One More Go favoriteDisgaea, Soul Nomad, Baroque, Odin Sphere and Ar Tonelico.
MY VIRTUAL MEMORY [harlancore, thanks to Elliot, who adds that Harlan’s Persona 4 series “will never fail to bring a smile to your face, whether you played the game or not.”]
Taking a break from the teasing for something a bit more tangible, Fez and Power Pill creators Polytron have just opened their 0.1 web store, offering five variations of its Gomez shirt featuring a sequential sprite rip of the Fez star, and three of the Polytron Portable Pro, their Mobira-esque Game Boy straight out of 1982’s imagined future.
The site actually appears to be down at the moment, but Japanese news outlet inside-games brings word that Game Freak/Polygraph’s previously mentioned brilliant joint venture POKÉMON 151 — creating art-style T-shirts for adults — has shown off these new upcoming designs.
While I’m quite taken by Tangela‘s slithering digit-stealing sinews and the chocolate/pink simplicity of the Mew, the ‘danger: falling rocks’ visual pun on the Graveler shirt (and turning its number into a highway marker) possibly tops the whole series so far.
