As Jim alluded to in his most recent column, one of my favorite memories of this year’s GDC was watching both him and PC Gamer UK’s Tim Edwards trip over themselves for the words to describe exactly what they’d witnessed in seeing Eskil Steenberg painterly, user edited, generative FPS MMO Love. Words failed them then, words quickly break down into a pile of descriptors that don’t quite mesh correctly in the brain (as just then) and I think still don’t quite have the impact that they should.
But the time for words is steadily growing shorter: capping off a long reflection on controller schemes, feedback loops, and Quake‘s online multiplayer ’50 Milli Second rocket prediction,’ Steenberg has dropped a tiny grenade in our laps with this: “Next week when i get back home from LA, my first alpha will go out…” Hopefully we’ll have a few more words of our own to stumble through soon.
LittleBigPlanet creator ‘physicslike’ (who is also behind a few of LBP‘s Tetris creations) appears to have dumbfounded even Media Molecule themselves with the new ‘Automatic Reversi’ level, which I can personally now attest rivals the Gradius remake as one of the most ingenious rule-breaking stages yet created.
As above, the level lets players use black and white stickers to plot their next Othello move which, awesomely, sets in motion a series of clockwork events just barely visible behind the board that queues it for the next move. Your best bet to try it — with its all -kana name, is to search via the ‘physicslike’ username, where you’ll also find a number of other interesting machinework tests.
Well, that was short-lived: just days after launching the by all rights completely excellent data scraped social networking site Sackbook, Sony have sent mastermind Chris Warren a cease and desist until “they take a look at how the data is accessed to ensure everything is safe and lovely (it is, but they are right to make sure of such important things).”
That shatters my theory, then, that Media Molecule had to be at least in part co-conspirators, and certainly ups my respect for his bit-jacking methods.
All eyes might currently be on LittleBigPlanet for the new wave of user generated content, but I’m very happy to see Travis Hendricks’s enterprising series of retro remakes in EA’s Boom Blox. Hendricks covered all the bases from Donkey Kong to Galaga to Pac-Man to Super Mario Bros. to Duck Hunt, and eagle eyes might spot that the last one does indeed look like it was meant to include a dog you can finally, finally, bean for all the years of merciless taunting.
Spotted via Tiny Cartridge and winner of today’s seriously?-most-unlikely-license goes to Zoo Digital and Elephant’s forthcoming Love Is… In Bloom expected just after the new year for Wii and DS.
Elephant’s site appears to have been crushed from the preponderance of in-bound love, but Zoo says the game will feature (as Tiny Cartridge aptly recalls) the Homer-Simpson-described “two naked eight-year-olds who are married” building “the best Florist shop around, by “preparing the soil and planting seeds to grow magnificent flowers that you can then sell them in your very own Flower shop to earn money and grow a little empire.”
We’re obviously not the target market here, but I’m also struggling to figure out who is, and only slightly unnerved by the image of even a little empire of the wo/man-children.
In his purple plastic new-wave shades, Jetdaisuke speaks the universal language of awesome in explaining how to construct a portable talkbox out of a plastic straw, a DSi, and Xseed’s Korg DS-10 software. If anyone needs me, I’ll be off recording my krautrock cover of Pete Drake’s previously featured ‘Forever’.
After burning through old stock in a Black Friday fire sale, games T-shirt design co. Meat Bun has revealed their new slate of product with five fresh designs, and it’s hard to choose a favorite.
If you Blip Festers haven’t come home all burnt out on square waves, the wonderfully named Doctor Octoroc has uploaded a 9-track preview of his unfinished (how many more can he come up with?) Christmas chip-tune album, each song done in the style of a different NES game from ‘Little Drummer Nemo’ to ‘The Legend of Noel’ to ‘Super Jingle Bros.’
Try as I might, I can’t come up with any suggestions for the second half (due by the new year, at the latest) better than one commenter’s wish for “a Metroid title music inspired ‘Silent Night.'”
I was set on not thinking much of this cheerily morbid little video based on description alone, but some mix of the Byrne and the hammered-home message about the thankless plight and futility in the games we play (and, by proxy, the life we live) won me over pretty quickly.
As Resigned’s ‘Sir Cucumber’ puts it:
I’ve never believed in much, but in my youth I held a private article of faith that in the extra mode of Balloon Fight if I just kept going a little bit longer, if I just held on, something good would happen. It had to. Or else what was the point?
A small part of me still wants to believe this, but I know better now.
Indie designer Edmund McMillen, the mind behind 2004’s excellent tar-ball platformer Gish, has just shown off No Quarter, his next game coming in early 2009.
McMillen describes No Quarter as an “album” of retro inspired mashup games, with a tracklist (as seen above) which so far includes:
Since it was announced before Offworld launched, I’ll also note that McMillen has just self-released a similarly album-like retrospective of his games and comics called This is a Cry For Help, which includes versions of web games like Meat Boy, Tri-achnid, Aether and Coil, as well as unreleased bonus material from commercial games like Gish and Blast Miner.
A full contents list can be seen here, with a trailer here on YouTube. His work has a tendency toward the dark (sensitive gamers warned), but is always thoughtfully tempered, smartly done and comes highly recommended.
