BROWSER BRAWL: STREET FIGHTER COMES TO YOUTUBE
Well spotted via Destructoid, Patrick Boivin’s Youtube Street Fighter, a fully playable (as playable as, say Dragon’s Lair), stop-motion version of the arcade classic done up with cleverly hacked overlay buttons and a frighteningly complex array of all various outcomes.
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GUITAR HERO 1.0 BEGGING FOR REAL-LIFE REMAKE
Today’s brilliant one-off gag: b3ta user ‘ianwarren’s Guitar Hero 1.0, which I’m hoping someone’s already on top of actually coding.
[b3ta, via The Internet Now In Handy Book Form]
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MEGA MAN VS… EVERYBODY AT ONCE
Rockman 2 Neta, a one-off indie hack from Japan pitting Mega Man against his greatest challenge yet. Auntie Pixelante explains:
instead of having each robot wait for megaman alone in a room, why doesn’t doctor wily just have them all jump him at once?
rockman 2 neta is a game built around exactly that design joke… and it is possible to win: that’s part of the joke.
And above, the entirely improbable seizure-inducing victory.
rockman 2 neta [auntie pixelante]
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MS PAINT THE GAMES OF 2008
Even though it’s primarily full of the hokey amateur charm you’d normally expect from threads like these, there are some entries in the NeoGAF forum’s “favorite videogame moments” MS Paint thread that are genuinely a little jaw-dropping.
Recreate your favorite videogame moments using MS Paint: 2009 Edition! [NeoGAF]
Previously:
Ye olde anagram game challenge – Offworld
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A NEW HANES BEEFY-T AWAITS
This T-shirt — fortuitously spotted by a twitter search, and, I’ve just sussed out, purchased by Southampton DJ James Zabiela — is just a few quick fixes away from being an amazing bit of site merch.
No luck finding my own, but at very least I’ve just learned the kanji for Offworld. [Update: Buy it here at Last Exit To Nowhere, thanks Transmission3000!]
Offworld Colonies t-shirt [via search.twitter]
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DRINKING TO EXCESS
An excellent year-end list from designer Steve Gaynor which focuses (with minor spoilers intact — unfocus your eyes to get past the bits you might not want to see) on the top ‘moments’ rather than games perfectly pointed out one of Grand Theft Auto IV‘s greatest charms:
In both scope and fidelity, it’s safe to call GTA4 an epic production. And really there was no better investment made than their decision to embrace Euphoria character physics…
Nowhere is this better showcased than in the game’s implementation of a drunken state: Nico and his drinking buddies stumble, lean, wobble, catch themselves, trip and fall with amazing dynamism, fully expressing a feeling of being out of control of one’s own body, and providing enormous comic relief as well.
For as much as it was a technical achievement, it was an acting one as well: Niko’s drunken dialogue diversion back into old-country pidgin English made him so much more complete and sympathetic a character, particularly his cab-hailing “yellow carrrr!”
Read the rest of Gaynor’s list for more excellent momentous choices from Yakuza 2, Rock Band 2, and No More Heroes.
MOTY 08 [Fullbright]
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TO AN UGH-MECK FUTURE
Very much enjoyed this recent column by Chris ‘Save the Robot’ Dahlen on a future of “user-generated, machine-mediated content” in games. Given the examples we’ve seen of the 90-9-1 rule falling short in games like LittleBigPlanet (his implication being that there’s a lot of thumb-twiddling waiting for that top 10 percent to create and share), Dahlen suggests a number of mediated ways to pull recognizably personal content into games:
Ever since Twitter exploded, people have written many programs to parse and analyze and psychoanalyze what people are typing. How about just porting it into a game? In The World Ends With You, players can “scan” the thoughts of the people around them. The canned text written for the game is good, but I’d love to eavesdrop real-time in real Twitter feeds.
– So many games include bathrooms. Why can’t we all write on the walls?
– I’m a sucker for a good Flickr mash-up. If you throw in a few tags and search for photos marked “interesting,” you get fascinating results – for example, my favorite one, Snapp Radio: an Internet DJ plays a song; Snapp Radio looks up the tags for that song on Last.fm; it uses those tags to find relevant photos on Flickr. Sometimes you get photos of the band, but in one case, I was listening to a Clash song and saw street riots, pictures of George Bush, and awful mismatched furniture – the colors “clashed.” It’s a bit of a parlor trick, but I’d love to see more games use pics this way, for a collage effect or just for a headtrip. I understand Little Big Planet will be able to import your pics by right about now. But I’d love to integrate with Flickr as well. Surprise me.
User-Generated, Machine-Mediated Content [Save the Robot]
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I GET ABOUT 55 PERCENT OF THESE FAILS
Even though my humor doesn’t quite fully extend to stack memory overwrite funnies, if anonymous-submission game bug/comment/build error blog I Get Your Fail keeps up with screenshots like the above (and the unbelievably awesome black-hole-sun pair), it might become my favorite games-related blog of 2009.
See also: Media Molecule’s beautiful breakdown.
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FOR FURTHER READING: GEARS OF WAR AS LIFE AQUATIC, LION LEGS, OFFWORLD
I was tempted to not follow up our earlier link to Simon Parkin’s first Best Games Writing list with his second, if only out of humility, as inside he does call Offworld his “favourite new videogame site of 2008” (next to Sci Fi network/Tom Chick’s Fidgit), but, hrm, right, it does have too many good things within to ignore.
Apart from Margaret’s debut One More Go column, he calls out an excellent IGN [!] piece on Gears of War 2, which beside Parkin’s quoted paragraph contains a wonderfully apt comparison of GoW to the delayed adolescence combat-games in The Life Aquatic, as well Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson’s review-response to a GameFaqs message board poster on whether you could drive into and break the legs off a lion in Sony’s PlayStation 3 safari sim Afrika.
Best Games Writing of 2008: Part 2 [chewing pixels]
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THE CRYING GAME
Having reached her breaking point on the tire-less/-some swirls of ‘can a game make you cry’ debate, Offworld’s own One More Go columnist Margaret has a lovely final (?) response on the matter, said wonderfully here:
Tears shouldn’t be our goal. Stories don’t need to be our tools. The majority of art forms don’t rely on narrative for their emotional impact. Stop and think about that for a second. The games industry tends to draw on such an amazingly limited roster of inspirations that it’s easy to forget it. But our obsession with linear, story-based – word-based, even – non-participatory art at the expense of all the other forms makes life so much harder for games, and it makes me crazy.
Read more, and her related GDC metagame plan, via her blog.
Snapping point [Lookspring]
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