HARDER, BETTER: SHANE BROUWER’S DAFT PUNK: THE GAME
Let’s be completely honest: it’s obviously not going to win any design awards, but Shane Brouwer’s Daft Punk: The Game — in which the band attempts to recover all its samples stolen by rival electro-duo Justice — is still a decent way to kill 10 minutes of your day, if only because doing the head-jump combos is every bit as satisfying as Super Mario‘s Koopa shell chains.
Play it via pedestrian.tv.
Daft Punk: The Game [Pedestrian.tv]
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VIDEO: BILL O’REILLY GETS WISE TO SUPER MARIO
Spotted via Gawker, Bill O’Reilly and his Peabody Polk award winning crew at Inside Edition report on the emerging world of Nintendo, at a time when the Mario name meant Puzo more than plumber.
As a bonus, a look behind the scenes at Game Counselor HQ, and another teasing glance at that gold-covered ‘Zelda Tips and Tactics’ booklet that used to sing its (too expensive for a pre-teen) siren song to me from every. single. issue. of Nintendo Power.
Nintendo 1988 Inside Edition TV news report with Super Mario [YouTube, via Gawker, and man, why have I never thought to search for a scan of Zelda T&T until just now, all of that via .tiff]
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RAGDOLL METAPHYSICS: CLOUD GAMING IS THE NEBULOUS SHAPE OF UBIQUITOUS GAMING
Science fiction has a habit of becoming reality a lot faster than we imagine. One of my favourite books, The Shape Of Further Things by Brian Aldiss, is a series of rambling, random essays written at the end of the Sixties. In it he suggested that one day we’d all be connected by an all-encompassing information network called “The Big Hookup” and we’ll be able to access it with remote devices that we all carry around with us independently. Crazy talk, Brian, really. That technology is centuries away.
Last year, at GDC 2008, I sat in a room with a bunch of the world’s most experienced developers, as they outlined science fiction ideas about how gaming might work in the future: how games might be rendered remotely on giant super-computing clusters and then streamed to our homes. A year later the tech was being demoed – apparently live and functional – at the same event.
Cloud gaming, the idea of “games on demand” proposed by startup services like OnLive and Gaikai, suggests that the days of us buying powerful home processing hardware – be it consoles or PCs – could be numbered. The theory that these services ride on is that they will be able to render and stream games directly to “thin” client side devices: nothing more than a gamepad, a screen, and the processor required to decode the video stream. All the big graphics crunching will be done by the servers, and at our end a low-spec laptop will do the job.
So the age old cycle of upgrading from one generation of hardware to the next will be over: be it on your work PC, or via a small box under your TV, that’s all that even the most high-end gaming will require. This is a huge step, because it’s secure from piracy and cheating, and because it won’t suffer from the problems that we currently have in getting games working on our laptop, or home PC. It is, in that shiny 1950s jetpack sense of the word, The Future. (more…)
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HUGE OFFICIAL TAITO T-SHIRTS ARE APPROACHING FAST
Today’s other necessary additions to your T-shirt collection: stateside import house NCSX has begun taking pre-orders for these official retro designs straight from Japan developer Taito, with both expected to ship in April.
On the left, obviously, their original arcade hit Bubble Bobble, on the right, the huge and clearly fast approaching battle ship King Fossil from their 1994 arcade shooter Darius Gaiden.
Bubble Bobble shirt / Darius Gaiden shirt [NCSX]
Previously:
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FEISAR AND CONSOLES AND BEARS: EDGE MAGAZINE OPENS ONLINE SHOP
Cruelly currently restricted to the UK and Europe, UK games mag Edge has opened a new store to directly order T-shirts and goods previously only given away as subscription gifts.
In addition to the shirt designs shown above (the Edge logo in a full console setup collection, an officially licensed Team Feisar logo from Wipeout, and, my favorite, the bear), they’ve also got a 200-postcard set of every cover used for their recent issue 200 blowout that I very much need to get my hands on.
Visit the store directly for more ordering information.
Edge Store Opens For Business [Edge Online]
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GIMME INDIE GAME: SHEN GAMES’ DON’T SAVE THE PRINCESS
Like Polygon ★ Gmen’s Transmover, indie dev and illustrator Alexander Shen’s Don’t Save the Princess! is a dead simple idea compounded smartly over a series of levels, with adorably restrained graphic style.
The essence: manipulate directional blocks in quasi-Chu Chu Rocket style (though more cerebrally to that game’s inherent chaos) to force an 8-bit executioner away from the bound princess and into the jaws of the patiently awaiting monster.
New in Shen Games’ latest version, a full level editor that lets you share custom levels via an exported file. Leave the URLs of your cleverest creations in the comments below!
Don’t Save the Princess! [Shen Games, via TIGSource]
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EDIT AWAY: BRAID LEVEL EDITOR GETS A NEW HOME
Well, that came faster than expected: as promised, Braid creator Jon Blow has updated the official game site with a downloadable starter package and the first draft of documentation for the level editor included in the PC (and forthcoming Mac) version of the game.
Head to the Braid Blog for the full details and instructions.
The Braid Level Creation Thread [Braid Blog]
Previously:
- Time lord: PC version of Braid contains full level editor – Offworld
- Listen: celebrate Braid’s PC release with original soundtrack, remixes – Offworld
- Penny Arcade game devs bringing Braid to Mac, The Maw to PC – Offworld
- DESIGN REBOOT HD: Braid dev's "games as cheap drugs" lecture …
- Xbox Live Arcade hit puzzler Braid coming to PC in March – Offworld
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ENDLESS LOOP: TWC’S ACADEMIC STUDY OF CHIPTUNE HISTORY
From the good things in unexpected places dept.: academic journal Transformative Works has devoted its latest issue to the subject of games, and chief amongst its best pieces is MIT students Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz’s exhaustive look at the history and rise of the chiptune genre.
From the earliest hardware hacking days of the Atari 2600, to the landmark creation of the SID chip (right, used most famously in the Commodore 64) to the concurrent Amiga cracking/tracking/demo scenes, Driscoll sets up the aesthetic roots of what would later be embraced by the likes of upstart (and still prolific) netlabel micromusic.net.
Driscoll also very adeptly covers the split between chiptune music for its own sake and its somewhat tenuous association with “videogame music” itself (a subject broached often in 2pp’s Reformat the Planet documentary), and the trend of covering formerly chipped music with live instruments (see: the Minibosses, et al).
It’s a fantastic and very readable primer to the scene, and an informative read even for old hats.
Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes [Transformative Works]
Previously:
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A QUICK LOOK INTO THE CROWDSOURCING POTENTIAL OF WARIOWARE: MADE IN ORE
Outside of the bit Generations (or, as it’s now known, Art Style) series, the WarioWare franchise and its chaotic strings of one to two-second-long microgames remains one of Nintendo’s boldest experiments after decades of safer and more traditionalist design.
Though each subsequent iteration (from motion-sensitive twisting, to DS original touching, to Wii-mote smooth-moving) has seen the refreshingly belligerent streak of the Game Boy Advance original necessarily tamed as it asked for more motor skill precision, the latest volume, now fully detailed for the first time in Japan, has laid the series’ fate in your hands.
While still not officially announced for the U.S. (though a shoe-in to appear), the latest DS version, Made in Ore (roughly, Made In Me), has taken the series for a decidedly crowd-sourced turn and will let players fully design, share and remix their own microgames — as well as comics and music. (more…)
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LISTEN (AND THEN PLAY): BOY IN STATIC’S TOY BABY GRAND
The best thing that’s landed in my mailbox so far this week: Alex Chen, half of pop-duo Boy In Static, submits the video (directed by Philip Stockton and himself) for his band’s latest single, Toy Baby Grand. Chen explains: “Footage for the video was captured like a performance, pasting text and GIF’s into Textedit in sync with the music.”
But! Then! Even better: after you’ve watched, you go play the video in game form to win MP3s, and, says Chen: “the twist is that we will unlock more MP3’s based on the number of hits.” So, go play, please.
Boy in Static (consisting of Chen and Kenji Ross) was originally signed to Alien Transistor, the label headed by Markus Acher of Offworld favorite band The Notwist (where their original web video Bellyfull was featured on the Mother Boing), before moving over to Mush and touring with the likes of Harmonix-related synth-pop mainstays Freezepop.
See more about Boy in Static here, and more about Chen’s other fantastic art/music/web work here.
Toy Baby Grand: the game [Boy in Static]
Previously:
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