THE MEME IN MOTION: SPACESICK’S IT’S A DIG, DIG, DIG, DIG DUG
What’s the next logical progression following the retro-game cover meme Olly Moss has inadvertently spread across the net? Title sequences, obviously, and Moss-cohort Mitch ‘Spacesick’ Ansara (who already has been in the spotlight in recent months for his brilliant ‘I Can Read Movies‘ series) is taking the first steps in that direction with an in-progress Bass-ian animated cinematic sequence for Namco’s Dig Dug as reinterpreted through the lens of 1958 (and the blog post title more blatantly giving away the source of its inspiration).
Coincidentally, Ansara’s latest I Can Read Movies cover? The best film games culture has birthed to date: Seth Gordon’s King of Kong.
It’s a Dig, Dig, Dig, Dig Dug [spacesick]
Previously:
Olly Moss's Penguin-inspired Videogame Classics covers – Offworld
Olly Moss brings a touch of class to Black Mesa – Offworld
Olly Moss's Man With The Golden Gear – Offworld
And then there were four: Olly Moss takes on Silent Hill – Offworld
Moss creates a monster: Something Awful takes on retro-classic …
Moss gets modern: GTA‘s most wanted America – Offworld
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LISTEN: KONJAK’S LEGEND OF PRINCESS SOUNDTRACK
This morning’s essential download: Joakim ‘Konjak‘ Sandberg has put together a free download for his recently recommended fantastic Zelda-as-sidescroller indie game Legend of Princess, which is as parodic as the game itself for staying just one-half-note off its source material but remaining instantly recognizable.
Side note: the file sharing service used is riddled with misleading links — the actual download link is all the way at bottom hiding tinily beneath the ‘File URL’ textbox.
Previously:
Gimme Indie Game: Konjak's Legend of Princess – Offworld
Listen: 2D Boy's free World of Goo soundtrack – Offworld
Listen: Pause offers free indie game soundtrack downloads – Offworld
Henry Hatsworth: The Pompous Adventurer's Theme Tunes – Offworld
See more posts about: Listen, Music, Offworld Originals
WEEKEND WATCHING: NETFLIX ON 360 EDITION
For this week’s Weekend Watching, I wanna know: what the hell are all of you people watching all the time on Netflix? Semi-related to the post below, though privacy issues stymie, I’d be thrilled if the Xbox 360’s NXE dashboard gave me at least a bit of a hint as to what lies beneath those alluringly sealed-off red boxes on my friends list, or even a data feed that gave me recommendations based on my friends’ preferences.
It was the NXE itself that sold me on finally subscribing to the service (more honestly, in tricking me into never canceling my trial account), but since then I’ve been at a constant loss to find anything truly amazing that I hadn’t already seen, and have instead relented to picking through every b-list movie I’d been meaning to watch for ages, and finally getting through that “Thirty-Rocks” show I keep hearing so much about.
So, in the spirit of CrownDozen’s recent blog post digging up some of Netflix’s hidden gems, Microsoft’s announcement that there’s now over a million of you on the service, and the launch of the brilliant new instantwatcher.com service that’s about a quadrillion times easier to browse than Netflix’s own site, I put it to all of you to find us all something good to watch on our Xbox 360 this weekend.
My quickie recommendation list looks a lot like CrownDozen’s (and probably the playlist of any given film-school geek): anything by David Lynch or the Coen Bros, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Persepolis, typography porn docu Helvetica, comic/outsider art nerd docus Crumb and In the Realms of the Unreal (don’t miss the latter!), effortlessly charming spelling bee doc Spellbound, the unanimously loved Man on Wire, and Errol Morris’s oddball Fast Cheap & Out of Control.
What else are we missing?
Netflix + XboxLive [CrownDozen, InstantWatcher]
Previously:
Weekend watching: Look Around You makes its U.S. debut – Offworld
Weekend watching: Rex Crowle's Grip Wrench – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Weekend Watching, Xbox 360
POCKETGAMER’S PLEA TO IMPROVE APPLE’S APP STORE
PocketGamer.biz, the industry-focused side of the always excellent UK handheld/mobile game news site has just published a very well-reasoned opinion piece on what Apple can do to improve the App Store experience both on PC and the iPhone itself.
The ideas presented — from better integration of Lite/demo versions, ala Xbox Live Arcade, to better recommendation tools as employed by Netflix and Amazon — are all fantastic, and while some are being solved by third party tools (LivingSocial’s iPhone section lets Facebook users share and rate their most-used apps, and I’m a frequent reader of Pinch Media’s new and updated app RSS feeds), we all hope Apple goes to greater lengths to learn the lessons of its competitors over the coming months and years.
Says opinion author Stuart Dredge on filtering, for instance:
The more games that are available, the more pearls there are to find. But how to find them? An essential part of any app store is decent search and filtering tools, enabling you to find the good stuff quickly and easily. And this is one area where the App Store currently falls down a bit.
As a gamer, there are two key criteria I want to use to filter the games on an app store. First, I want to know what’s new – what’s really new, as opposed to what old games have just been patched.
An option to quickly scan all the games that have been released today, this week, this month or even since the last time I logged on (if that’s tracked) would be invaluable.
Anything Dredge missed from a consumer or developer standpoint? We’d all love to hear your opinions via the comments below.
Opinion: The perfect mobile app store [PocketGamer.biz]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
NICE SHOOTING: ERIC TAN’S DUCK HUNT TROPHY
Somehow I missed this entry in 2008’s i am 8bit show but VG Arts once again pulled in the slack by pointing me toward Eric Tan’s fantastically detailed Duck Hunt trophy… and now if I can just make it out of this post without re-treading the “I always wished you could shoot the dog” meme.
Game Over [Eric Tan, roundabout via VG Arts]
Previously:
Ben Marra's view from Vice City – Offworld
The love that dare not execute its algorithm – Offworld
Left 4 Love: Alexandria Neonakis' latest valentines – Offworld
Mui mui bella: Loco Roco in 3D – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
FLASHBANG LIVE-BLURSTING ALL OVER YOUR SCREEN
Oft-blogged indie devs Flashbang have kicked off a new Friday feature web-casting the office goings on which, from what I’ve seen so far, has included live banana eating and further discussions of lunch. But! The team promise some blurry looks at what they’re building in there:
Fridays with Flashbang! We’re going to run a webcam every Friday for your amusement. Fridays are actually our experimental days, so people will be working on all kinds of random stuff.
Drop by and give them an Offworld hullo via a live chat on the blog, and be sure to pester them relentlessly about what secret project ‘sweetarenashooter’ might be.
Flashbang/Blurst Offices on Live Webcam [Blurst]
Previously:
Gimme Indie Game: Minotaur China Shop, happiness in shattery …Riding the iPhone's Raptor Copter – Offworld
Flashbang let loose a little Blush – Offworld
Things We Lost In The Snow, pt 4: Raptor Copter hit the iPhone …
See more posts about: Blurst, Flashbang, Offworld Originals
ANOTHER DIMENSION: LEFT 4 DEAD IN TRUE 3D
Though honestly just part of nVidia’s drivers that support anaglyphic 3D views in a number of games (to varying degrees of success), gamerslastwill have posted directions to add new depth specifically to Left 4 Dead, which sounds like a capital weekend project, if I can just remember what I did with my glasses after testing out Polytron’s super HYPERCUBE.
3D Left 4 Dead? For free? Oh yeah, here’s how [gamerslastwill.com]
Previously:
Only on Offworld: Polytron/Kokoromi's Anaglyphic super HYPERCUBE …
Bringing Gamma home to you – Offworld
Left 4 Love: Alexandria Neonakis' latest valentines – Offworld
Left 4 Dead: Savage beyond belief – Offworld
Surly Hate Machine: Dance to everything Left 4 Dead's Francis can …
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
CENTER OF GRAVITY: DUNCAN FYFE DOES GRAVITY BONE JUSTICE
If it wasn’t overly obvious, I was strained on the end of my leash in my initial writeup and recommendation of Brendon Chung’s indie PC game Gravity Bone, trying with all my might to not explore its smartest parts too deeply for fear of over-explaining the punchline.
But Duncan Fyfe’s recent thoughtful write-up is easily the best piece I’ve read on the game, and (be forewarned), he doesn’t take any shortcuts or dance around the point, so take the short time to give the game a runthrough first, but go with this poignant bit by Fyfe:
Gravity Bone is a 300-page novel that ends on page 60. Because the art style is so charming and pronounced, players might think that that’s the big attraction and therefore the extent of the game’s creativity. Gravity Bone’s purpose is to manipulate expectations by cutting them short, which is why it’s effective at all. Everyone who plays Gravity Bone gets played by Gravity Bone. If you remember the debate over Portal’s shortness from a year and a half ago, the consensus was that Portal’s brevity was beneficial. Here, it’s essential.
Rosetta [Hit Self-Destruct, Gravity Bone home]
Previously:
Gimme Indie Game: Gravity Bone – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
FROM PCS TO LBP: USER-GENERATED CONTENT THROUGH THE ERAS
Gamasutra’s got a nice history piece running as today’s feature on the impact of EA’s Pinball Construction Set on the industry as a whole. One of the first games with truly integrated mechanisms for user-generated content, the piece traces routes from PCS to later games like Adventure Master, Adventure Creator, GameMaker and onward to its current pinnacle: LittleBigPlanet.
As a bonus, dig that beauty of a gatefold package for the game, a relic from when EA packaged each of its titles as lovingly and thoughtfully as music albums of the day.
The History of the Pinball Construction Set: Launching Millions of Creative Possibilities [Gamasutra]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
GLORIOUS RETRO CARNAGE: WYLD FILE’S HALLUCINOGENIC VIDEO FOR BECK’S ‘BAD CARTRIDGE’
Just officially uploaded by Audio Dregs co-founder Eric Mast (in case you missed it on, say, the early video UMD), the video for Paza’s 8-bit remix of Beck’s ‘E-Pro’ — a project Mast took on as Wyld File, his collaborative company with art collective Paper Rad.
Mast, more commonly known by his pseudonym E*Rock, is the brother of Evan Mast, most recognizable as the marginally less hirsute half of Ratatat and 100% of Offworld (and Flashbang) favorite E*vax.
For more excellent — but infinitely less games-ey — Friday morning watching, see E*Rock’s video for Ratatat’s Cherry and those at the Ratatat site linked above. Or, more appropriately, ‘Kiptok’s fan-video below for Ratatat’s Imperials, which interprets the song’s brilliant over/under-water hook via glitched-up footage of Ecco, Sonic and Mario.
See more posts about: beck, Offworld Originals
