THE GAME-CAKE CHAMPION MIGHT BE SETTLED
Say what you will about the game-cake meme, but it’s not often that the cakes themselves are playable, as with quintanaroo’s Cupcakes of Catan. Plus, it’s not often that you discover that they’re not the only edible versions of the game, competing against the Pizza of Catan and the Gingerbread of Catan.
Initial Set-up for Cupcakes of Catan [Flickr, via Wonderland]
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SCEENE-AGE KICKS: NES INSPIRED FOOTWEAR
Nike’s NES-schemed shoes a bit too subtle for your tastes? Consider Etsy seller SceeneShoes’ wares, which are custom printed canvas slipons made to order. The site lists Zelda, Mario, and Mega Man examples, but none better than these bejeweled Tetris kicks.
Sceene Shoes [via GamOvr]
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TOUMA SHARPENS ANIMAL CROSSING’S CLAWS
It’s been since Christmas since I’ve properly flushed out my vinyl toy feeds, and parsing through it today, I came across more fantastic razor-sharp Touma crossovers. As first mentioned in early December, the Japan based designer has been working almost exclusively with Capcom and reshaping the game’s Felynes into these more malevolent counterparts.
In the meantime, Touma’s both shrunk the originals down into cellphone straps and is preparing a second round of the full-size beasts, this time all more properly armed.
Even more wonderfully, on display in an undisclosed location in Japan, a series of customs including not only a fantastically stylized Mario, but two one-off models of the black sheep of the Animal Crossing world.
[all via the delightfully named ‘luciferjackass’s Taiwanese blog]
Previously:
A Felyne of your very own – Offworld
Reactor-88's Dig Dug Dunnys – Offworld
The Munny shot: Earthworm Jim edition – Offworld
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IMPERIAL JUNKIE & KISER: PIXEL FASHIONISTAS
Found via a trip through online fashion outlet Karma Loop, this set of games-brut Ts and hoodies from Imperial Junkie and Kiser doing Space Invaders and Galaga chic.
From L to R: The Spaced Invaders Tee, The Galaga Junkie Tee, The Space Junkie Hoodie, The Space Invaders Tee.
Karma Loop [Thanks, Aaron!]
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CATCH SOMETHING: CHANNEL 4’S PROJECT ROUTES
Another development I’ve been keeping an eye on (as it’s being produced with the help of Boing Boing/Offworld friends Alice Taylor and Margaret Robertson) but haven’t yet mentioned is Routes, from UK TV network Channel 4. Ostensibly a half-interactive/half-educational look at the science of DNA and disease, the 8-week project launched smartly with Breeder, a viral campaign to cross-breed and mutate — quasi-Spore style — a creature with other Facebook and MySpace users.
But now it’s gone even more literally viral with Sneeze, a game designed to hammer home the exponential rippling effect that airborne contagious diseases can take. Here it’s played out with something wonderfully akin to Q Entertainment’s Every Extend Extra or k2xl’s Boomshine: you’ve got one sneeze to try and infect a maximum amount of wandering passers-by, whose delayed sneezes then, hopefully, continue to infect everyone across the board.
There’s six more games to go, and they’re just a part of what Routes is offering: the film side is currently following the ongoing story of comedian Katharine Ryan and her battles with lupus, and, underneath it all, alternate reality gaming fanatics unFiction quickly discovered that there may, in fact, be “ARG in these here waters,” and have promptly commenced sniffing out clues where they can find them.
Routes [Channel 4/Wellcome Trust]
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PUZZLE QUEST: GALACTRIX PC DEMO SUCKER-PUNCHES PRODUCTIVITY
Showing no signs of letting schedules return to normal, publisher D3 and Infinite Interactive have followed directly on the heels of their initial online Flash demo of sci-fi puzzler and Real Ultimate Timesink Puzzle Quest: Galactrix with an even more extensive PC demo, available via Big Download.
Unlike the Flash version’s battle-mode only limitations, the PC demo lets you play the first good hour or two (by my watch) of the game, and get a feel for its overworld, mission structure, and ancillary activities like asteroid mining, warpgate hacking and item crafting.
The verdict? Everything feels comfortably as if it was in the same spot as you last left it despite the galactic overhaul, from the frantic time-based challenges of its hacking minigame (here scoring matches in a set sequence rather than against an opponent) and familiarity of crafting and mining — it certainly earns the Puzzle Quest in its title.
But it also hints at much greater complexity to unfold: shuttling mined ore to the outposts that pay the highest price, your eventual bank of three ships with configurable weaponry (Galactrix‘s versions of PQ‘s spells) and crew that can be recruited throughout the quest.
And that’s just the overworld window dressing. As I noted in the last look, Galactrix‘s battles (particularly its shield and mine mechanics) push it well beyond simple tile-swaps, and both its shape and its omni-direction lack of gravity light up an entirely different part of your brain. It’s as fresh and initially baffling as it was to move from Tetris to Lumines — the language is the same, but the syntax is incompatible.
D3 also announced today that the game will be coming to the DS on February 24th, with a still-nebulous “early 2009” for its PC, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network release, good news for a wait that’s already felt too long.
Download Puzzle Quest: Galactrix [Big Download, game site]
Previously:
You’re my obsession: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix demo goes live – Offworld
Things We Lost In The Snow, pt 1: PuzzleQuest hit the iPhone …
Nintendo's Wii/DS outlook: The Offworld view – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
ANITA FONTAINE AND MIKE PELLETIER’S CUTEXDOOM II
Today’s sinister art overload and currently on view in Amsterdam’s Maxalot gallery, the second installment of Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier’s playable art installation, CuteXdoom II. In this version, created as an Unreal Tournament 3 mod:
Sally Sanrio wakes up from her paroxysm to find herself in a familiar, yet changed, environment. Upon drinking a liquid nearby, she notices that the cute environment she once sought to enter is becoming increasingly strange and distorted. She realises that she has been poisoned. Once sweet characters now appear malevolent, predatory; the landscape becomes surreal and sinister, graphic forms are elegant, and almost cruel. In this altered state of perception she realises that the cult of CuteXDoom was not what she thought it would be, and that she must fight the effects of the poison to find the antidote and escape.
The project is an updated version of their 2005 original (and slightly more cuddly) Cute X Doom, done in the first UT engine, in which Sally had to “join a supermodern religious cult who believes the worship of cute material objects will lead to happiness and enlightenment,” by collecting plush mascots to please the cult’s robotic panda guru (!).
See more game/art crossovers via Fontaine’s site, or via a secondary Cute X Doom page. [via Creative Review]
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NOBY NOBY BOY STRETCHES FURTHER INTO FEBRUARY
As you can see from the awesomely hastily scribbled out and corrected dates on Noby Noby Boy‘s official site o–o, the arrival of the game, which was previously due in just one week from today (which would have explained the involuntary heart palpitations that’d been growing over the past few days) has now been pushed back by three weeks to just after Valentine’s Day: Thursday, February 19th.
The reason, Namco Bandai politely explained, is simply “in order to provide better quality.”
Still confused as to what Katamari creator Keita Takahashi is trying to accomplish with his PS3 downloadable game and non-game? Have a look at my first writeup from mid-December, where I tried to weave all the loose threads Takahashi laid down in 2007 at the game’s first live debut at Nottingham’s GameCity festival — I think, bolstered by subsequent video footage and details that have been released since, that I might’ve been onto something.
Previously:
It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy …
Another new look at Noby Noby Boy – Offworld
Happy Holidays from Offworld (feat. Keita Takahashi) – Offworld
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ONE MORE GO: DISGAEA’S QUEST FOR NUMERICAL ORGASM
This American Life, Ira Glass’ impeccable radio show, always urbane and humane in equal measure, opened the year by re-broadcasting one of its classic episodes, Numbers. Catching up, it introduced me to the story of Andrea, who as a young temp more than a decade ago taught herself Microsoft Excel by making a spreadsheet called My Love Life: A Ten Year Span.
The years were plotted along the bottom, and the Y-axis recorded the number of people Andrea had got lucky with each year – hitting a total of seven in her luckiest of years. Seeing her life laid out in stark statistics like this was somehow reassuring, she confided: “It is just numbers. Looking at it this way, the people totally go away… So many of these things on their own I would normally classify as failures, they were were rejections or something painful, but when I look at it in the context of all this, these are all my scores, my successes.”
Scores! That simple piece of abstractional magic that can turn failure into success, that assigns you a clear place in a world which can otherwise seem oblivious to your efforts. Life is full of unquantifiable mysteries – rewards you don’t quite feel you’ve earned, punishments you know for sure you haven’t, equations that can’t be solved about whether people who are richer, fitter and prettier, but also ruder, stupider and lonelier are actually better than you or not.
It is from these pains that I take refuge in Disgaea.This time it’s the DS version, but I’ve retreated to the the first two often enough, as well as to stable-mates La Pucelle and Phantom Brave over the years. They’re all made by Nippon Ichi, a company who specialise in producing games for people who like numbers, grids and jokes. Or, to put it another way, me. (more…)
See more posts about: disgaea, Offworld Originals, One More Go
EA DETAILS SPORE’S 2009 PC, WII, DS EXPANSIONS
EA has laid out four different ways it plans to expand its Spore platform this year (and co-opted LittleBigPlanet‘s ‘create, play, share’ mantra in so doing) with two new PC games and a new Wii and DS game announced that will let players interact with their creatures in new ways in 2009.
The first (and shown above) is Spore Galactic Adventures, which it says will add “a tremendous amount of variety and depth to the original ‘space game'” by letting your creatures beam down to planets and take part in and create new mission-based adventures with unique rewards doled out for each (“from an Energy Blade and Stunning Charm to a Jump Jet”). Created adventures can be shared, as with all things in Spore, with friends.
Targeted toward a younger crowd, the PC’s Spore Creature Keeper is something of Spore gone Tamagotchi, with players “nurturing, training and playing with” their creatures, giving them toys and setting up online play-dates to meet with creatures from your friends.
Finally, for its first console outing, Spore will be coming to the Wii as Spore Hero, an adventure game “focusing on creativity and evolution,” and utilizing the console’s signature controls, and the game will also be returning to the DS with Spore Hero Arena, which, as the name implies, will let players battle their creatures, as with both the Pokemon arena titles and EA’s own iPod version of Spore. In this version, unlike the current Spore Creatures DS game, the creatures will be full 3D rather than Creatures‘ paper-cut creations.
On the whole then: a good shot at expanding the limits of what Spore can be, given the limits of its scope as first released last year.
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