LITTLEBIGWATCH: MEDIA MOLECULE MAKE HISTORY
The latest sticker/costume pack coming to LittleBigPlanet on August 13th is one that seems more deliberately aimed at helping inspire player creativity (versus recent overtly-licensed/crosspromoting content): a History Pack, which will include nearly 150 stickers, new music, objects, materials, and decorations based on Oriental, Arabic, Egyptian, Gothic, Roman, Celtic, and Native American styles. This time, the entire kit will be wrapped in its own showcase level, as above.
Alongside that, this set of diverse costumes from Celtic queen Boudica (who led Britons against an occupying Roman Empire [I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have to wiki that]) and Ada Lovelace, the “world’s first computer programmer”, to Mozart and Genghis Kahn.
Consider this, then, the rough equivalent of a generic “castle/city” Lego set: new, blank building blocks for your creations, rather than trying to retro-fit Harry Potter and Star Wars bricks into your own design.
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LISTEN: DEADMAU5 TAKES ON ZELDA
Toronto electro artist Deadmau5 figures out the fastest way to get his crowd moving, opening his Nature One festival set this past weekend with a theme Familiar To Everybody. [via Anamanaguchi]
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ICY COOL: GAMA-GO’S YETI KONG T-SHIRT
The Mother Boing’s own David Pescovitz notes a.) the latest 8-bit homage tee starring Gama-Go’s signature mascot Yeti, and b.) that shipping is free if you order the shirt alongside one of Gama-Go’s own Boing Boing themed shirts.
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PAPER TRACE: DDI7I4D’S INVISIBLE BOO MARIO 64 MODEL
Nintendo papercrafter extraordinaire ddi7i4d turns from automata to optical illusion with his latest Mario 64-themed entry, the Invisible Boo. [via Nintendo Papercraft]
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HIGH CONCEPT: INSIDE ITALY’S THE ART OF GAMES GALLERY EXHIBIT
First mentioned back in March, I woke up this morning to find in my inbox this set of rendered preview images from The Art of Games exhibit still running through November at Italy’s Museum of Valle d’Aosta.
Searching around trying to parse out what might have marked the occasion, I also stumbled across this video walkthrough of the exhibit, with the represented artists have provided concept art to games spanning Heavenly Sword, Deus Ex III, Half-Life, Fallout 3 and Afro Samurai (see a list of the artists here).
If you’ve been to the exhibit itself, let us know what you thought via the comments!
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WORD PLAY: BEATING POPCAP’S BOOKWORM WITH SCIENCE
It’s probably no coincidence that the weekend PopCap “does a Peggle” (in the parlance of our times) and drops the price for the iPhone version of its wordgame Bookworm from $4.99 to $0.99 (which is still active for a few more days [App Store link]), Flashbang head Matthew Wegner drops this: an automated OCR program to beat the ‘worm at his own game:
I still have a hard time increasing my mental lookup times for bizarre letter combinations. I don’t like the feeling of floundering at a task that I know is more well-suited to a computer. So I thought: Why not have a computer do the actual work?
Head over to his blog to see the process in action, about which he enticingly adds:
I may launch it as a service, actually. It would be amusing to unleash this on the hardcore Bookworm fans. You would take a screenshot, email it to some address, and get your best words emailed back in a minute or two. I wonder if people would actually use that? Only one way to find out…
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ONE SHOT: FORT AWESOME’S “MY FIRST ROCKBAND”
The above illustration of PaRappa and Lammy jamming (umjamming?), rendered on a page from a music book, is part of a series of prints available for sale at Fort Awesome’s Etsy Shop. The illustrations of the various videogame characters are cute on their own, but their juxtapositions on vintage book pages elevate them to tongue-in-cheek whimsy.
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ONE SHOT: TRIPPING WIPEOUT HD’S LIGHT FANTASTIC
Edge editor Alex Wiltshire vies strongly against Duncan Harris’s own postcard-pretty Fallout 3 shots for the games-photographer crown, with this gorgeous set of photos capturing the chroma-smeared essence of PlayStation 3 racer Wipeout HD.
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GDC SLIDES: WHAT DISNEYLAND CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT GAME DESIGN
Found via a spied-upon conversation between Deus Ex: Invisible War and Karmastar designer Harvey Smith and God of War‘s David Jaffe: slides from this GDC talk I now regret missing (though it appears BB’s own Cory Doctorow didn’t), in which Pac-Man World, Maximo and God of War designer Scott Rogers explains that everything he knows about game design he learned from Disneyland.
Even without Rogers’ overlying explanation, there’s a lot to be gleaned from the slides, from Disney’s use of ‘weenies’ — distant landmarks to orient and draw the player into your world — storytelling via your environment, and building anticipation through landscape lulls.
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ONE SHOT: SUPER MARIO LILLIPUT
A bizarre climax to the short-lived Game Boy Comics series sees the inhabitants of Super Mario Land seek revenge on an unsuspecting player. [via retronauts, via Christian Nutt]
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