HOLE IN 1×1: THE LATEST GARTH + GINNY 50×50 PIXEL FILM
Resident favorite pixel-videographers Garth + Ginny effortlessly sink the third installment of their fantastically expressive < 30 second video series, particularly with that teeeentative gator bite near the end. Someone please get them a deal to keep cranking these out more regularly. See also, if you haven't already, their animation for sensitive comic artist Jeffrey Brown.
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FACEBOOK CONNECT COMES TO THE NINTENDO DSI: A GUIDED TOUR
A surprise firmware update went live last night for Japanese DSi owners: the Facebook Connect functionality Nintendo announced at their E3 conference — let’s have a quick poke around how it works.
First, as above, as you browse through your album of various photos — say, for example, of your 4:30am (adjusted for PST) drunk-Denny’s visit on the second-longest night of the Game Developer’s Conference — you’ll notice a new Facebook icon next to the standard card-suit flags.
Tapping this then leads you to the e-mail/password entry menu. Your email address is saved by default, but you’ll have to enter your password again each time, which lights up the Login box at bottom. Tap that, and the magic unfolds:
Like your ‘mobile uploads’ album, when sending photos via txt or mobile email, the DSi automatically creates a new “Nintendo DSi’s Photos” album, which all subsequent photos are uploaded to. Currently, there are no additional prompts for photo captions.
The DSi’s cameras are decidedly an as-yet underutilized hardware upgrade — the DS too large and un-connected to replace your cell as the snapshot tool of choice — but this brings us one step closer to bridging that gap, however incrementally. Expect it to have the side-effect of flooding the service with WindWaker-Link-eyed/pig-nosed/kaleidoscopic close-ups when the firmware update propagates out west-ward in the coming weeks.
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‘NAUTSOMANIA: MORE COMIC-CON FOOTAGE OF SCRIBBLENAUTS
All 5th Cell have to do at this point is sit back and let the hype for their upcoming say-anything DS puzzle game Scribblenauts generate itself. G4TV gave the game a whirl at this year’s Comic-Con, and, apart from re-confirming Keyboard Cat’s presence, proved its amazingly broad vocabulary best by summoning a treasure, and then — and I honestly didn’t believe it was going to work — a ‘kleptomaniac’, who rightly and dutifully appeared to steal the treasure and steal away.
The only notable failure, an Ark of the Covenant, which G4 surmises was due to trademark issues [?! ™© God, Inc?].
Previously:
- E309: Scribblenauts DS settles Kraken vs. God vs. Keyboard Cat …
- Everything is pixelated: Scribblenauts catalogs the natural world …
- Giant crab battles, narrow baby-violence-avoidance: it must be a …
- One shot: On the near-impossibility of rating Scribblenauts
- One shot: the Scribblenauts time-travelling T-rex robot-zombie …
- One shot: Street fighting Scribblenauts
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ONE SHOT: ENJOY NUKA-COLA QUANTUM
A dioramatic tribute to Fallout 3‘s soda of choice from Marque Cornblatt (whose work you may recall from Boing Boing Video coverage at GDC), that perfectly captures its irradiated aura, and is a perfect companion piece to Chris Furniss’s Wasteland clutter (which Cornblatt says he’ll be making and adding to this).
Previously:
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GALLERY: THE BROKE-DOWN STEAMPUNK DYSTOPIAN MAGIC KINGDOM OF EPIC MICKEY
I always feel a certain twinge of sadness when art and images leak ahead of official release, and try and keep Offworld clear of speculation (except in exceedingly rare cases), but now that the mecha-zombie-Goofy is officially out of his bottle and can’t be shoved back in, and because they’re such a particularly glorious and exciting spectacle to behold (and seemingly hand-crafted for BB’s own Cory Doctorow), the full story:
Anonymous net-scourer extraordinaire Supererogatory has come up for air with his/her biggest prize in recent memory last night: concept art (above) from Fred Gambino of Epic Mickey, the forthcoming (and now more or less confirmed for the Wii) project from Austin-local studio Junction Point.
The project — a trip through a fantastical dystopian Magic Kingdom — is being headed by former Deus Ex designer Warren Spector, whose studio was acquired by Disney in 2007 (and who explained why this was such a perfect match in an interview with me at the time). The game was first confirmed to exist last December, when similar images were discovered by artist Gary Glover, including the ‘beach attack’ above, with its unbelievable Seven Dwarves tea-cup diggers.
Behind the fold, then, more images from both Gambino and Glover, covering rotted Epcots, foreboding Cinderella castles, terrifying scorpion-like mecha-Country Bears, and more — all of which come with the obvious caveat that they may or may not reflect anything of the current state of the project. (more…)
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INFECTION-FREE: INTRODUCING THE SURVIVORS OF BEN BORTHWICK’S LEFT 4 SIMS
Inspired by Roburky‘s touching father/daughter tale Alice and Kev — storytelling as generated by Maxis’s Sims 3 — Ben Borthwick brings us this: Left 4 Sims, the domestic serenity/toils of Left 4 Dead‘s survivors.
Borthwick promises future episodes will see the group take on “their toughest and most terrifying challenge ever: living with each other,” but even just at one chapter in, I’m already forever scarred by the indelible image of Bill prepping dinner in the buff.
Follow the tale via Borthwick’s blog, and you can download the survivors yourself via the official Sims site here. [via Fidgit]
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EVONY & AGONY: POPCAP’S PLANTS VS. ZOMBIES PARODIES BOSOMY BANNERS
Jeff Atwood’s already done a nice piece on the evolution of the ubiquitous and increasingly intrusive bosoms bulging from banner ads for free-to-play game Evony, a campaign he says illustrates how to “take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom … then dig a sub-basement under that, and keep on digging until you reach the white-hot molten core of the Earth.”
While we wait for a scathing expose on the game itself from someone in the media (I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach to let it be from me), this temporary antidote from PopCap, perfectly parodying the banners — if, My Lord, I do say so myself — for its certifiable hit tower defense game Plants Vs. Zombies. [via Bruce Everiss]
Previously:
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ONE SHOT: THE ANCIENT TALE OF MARIO AND BOWSER
In which we discover that Shigeru Miyamoto took strong liberties with previously-unknown Edo period legend when creating his most famous game. (OK, actually, Singapore illustrator William ‘xiaobaosg‘ Chua’s Monster Hunter-inspired contribution to the previously mentioned forthcoming über games art book.) [via superpunch]
Previously:
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VIRTUAL VINYL: THE SECOND LIFE TOY/ART GALLERY THAT NEVER WAS
This was going to be, at first sight, the first thing that made me immediately jump back into Second Life since those long, lonely stretches several years back wandering vast empty expanses of its virtual space and wondering where, exactly, the party at.
Then I realized it’d never got off the ground. But, either way, cheerfully obsessive fan-site Doodlesplatter — dedicated to all things Jon Burgerman (he of the recent LittleBigPlanet sticker pack) — features a gallery of this gallery: a “quarter square mile” art space with “a solid chunk of real estate devoted to Burgerman” that was being officially developed by London-ite Cris Rose.
Above are a selection of Burgerman’s prints and, even more wonderfully, larger-than-life-sized models of his Burgerminos toy series from a year or two back, and, at very top, at far back, you can spy an additional print by also-Offworld-favorite design duo Tado.
Doodlesplatter has many, many more images of the gallery that apparently wasn’t able to launch before “third-party funding… fell through” (from Kidrobot, perhaps?), though Rose himself left a chin-up “maybe in the future!” response to the post earlier today.
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WANT TO SEE SONIC CD ON THE IPHONE? SO DOES THE TAXMAN.
Programmer Christian Whitehead has been working on various iterations of his ‘Retro Engine’ — a 2D engine he says currently supports PC, Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch — for some time now, nearly always under the auspices of creating the perfect bit of Sonic the Hedgehog fan-kit, and now he wants to lend it to Sega.
In what he says was under a month, he’s put together the above video showing a version of Sonic CD ported through his engine to the device, rather than Sega’s internal emulator used for the original Sonic release, which was criticized for widespread performance issues.
Whitehead’s video is an open plea for gamers to tell Sega (at this recent blog post) that they’d like to see Retro Engine used for a new version of the game, which — though admittedly, from a corporate perspective, is as powerful any given internet petition — seems to already be gathering some steam.
See more about Whitehead’s work on the Sonic CD version above at his blog. [via TAF]
Previously:
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