ONE SHOT: THE SAD SIGHT OF A MIDDLE AGED MARIO
Don’t get him started about his glory days at a liquid lunch. Part of Grupo Novel’s Dotter-esque print campaign that also included Donkey Kong gone carjacker, and DK damsel Pauline turned lady of the night. [via GamOvr]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
MANNY MUNNY: KITT WALKER’S CUSTOM GRIM FANDANGO VINYL
Giving Iain Reekie’s custom Grim Fandango sculpey figures a serious run for their money, Kitt Walker has posted a few glamor shots of the Manny Calavera Munny made lovingly as a birthday gift by his “beautiful and gifted girlfriend.”
See the full set of three shots here.
Munny Calavera [flickr, via Toycutter]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Toys
ONE SHOT: JOHN FREEBORN’S 3 COLOR JOYSTICK REPEAT DRAWING
Meticulously colored in like an Atari-obsessed dropout’s bubble-form exam. Part of a new series, available on Etsy, alongside Freeborn’s laser cut charms featuring a pink scorpion from Pitfall! [via .Tiff]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
MOUNTAIN GAME: CRAIG ADAMS’ KUROSAWA-INSPIRED ARTSY DESIGN, ALPINIST
The folks at Artsy Games Incubator have been doing a wonderful job recapping Toronto’s recent indie-all-star Artsy Game meetup, but it wasn’t until today’s entry that my ears perked up in a big way.
While Craig ‘superbrothers‘ Adams’ demoed his parodic and metaphorical A Hit Videogame on day three (the premise: a one-button baseball game that quickly devolves further away from predictable — like game development itself — at the cheering of industry executives), his day four game took a more serious turn.
Known for now as Alpinist, Adams’ game design takes its inspiration from ‘The Blizzard‘, one section of Kurosawa’s multi-part film Dreams. The game would see one player making an agonizing climb up a mountain during a blizzard, with, AGI notes, Prince of Persia-like precision jumping that takes into account gale force winds, and meters for your “body temperature, alertness and coherence.”
Adams is, of course, the artist behind the previously blogged Dot Matrix Revolution video and upstart the1console blog and the DESIGN REBOOT HD video which animated Braid creator Jonathan Blow’s provocative Montreal Game Summit lecture for futher discussion.
Alpinist currently still exists in design only, but hopefully we’ll see much more of it some time soon.
Round 4, Session 4 Recap [Artsy Games Incubator, superbrothers, the1console]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Superbrothers
HEADBANGER HERO: PAINSTATION CREATOR’S NEW MOSHPIT AMP
From the creators of the Painstation — the multiplayer arcade cabinet that delivers heat, shocks, and a wire whip as you lose a point in Pong (video preview here) — //////////fur////’s MoshPit Amp, which admittedly isn’t much of a game, per se, but should be.
fur explains:
You simply approach the MoshPit to activate the amp. The music will instantly begin and lights will create a stagelike setting. If you are a true metalhead you can’t resist and will start headbanging – and the music will instantly turn up. As you mosh on, you can change the individual volume levels of the four instruments through your headbanging style and intensity.
You can see how far you have pushed the level of each instrument on the four MoshMeters. Mosh the volume of one or more channels to the max, and you can trigger new musical patterns like another guitar riff, diabolic vocals or a different drum track. If you mosh really hard you can unlock a guitar solo supported by light effects, smoke and pyrotechnics.
There are four MoshMeters, one for each of the four instruments, and if you look really close at them you can see that this amp goes to eleven.
Double Fine — I’m almost positive there’s crossover peripheral potential here.
MoshPit: Metal Head Orgasmatron, 2009 [//////////fur////]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
SHEEEEIT: PUNCH-OUT!! VIRAL DOC STARS CLAY DAVIS AS DOC
There’s a lot of things Nintendo’s done right in this viral documentary for the upcoming Wii remake of its classic Punch-Out!! — not least the overstuffed King Hippo-dressed punching bag [belly button ‘x’ and all] and bike scene re-creation. But casting Isiah Whitlock, Jr., now forever known as The Wire‘s Clay ‘sheeeeit‘ Davis, as coach Doc? That’s the TKO.
Follow the official WVBA Championship Circuit twitter account here, and fund Clay Davis’s re-election campaign with Mule Design’s T-shirt, available here.
Punch-Out!! [Nintendo]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
NERD MUSIC: IL CREATORE’S VOCODED SID-POP
Rome’s Il Creatore produces music using a Commodore 64, SIDStation, talk-box, and a vocoder. Owing to an early 80s italdisco and synthpop influence (the artist’s page cites Kraftwerk, Telex, and Rob Hubbard), it’s all very catchy stuff.
More lo-fi (faked) pixel videos can be found on his YouTube channel.
Il Creatore [iperuranoaddizioni, YouTube]
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
ONE SHOT: MIRAGE’S C64 PIXEL MONTAGE, 1 UP – 1 DEAD
C64 pixel art by Mirage of demoscene group Focus. [via pixelstyle]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
ONE SHOT: BRüTAL LEGEND’S ULTRA-VIVID CONCEPT ART HORRORSHOW
Not gonna lie: I was big gunning to feature Brütal Legend in an upcoming installment of Concept Album since this GDC session, and was quite disappointed to be beat to the punch by remorseless rapscallions ripping half-blurry mid-res versions of the art from the GDC-stored PowerPoint. Anyway, this one was the most brilliant bit, by the inimitable Scott C., who has his own Action Comic here.
Previously:
See more posts about: Brütal Legend, Double Fine, Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
MOB RULE: MY NIGHT WITH THE XBOX 360 PREMIERE OF 1 VS. 100
Tonight, I snuck across the border. As the hour reached vodka-rocks-o’clock, I went under cover of a hotmail.ca and freshly created Canadian Xbox Live account (meet the mild-mannered, balding middle-aged ‘powerpi11‘) to spend a quiet night in seeing what Microsoft and Endemol had in store for their Xbox 360 massively multiplayer real-prize game show initiative, ‘Primetime’.
First announced at last year’s E3 and currently only ‘airing’ in Canada, tonight was the beta premiere of its version of NBC game show 1 vs. 100.
Here’s the premise, for those that haven’t seen the TV version (as I hadn’t!): a titular ‘one’ is chosen from the viewing audience (players have a higher chance of getting chosen, apparently, by doing well at the game playing along at home) to go up against a ‘mob’ of 100 other players — though I’m less clear on how this is doled out, as there seemed to have been at least 10,000 players connected, and I always seemed to be in the mob (sharded, presumably?).
Then begins the trivia questions: topics in the opening night ranged from who first reached a million followers on Twitter (A: you know this) to what members of an audience were doing to make Morrissey abruptly shut down a recent performance (A: eating meat).
If a player answers correctly, they move on to the next round, and any mob member that chooses incorrectly is taken out of the prize running, but still continues to play. And here’s the crux: the more mob members taken out, the higher the one’s prize winnings rise on a tiered structure — 160, 300, 600, 800, 1200, 2000, 3000+ Microsoft Points, which begins to quickly add up to an un-sniff-worthy amount of Xbox Live Arcade money for a free, online game (that above range roughly equates to between $3-50+).
After a certain number of rounds, the player’s asked each time — in true fomulaic gambler’s dilemma game-show tradition — if they want to take the Points they’ve earned so far, or continue on. If a player continues and loses, that amount of Points is distributed to the mob members remaining. On average, that amounted to somewhere between 80-160 points ($1.50-3 per player). At left above — the ‘one’ deciding whether to take their 3000/$50 of Points, or try to eliminate even more of the 23 remaining mob.
So what did I learn from my hour and 15 minutes of play, before being ingloriously booted from the proceedings for not actually having an Xbox Live Gold account (was that about to be my chance to be the one?):
* Just that slightest amount of interaction instantly turned an activity I’d rarely consider taking part in passively to one that legitimately and repeatedly made my heart fractionally tighten. Suddenly, the thrill of game/reality TV that inexplicably seems to captivate howevermany millions of viewers cut through me like a hot knife.
Even with absolutely nothing at stake (no prizes are being awarded during the beta), I played for 80 minutes, non-stop, dead simply in some semi-sad anticipation that I might be the next ‘one.’
With ‘commercial breaks’ lasting some 20-30 seconds — never nearly enough for kitchen or bathroom runs — that is a captive audience, and that is a Tivo-era marketer’s dream come true (ads shown in the beta: manga.com, UFC [above], and, natch, Microsoft/MSN).
* I am unstoppably quick on the answer-button draw (sorry, rza145), and even when you’ve been disqualified from the prize running, the sub-competition of playing against your small group of four other local or Xbox Live users for point (not cashable Point) prowess is stimulating enough to keep the controller in hand.
* Like any true corn-fed American, I know next to nothing about Canada. Not even, embarrassingly enough, when pressed, what ‘Nova Scotia’ means (I’m sorry), or that Vancouver’s nickname is ‘Hollywood North’ (why?), or what a Tim Hortons ‘timbit’ is (also: what is a Tim Horton). But, if nothing else, what this showed was the lengths Microsoft is willing to go to to custom tailor its questions.
* At least 5 people out of 100 in Canada think that either Marilyn Manson or Marilyn Monroe died recently (A: Marilyn Chambers).
* At least 1 person out of 100 in Canada thinks you can get a temporary tummy tuck or a nipple ring in a box of Cracker Jack (A: tattoo).
* I would very much like to live in a world where network TV shows broadcast billboard ads for indie games like Metanet’s N+ (the Toronto developer presumably chosen here representin’ the Great White North?).
Will I play again? Are you joking: come May 12th, I’ll be donning that ‘powerpi11’ skin an hour ahead of time, just to see if I can again make it through the digital RCMP’s mindful watch (whose uniforms, I now and forevermore will remember after tonight, also go by the nickname ‘Red Serge.’)
1 vs. 100 [xbox.com]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
