After stepping through the mind-melting time-warps of GDC’s Experimental Gameplay darling Achron and Flashbang’s similarly looped Time Donkey prototype, you might be ready to get your head around the latest Experimental Gameplay entry to be publicly revealed.

Also in development by Time Donkey designer Steve Swink and Scott Anderson — and playing somewhat like Tyler Glaiel’s Closure in reverse — Shadow Physics sees you controlling a character locked on a flat 2D shadow plane while you simultaneously manipulate a light source to cast shadow platforms necessary to proceed.

As you can hear in the video, the demo’s a rough cut with ideas still not implemented, including variable light brightness that can wash out shadows in certain areas to create gaps in platforms, and colored lights for colored shadows, each with unique properties.

This early on there’s no set date or target platform, but Anderson says the game will be in development for at least another year.

Experimental game: Shadow Physics [YouTube, via Chroma Coders]

Today’s best LittleBigInspiration: Spanish creator danteneverdies’ in-game tribute to Daft Punk.

Little Daft Punk [YouTube, DND blog, via Destructoid]

LISTEN: 8BIT FM, AND OTHER RELEVANT NERD MUSIC

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4.25.2009

Brandon Boyer

10 Replies

Your new unofficial soundtrack for Offworld browsing: Mnemosyne’s 8bit FM, streaming “nerdcore, chiptunes, soundtracks, remixes & more.”

The link comes via Mike Nowak, who’s just launched his own very valuable new tumblr blog dedicated solely to ‘nerd music’, including a few finds previously spotted here.

8bit FM [Mnemosyne, Nerd Music tumblr]

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: OUTRUN ONLINE ARCADE

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4.25.2009

Tom Armitage

9 Replies

I don’t know about the weather where you are, but where I am, spring really has taken hold, and in the past week or two given me the most tantalizing glimpse of summer just around the corner; it’s been shirt-sleeve weather all week. How apt, then, that the recent release of OutRun Online Arcade coincided almost perfectly with the start of a hot spell.

OutRun is summer gaming personified: taught, arcade racing, with a blazing blue sky, an open road, a girl at your side, and heady salsa rhythms blaring from the stereo. Although OutRun saw release in 1986, it’s really 2003’s OutRun 2 that my heart belongs to, with its rolling roads, spectacular scenery, and thumping Richard Jacques re-workings of the classic OutRun score. Sumo Digital’s OutRun Online Arcade is an HD reworking of OutRun 2 SP, the arcade follow-up to OutRun 2. Sumo were responsible for both the original Xbox OutRun 2 port, as well as the majestic OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast – spectacular on a powerful PC, and still one of the few games to let you share saves between a PS2 and PSP.

OutRun‘s gameplay has barely been altered in 23 years: you race your Ferrari through a forking map of stages, dodging traffic and other racers, left turns taking you to easier stages, right turns to more challenging. The end of each stage extends your time; if you’re good, you’ll make it to one of the five goals. And that’s it: it’s a pure Arcade racer, better as time-attack than competitive. What the 2003 sequel – and subsequent iterations – add to this a fabulous drift model.

When it comes to drifting, OutRun is not quite Ridge Racer: drifting is not always the best solution to every corner, but it is a spectacular one, and one that your female passenger always seems to enjoy. The careful balancing of drift with conventional cornering, sliding the car from lock to lock through hairpins, and slipstreaming through traffic to make ever-tighter deadlines is a real challenge, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be gained from shaving second after second off your times.

A few notes for first-time OutRunners; the trial version is a bit crippled, as it doesn’t extend time after checkpoints, meaning it’s quite hard to envisage what full-on time attack looks like. By default, the game is set to VERY EASY and has over-sensitive handling – you can fix this in the options menu, and you should find Normal difficulty offers a fair bit of a challenge. And, whilst it’s a remarkably impressive game squeezed into Live Arcade’s 350mb cap, a lot of the sound has been heavily compressed – which is, sadly, most noticeable on the marvellous soundtrack. It should sound a little better than that, honest.

But: give it a chance and it will slowly win your heart. The stage design never ceases to charm; the first time you speed past its waterfall or Easter-Island-inspired statues at 300kmh, you can’t help but grin. There’s no time to stop and take pictures, because there’s racing to be done; you’ll just have to come past this spot again. Whenever it’s grey and wet outside, you’ll know it’s always a Mediterranean summmer in OutRun land, and five stages should do as a cure for any Seasonal Affective Disorder.

OutRun Online Arcade is polished, joyous, arcade fun, and the perfect game to get you in the mood for a spring weekend in the sun. That’s what I’ll be doing with some of my weekend (along with the ever present levelling in Feralas); what are you going to be up to, Offworlders?

[OutRun Online Arcade is available on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade, right now]

Matthew ‘gangles‘ Gallant takes one part SNL and one part GCN and gives us the best mashup this side of Ocarina of Rhyme with the (highly uncensored) Wind Waker version of I’m On a Boat.

Check Gallant’s blog for the DS Zelda: Spirit Tracks ‘Crazy Train’ followup.

Your Move, Nintendo [Gangles, via Insult Swordfighting]

After teasing you with the first look at PopCap’s parodic tower defense game, its sing-along music video premiere and its sublimely bizarre viral followup, now, finally: the first gameplay footage of Plants Vs Zombies.

Plants Vs. Zombies home [PopCap, thanks Kevin!]

The second urban-pixel landscape we’ll scroll through today: You’ve previously seen pixel magician Myk Dawg do his 16-bit dirty work for DJ I-Dee and DJ Shadow, now he turns his attention to Kanye West’s “Robocop”. The video’s uncommissioned, but it’s “simply [his] favorite song on the album, and one day I figured why not make a badass music video for it” — and so he has.

Kanye West – Robocop (1988 import version) [Myk Dawg]

ONE MORE GO: WIPEOUT, OR THE SINGLE BEST GAMES CONSOLE YOU NEVER BOUGHT

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4.24.2009

Margaret Robertson

13 Replies

What’s your favourite console ever? Mine’s grey, regular in shape, weighs about three pounds. Graphically, it’s a bit underpowered by modern standards – great colours, lousy detail – but it’s got a killer game library. The one I’ve got is showing its age a bit, but it’s still my most precious possession in the whole world.

It isn’t, as you’ve already guessed, the Dreamcast. It’s my brain. My spongey, stupid, sloppy, saturated brain. The thing that makes it the best console ever made is that it’s 100% compatible. It’s like the ultimate emulator. Using it, I can replay ever game I’ve ever played. I can even, thanks to its remarkable ‘Imagination’ engine (watch Sony nick that for PS4), play games that haven’t even been made yet. It’s portable, never needs batteries, never needs upgrading, boots instantaneously. There are no carts to lose, no discs to scratch, no controller wires to unsnarl.

The last thing I played on it was Wipeout, which I dug out last night when I couldn’t sleep thanks to a head full of rather shampoo-y white wine and a three hour argument about the future of game distribution. Proper Wipeout, mind. Original, clunky, exacting Wipeout. Nearly 15 years on, it plays as well in my mind as it used to on my trusty 14″ Trinitron. I can still nail the boost start every time, still feel the flow and flex of every camber and turn as I loop endlessly under the specked ink of Altima’s sky. Some insomniacs count sheep; I count zip pads. (more…)

WHAT DOES YOUR SOUL LOOK LIKE: DUALSHOCK EDITION

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4.24.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

NYC artist Satre Stuelke’s radiologyart project takes cat scans of every day objects that “hold unique cultural importance in modern society… to plant a seed of scientific creativity in the minds of all those inclined to participate.”

Above, the ghostly skeleton of a PS3 DualShock controller, also available in video form.

Coming soon to Stuelke’s project, “the PlayStation 3 box, and a de/re-construction movie.”

DualShock radiologyart [Satre Stuelke, via zillionmonkey]

An NES trailer for this month’s upcoming Pulsewave performance at NYC’s The Tank.

Music by Alex Mauer, creator of the previously mentioned Vegavox NES music cart, code by oft-mentioned NES hacker No Carrier, graphics by Enso of the recently hyped pixelstyle tumblr blog.

Pulsewave warns of the gig itself:

This show contains high-energy musics, eye-popping visuals, and what can only be described as wondersexapalooza and is not intended for the boring, loveless, and whiny.

Download the intro as a NES rom here.

March [sic] Pulsewave NES ROM Flier [enso]