Incredibly Strange Games: Archive

Incredibly Strange Games

April 2012

8 posts

This will not end well...

Home is an old school adventure with pixelized graphics and some disturbing ideas. I just pre-ordered the box version with tons of goodies for $20, but the game itself is available for $2. No clue what I’m getting, but I’m prepared to be horror-fied.

Awesome history of the first Indie console: Net... →

Fun fact: Next Generation magazine’s cover story on the Net Yaroze was one of our top selling issues ever.

I want this game to come out in America so much I can’t stand it. Sometime in the near future humanity has vanished, leaving their cities to decay and the animal to inherent the Earth. Specifically Tokyo. Through the eyes of a sweet pomeranian, you must adapt, survive in the true urban jungle, and just maybe find out what happened to your master and the rest of the two legged horde....

Bear Game Website in Rename Shocker!

The recently formed “Bear Video Games” site has had its name changed, less than 96 hours after launch! After famous videogame designer Ron Gilbert erroneously tweeted that the site was called “Video Games That Have Bears in Them” the site’s founder decided that the publicity was too great, and rather than correct Gilbert, simply changed its name. The site can still...

Awesome new website!

There’s an awesome new site you need to visit: Bear Video Games, which features stories about videogames about bears.

March 2012

1 post

February 2012

2 posts

You know what happens when you put too many smart German designers together? They form a design collective and make an analog version of a videogame. You know, like electromechanical Pong, or Tetris in building lights. Or, in this case, they take one of the coolest games of its age, Wipeout, and take it analog. Behold Racer — an arcade racing game with a distinct analog twist. Racer...

January 2012

6 posts

December 2011

6 posts

Ms. Pac-Man Tournament 3! It's on!

Posting from the road in Oregon as we head down to Oakland. The annual ISG Ms. Pac-Man tournament is THIS TUESDAY, the 20th or so. Location is tbd but check here or @iocat on Twitter for final location. Likely gonna be Launderland in Temescal starting around 7.

Merry Chritmazombies

Last year 1up.com did a great round-up of Christmas games, which I’m not going to link to again, because the guy who wrote it doesn’t even work there anymore (but I think it’s in the archives of this site someplace). This year, feast your eyes on this four-player Santa vs. Zombies (and polar bears) shooter, called, appropriately enough, Santa and the Zombie Encounter. And when...

October 2011

2 posts

My Steve Jobs story

It’s definitely not game related — let’s be honest, despite enabling one of the biggest game platforms in history, Steve Jobs did not like videogames — but my one in-person experience with Jobs back in my journalist days was still pretty cool: I went to interview him just after the iMacs came out. The interview was in late afternoon in this board room at Apple. I sat with...

September 2011

3 posts

IBM's $20M Pong AI

Over at Insert Credit, Brandon Sheffield has an interesting report on IBM’s latest neural processing chips, which enable complete dominance at Pong. He also posits that humans playing IBM WebPong may have been unwitting dupes in ushering in a dark age of Pong dominance by machines…

Canabalt for C64

Obviously I love Canabalt and the whole Canabalt fan-fic scene, but it’s cool to see the game finally come to Commodore 64. Sadly, it looks like it’s going to be jammed on a 16K cartridge instead of the disk-based release we were all hoping for. Check out the early preview video!

July 2011

2 posts

Kicking Girls in Copenhagen with Johan Sebastian...

It’s pitch black. I’m on a derelict barge in a backwater of Copenhagen harbor, and I’m trying to kick a girl. Welcome to Johan Sebastian Joust. It’s interesting to see how the global indie development scene is evolving. In the U.S., maybe not unexpectedly, success as an indie developer these days seems to include (require?) getting rich. Or at least selling a lot of...

Receipt Racer →

Via Tanio Klyce comes an incredible mash-up of some of my favorite things. Very analogy electronic games, projected graphics, rapid development and thermal printers! Awesome!

June 2011

1 post

Incredibly Strange Bugs: The Crop Circles of... →

iRacing is a seriously hardcore online racing sim. Real player names, real cars, real tracks, real leagues, and real competition from actual race car drivers like Justin Wilson, Will Power, Dale Jr. and more. Created by the team behind the legendary Grand Prix Legends and backed by the owner of the Red Sox, the service is the closest simulation of racing you can get without being on an F1 team. ...

May 2011

1 post

Zine Review: Cultured

I don’t know Michael R. Brown, but for some reason, I know like half the people he talked about in issue one of his new zine, Cultured, which focuses on videogames this issue with overviews of Capybara games, Double Fine, Tell Tale, and The GDC. There are also personal profiles/interviews with Nathan Vella, Zack Karllson, and the design director of Tell Tale. Anyway, I love the fact that...

April 2011

1 post

My Canabalt Dream, Bettered.

So I had this dream, and the dream was to do Canabalt fan fiction. I love making back-stories for games. I did it in my head playing arcade games as a kid, and the less story the game has, and the more I can do in my head, the more I like it. I even made a backstory for KLAX when Mike Mika and Bob Baffy and I did a version for GameBoy Color (you can find a code...

March 2011

4 posts

Strange Accessories

There have been some strange videogame accessories, but my favorite are the homemade ones. I found this at a tag sale near Lake Tahoe a few summers ago. I suspect the seller had worked at Atari Grass Valley, because he was also selling some Atari prototypes and a lot of 2600 games on loose EPROMS. This exceptionally well-crafted (and over engineered) piece of hardwood was a lapboard for 2600...

doubleplusgoodgames asked: Chris,

I just saw your recent post on Twitter about Yu Suzuki winning the GDC Choice Pioneer award. I'm glad that there are still people out there that remember the classics and that the GDC is showing their gratitude for all his accomplishments.

Also, I am now following you on t3h Twitt3rz (@doubleplusgames). Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

February 2011

1 post

Oscar opened up my Atari 7800 box today and was like “who is that?” What was there was one of my favorite videogame industry photos of ALL TIME. I thought it was lost in the flood with Miyamoto and Yiu Susuzki’s business cards. All I can say was, I took it in Japan in 1996, and it should debit in the next issue of Incredibly Strange Games, which could be done in less than 100...

January 2011

3 posts

Dance Dance Immolation

Ever since I was a little kid watching TV, I wanted to someday wear one of those shiny, fire-proof asbestos suits and be totally impervious to fire. A few years ago, I made my way to a warehouse in a scary neighborhood in West Oakland and had my chance. It’s a pretty simple concept, really. The awesome fire hackers at Interpretive Arson hooked up some DDR pads to a PC clone of DDR, and...

December 2010

6 posts

Innovation Inversion: Videogame Hat Edition

Time was, Sega innovated and Namco followed. Virtua Fighter was followed by Tekken. Virtua Racer was followed by Ridge Racer. Even Space Harrier got a Namco copy in Burning Force. But when it comes to funny videogame hats, Namco has led the the way. Now Sega is looking to follow Namco’s lead with this awesome Sonic hat… (When I heard this was a pre-order spiff for Sonic Colors, I...

Ms. Pac-Man Tournament After Action Results...

The second annual Ms. Pac-Man Tournament went off without a hitch. We moved things to Dark Void Zero developer Other Ocean as that’s where my Ms. Pac-Man machine is currently living, since Old Lady Hollyhock noticed — and more importantly, removed — the extension cord we had strung up from the I.S.G. clubhouse near 98th and 580. We got about 10x the turn-out of last...

Strange Christmas

I wanted to do a round up of strange Christmas games, but Frank Cifaldi already did it better than I could have. The 20 strangest Christmas games feature is available at 1up.com! It even includes the legendary (and creepy) Santa v. Easter Bunny FPS from the ’90s!

Developer Bandai Publisher Bandai Platform GameCube! I love sci-fi stories where some radical new technology is required for the plot to even work. Ribbit King is like that. Let’s face it: A frog golf game just wouldn’t make sense without the notion of a galaxy spawning Frolf league, which you and your talking picnic basket side-kick have to win (against a horde of super-cute alien foes) to obtain...

November 2010

1 post

It's never been the same since videogames...

You can read more about THE FINGERS at the terminally awesome music site: WILLFULLY OBSCURE

October 2010

1 post

Zombies Attack Oakland

Is a Choose Your Own Adventure a game? I don’t know, honestly. That’s the kind of thing you want to argue about with Gabe Smedresman over brunch. I guess I don’t care either. I just like them, especially the challenge of trying to represent and track multiple states with only branching… theoryblahblahblahboringboringboring. Anyway, if you’d been smart enough to go...

September 2010

7 posts

Xtreme Xrunch Kart

Platform: iOS Developer: A Bunch of Carrot Farmers (AKA Bolthouse Farms, et al) Bolthouse Farms changed the way you eat. Now they want to change the way you play games. The innovator behind full-sized carrots packed in cellophane (you know, without the tops), they also introduced year-round fresh carrots to America by successfully introducing the delicious salad root commercially to...