January 2010
7 posts
Circus Maximus
created by: Kodiak Interactive platform: Microsoft Xbox
…and then the Xbox came out. Full screen anti-aliasing for free! Scads of RAM! Finally we had a console with a hard drive and about as much graphical and CPU horsepower as we needed to deliver any game in our imagination on a 3:4 TV.
The Bungie team got console shooters right with Halo, Media Vision nailed videogame fur with...
6 tags
ASCIIpOrtal
Created by: Joe Larson, sounds by Steve Fenton Platform: PC
Here’s the thing… This should probably be called ANSI Portal, because it doesn’t actually even use the ASCII character set. It uses the so-called “Extended ASCII” set, which isn’t even a real standard, it’s just a misnomer name for the Code Page 437 character set that IBM included with the...
9 tags
Mimesis and why it matters
For the past 30 years, the biggest challenge in videogames has been making the graphics good. As a species we’ve been able to design good games since prehistoric times, with whatever tech happened to be laying around (look at chess — it’s fun and it doesn’t even require electricity!), and videogames are no exception. The history of games is crowded with titles that are as...
7 tags
Parrot Augmented Reality Drone
Created by: Parrot Platform: iPhone and custom drone hardware
I’m not 100% sold on Augmented Reality yet. I enjoyed Eye of Judgement as much as the next guy who’s basement was too dark to actually be able to play it effectively, but something about looking at the TV to see the cool animations, while my hands hand to keep touching cards that didn’t have awesome little monsters...
11 tags
Battle Construction Vehicles (Buchigire Kongou...
Created by: ArtDink! Platform: PlayStation 2
I love ArtDink. When discussing strange games, ArtDink is the absolute gold standard. The creators of Tail of the Sun, Carnage Heart, Aquanauts Holiday, No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, among others (all forthcoming article subjects, of course!), ArtDink practicaly defines odd when it comes to commercial console games.
I was lucky enough to get to visit...
12 tags
Plaque Attack
Publisher: Activision Developer: Steve Cartwright Platform: Atari VCS
There are plenty of strange indie games out there — heck we’re in a beautiful golden age of weird indie games at the moment — but there’s something really fascinating about strange commercial games. When an odd game makes it through a sales-and-marketing risk-analysis process that seems destined to crush...
CYOA
Normally I’m not one for academics. The typical game academic seems to re-discover (or steal) a meme developed and posted about by the basest junior member on neogaf.com, restate it in dry academic speech (typically without really expanding the concept), and then act as though they’ve contributed something to the world (see also: videogame analysts). Honestly, reading your typical...