A retrospective survey of five formerly thriving gaming companies which have since gone under, including Ken and Roberta Williams’ Sierra On-Line, author of the classic King’s Quest series, which I spent much of my childhood enthralled by.

Read the article here.

It’s a tad gnarly getting shots to line up — how about a bigger hit area? And what happened to your shields/bases from the original game? But, still. Dope!

[link via Neatorama]

In my latest hiatus several animations / music vids / motion graphics pieces have accumulated in my craw. Without further ado …

Australian artist Paul Robertson made this outrageous animation (drawn GIF-style — i.e., frame by frame – in ImageReady over the course of several, no doubt carpal-tunnel stricken, months) evocatively titled ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006,’ in the spirit of the old school horizontal fighting scrollers such as Double Dragon or Bad Dudes. Though things in Double Dragon nor Bad Dudes certainly never got this hectic …

Watch the video here.

[via BoingBoing]

Better in concept than upon execution perhaps, but still impressive. Lorenzo Fonda (an Italian animator with a seriously irritating portfolio site) attached static frames to dominos, and tracked them as they fell, forming the animation. Well, that was the idea anyway.

Watch the video here.

[via Motionographer]

I came across a link to the Swedish motion graphics house Pistachios a little while ago. Some freshness surely is to be found; take a look here.

The smart and ballsy British director Michael Winterbottom (who directed 24 Hour Party People, Code 46, and the art-porn dealio 9 Songs) directed this video for the Boards of Canada track ‘Davyan Cowboy.’ There is no Maya / After Effects / Flame pyrotechnics here; Winterbottom goes for the timeless and the sublime through the splicing-together of old film stock. In the first half we watch a aerial dive from a hot air balloon that looks like it’s floating somewhere in the upper stratosphere; and we end up surfing in the azure Jaws of an endless North Shore summer … 

Grok the video here.

[thanks Mira!]

UPDATE: Thanks to the latest issue RES (July/August 2006, Vol.9, No.4), I now know that this video was put together by Melissa Olson, not Winterbottom. Terribly sorry about the mix up …

LA motion graphics house Bl:nd directed this music video for Gnarls Barkley, aka the recent collaboration between R&B guy Cee-Lo and rising producer Dangermouse (of Grey Album and The Mouse and the Mask fame).

The song is called ‘Crazy.’ Accordingly, Bl:nd conjures hallucinatory formations out of Rorschach inkblots over the course of the track, often in brilliantly unexpected ways. The idea is strong, and the fluidity of the animation / compositing work is unbelievable. The video nails it on so many levels. The track, too, is buttah …

Watch the video here.

[via Coolhunting]

This was a high resolution motion series of bumpers that Psyop created for MTV’s new HD music video station. A discussion of the creative and production process, as well as hi-res stills from the video, in this article in Dexigner. 

View the video here.

Diesel’s new Spring/Summer 2006 campaign, made by Barcelona shop Vasava, breaks all aesthetic restraint and goes for broke. While one might better appreciate the rigor that Psyop and Bl:nd employ above, it is still easy on the eyes.

View the piece here.

[via Motionographer]

It’s been a while since the last post, and unfortunately the delay cannot be attributed to inspiration or a rise in meaningful work volume on other fronts. Rather, it owes to a fateful visit Meredith and I made to the Toys R Us on Times Square a couple of weeks ago, where we dropped some duckets and walked out with a brand new Playstation 2 (slimline edition). Yeah.

In apt pursuance to vampire lore, which advises you never to willingly invite one into your home (lest you grant it immunity against garlic and holy water, apparently — at least according to Lost Boys), it was not long before our PS2 — so innocent and beguiling in its tiny, inobtrusive body — was slurping away on our time, attention, and brains.

I am of course no expert when it comes to psychological pathologies, but I find it misleading to characterize OCD (which we commonly do) as constricting repetition and exactitude, while thinking of ‘playing’ or ’slacking’ as pleasurable, mostly unstructured states of release. As any gamer will attest, sitting in front of a game for hours on end, sacrificing personal hygiene, nourishment, productivity and meaningful human-to-human social interaction, striving for the next virtual checkpoint, and then, having passed that, reflexively pressing the Continue button in order to ‘go one more’ (like the coke-addled monkey which would rather press the dope button than the food button until it died of starvation, or, speaking of monkeys, the notion that George W. Bush has the ability, temperament, and heaven knows the inclination to send forth a volley of American ICBMs on a freedom-spreadin’, Ayatollah-spankin’ whim, the Button is the metaphor for Mankind’s gleeful will to self-annihilation), is all par for the course; gamers know that playing video games can be every bit as obsessive-compulsive as washing your hands until your fingernails fall out.

Oh but all this sourpussing’s not to say the last two weeks haven’t also been fun fun fun …

The intitial booty of games: We Love Katamari (in progress), Black (in progress), GT4, Winning Eleven, God of War (completed; excellent, excellent stuff), Tekken 5, Rez, and Guitar Hero (a definite crowd-pleaser!). Six years of steady PS2 game development = a lot of games. 15 years of parent-induced game console-repression, suddenly lifted = an abundant enthusiasm to play them. And ergo my hiatus …

Gizmodo recently linked to this clearinghouse of information regarding the most highly anticipated and disappointingly problematic release since the Spruce Goose. It’s hard to separate the promise from the hype, the real critics vs. the haters. But the games under development that they list here — and they are legion — will bring the simmering stew of anticipation to a boil and send the fanboys home to change their shorts.

 

 

Spore is the upcoming ‘god’ game designed by Will Wright (of Sims fame), and ‘god’ — as in oh my fucking * — is right; its procedural gaming engine takes emergent AI to another level. As this paradigm-busting demo video (of Wright’s presentation of the game at the recent Game Developer’s Conference) progresses, the edges of gameplay leap continuously outwards, past every conceivable boundary of expectation. To be released sometime this fall, Spore displays a complexity and plasticity beyond pretty much anything you thought possible for a computer game today.

The tingling you are feeling is the Shock of the New …

 

Many opportunities and perils are converging around the still dateless release of the Playstation 3.

Will Sony’s gambit with Blu-Ray technology pay off? Will the quality and multimedia muscle of its games offset the apparent difficulty of developing them for the platform? How long can Sony withstand the post-release hemmorhaging before it begins to profit off expensive and so far untested technology? And given the large headstart that Xbox 360 has (a headstart which is growing longer with each passing day), will the PS3 fulfill the expectations that have grown feverish in the vacuum?

There is no doubt much Tums-popping and Peptol-swigging in the hallways of Sony right now.

The full article is here.

 

They’ve done it with music, they’ve done it with movies, they’ve done it with movies and music with each other – ever attempt the infamous Dark Side of the Rainbow?

A conflation of the FPS shooter 1945 with the NES classic Duck Hunt. Awe. Some. A one-trick pony perhaps, and not really a terrific flash game (for that, try the excellent RaidenX, or of course, the incomparable flash game cum Playstation2 hit Alien Hominid), but as a concept – video game mashups! – it reeks of promise. Oh, the possibilities, the possibilities …

[via BoingBoing]

Ok, on a less silly tip, the McDonald’s Videogame, by La Molleindustria, a left-wing Italian digital art/activism group (who design/develop ‘Political videogames against the dictatorship of entertainment’), is a web-based flash game that critiques the shady political, economic and agricultural practices of MickeyD’s. You use a Sims/SimsCity-esque interface to control various aspects of production (raising the cattle and running the genetically-modified feedlot) and management (spanning the lowly franchise to the lofty heights of the executive board room).

If you still insist on fulfilling your Big Mac attacks in this day and age, after The Jungle, Fast Food Nation, and Super Size Me, after all the gas, the runs, and Morgan Spurlock’s fat-encrusted liver, then you need to play this game. Then again, you are also probably beyond hope …

From the site:

‘Making money in a corporation like McDonald’s is not simple at all. Behind every sandwich there is a complex process you must learn to manage: from the creation of pastures to the slaught, from the restaurant management to the branding. You’ll discover all the dirty secrets that made us one of the biggest company of the world.’

[via WeMakeMoneyNotArt]

 

I recently finished the fairly satisfying FPS called F.E.A.R. (thanks Theo!). It contains a decent premise; you are a Special Forces soldier trained to deal with paranormal enemies. Sweet. Think: Ghostbusters but more blood than ectoplasm, or X-Files with more firepower.

J-horror quotes abound; strange images flickering across video surveillance monitors, you are seized every once and a while by mysterious and terrifying hallcuinations, and of course, creepy little girls who are evil and homicidal and do the four-on-the-floor crab-walk thing — there are more references here to Ring and The Grudge than you can shake a bloody stick at. I appreciated these artful touches, especially the occasional headtrips, where you run down hallways with ceilings that burble blood; when voices taunt you from dark corners; when you run after shadowy figures that dissolve into ash just beyond your reach). The game-makers were pursuing, I think admirably, more nuanced scares (the cinematic sound design sustained an atmosphere of dread throughout the entire length of the game), beyond the cheap jumping-out-of-closets kind that shitkicking id series like Doom and Quake continue to flog like they’re going out of style. But the movie references (sometimes bordering on cliché) were way too derivative to be really scary, but whatever, A for effort!

Gameplay is very satisfying. There is the SlowMo feature that allows you to slooooow tiiiiiime dooooowwwn so you can roll your own Matrix office lobby scene, which is satisfying for no other reason than that, as I think it put things a little on the easy side.

It is moreover the AI (along with the aforementioned sound design) that is the most original and impressive feature. Maps are designed to be non-linear; rooms have multiple entries and exits, the gamespace can be navigated in several ways — by you as well as the enemy. Meaning that when you engage hostiles, they don’t charge you like dumb, unthinking bastards (which is exactly what the super lame demons in Doom and the Strogg in Quake do!) nor do they just stand around waiting to get shot; they will actually evaluate the lay of the land and move around the space in order to flank you from the side or from behind. They will move furniture around to use as cover. They will dive-roll through windows into your secure spot while you’re reloading and surprise the shit out of you. They will do the squad thing and provide suppressive fire while one guy closes in; they’ll toss a grenade to flush you out and then open up when you run out from cover. You can often suspend just disbelief to feel you are actually fighting sentient enemies.

I recommend it. Although you’ll need a fairly souped up machine to play.

Check out the official game site here.