Jenn Frank ·
June 28, 2009 at 1:12 pm
· Filed under Music
Jackson’s popularity was such that his influence has permeated the gaming medium, whether through his direct involvement, composers riffing on his yelps and yowls, or just a bit of cheeky satire. Yet what I’ll remember most about him is how his music became an essential component of the sonic texture of arcades, along with the distant warble of a dying Pac-Man, the chime of a stage beginning in Galaga, a bold narrator extolling the virtues of Dirk the Daring.—Jeremy Parish
While it’s true that 1UP’s Michael Jackson retrospective skipped over my favorite homage—the ‘Thriller’ dance sequence near the beginning of Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (video link)—it’s certainly a nice gesture. More meaningful, though, I think, is Jeremy’s short and heartfelt little ode to MJ over at 1UP’s Retronauts blog.
Jenn Frank ·
June 3, 2009 at 6:32 am
· Filed under Fashion
So laFraise is basically the European Threadless: aspiring designers submit potential T-shirt designs, and the winning art is printed in gratifyingly limited runs.
I have no idea what is happening on this shirt, but I like it.
At €19, it’s pretty expensive (US$27, in fact!), but—well, no, OK, I just confirmed that’s how much it costs to have 5-7 colors hand-screened by Spreadshirt. So I guess it… isn’t… that expensive.
Remember how that one Japanese copyright official called pirated DS games "information terrorism" last week, and everyone freaked out? At the risk of hyperbole, I call Tim Langdell’s pattern of actions and behavior "intellectual property terrorism." It’s a real precedent in litigious cruelty—kudos to TIGSource for revisiting the subject. You should be furious; please read.
Jenn Frank ·
May 30, 2009 at 3:37 am
· Filed under Ephemera
Cactus (who, together with Ville Krumlinde, comprises Lo-Fi Minds) just took to his Twitter account with a trailer for Air Pirates, Lo-Fi’s latest collaboration.
Jenn Frank ·
May 30, 2009 at 2:38 am
· Filed under Ephemera
Remember Dragon’s Lair? With Dirk the Daring starring as the blundering hero, tasked with rescuing the princess? Kind of tedious?
Within the year following its release, Don Bluth Studios loosed yet another multiple-choice, feature-film-quality adventure into arcades. Called Space Ace, the titular hero—Ace, I mean—was sort of an intergalactic refitting of his medieval forbearer.
And while the thought of conducting Ace through a sequence of quicktime events doesn’t exactly thrill me, the idea of cramming an entire laserdisc game onto the iPhone absolutely does.
Touch Arcade, with undeniably impressive gameplay footage, below:
Maybe I shouldn’t be so dumbstruck by this; hell, Space Ace was gorgeous to begin with. But on the iPhone? Holy cow.
I think I like the idea of this game—a onetime feat of technology—being marvelous and novel all over again. I guess the medium really is the message.
Jenn Frank ·
May 29, 2009 at 9:39 pm
· Filed under Linksplosions
The real problem with Twitter? It’s hard to know when to disconnect.
I was sitting in the movie theater, wearing my polarized 3D glasses and waiting for Up to begin. As the lights were dimming, I pulled out my cell phone. I’ll just tap my way into Tweetie, I decided, and take a quick peek at the haps before diligently turning my little machine off.
In the ensuing thirty seconds, I learned:
Holy god, 61FPS is leaving us: 61 Frames Per Second—which is, for a variety of reasons and writers, one of my favorite blogs—is shuttering. And so soon after its extremely tasty reboot! The blog’s parent and host, nerve.com, is relaunching itself (again!) as a magazine: I can dig that. Nerve was the Internet’s edgy, geeky, sexy kick-in-the-pants in the 1990s (back when I shouldn’t have been visiting nerve.com but did anyway, titter, titter). Apparently Nerve is refocusing on what it does best—sex—so I can only nod and shrug with reluctant understanding. Perhaps nerve.com will consider covering sex in videogames? I’d buy that from the newsstand! (But only if I am wearing sunglasses or a hat.) Best of luck to 61FPS’s talented writers, each of whom is a gem in his and her own right.
Holy god, EGM is back in business: It’s a strange and risky time to rekindle a property and hop back into print, but along with Nerve the magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly is staging its triumphant return. Little could anyone have guessed, EGM founder Steve Harris zoomed in to reclaim his once-and-future publishing rights from Ziff Davis (Harris sold EGM to Ziff in 1996). Update: Some informed musings from James Mielke and Sam Kennedy. What could the future have in store?
It’s a shoot-em-up for Petri Purho! In less bittersweet news, Petri Purho confirms to Bitmob that, yes, his game will be a shmup. More speculation from readers in Bitmob’s comments. I can’t wait!
Nayan Ramachandran returned to the States last month; he’d been living in Japan for three years. But where were all the iPhones? An interesting piece about the perception of Apple products abroad.
A terrific analysis of ‘Majora’s Mask.’ I kind of giggled when I got to "If this next part sounds pretentious, forgive me and bear with me a little longer. Cool?" I like the preemptive apology for the ensuing analysis; Internet, I cry for you.
With the news of the Metroid: Prime trilogy coming to Wii, it’s easy for me to feel all lovey-dovey about Metroid retrospectives this week. Over at 1UP, Jeremy Parish discusses "wall-walking," a little cheat of a glitch that enables the player to simply walk into ‘secret worlds’—and by ‘secret worlds,’ Parish almost certainly means a scramble of pixels never intended for human eyes.
You might not know this, but Nadia Oxford is seriously the Internet’s number-one Metroid expert. In this short and sweet retrospective, Oxford traces game history’s path in search of, as she words it, "the starting mark for Samus’ tumble into game heroine mediocrity."
I’d thought I was all bingo’d out—bingo is a pretty popular bridal shower pastime, I guess—but no. These are fantastic. I think I’ll follow the RSSes and play from home!
Jenn Frank ·
May 28, 2009 at 6:39 pm
· Filed under Ephemera
Two days ago, and without any further explanation, Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho tweet-leaked a screen from his newest project.
Of the screenshot, Offworld’s eagle-eyed proprietor Brandon Boyer noted, ”[Purho’s] ‘creatures’ are all being procedurally generated from a common set of facial and bodily elements.”
As if in confirmation, Petri writes,
...followed by…
Now to find out what it is!
Update: Curious, writer Demian Linn did the reasonable thing and emailed Petri with questions about the work-in-progress. Petri didn’t relinquish much, but he did say the game was “probably going to be a SHMUP.”
Jenn Frank ·
May 28, 2009 at 2:00 pm
· Filed under Ephemera
Perhaps you are wondering why Infinite Lives is being updated with alarming consistency! It is because I have the flu and a fever, and I am in bed and bored.
But besides trolling the Internet for items of interest, and coughing, I’ve also been looking around for abandonware DOS games to install.
My current squeeze? 1987’s The Fool’s Errand.
Late last week, GameLife published David Kushner’s interview with Cliff Johnson, the designer behind Fool’s Errand. Its sequel, The Fool and His Money, is slated for release this summer. (If you absolutely can’t wait, you can play the demo now.)
The 1987 puzzle game seemingly builds itself around the Tarot—which itself has an inbuilt sequence and circular narrative—beginning with the Major Arcana and then moving toward made-up arcana like ‘the Humbug’ and ‘the Not-A-Merchant’.
Johnson has made Fool’s Errand and all its extras available as free downloads. While he himself prefers the Windows and Macintosh versions of the game, they might require a little finagling. Intel MacBook users like me might do well to install the much uglier, 16-color DOS version instead:
