Via Laughing Squid: Feast your eyes on these high-contrast Spore Creature Silhouette designs, which are available on both T-shirts and promotional posters through zazzle.com.
Because the official Spore store is powered by Zazzle, you can also upload your own Spore creature, then make a custom T-shirt, coffee mug, or postage stamp.
Scott Sharkey’s favorite kid on YouTube plays ukulele. So does mine. Scott Sharkey’s kid does a cover of “Still Alive.” So does mine.
So of course S.S. and I compared videos.
And we’re in agreement: we have to get these two kids together. If there is a god, these two will meet and fall in love.
edit: They even both do a twee little thumbs-up at the end of their songs! Which makes me wonder whether the boy had never seen the teenaged girl’s YouTube video—but more likely than that, their love is simply meant to be.
Yesterday, indie dev team D-pad Studio announced their 2D platform/adventure game Owl Boy. In development now, the boys at D-pad expect to have a playable build by March 2009, just in time for the Independent Games Festival.
Guessing only from preliminary screenshots, Owl Boy’s splendidly retro art has that rusted-cog aesthetic everyone likes so well. Can’t wait to hear more as it unfolds.
The Shooting Watch, I have only just learned, is a pedometer for your fingers. Which would make it a… well, a digitometer, actually, except that doesn’t sound quite right. So we’ll just say ‘Shooting Watch,’ then.
According to 1UP’s Ray Barnholt—the go-to man in all things obscurely Japanese—NCSX is now accepting preorders for their brand new Shooting Watch, a replica of the original 1987 Hudson design. At US$19, it’s a steal! But this fan-servicey offering is sure to sell out, so if this sort of gadget is your bag, act now!
Still, should you miss the preorder window—or if you just can’t wait for that numinous, revelatory button-mashing experience—you can also nab Shooting Watch DS, a homebrew downloadable that turns your Nintendo DS into one fierce digitometer.
The Shooting Watch, available from NCSX, ships December 18.
First of all, I absolutely cannot believe I missed this. For anyone else who missed it: last week, games journalist (and, full disclosure, friend) Jared Rea made a video poking fun at John McCain’s “Prisoner of War” campaign angle.
I love that this is the web 2.0 equivalent of a political cartoon, tailored to suit the tastes of video game enthusiasts.
Obviously, the video went viral—so viral, in fact, that it was actually picked up by the Crooks and Liars blog. “Probably the most juvenile thing I’ve ever seen on this site,” snipes the very first commenter. I cackled aloud when I read this remark.
But let’s say that, instead of a video about video games, Crooks and Liars had posted a political comic strip, and in that strip, McCain is playing Poker or Go Fish or Uno with his political opponents. And say that McCain, in this game, keeps playing a ‘POW’ card. Let’s say that happened. Would that commentary be considered “juvenile”?
But then, and for me this is maybe the most interesting part, Jared found himself defending his work on his home turf, right there in his blog’s own comments. Now, to be fair, plenty of folks were impressed with the video’s astute, if spectacularly silly, shorthand analogy. But a lot of people are uncomfortable when video game iconography is used as a metaphor for current events, it would seem (as we saw earlier this month).
One man expressed his distaste, going so far as to lambast Jared, in the comments section, for “making a political message thinly veiled with a video game shell, when you are first and foremost an entertainment writer. What does any of this [have] to do with video games?”
Is Jared, as “an entertainment writer,” obligated to conceal his political bias?
More to the point, though, I’ve seen this particular complaint pop up at several mainstream video game sites, and especially at those sites where editors are permitted to post to blogs. Hey! You review video games! What gives you the right to talk about politics, current events, war, or culture? Or, and I’ve seen this argument around, Hey! I come here to talk about fun stuff! Knock that off!
I wonder with what frequency critics of other media—movie critics, for instance, or music reviewers, or book critics—are accused of doing the same. I do think it’s somewhat strange, and a little disheartening, that even fellow gamers are suspicious of politics-and-gaming’s overlap.
Is the consensus, even within our own gaming culture, that the medium of games is too lowbrow for the projection of potentially engaging metaphors?
With the hopefully-temporary dissolution of my beloved Muxtape, I’ve found myself relying on other streaming music sites and services.
But I was completely unprepared for Mazemod.
More like AMAZE mod! Apart from the fact that I had no idea how completely rad Amiga chip music is, look at this website! Let’s face it: this is what William Gibson thought the internet would look like.
Chainsawsuit is a pretty weird comic. It isn’t specifically a comic about video games, but its author does play games. He also thinks about cooking, doctors, and Superman.
This strip is from last week. I like it a lot.
Today, the growing 4 color rebellion network announced the addition of their excellent arts/culture/DS blog, Tiny Cartridge. Topics and subject matter range from Retronauts to Game Center CX, to the cutest little Metroid diorama I have ever seen. Obviously, I added Tiny Cartridge to my feedreader immediately. You should do the same.
I’m getting some freaky health thing checked out, just to make sure it’s nothing serious—I’m not sure how long that’ll keep me away, but if there’s a dearth of updates, yes, that.
Prolific game designer Petri Purho doesn’t need a gimmick, but if he has one, it is this: the man is committed to making one new game every month.
And he’s no slouch. As Kloonigames approaches its two-year anniversary, Petri has created the Big List o’ Games, a one-stop catalog of his 24 most recent creations. Many of them are must-plays for anyone interested in indie game development—so go check them out! Go on! Shoo!
Congratulations on two years of Kloonigames!
