Tibori is an japan-based design group, that do pixelart in 3-dimensional form. They build imaginative landscapes with blocks and also use popular sprite characters like Super Mario, Megaman, Kirby or Link from Legend of Zelda. The works are expressing the obvious in beautiful shapes with a beautiful sense for colors. You can follow the works / progress at their blog Dotter Dotter

Ratloop figured out an extremely cool way of designing and creating your avatars and textures for the avatar, as well as puzzles and leveldesigns, in a charming, but also likely technically overdriven way at thier game Mightier. In order to get your avatar, you print out a sheet of paper, fill it with the texture, the body, the physiognomy. You do it by drawing face, foods, legs, skin with a bold pen simply on the paper. It is easy as that. After feeding your creation into a special scanning system (you can use a webcam), it magically turns into a virtual avatar. The same princible applies for creating platforms, levels and landscapes, simply by drawing lines on paper.

The game was submitted for the Independent Games Festival Award 2009 and can be downloaded on their website. Someone just handout the award for them.

A nice mixture of music and puzzlegame is Auditorium. Your goal is to “put on” audio-engines by throwing particles on it. The more particles it receives, the louder the sound will get. If all audio-engines are on, the level is won. On later levels more engines will appear and also more “particle modifiers” and the particle steam will have a more complex route to pass. Unfortunately, at least on my computer, the CPU usage really got high at higher levels. A non glossy cpu-friendly version of this game, a lot more trickier, with better puzzles and a more fun gameplay, could make this a much much better game. You can set the flash-player into the “low-quality” the optimize to performance a little bit. I also think that the the particle-stream without the glow-effect is pure and intense, beginning to melt the sensitive motion and the music into a good flow.

Thanks Frank for the tip!

I am not the biggest fan of Christmas chipmusic-collections in general, but this here is high energy and and surprising good quality. Several chipmusic artists made versions of Christmas-songs – some are happy, some are moody, some experimental. What all this songs have in common is the extraordinary high music-quality. Chipmusic is more like hypermodern jazz, than just a simple “retro-thing”. This guys know how to play their instruments. The collection is released on the Pixelmod Records. They write about the release:

This christmas compilation contains the who-is-who from the current chiptune scene and some fresh and sparkling newcomers.

To give yourself this Christmas-pleasure, just download the .zip here.

via Player1

Oh boy, this currently released material of the game “Owlboy” just left my mouth wide open. Owlboy is an upcoming independent platformer with more than just “incredible” pixelgraphics. Really, it is hard to tell, how awesome the graphics are. The style is absolutely pure pixelstyle, but in a very laborious manner. Gameplay is also very classic in the style of jump’n’adventure, a little bit like Gargoyles Quest, Castlevania or Rainbow Islands. Owlboy will be a pleasurable graphic-adventure trip, but it is in 2d and feels extremely good and cutting edge. Should somebody say, that graphics lost its relevance. (I suggest this posting on 2d-sprites and animations on GameDesignScrapbook).

The publisher of Owlboy D-Pad Studio should think about releasing printed posters to sell, just instead or besides the game. I would definitely count in for such a goodie.

A man called Myk Dawg (official website here) made two years ago a nice videoclip for a relaxed DJ Shadow video. This information comes partly via the new blog from the BoingBoing Offworld. You also definatelly should have a look on this blog, because, well, it is really well made off-content. As always guys. Take a look at the other video from Myk Dawg.

The one and only netlabel-magazine Phlow-Mag gives us a second christmas-special with the best of the best of netaudio released on the web. Like last year, mo. and Sven Swift not only put together a fine netlabel-collection of music, but also netlabel-activists, musicians and other artists answer willingly the questions of their personal favourite netlabel-music from 2008. Much, much great music to explore. I highly recommend peeking around this and that playlist.

The compilation: Fall is for lovers.