Uhh, I love acid. And thanks to the solid taste of the mighty Independent Gaming Source I discovered this two games today, that make extensive use of acid as the music score. Game, Toy, Sound-Sequencer. The games are a little bot of everything, like “Space Invaders meets Jump’n’Run, R-Type and Doijin-Shooter”. Not much gaming elements, but all mixed up a little bit.Download them here.

Action Jockey

You control the the player sprite and the music sequencer with the cursor keys, while jumping and shooting is done with X and C. Press X two times for double-jump. Music is getting loud and tricky from time to time. The sprites have a nice and reduced pixelstyle. It somehow reminds me on the game Dive from the Gamma256-collection.

VS-Music

This is basically a shooter. Press space to start the game. In the game you press X to shot and C to drip a bomb in order erase all bullets from the screen. The bullets are synchronized to the sequencer sound. Unfortunately I did not found any instance to change or modulate the sequencer data. That would be a cool feature, even if you had to modify a simple text-file. You can change the sequencer-data by shooting the white squares that appear on the enemies ship.

I didn’t test it, but you should also be able to replace the sound-data. They are stored as wave-files in the sound-folder of the game-directory. What I also like about these games: the usage of the keys C and X instead of Z and X, that most games from Japan and US use. Using C and X makes it seamless playable on qwerty and qwertz-keyboards – without changing the language scheme.

PS: I noticed, that the independent gaming source freshly opened up a database of indiegames. Good work! Clean and usable design.

Wanderlust – 2d

Björk’s videos are always impressive and surprising at the same time. The new video “Wanderlust” reached a new milestone in the aesthetic process of Björk’s video works. They used a wide variety of different techniques, from 3D-rendering to scenes made of clay and people in costumes. To top this the official video will be released in 3D-stereo: you will have to wear old-school 3D-glasses to enjoy it. However, the version released on the internet is in plain 2D. Enjoy the epic quality of it! Never seen something like this before.

There is also a remarkable making-of Wanderlust. If you like, you can watch a high quality version of Wanderlust.

[ via CreateDigitalMotion, Motionographer ]

Blissful!

What can you say about the band TRS-80? At least lo-fidelity aesthetics, use of retro-technologies, very unique style and hypnotizing music. The new video “Tinted” is made of 2 or 3 simple layers and could be, in other words, made with Resolume or others of this “I layer three videos” VJ-Tools. The mix of vintage look and live recordings give them a very special feel. At least I love the music. Somewhere between early Mouse on Mars and Nonex. The glasses give me urban-moods like DaftPunk did before.

This is the highest wisdom of manufacturing synthesizers in a homebrew way! It is loud and awesome, does not sound that good, but looks amazingly beautiful. But maybe you have to practice in order to get nice sounds. Nevertheless I would like to play with it a little bit.

The creator Stanley Povoda lives on Prague and simply looks like he made it very far on the way of being a real slack-master. You can check out his working-place – or should I say home or laboratory? – here, a nice 360 degree picture.

[ via ]

If this thing is really working as good as it says, than finally a good solution in making computer-suitable drawings outside is offered. The “Paperium” is basically a pen. With it you can draw and write as with any normal pen. The funky detail is that all your movements are stored in the pen and with the click of a button you can send the path you just drawn to your computer via Bluetooth. It combines the freedom of expression with computer-based memory and the ability to enhance the data after you have generated it. Sounds to me like an interesting alternative to most of this ugly table-boards. The people who made Paperium this is small company located in Vienna.

The pen is computing your drawings.

Maybe there will be good times coming at us for computing outside. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) also offers a monitor that is clearly visible in direct sunlight exposure, at least in black and white mode.

Korg is always very certain when it comes to find cool names for their instruments. They launched a sythesizer-project on the Nintendo DS that is simply called DS-10. It is a full scale synthesizer, that should be available for under 50 Euro. A tool that really would add value to your gaming console. The features of this synth are: two patchable virtual synthesizers with two oscillators on each channel, a drum machine, a sequencer, and a full range of effects. Here is the official website. Notice that interesting use of the stylo with the appregiator I somehow seen before anywhere in the homebrew scene…

[via]

Scrabb Island

Good news for everyone who are interested in both, computing game history and game design as well. There is a Monkey Island wiki, complete dedicated to Lucasarts Monkey Island games. As you can imagine they feature everything from the complete cast of all characters over the setting towards the people behind the games. We get to know mind-blowing, unforgettable quotes from the characters, like Elaine Marley, who said one time: “I… I can’t. I’m washing my hair tonight.”

Like on Wikipedia, you can edit and more interesting discuss each article. Same people ran the site “The World of Monkey Island“, but discontinued it at the end of 2007. The wiki will be the replacement, although the World of Monkey Island site is still up. If you want to need to know anything about this games, just ask those people.