Homebrewed VJ system.

Pikilipita VJ is a homebrew software, that took in total three years in the making. It’s a VJ software for doing visuals at night clubs. You can select different levels and “play” the visuals, selecting colors etc. It is available for Game Boy Advanced, so also Nintendo DS compatible. The cartridge is available for about 40 Euro – shipping worldwide. A version for GP2X is also available.

The creator says about himself at the website:
“I’m a ‘no laptop VJ’, I mix moving pictures only using handheld video game devices.” …and this is great. Another brilliant homebrew release directly from within the scene. You can see it directly in action here: at the club or here a tech-demo.

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DHTML Lemmings

Maybe JavaScript is the “next big thing”. After millions of widgets and other stuff written in JavaScript on the Web 2.0-aged internet, making of browser-based games could be the next thing in the obscure career of JavaScript, since every modern browser and at least every modern user has JavaScript enabled to get AJAX and MashUp-goodness. I would bet, that since GoogleMaps everyone will have JavaScript enabled. That’s the presence or the recent history.

But then. Have a look at a complete implementation of Lemmings and a clone of Super Mario Brothers to see the abilities of JavaScript in browsers in gaming action. How do you do this? Follow this short tutorial on get your html to JavaScript games. It is not that difficult as you might imagine, because basically you model user input, game logic and the visible objects on the screen. I haven’t researched into performance yet, but JavaScript games in browsers could be an alternative to 2D-Flash games. The good side on JavaScript is, that it integrates seamlessly into the Web 2.0 wonderland plus it is easy, straightforward and open-source. Hi-scores and community-features galore!

Transmigration is a wild mixture of sound, music and gameplay. This shooter is not too hard, but the emphasis is clearly on the dynamic of music and play. Feels like interactive video or better the future of music videos. Have a instant play now. And read this related article.

There are some cool pictures for everyone interested in the making of “Cave Story“. The creator Pixel released pictures on the making of, while Derek Yu from the Independend Gaming Source collected them all on one page. Enjoy, relax, have fun, develop.

Tobias Leingruber is a student at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and got last year attention for a media-art webcrawler project called “Hoebot”. This crawler was programmed for the student community “StudiVZ” – the german counterpart of Facebook. Tobias wrote in total two bots: Hoebot – a crawler automated to ask users on the social platform for data and Lovebot – a bot that connects people automatically “love”-based on the crawled data from Hoebot. The StudiVZ as a social networking platform for students got much attention in the german web 2.0 scene and at the same time was criticized for having issues on low security and privacy politics. And exactly at this point the crawlers set the point. The works of Tobias focus on networked and browser-based systems.

Timemachine on the website msn.com and Tobias Leingruber

Tobias Leingrubers recent work is focusing on Mozilla Firefox add-ons, with the Timemachine as the leading project. It is is a Firefox extension that brings websites back to the 90s by manipulating the display of any website browsing. This will maybe the starting point for a series of art-based Firefox extensions and a related art-add-on community. Read the why and how below.

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Artwork from the release 08 Badlands

Finally there is another netlabel focusing only on high-quality music made with vintage computing and gaming gear. The netlabel II music (ii, but it feels like a pause sign, huh?) does this. There are some of this netlabels, like 8bit-peoples or that one I ran once (if you know more, then put it in the comments). But what I like most on II music is their attempt to make finished works, albums that stand on their own and have descriptive and epic qualities to trip your head into wandering motion pictures. So exactly that thing I liked about games from an era long ago. It’s a bit more than the usual form experiments that most blip-warriors do. They have no ability to pre-listen tracks online. They would fail the Web2.0 compatibility test. But be sure that each download is worth it. And somehow downloading stuff feels like nostalgia, doesn’t it?

One thing great about collections is that you hear/see things that are normally hidden in the timeline.