Triptych: This Is How I Feel Today

"Limbo Design" by Yolkia

"Black and Gray" by Iago M

"Limbo 8-Bit" by Nestalgic Bits

Triptych: Trapped In Limbo

"Better Stay In Bed" by Mikaël Aguirre

"Limbo #2: Hotel" (t-shirt) by Big Lime

"Expecto" (t-shirt) by Joey Tollefsen

Showcase: Little Pixel's Indie Game Posters

[Little Pixel's
Indie Game Posters]

Triptych: How Low Can You Go?

"Limbo Limbo" (t-shirt) by Drew Wise

"A Wrong Turn" (t-shirt) by Perdita00

(Click for full-size)
"Professor Layton In Limbo" by Jessica Hoffmann

Double Triptych: Journey Men

"A Journey To Beauty" by RyuuKiba

"Journey" by SiOtheCaveman

"Journey" by Leonardo Gutierrez

"Journey" by Michael Bills

"Sandstorm" by Rebecca Gunter

"Journey" by Luisa Rafidi

Journey is a game that I've been wanting to play for a while, but haven't been able to get ahold of a PS3 to do so since it was released back in March. Nevertheless, the game looks beautiful, and it's already starting to inspire some pretty stunning fan-art.

Triptych: Play All The Games!

"Indies Assemble" by Steve Courtney

"Captain Valve: The Animated Series" by ZeroLives

"Katamari" by Jeremy Tinder

Triptych: Indie Groove

"Bit.Trip" by Cory Godbey

"Peacock Rocks!" by RioRock¹

"Amnesia: The Dark Descent" (poster) by SClarke²

¹ Peacock is one of the characters from the upcoming indie fighting game SkullGirls, slated for an early 2012 release on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade. It looks, in a word, incredible.

² Probably the scariest game of all time.

Indiesplosion!

A trio of indie games I've been meaning to post about for a few weeks: Stealth Bastard and Gunpoint are stealth-based 2D platformers, while Retro City Rampage is kind of a satirical 8-bit GTA demake.

STEALTH BASTARD: TACTICAL ESPIONAGE ARSEHOLE
Curve Studios
(PC, free download)

Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole has been described as the unholy spawn of Super Meat Boy, Portal and Splinter Cell. I'm not 100% certain what makes the protagonist such a bastard\arsehole, but robots and lasers definitely seem to think he's kind of a dick, and wish all sorts of ill upon him. Stealth Bastard offers 28 levels, a level editor, and is completely and unreservedly free.

Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole Trailer

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GUNPOINT
Tom Francis (Pentadact)
(PC, December 2011 release)

Gunpoint reminds me a lot of an updated Elevator Action, if that game was a lot more violent and had Batman's detective mode from Batman: Arkham Asylum (called 'rewiring mode' here). The game's not out yet so I haven't had a chance to try it out, but it looks fantastic and seems to have a pretty unique gameplay mechanism. The video below is a talk\playthrough of an early, very rough version of Gunpoint which nevertheless contains all of the basic elements of the more polished upcoming version.

Gunpoint Early Talkthrough Video

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RETRO CITY RAMPAGE
VBlank Entertainment
(WiiWare, XBox Live Arcade, release date TBA)

Retro City Rampage is insane. Lots of carjacking and criminal activity and random acts of violence, all in glorious 8-bit. It also looks highly referential, and packed full of classic videogame in-jokes and sight gags: everything from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game to Metal Gear to The Legend of Zelda II get satirised. The game world is huge, and the designers promise over 20 available weapons and 30 available vehicles (including but not limited to the TMNT van, the A-Team's van, and Doc Brown's DeLorean). I'm looking forward to this finally getting released.

Retro City Rampage Trailer

Triptych: Spelunking Anecdote

"A Story About Caves" by scrotumnose

"Doukutsu Damacy" by Alex Ahad

"Cave Story" by 8-bitch

LIMBO Finally Out On Steam

"8-Bit Limbo For PC!" by The Last Monkey

Way, way, WAY, WAY back in 2006, when this blog was still the Cabinet of Curiosities, I posted about Limbo, an upcoming indie game from Copenhagen-based Playdead Studios. Limbo was subsequently released last year on XBox Live Arcade after a four-year development cycle, but sadly I never got a chance to play it.

Well, now Limbo's been released on Steam for PC, at a more-than-reasonable price of $9.99, so I guess I no longer have any excuse not to play it. The game's garnered rave reviews across the board, and considering it was one of the first indie games that I got genuinely excited about - excited enough to start blogging about videogames, in fact - I think I owe it to myself to put it into rotation.

The GAF Collection

The GAF Collection, Collected has compiled roughly 400 videogame covers created by the members of the NeoGAF forums, done in the style of the Criterion Collection. Like Criterion covers, they're classy, artful, and often very clever.

Below are a few of my favourites, and just a sampling of the hundreds to be found over at TGAFC,C.

Shadow of the Colossus (PS2), Katamari Damacy (PS2)

Two of my favourite games for the PlayStation 2. In both games, you control a positively tiny protagonist and the overall theme is one of largeness. Each of these covers emphasises this by offsetting your character against a backdrop of a massive Colossus\Katamari of which only a portion is shown. Both Colossus and Katamari seem overwhelming to the point of being nearly insurmountable.

Scott Pilgrim Levels Up

It would be overly simplistic to state that Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim is a comic series about videogames... But on the other hand, it's not NOT about videogames, either. Games are just one of a number of themes woven into Scott Pilgrim that make my nerdy little heart race with glee every time I read it. There's the fact that Scott and his friends are (mostly) Torontonians, so there's any number of casual shout-outs to daily Canadian life (Scott regularly wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the CBC logo, for example.) Or the whole struggling, self-important indie band thing, as epitomised by Scott's band Sex Bob-Omb or rival band The Clash At Demonhead, amongst others. Or the near-constant stream of pop-culture references - Amazon.ca, Trainspotting, The Shins - that never come off as forced or overly cute.

But this is a blog about videogames, and if there's one thing Scott Pilgrim's got in spades, it's videogame love.

To date, O'Malley's released five of his intended six-volume Pilgrim opus, charting Scott's epic quest to defeat his girlfriend Ramona Flowers' seven evil ex-boyfriends (I'm wildly speculating here, but presumably the final volume will come out concurrently with or just prior to the theatrical release of the movie adaptation this August - but more on that in a sec.) In both concept and execution, it's pretty much a comic-book translation of the definitive videogame storyline: the hero must tackle and beat X number of level bosses, go up against the Big Bad, and win the heart of the princess in the end. It sounds incredibly precious, and make no mistake, it is - but O'Malley knows what he's doing, and over the course of the five books to date, he's thrown so many curveballs into the proceedings, and dealt with so many identifiable, grown-up trials and tribulations (like scraping together enough rent money to hang onto your shitty apartment for another month, or navigating awkward and often soon-to-fail relationships) in an admirably deft and even-handed manner, that it's anyone's guess where the story will end up.

Of course, at heart Scott Pilgrim IS about videogames, and there are clever little touches throughout to remind the reader of this fact. Besides the band names, the ex-boyfriends literally drop coins (actual pocket change) and items after they're defeated, and characters transform from average 20-somethings to cartoonish, insanely skilled fighters at the drop of a hat. They operate within a universe that's half-reality, half-videogame, and Scott himself is the quintessential videogame protagonist. And in a weird way, all of this makes perfect sense and actually lends the book a kind of heightened realism (at least for colossal nerds like me): how many times have I gotten through a rough day at work by thinking of it as XP grinding so I can eventually level up, or justified dropping $100 on a textbook by looking at it as providing +1 to INT?

Yeah, it's nerdy. Laugh all you want, but you do it too - we've all been deeply influenced by a lifetime of growing up playing videogames. And the great thing about Scott Pilgrim is that he doesn't just think this way: this is the way his world actually works.

Unless you've been living in a Hutterite colony for the past year and this is the first opportunity you've had to escape the watchful eyes of your elders and get onto the internet, you're probably aware of the upcoming adaptation of Scott Pilgrim, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which - barring global catastrophe - should hit theatres August 13th of this summer. Edgar Wright (who, besides having directed Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, was the co-creator and director of the brilliant nerd-love British series "Spaced", which if you haven't seen... you should) is directing, lovable geek George-Michael Bluth is playing Scott Pilgrim, John McClane's daughter is playing Ramona V. Flowers, and the likes of Brandon Routh, Chris Evans, and the incorrigable Jason Schwartzman have been cast as various Ex-Boyfriends (the screenplay was penned by one Michael Bacall who, despite having no major studio credits to his name thus far, is following up his Pilgrim script with a fictional adaptation of the documentary The King of Kong for New Line Cinema - good enough for me.) And it was, appropriately enough, shot in Toronto, which makes it one of the few high-visibility American films I can think of both filmed in and unabashedly set in a Canadian city (seriously, can you think of any? At all?)

There are a ton of movies out this year based on both comic books and videogames. On the one hand, we've got Iron Man 2, Kick-Ass, Jonah Hex, and The Losers, while on the other, there's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Resident Evil: Afterlife, not to mention the rumoured Mortal Kombat remake. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World stands as the only adaptation slated for 2010, however, that falls comfortably into both categories, and frankly (based on the admittedly-miniscule amount of information that's trickled out thus far,) it's probably the one film I'm most excited about, in a cautiously optimistic sort of way.

AND, because the world apparently is a beautiful place, Ubisoft Montreal is currently developing a videogame adaptation of Scott Pilgrim. Whether it'll hew closer to the film or the graphic novel (or equal measures of both) remains to be seen, of course, but in an interview with Comic Book Resources, Bryan Lee O'Malley has gone on record to state that it'll be a classic, retro side-scroller beat-'em-up.

Just as it should be. A videogame based on a movie based on a comic book inspired by videogames? It's almost enough to make a guy religious.

***

All five volumes of Scott Pilgrim are available in paperback from Amazon.ca for $11.26 each (Canadian funds). That means you can get all five for around $60 Canadian, including shipping! That's how much you spent on Brütal Legend! This is a much better investment, trust me.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Vol. 1)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Vol. 2)
Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness (Vol. 3)
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Vol. 4)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe (Vol. 5)

First Person Tetris.

You should play First Person Tetris. Here are some glowing first impressions from people who have happened to stumble into the room while I've been playing it:

"No. That hurts my brain."
- Cait (my roommate)

"It satisfies some strange primal adaptive mechanism... That part of the brain that separates us from the reptiles..."
- Doctor Strange

[First Person Tetris: A Dizzying Take On The Classic Puzzler, via terminalgamer.com]

2010 Indie Games Festival

Boing Boing has a feature on 20 or so stand-out games from the 2010 Independent Games Festival, which I'll just refer you to rather than attempting to emulate here.

I will, however, point out that amongst the many fine indie games mentioned (including personal favourites Cogs, Miegakure, and Today I Die,) is a long-forgotten gem which I mentioned in one of my very first gaming-related posts on my other blog - Limbo. After four years of total silence on the part of the developers, I'm excited to see that this game is finally coming to fruition.

In Boing Boing's words:

Limbo is one of IGF 2010's biggest surprises, both for having fallen completely off the map for over three years (it was originally featured here on BB in early October, 2006), and for re-emerging with one of this year's best-realized atmospheric treats.

Despite the time between there and here, it still offers pretty much exactly what you wanted it to from that first video teaser above: a warmly and softly lit monochromatic world that stands in surprisingly harsh opposition to the cold realities that await your young adventurer within (that bit with the terrifying tree-monster in the video? That doesn't end so well on your first encounter), and a series of delightfully modeled physics-based challenges that give that world real weight.

And for reference, here's that clip.

Warning: This Game Is Canon

When I first stumbled across "Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden - Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa", I naturally assumed that it was not - could not, for that matter - be a real thing. How wrong I was. Tales of Games' freeware JRPG, done up in the style of classic SNES turn-based roleplaying games like Final Fantasy IV and Illusion of Gaia, is presented as an unofficial (yet, nevertheless, "canon") sequel to the Super Nintendo\Sega Genesis basketball throwdown game "Barkley Shut Up and Jam", despite the fact that there was an actual "Barkley Shut Up and Jam 2" released two years after the first. While I'm no videogame lawyer (actually I am,) I suspect that a major copyright litigation case is NOT in the works.

The plot of "Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden" is at least ten kinds of crazy. Here's a very brief snippet from the Wikipedia entry on the game:

Twelve years prior to the game, Charles Barkley, in an attempt to impress his son Hoopz Barkley, performs a Chaos Dunk—and inadvertently kills almost everyone present. As a result, basketball was made illegal and nearly all great players were killed in "The Great B-Ball Purge of 2041" (a.k.a "B-Ballnacht").

In 2053, another Chaos Dunk rocks Manhattan, killing fifteen million, and the blame falls on Charles, who is believed to be the only human capable of performing the Chaos Dunk. With the help of the Ultimate Hellbane, Charles escapes his pursuers: the B-Ball Removal Department, led by ex-NBA all-star Michael Jordan. Charles follows Ultimate Hellbane through the B-Ball Catacombs to the tomb of LeBron James, discovering that the Ultimate Hellbane is actually Balthios - the Octoroon great grandson of LeBron James. James contacts Charles from the B-ball dimension, offering him a warning which tells him to "seek the Cyberdwarf."

And that's just a SNIPPET. Click through for the full plot synopsis and then try to resist downloading this masterpiece right away. You can't, can you?

Here's Tales of Games' official trailer, if you're somehow not yet sold.

And Tales of Games doesn't stop there! Oh no.

"The Sewer Goblet: The Wu-Tang Clan and the Wu-Tang Baby" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Replacing Charles Barkley with the Wu and swapping the SNES-era JRPG engine for an NES-era one, it follows the legendary rap enclave as they attempt to rescue a "majestic baby with a mysterious pendant" from an evil wizard and his henchman, Cheese Panda XD, both of whom live in the sewers (for some reason.)

You can grab "The Sewer Goblet" from Tales of Games' website.

[Tales of Games]

Demade, As Per Your Requirements

Demakes. By now you're probably familiar with the concept: take a contemporary game and remake it as it might have appeared on an earlier platform. The term and concept, coined by Phil Fish over at the TIGSource forums (THE definitive repository for independent demakes!), are a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the whole short-on-ideas-but-big-on-fan-franchises mentality of today's game development industry - It's hilarious to imagine Mirror's Edge on the Atari 2600 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on an XT with EGA graphics, but at the same time, we're still playing the latest Castlevania, Metroid or Wolfenstein. If games can be updated, why can't the reverse also be true?

And truthfully, there's some very impressive work being done in the indie demake quadrant - again, much of it stemming from The Independent Gaming Source's Bootleg Demake Compo in the summer of 2008.

So without further ado, I give you a small sampling of games dragged kicking and screaming into a generation of hardware limitations they were never meant for.


Megaman 4kb (C64 Demake of Megaman)

Hold Me Closer, Giant Dancer (Shadow of the Colossus Demake for the TRS-80 III)

Final Fantasy 7 (Demake for the NES)

Codename: Gordon (Half-Life\Half-Life 2 Sidescroller Demake, available on Steam)

Soundless Mountain II (Demake of Silent Hill II for the NES)

Portal: Still Alive (Flash-based Demake of Portal)

ASCIIpOrtal (ASCII Demake of Portal)

Super 3D Portals 6 (Atari 2600 Demake of Portal)

A list of the games being demade by the guys over at TIGSource can be found here, as well as the official catalogue over here.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fantastic Gameboy demake mockups, in glorious grey\green\beige, by the folks over at wayofthepixel:

(Bioshock, by CroM)

(Psychonauts, by HMC)

(American McGee's Alice, by Arachne)

(Okami, by Doppleganger)

(Sam and Max Hit The Road, by KhrisMUC)

(World of Warcraft, by Arachne)

(Resident Evil 4, by Bouzolf)

And then, of course, you have the other side of the coin: remakes of retro games, a designation which apparently only requires that the game in question be updating to a platform released subsequently to the one the original came out on. Retro Remakes has a great list of remakes both current and in development. This deserves a post in itself, but in the meantime I'll leave you with this, from the as-yet-unreleased Maniac Mansion remake by German-based indie developers Vampyre Games (and which looks downright brilliant):