The Pit

(Click the image to view all the gory details)

Ever wonder what happens to Mario when he falls into one of the pits in World 1-1?   Artist Dash Coleman has the answer.

Mega Man Tribute, Part II

More great submissions from UDON's Mega Man Tribute contest!

"Mega Man and Rush" by Mathieu Beaulieu

"The Calm After The Storm" by Robert Kim

"M Is For Mega Man" by Albert Covarrubias

The National and Portal 2

Just a blurb so far, but it appears that The National (High Violent, The Boxer) are contributing an original song to the soundtrack of Portal 2. Not much else is known as of yet. As a fan of both Portal and The National, I find this to be an excellent, if somewhat odd, pairing.

In other Portal 2-related news, I forgot to post this amusing Valentine's Day gift-buying guide from Aperture Science in a timely manner, so I'll do it now.

[Forlorn Band 'The National' Pens Original Dirge for Portal 2, via Kotaku]
[thinkwithportals.com]

IPB&C

I seem to have two themes today: the ghosts from Pac-Man, and fatheed's art. Here they are, together at last!

"How They Died"

Triptych: A Terrifying Nemesis

"Live Action Cutscene" by fatheed

"Pirate Killer" by fatheed

"Space Invader" by ~Great-OHARU

Alice: Madness Returns

The original American McGee's Alice was, in my opinion, an underrated cult classic, a dark revisionist take on Lewis Carroll's Wonderland novels with phenomenal character design and a grim and clever sense of humour. Although it received a fair amount of criticism for its poor controls, the outdated (though striking) graphics, and the fairly straightforward game structure, it had a kind of indie dark-horse charm to it, featured an absolutely haunting soundtrack by Chris Vrenna (of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson), a well-thought-out world map, and one of the best weapons rosters of all time, including a Blunderbuss, a Croquet Mallet, and Jacks. I played the hell out of it, and loved every second of it.

It looks like American McGee is at it again with the forthcoming sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, slated for a June 14th, 2011 release, and based on the below gameplay trailer, it looks like a return to form. I couldn't be more excited about this game if I tried. Previously, I'd been a bit wary, as everything McGee's done in the interim has been - to put it kindly - underdeveloped at best, but the video highlights what looks to be a definite improvement in both visuals and controls, and I'm now counting down the days until June 14th.

Of course, I got this unreasonably excited about Epic Mickey too, and look how that turned out.  Oh well.  Fingers crossed!

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.

Fantastic Four #26, Donkey-Kongified

"Fantastic Four #26", by Anthony Vukojevich

Covered is a blog featuring reinterpretations of classic (and sometimes not-so-classic) comic book covers by a number of artists. There's some excellent work to be seen there, notably Anthony Vukojevich's classic videogame-inspired rehashing of Jack Kirby and Sol Brodsky's cover of Fantastic Four #26 (check out the original here for comparison.)

Gaming Triptych: 5x5 MegaMan, Metroid, Mario (Alexander S. Shen)

"rock, man." by Alexander S. Shen

"it's a girl" by Alexander S. Shen

"italian plumber" by Alexander S. Shen

As always, clicking on the images above will take you to a larger version.

Gaming Triptych: Street Fighter II

"Super Street Fighter Bros. 8bit" by ~torokun

"Street Fighter, Abstract Edition" by infinite continues

"Chun Li" by springfieldpunx

Click on any of the above images for a larger version.

Gaming Triptych: Final Bosses

"Final Boss", by fatheed

"Boss Battle", by dorito bandito

"Ganon: The Other Dark Meat" by Jude Buffum

Click on any of the above images for a larger version.

The Legend of Busting Up People's Stuff (or, Why Link Is A Jerk)

A trio of Zelda-related videos for your enjoyment.



Really makes you wonder about Link's priorities. I mean, the dude picks the worst possible time to go fishing. Then again, what's up with villagers handing out pointless busy-work to Link when there are clearly more important things to be focusing on? They should know he's got the attention span of a ten-year-old on a sugar high.



Crazy red-eyed Link ineffectually smacking a chicken with his sword makes me bust a gut every time.



I don't know why this is a thing.

Hadouken!

Following up on Hipster, Please!'s Doctor Who mixtape I linked to the other day, I thought I'd offer up another free download - this one somewhat more relevant to Apocalypse POW!'s usual theme: Akira the Don's full-length Street Fighter II remix album. And, if you'd like to hear it before you pay zero dollars (or whatever you like) to receive high-quality mp3s straight from the Don himself, he's put the whole thing up as an embeddable stream.

Akira The Don - ATD23 - The Street Fighter Mixtape by Akira The Don

And here's the tracklist:

Akira The Don – ATD23: The Street Fighter Mixtape

Produced, engineered and mixed by Akira The Don at Don Studios IV
Cuts by DJ Jack Nimble
Extra guitars by Jeremy Allen

Tracklisting:
Waking Up
Theme From Ken
Entertainers ft. Littles
Be Brave
The Title
Winners ft Envy
The Victory Boogie
R.Y.U.
Ending 1
Nomad
VEGA
Street Fighter (I Will F U Up) ft Big Narstie, Littles & Lickel P
Steal The Show ft Littles
Congratulations
BONUS: Ken Will F U Up

Pixelbomb!

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.

Uploaded by onemoreprod.

Patrick Jean's Pixel is one of those rare gaming-related video art projects that's both clever, hilarious and aesthetically pleasing.  I could watch it fifty times in a row and not get bored of it.

If you can, watch it full-screen in high-definition to get the full impact.

(via One More Productions.)

Amazing Races!

Tron, if it had been released in the 1960s and had titles designed by the legendary Saul Bass:

Tron vs. Saul Bass from Hexagonall on Vimeo.

Truly, this is why I get up in the morning.

Saxton Hale Will Beat You Up.

Saxton Hale.  President of Mann Company (“We Sell Products And Get In Fights”), proud Australian, and inventor of Jarate (the jar-based karate).  He fights lions, sets grizzly bears aflame, and makes sharks cry.  He is more of a man than you will ever be (especially if you’re a girl).  In fact, you could invent a machine that allows you to travel to alternate dimensions, kidnap ten of the most manly versions of yourself, tape them all together, and Saxton Hale will still punch them to death with both hands tied behind his back and wearing a blindfold.

As always, click on the image for full size.

And you can check out one of Saxton Hale’s Thrilling comic-book adventures over here!  Saxton Hale.  He’s made of stern stuff.

I haven’t played Team Fortress 2 yet, but this is exactly the sort of demented thing that will convince me to get into it.

The Science Gets Done and You Make A Neat Gun

Days like today, you realise how beautiful a place the Internet has the potential to be.

Yesterday, Valve released a Steam update for Portal, containing one new achievement and a couple dozen short audio files which play on peripheral radios throughout the game. The fact, I guess, that Valve would bother releasing an update with such minimal content got fans of the game thinking, "There has to be something else going on here."

Naturally, they got to digging, and it turns out their suspicions were right. Here's the quick rundown of what they found:

1. Hidden in the audio-file data were Morse code transmissions and SSTV (Slow Scan Television) encoded images;
1a. Some of the Morse code data were easily translated and contained a username and password;
1b. One in particular was Morse coded Morse code for 'LOL';
1c. Another was an MD5 checksum string.

2. The SSTV images looked like framegrabs from security cameras from inside Aperture Science, along with a handful of close-up shots of keyboard keys and black\whiteboards, emphasising certain digits, characters and equations.

So far so good. This is starting to look like an adventure, Encyclopedia Brown!

3. After applying the presumably Hogwarts-acquired spell Mathemagicus to this information, smarter people than I came up with a random string of characters, which itself turned out to be, wait for it...

3wtf. ...An encoded phone number for a BBS.

4. Dialing up this BBS and logging in with the given username and password provided access to the old Aperture Science board, and an impressive amount of oft-hilarious infodump, most of it written by witch-hatin' Aperture Science founder, Cave Johnson.

A short sample of one of Johnson's typical missives to his employees:

"Science isn't about why, it's about why not. You ask: Why is so much of our science dangerous? I say: Why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won't hit you in the butt on the way out, because you are fired."

Anyway, here's the thing: amongst the witty little system responses like "ERROR: ERROR NOT UNDETECTED" and "WARNING: BIOS INSUFFICIENTLY BASIC", company memos from the 1970s detailing policy on "Low Risk" Human Resource Acquisitions (summary: Hobos good, Orphans even better, Psychiatric Patients and Seniors unencouraged,) and low-rez ASCII art renderings of various photos and diagrams...

There's a fair amount of teaser information for Portal 2 and, quite possibly, Half-Life 3.

To begin with, the above-mentioned memo seems to delve into the reasons for GlaDOS' fractured, passive-aggressive personality more than ever before. The founder of Aperture, "Cave Johnson", is introduced. And there's one ASCII image in particular, of two robots holding hands, that hints both at potential new enemies for Portal 2 and Half-Life 3, and suggests some kind of backstory for the Aperture Science\Black Mesa animosity.

Here are a handful of screengrabs for you to pore over and try to make sense of. Click through to embiggen.

Hey, Valve? Y'all are magnificent bastards. But I like your style.

[Original post on Kotaku right here.]

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)

Dragon Quest: The Bar

A Dragon Quest-themed restaurant called Luida's Bar has opened in Tokyo's Roppongi District. I'd have more to say but I'm busy booking a one-way flight to Japan as we speak.

(Yes. I plan to live there, in the restaurant itself, lurking under tables and gathering scraps of fallen food until I have enough material to craft a liquid metal sword. You heard me.)

This is simultaneously the greatest news I've heard all day, and the worst. The greatest, because clearly my daily prayers to the Goddess have not only been heard, but answered; the worst, because I promised to sacrifice my first-born child (as yet unconceived) for it to happen.