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.

Miscellany: Super Mario Bros. Art

Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 Remake by ~marobot

Super Mario Realistic Pixelated by jimiyo

1985 by Mike Mitchell

half-real: a critical study of gaming

One of the things that's taken my attention away from Apocalypse POW! this summer is a website I'm in the process of putting together, half-real: a critical study of gaming. It's the first part of a sort of interactive thesis that I'm writing on the history, cultural impact, and development of gaming, and I figured it might be of interest to those of you who read Apocalypse POW! on a regular basis.

half-real is currently broken up into three categories: the sociological perspective on video games, the cultural perspective, and the industry perspective. Right now, this is about one-quarter of what I plan to incorporate -- eventually there will be chapters on Design, Marketing and Production; Studio vs. Independent Development; and Traditional vs. Emergent Gameplay. It's very much a work in progress, so if you have any feedback or comments, feel free to contact me.

Here's an overly-wordy sampling:

The cultural study of video games tends along a spectrum, with one extreme termed Ludology and the other Narratology (as defined by Gonzalo Frasca). In their purest forms, Ludology focuses on rule-based game systems, while Narratology focuses on story-based game systems. In other words, Chess cannot be studied from a narratological perspective, as the game functions entirely as a rule system. Similarly, a work of interactive fiction, for example Infocom's 1980 text-based adventure game Zork, is difficult to assess from a ludological perspective, as it operates as a story delivery system with a minimal imposition of rules (which can be summed up, essentially, as "don't die" and "complete the story".) That said, most games today contain a roughly-proportional division of rule systems and story devices, allowing for multiple approaches to critical analysis.

[h a l f - r e a l : a critical study of gaming]

Assorted Miscellany: Our Man On The Inside Edition.

Life has a tendency to get in the way of the things I'd much rather be doing, like blogging about videogames. However, I have a few key articles of news to report today that can't wait any longer. Frankly, I can't believe I left them as long as I have.

First and foremost - my good pal Mister Horrible recently lucked into a cherry position at the Redmond, WA offices of none other than that paragon of family-friendly interactive entertainment, Nintendo. This is awesome on roughly seventeen levels. Not only will he be able to supply me with insider news (which, I'm sure, will invariably come along with the condition that I in no way leak said information on my blog,) but I will also be able to suggest game ideas to him and pretend that they will be passed along to the appropriate departments.

Supposedly Nintendo has already anticipated my incoming deluge of brilliant pitches, because according to Mr. H, the employee handbook explicitly states the following:

Each week, Nintendo receives hundreds of questions and suggestions about our games and systems. While we appreciate the enthusiasm, due to the volume received, we simply do not have time or resources to process them. Accordingly, it is Nintendo's policy to NOT accept unsolicited game ideas.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I'm nevertheless convinced I can wear them down. Anyway, props to Mister Horrible! If nothing else, I look forward to scouring the Nintendo employee tuck shop and picking up Invincibility Stars at cost.

On another note (one which is easily as geeky as my usual fodder, but for once not game-related) I'd like to point you all in the direction of Visitations: A Musical Tribute to Doctor Who over at Hipster, Please! - Z.'s put together a pretty sick Who-themed nerdcore compilation for your time-and-space-voyaging, Dalek-outwitting, sonic-screwdriver-wielding enjoyment.

And while you're at it, take a look at his write-up on Doctor Octoroc's chiptune-and-video project reimagining Doctor Horrible as a classic 8-bit NES game. I was going to post on this myself, but thankfully Z. got there first and saved me the trouble.

And then go here and watch the video in glorious full-screen Flash animation for yourself.

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.)

Retro Roots: How Did You Get Started?

Inspired in part by this post over at Kotaku, not to mention the urge to prove to myself that I have actual readers beyond search engine spiders, today I’m opening up the floor (or at least, paying more attention to the comments than usual) and asking the question: What was the first gaming rig or console you ever owned? 

I suppose 90% of gamers out there got the bug with their first NES, and rightly so – for me, although I was staunchly a member of the Nintendo Generation, my first post-arcade pixellated experience was two-fold and pre-dated the household NES by about a year.

My first console, or at least ostensibly mine, was the ColecoVision, around 1984.  My grandparents, suddenly burdened with half-a-dozen grandsons between the ages of six and twelve, did the only sensible thing they could think of (and in doing so, were nigh prophetic in the grandparent-grandchild-videogame interrelational framework which exists to this day) and purchased a ColecoVision and handful of games to keep us occupied while the grown-ups drank coffee and, I dunno, made borscht or something.  I only recall playing two games on this console, but I played them harder than any young boy had a right to – The Smurfs: Rescue In Gargamel’s Castle and Donkey Kong.

The Smurfs game was horrible, insanely hard, and tedious.  Like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong or any of the other classic games from that era, there seemed to be an endless number of levels, patterned thusly: daytime meadow, scary night-time forest, Gargamel’s castle.  If you could get past even the first meadow, you were treated to a round of cheers and astonishment from the collective cousins, but you quickly discovered that the greatest gamer in the world could not BEAT this god-damned Smurfs game.  And the music… Christ, it haunts me to this day.

Donkey Kong, on the other hand, struck a chord with me from the very start, and I presume I hassled my parents for my own videogame system almost immediately.  Never quite trusting new, hyped technology (my dad got burned in the whole Betamax fiasco) they opted for an Atari 2600 over the just-released Nintendo Entertainment System.  While the NES thus became the ever-untouchable Holy Grail for my brothers and I, the 2600 did an admirable job of keeping us entertained over the next year.

I don’t recall the complete list of cartridges we owned, but a few will stay in my memory until my dying day.  Yar’s Revenge was easily my favourite, along with Atlantis and Dig Dug.  I logged my requisite hours with Adventure and Joust, though I could never figure out the point of the latter.  I made my little brother cry whenever I played E.T. (which wasn’t very often.)  And although I could not now comment on its overall quality as a game, I remember making my mother take me to K-Mart to pre-order Desert Falcon and then shell out $59.95 upon its arrival (subsequently, whenever I was being a pest, her typical exasperated response to me was, “Why aren’t you playing that $60 game I just bought you?!”)

Around the same time, my parents latched onto the firm belief (which was admittedly widespread in the ‘80s) that Computers Were Our Future, that it was their responsibility to expose their kids to the wonders of personal-computing technology, and that somehow, Pac-Man on a Commodore 64 was more educational than Pac-Man on an Atari.  Thus began the near-constant stream of computers into our household: A Timex-Sinclair 1000 with a cassette-tape drive my father could never quite figure out how to make work; a used C64 that broke after six weeks; an Apple IIe; and countless others.  Somewhere in the midst of this, we adopted a Trash-80 Model III.

The TRS-80 Model III was notable in exactly one regard: it was a complete unit, housing CPU, drives, keyboard and monitor.  It also had one other quality that allowed it to survive in a household of reckless, overexcited boys.  It was virtually indestructible.  I swear to God, it lived in our garage, amongst my dad’s power tools, dune buggies and engine parts, and it worked beautifully up until the day someone accidentally rested a welding gun on its frame.  The thing had some serious silicon balls.

I don’t recall exactly how old I was when the Trash-80 happened along, but I do know that I was young enough that, by all rights, it should not have managed to lure me away from my Atari as successfully as it did.  To begin with: it had no games.  No store-bought, neatly-packaged games with instruction manuals, anyway.  We had exactly one original game for it, which had been thrown in by the original owner, and that was Zork. 

This was my introduction to coding my own games.  First off, the thing had BASIC built into it, meaning I could (and did) scour my local library for books with pages upon pages of reproduced BASIC code for everything from Pong to Chess to god knows what else.  While my pre-pubescent attention span never got further than laboriously typing in the first three or four pages, I did manage to pick up enough of the language to start making my own games, inspired by Zork and whatever Saturday morning cartoon show I had just finished watching.  Thus, I undertook to design my own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles text adventure – and though I devoted dozens of hours to it, it sadly remains unfinished to this day (and is probably still sitting on a 5.25” floppy in one of the melted drives of the defunct beast to this day.)

Of course, soon after its demise, we acquired an XT with a modem and everything went downhill from there.  The sheer availability of easily-obtained pirated software by that point deterred me from the necessity of programming my own entertainment, and sadly it’s a skill I have long-lost.  But I still remember that Trash-80 as my very first gaming rig, and it will always have a place in my heart.

Now it’s your turn.  What was the first game you remember playing?  When, where and how did you get hooked? 

Pixified: More Gaming Wallpapers

Hot on the heels of my previous post on game-themed wallpapers, I’d like to formally welcome you to Round Two.  Fight!

Oh Nintendo Is So Cool, by ~Jhny-heat (1680x1050)

NES Gamepad Guts, by Reintji (1280x1024)

WASD, artist unknown (1680x945)

Pixel Pipe, photo by Annamarie Tendler, original artist unknown (1680x1050)

Bioshock, by Jhonen Vasquez (1358x1018)

Big Daddy & Little Sister, Penny Arcade (1600x1200)

Hitler's Revenge Contains Neither Adolf Hitler Nor Vendettas.

This is a perfect example of the kind of nonsense we as gamers had to put up with during the 8-bit NES era.

Excellent Advice.

8-Bit Conviction, by mycoldman.

mycoldman has some equally valuable advice pertaining to ExciteBike, Pacman, Duck Hunt and Tetris.

Pixified: Gaming Wallpapers

A handful of gaming-themed wallpapers, submitted for your approval. Click through or right-click and save for full-sized images.

Megaman by ~ivanev (1280x1024)

Cute, cheerful, simple lines, and I like the background raster effect.

Alice In The Mushroom Kingdom, artist unknown (1366x768)

Wonderland = Mushroom Kingdom.  It's so obvious.  I can't believe I never saw it before. 

Half-Life 2 Evolution, artist unknown (1920x1080)

Half-Life 2 may well be the greatest game ever made, but I'm still confused by the whole "Combine being aliens\mutants\hybrids\from the future\from a different dimension" thing.  This clarifies it only slightly.

Rapture (Bioshock), artist unknown (1680x1050)

On a similar note... Bioshock had one of the most incredible opening sequences ever.  I love the simplicity and Saul Bass-inspired graphics here.  

Pip Boy (Fallout 3), artist unknown (1440x900)

I've been catching up on my PC gaming lately, and Fallout 3 has rapidly risen to the top of my current list.  This image captures everything great about The Vault: the innocent, cheerful optimism of Pip-Boy scraped away by decades of grunge and grime.

If anyone knows the source of the unattributed images above, by all means let me know in the comments.  I hate posting links to artwork without giving credit where it's due.

Super Mega Mario Kart Panorama.

As those of you who read Copperpott's Cabinet of Curiosities may be aware, I have a bit of a yen for panoramic pop-culture art. And so much the better if that piece happens to be the collaborative effort of over forty very talented artists, and based on one of the greatest Nintendo games of all time - one that, appropriately enough, is itself founded on the principles of collaboration, competition, and group play.

Thus we have The Mario Kart Collab, v.0.1: the (nearly?) final product of an assortment of artists from DeviantArt, each taking one character and their vehicle from the Mario Kart games and rendering it in their own unique style.

Click on the image below to see the full-length work.

(Mario Kart Collab, v.0.1, by various)

(I hope that Themrock and Deviantart forgive me for the direct link to the larger piece, but Photobucket refuses to host such a large file for me without resizing it first, and trust me, you want to see it in all of its glory.)

To quote Tara from Purple Peep Bits (and Birdo artist):

Almost a year ago I was invited to take part in this collaboration project that my good friend Dirk was throwing.

It's a collaboration done with over 40 of the finest artists you can find on DeviantART. Independent and people who already work in the industry came forth for the project from all over the world.

It's an absolute MUST to full view the original picture and check out everyone's interpretations of each driver. They're all fantastic!

Driver artists:
Toad - Mike Jungbluth
Baby Mario - Patricio Betteo
Dry Bowser - Robb Mommaerts
Luigi - Dirk Erik Schulz
Funky Kong - Hugh Freeman
Yoshi - Henry R. Frew
King Boo - Grim-Amentia
Princess Peach - Makani
Baby Luigi - Adrián Pérez
Mario - Andrew Kauervane
Donkey Kong - Fubumeru
Baby Peach - Basakward
Waluigi - Dapper Dan
Bowser jr. - Erin Hunting
Bowser - Richard J. Smith
Dry Bones - Neilando
Birdo - Myself
Daisy - Vernavulpes
Diddy Kong - Becky Dreistadt
Wario - Zach Bellissimo
Toadette - Kyle A. Carrozza
Petey Piranha - Sam Mckenzie
Koopa Troopa - Mario González
Shy-Guy - Benjamin Anders
Para Troopa - Emma Särkelä
Rosalina - Der-shing Helmer
Baby Daisy - Chris E.
Lakitu - Sabrina Alberghetti

Background Characters:
Luismario
Michael Perez
Explosiv22
Emily Jayne Weber
Frobman
Yves Bourgelas
Cotton-Gravy
Lindsay Smith
E. D. Thweatt
Adrian vom Baur
Psycho Time
Cheezadiddle
Evanatt

I really hope that "I am 8bit" checks this out.

I second that. I want a poster-sized print of this for my living room so badly it's not funny.

(via Offworld)