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.

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]

Back To The Future Crysis Mod.

Despite FPSs being my videogame drug of choice, I haven't yet played Crysis (sadly). One minute and forty-nine seconds after pressing play on this video, however, I am now consumed by the need to rectify that, if only so I can install this mod.

Click through for the larger version, as always.

(Delorean Time Machine mod for Crysis, via www.crymod.com)

Fast Food Fighters

This one's been floating around the internets for a couple of years, but I feel bad for not updating much this last week while my white blood cells combat a horrible invasion force from beyond, AKA influenza, so here you go.

Extra Value Combo Alpha, by ~Lysol-Jones

Why this has not yet been the subject of some kind of M.U.G.E.N. mod is a true injustice. Unless it has. I'm too sick to research it right now.

EDIT: It turns out that a) I'm NOT too sick to research it, and b) someone HAS ported this (in part, I guess?) to M.U.G.E.N., or at least has made Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders characters. So the balance of the universe has been restored... For now.

Epic Mickey - Slowly Becoming Reality

I've been fighting off illness for the last week and today it finally developed into a full-blown (swine? maybe!) flu. My weekend has been spent sitting on the couch listening to The Cash\Dylan Sessions (the aural equivalent of chicken noodle soup), re-watching Twin Peaks, and trying to keep down greasy take-out, but I couldn't resist posting this update on what is starting to look like my most anticipated upcoming game of 2010: Epic Mickey.

Until now, precious little information had been released on Epic Mickey other than some intriguing concept art (which you can see below the cut). That's starting to change, however, with Game Informer's leak of their November issue wrap-around cover.

Game Informer also promises a month of regularly-posted updates on the game at their Epic Mickey Portal, which you can be sure I'll be keeping a close eye on.

What has been revealed about Epic Mickey thus far:

· It's being developed by Junction Point Studios and produced by Warren Spector, the man behind Wing Commander, Ultima, System Shock, and the brilliant Thief and Deus Ex games (fun fact: he also designed the pen-and-paper RPG Toon for Steve Jackson Games with the legendary gaming god Greg Costikyan, whose blog is required reading for anyone interested in gaming culture).
· It will be released on the Wii with a projected date of third quarter 2010.
· "Epic Mickey" is most likely a working title and not final.
· It will be a platformer and has been described as "steampunk" (coincidentally, before I started coughing up chunks of lung and downing Nyquil like Kool-Aid, I was working on a post on steampunk-themed games, so watch for that once I return to my typical fine fetter).
· It will blow your mind.

I've long held the conviction that Disney is a lot more subversive than the watered-down, family-friendly image it's known for. That, or it's such a massive superstructure that internal subversion goes overlooked. If you still have your doubts, check out their 1995 short "Runaway Brain" below:

Anyway, on to the Epic Mickey gallery:

By Fred Gambino:

By Gary Glover: