Thursday, 9 October 2008
I like how this turned out. More playing with colors. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about video games!
I was talking games with my friend Mike and poking around the interwubs, and it seems that Cave Story is coming to the Wii. Interesting! For those of you who don’t know, Cave Story is one of the most loved and respected indie games ever. It’s freeware (available at that first link), designed by a guy named Pixel, and has better gameplay, art, music, story, and soul that most games I’ve ever played. Get it! It’s free!
Another free game I’ve enjoyed lately, by way of Ryan North, is ROM CHECK FAIL: a small and completely insane game that rapidly and randomly mix-and matches gameplay, tilesets and SFX from an assortment of video game classics. It’s brilliant, and great spastic fun, reminiscent of Wario Ware.
Also might I mention that both games are available for Linux? MMM? (Plus the Windows Cave Story runs fine in WINE, which is how I originally played it.)
So. Played any good games lately?
October 9th, 2008 at 07:20
Yes! Yes! Yesss!
I went to check if Cave Story had already come out for WiiWare (fantastic news, but not yet there unfortunately) and discovered that Super Mario RPG, one of my two favorite SNES RPGs that made a big impression on me when I was young and playing games with Brian Klein in the Poconos (the other being Earthbound, my favorite game ever, though not on Wii yet), had come out for Virtual Console. Needless to say, I’m playing it right now.
One game I found, either on Dinosaur Comics or Kottke (I can’t remember) is Passage. Passage is less about being fun and more about being art. Play it through first (it can take five minutes or a lifetime), then read the artist’s statement. It has binaries for Windows and OSX, UNIX source, and plays fine in Wine.
Also, I was never able to get ROM CHECK FAIL working, maybe I’ll try again.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:25
Awesome. Super Mario RPG is sweet.
I’d seen passage before (I think it was on DC), but never played it. So I just went through it a few times, and yeah, it’s really well-done. As I was playing through it, I kept thinking about the design and was amazed by how well it all fit together.
October 10th, 2008 at 01:07
I’m afraid I couldn’t comment on anything gaming related. But at least you couldn’t complain that I’d ever beat your high score (though I don’t have pea soup green eyes either). (Sorry, couldn’t resist the SHTYM reference.)
I like the lack of panels/layout in this - reminds me particularly of Kabuki, though there are other comics that do that sort of thing. In terms of light - blue and yellow are opposites, which will probably never stop amusing me. I wonder if this is referencing that as the shadows are blue and the highlights are yellow…
October 10th, 2008 at 08:03
Thaaaanks, I’ve still got to read that. And yeah, the color scheme came from shading my watercolors with blue to get a sunlight look. So I just kinda amped up the shadows and highlights and didn’t add any real colors…