It’s the mid of the month again, time for a sum-up of the interesting things I found last month that somehow did not found its way into this blog yet.

This time it will be an issue with music, but first…

1.

Take a look at this highly recommended reading on 20 Underused Game-Mechanics. This one is for people seeking out some inspiration on how to control games. I think this will fall under the topic “Game Theory and Practice”.

2.

Soothing, relaxing videos. Trance spirit and quite minimal video aesthetics. If I see it right than this made with any cool Apple visualizer plug in and therefore preset funk. Anyway, it does unfold their magic. Take the deep dive at NM’s YouTube site.

3.

Magical, magical circuitry and music ahead at this one: Paris/Voltage Controlled with minimal visual glitches on portable gaming devices and a looping addictive soundtrack. This is my personal pick of the month.

4.

Lofi aesthetics from Italy. Just happy with a game of life implementation and other goodness on the C64. Music is also with vocoder and well, this all gets very strange.

5.

Scene from original Dark Castle on the Apple Computer

I had a really good bliss at this article about Dark Castle and the remake of it at fine weblog The Artful Gamer, and I still consider getting deeper into this topic by dedicating an own article to it.

Connect..Disconnect..

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X-Dump is a sideproject from the hard rocking chipmusician Psilodump. It’s a collective of electronic musicians from Sweden, that are in a way dedicated to pushing beats and chipmusic-style. Paza Rahm from the X-Dump collective has released an album “And his Gummiband“, of which we are going to watch the videoclip “Jhonny the Owl’s Big Break”. It has this somehow special poetry.

Ronski Polski is the moniker of Ronnie Deelen who originally comes from the Netherlands, but for somehow reason studied in Poland at the Art Academy in Katowice. His style is playful, combining tactile interfaces, graphic design and illustration with 8- and 16-bit sound from devices like Game Boy and Casio VL1, Mattel Synsonic Drummachine and an Electric Kazoo. This video here (see below) shows a live-performance in the new art building in Katowice: the “Rondo Sztuki” (Art Roundabout). Please notice the music and the colorful visuals he makes with two other guys under the moniker RGBoy. This clear style (the 8-bit guys nowadays know how to get into mastering…!), clean melody lines and driving, unrushed beats – I simply like it.

Notice Ronski Polski’s diploma work, where he merged dolls, illustration, performance, computer-based visuals and hardware music into a colorful something. He’s got a myspace, too.

The demogroup Kewlers made a remarkable demo, that is called “Aesterozoa“. This is best andromeda-style and I like the dense atmosphere, as well as the continuous transitions. You can watch Aesterozoa video here.

Mfx did in cooperation with the Kewlers another interesting production, that is Vorticity. You can watch Vorticity video here.

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Independent games superstar Jonathan Söderström, better known as Cactus, is famous for his outstanding quick, experimental and interesting games. I’ll bet, that you all already met some of his games. If not, read this interview. Else start here. It will get interesting – we have some very interesting questions and answers at hand.

What was your initial mind when you started the game Clean Asia?

I had played a game called “Nvaders” by a guy with the nickname “TehSilentOne“. It was basically a Space Invaders meets Warning Forever game. The small Space Invaders sprites had been blown up and each pixel had turned into a separate piece of the enemy. Some pieces where cannons others were just static. When you destroyed a piece, it left of a little energy power-up that you could absorb and then launch back as a charged shot. I really liked the idea as it allowed you to destroy the enemy rather fast as your power grew the more destruction you dealt. However, the game felt slightly rushed and a bit incomplete, so I decided to steal a bit from it and make my own thing centered around a similar mechanic.

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KZero, a company specialized in consulting and research on virtual worlds, released a first version of a map showing the number of users and the age of specific user groups of the virtual worlds. As you can see, Second Life is suited for people over thirteen years, as well as the Habbo Hotel, that one for kids, got far the most users (source: January 2008). KZero also have a metaverse growth forecast besides other interesting things.

A small, but fun work. Used colored html-table tags to generate pixel-artwork. I think the source-code – result ratio is not very efficient, but at least you can do it. This reminds me of an older work, I’ve seen from Danielle Aubert. This also dealt with tables, but in Microsofts Excel. Also tables, also colorful work.

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