The “8bit-Guerrilla Chiptune Database” is an ongoing collection of links to artists, musicians, releases, tutorials, tools etc, that as connected to 8-bit -scene, -culture and -style. Everyone is invided to submit own links with brief descriptions to their works.

Just in case you missed the beta of the game FRACT: just don’t miss it. FRACT is a somehow abstract adventure game, that plays in a virtual world, reminding of TRON or something like The Sentinel, Rez or Darwinia. It is not only the look, but excellence also comes from the sound-design. Extremely well made sounds totally support the games experience. (The game was selected as one of the Independent Games Festival student showcase winners as well.)

For my opinion the riddles are a little too abstract, but walking through this designed landscape alone is worth the try. The beta is available for download the the FRACT website, is available for Mac or PC (and is about 170 Megabytes, just in case you ask). The game was made by Richard E. Flanagan, linger in his portfolio as well!! (via)

Pause Music is back with a classic-sounding 8-bit release from Zan-zawa-zawa-veia. The tracks oscillate between music, you would expect at NES or gameboy classic games. The vibe is offworld and sometimes messes in technical, musical structures. It’s all a little sick, including the bands name “Zan-zawa-zawa-veia” itself. Music like 486-PCs. Classic game-music lovers just head over to the Pause-Music site and have a listen to Lune Rose or head over to the Bandcamp-site for doing the same.

Once again Cologne, once again “digital games meets art, culture and business”: In November 2011 the second edition of the “Next Level Conference” will take place at the Abenteuerhallen Kalk – a very nice locations, that hosts the demosceneparty Evoke as well, the Gloria Theater and the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. In panels, performances and workshops you will learn lot about games, art, sound, teaching with games and the business around games as well. Next Level is about connecting creatives and supporting artful use of the medium game. One partner this year is the SoundTrack_Cologne, who care about music and sound in films and games. Read all about the festival-program at the opulent Next Level Conference Website.

August 2011 there will be the second edition of the Platine-Festival – parallel to the Gamescom 2011 and the GDC Europe. Is is a small scale, decentral organized, but really great festival upon contemporary game-art. The exhibition features a handful of cutting-edge artworks, that is somehow connected to games and art. It is taking place at various venues right in the heart of Cologne. I went there last year and really was not disappointed. The festival-program is available at the platine-cologne website. But to tease you, the friends of the Netlabelism-magazine, put together a small compilation of netmusic – featuring bits and bleeps, somewhere between game- and chipmusic. The compilation is also available to download (.zip).

People, who are into game development and iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch could take a look at the Sparrow Framework. It is a lightweight, free and open source framework (BSD licence), that should making games easy, especially for people who worked lots with ActionScript. There are things like sprites and tweens.

“All developers that have come in touch with ActionScript, .Net or Java will get started quickly. Especially Flash/Flex developers will feel at home immediately, since it follows most of the ActionScript dogmas and brings them to pure Objective-C.”

Stepping into this framework should be easy, because the developers tried to keep the amount of classes and code to a bare minimum.

Creative Code hackers and artful code tinkerers can cheer up. Because there is a new project coming at them: Zajal can briefly described by Ruby meets openFrameworks and OS-X in a graceful Processing-style. Currently the project is at version 0.3.3, the source-code is available at github. But people want to see examples to get an idea: here is the public sketchbook of Zajal.

One interesting aspect of this project is, that you can use Ruby and the full power of Ruby gems to develop your sketches. The design of the language is really Processing-like: to pick up and get started fast. Get results quickly. As you can see, that thing is also suitable for livecoding!