Retro Game Crunch is an interesting project, that can be backed on Kickstarter. It’s for people who a) love retro-styled games and/or b) like to influence the game design process. And have six instead of just one game!

The team around the Retro Game Crunch wants to make a new game every month. The people who back, can give the theme / topic of the new game to make – and they can debate and make critics. In order to get something great done. In the end there hopefully will be six nice looking fun-arcade games.

Well, at the Kickstarter page, the game creators say with a smile, that “biggest challenge will be burnout”. They “promise to take regular breaks, drink plenty of water, and remain functioning members of society.” So stress or back – in the end enjoy!

You should checkout the small game Skrillex Quest. It’s a creative game, in a Zelda meets 3D meets some interesting twists, made by Jason Oda for the DubStep musician Skrillex. In the game you have to fight glitches, that came into a cartridge by a particle of dust. The game is not a masterpiece, but has some really interesting ideas in it.

Here is another very cool entry of the Fuck this Jam – GameJam. It is a “parody” of the not-game Dear Esther. Not much than a landscape and some voices that are played while walking around in the landscape. But somehow the mixture is interesting and absurd – like spring highlands meets an abandoned cyberpunk past. Maybe stuff to build upon…? Read more at Rock Paper Shotgun or download the game.

Fuck this Jam is the name of a game-jam, where the topic is about making games about a genre you hate. This is meant as a good design practice, to learn and build upon. The submissions for this game-jam were partly great.

I want to highlight the work from the Monochrom-art-collective from Vienna. They made a version of an ego-shooter, called Portraying The Terran Condition: An Approach To Simulate A Civilization. The game is about a “simulation of the humans on earth” for an alien race in a distant future. The game tries to emulate “human life” – but the scientists made many wrong assumption about how human life really was. It begins at the abstract looking landscapes. The game-designers about the game:

“This 7D (backwards compatible to 2D) world simulation depicts six different key events in the history of Terra (‘Earth’), a low-tech civilization that self-destructed several aeons ago. Based on the relatively few biological and cultural artifacts, a team of multi-AI minds was able to recreate a stunningly accurate depiction of this ancient civilization.”

This game is surprisingly well made, full off tension and crude humor. Indeed also the sound design is really great. There is so much words now, but nothing can replace playing the game itself.

Back to the Fuck this Jam: Feel free to browse the complete submissions of Fuck this Jam entries. Also read about other good entries of the Fuck this Jam at Rock Paper Shotgun (Recommended!).

Yatta! is the name if an online net-art application, that bridges pixel art, netart and glitch aesthetics. Users drag and drop any image to the browser. That image then is converted into icons, like emoticons, game characters, animated bubbles or blinking palettes. Straight forward and invites to experimentation. This project was made by “Maadonna“, which seems to be a collaboration between Emilio Gomariz and Kim Asendorf. (via)

The people around the Creative-Applications blog want to do a niftly project, that circles around – guess! – art, technology and design. Their planned HOLO Magazine will be a full featured print magazine, that should come two times a year. It will me “more like a book, than a magazine“. The project looks very fine. Just thank you guy for caring about the new media art scene so much! Support them on Kickstarter.

Today I came across the website from E-Waste Workshop. The people there are about media-art strategies and electronic waste. The website features an interesting blog with contents, that circle around upcycling, circuit-bending, modifications of existing e-waste and things like that. I post here one example-video from the blog – showing how to make a small drawing machine out of a floppy-drive with the help of a Arduino-controller.