Tag Archives: video games

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair – Jeremy Parish's Review

It’s weird in the sense that Harmony is a far cry from what fans expect from the series. It’s weird in the sense that it uses familiar graphics and mechanics and music to create a game quite unlike its source material. And weirdest of all is the fact that it actually works. Harmony of Despair is no masterpiece, but it’s unique and even fun, and that makes it worth playing.

If there is one person in gaming journalism that I would trust to review a new Castlevania game, it is definitely Jeremy Parish.

(via 1UP.com.)

Demakes of Contemporary Games

This is kind of super-awesome; a forum post with a bunch of “demakes” of video games created by this artist for a gaming mag. It’s like taking the iconic imagery of the last few years and boiling it down to a pixel art minimalist style.

Love it.

Here are a bunch of demake mockups that I’ve made for swedish gaming mag Level over the last years. Many of these were made quick and dirty (relatively speaking) in order to make deadlines, so they’re not all that pretty to look at. But I figured I should post them somewhere so they don’t just gather dust on my hard drive. Any feedback is of course appreciated.

This guy needs a blog where he posts these as he makes them. They’re amazing.

(via Pixelation.)

Old School Color Cycling with HTML5

Mark J. Ferrari, who also illustrated all the original backgrounds for LucasArts The Secret of Monkey Island and Loom, invented his own unique ways of using color cycling for envrironmental effects that you really have to see to believe. These include rain, snow, ocean waves, moving fog, clouds, smoke, waterfalls, streams, lakes, and more. And all these effects are achieved without any layers or alpha channels — just one single flat image with one 256 color palette.

Unfortunately the art of color cycling died out in the late 90s, giving way to newer technologies like 3D rendering and full 32-bit “true color” games. However, 2D pixel graphics of old are making a comeback in recent years, with mobile devices and web games. I thought now would be the time to reintroduce color cycling, using open web technologies like the HTML5 Canvas element.

This demo is an implementation of a full 8-bit color cycling engine, rendered into an HTML5 Canvas in real-time. I am using 35 of Mark’s original 640×480 pixel masterpieces which you can explore, and I added some ambient environmental soundtracks to match. Please enjoy, and the source code is free for you to use in your own projects (download links at the bottom of the article).

Ferrari really was a talented artist in the medium. Monkey Island and Loom are classics partially because at the time they were visually arresting.

The demo of the HTML5 Canvas elements has to be seen to be believed. Show the additional options to see the palette shifting apart from the image itself.

And the code is LGPL to boot.

(via EffectGames.com.)

Masterpiece: Robotron 2084 (via Ars Technica)

Ben Kuchera on why Robotron 2084 is one of the great games:

The game popularized the twin-stick design, where one joystick moved your character and the other controlled your direction of fire. (You only had one weapon.) The joysticks were of course digital back then, so you could only move and shoot in eight directions. There was no scrolling and there were no surprises. The game showed you the entirety of the level for a second before play began; you had a tiny moment to see the four walls and to take in where the enemies were and in what numbers. This was the game’s way of bowing at you before the attack.

(via Masterpiece: Robotron 2084.)

Cultivated Play: Farmville (via MediaCommons)

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity.

A great essay and a look into why so many of the people on your Facebook friends list are playing a game they will never win that intrudes upon their real life and isn’t even fun.

(via Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons.)