Journey Performance

When you think of interpretive dance what do you think of? No, wait come back... honest it's not all pretentious pap. To prove it have a look at this wonderful performance create on the theme of Journey, the touching PS3 game by thatgamecompany. It may just change your mind about interpretive dance forever!

This reminds me of a TED talk I saw online a couple of years ago by Andy Robertson who discussed the idea of  the"Priesthood of Player-Critics".  In the fascinating talk Andy discusses how computer games could enable more people to benefit from their emergent ways of telling stories about the human condition. Check it out if you can.

Sollier Gallery Make Duplo Bricks Art

Lets face it, Lego gets a lot of love but what about its less famous, less popular cousin Playmobil? Well artist Pierre Adrien has been creating wonderful paintings using the Playmobil playsets as inspiration and the results are marvellous. My personal favourite is the Seurat but what's yours? If you really like the pieces feel free to purchase them from his website linked below!

Child of Light Story Book Available to Download for Free

One of my favourite games of last year was Child of Light, a beautiful RPG created using the UbiArt engine. The game was a big hit and was recommended by many publications for Game of the Year, and whilst I liked it I think that would have been a bit too much! However there is no denying that the world of Lemuria as presented in the game had charm and beauty, ready to be explored further than the 8-10 hours of the game allowed. To this end Ubisoft have released a free e-storybook about Reginald the Great, the adventure seeking mouse. As you would expect from UbiArt the images are beautiful and the story simple and well told. Putting my teacher hat on I do believe that this could be used to inspire Literacy lessons, fantasy settings maybe? Either way, get the e-book from the link below, its free and well worth it!

Sesame Street: The Aveggies- Age of Bon Bon (Avengers Parody)

As the Healthy Eating Coordinator at my school I'm always trying to promote a healthy balanced diet and making healthy choices through events and contests in school. However I needn't have bothered as Sesame Street has done one if its amazing parodies promoting healthy eating through the use of the Avengers IP. The result is a brilliant parody that has jokes for the kids but also for the adults.

Web We Want Festival at the Southbank, London

The World Wide Web has transformed the world and the Southbank Centre is celebrating by holding its annual Web We Want Festival from 28th to 31st May 2015. The festival is comprised of workshops, exhibitions and talks to celebrate how the internet has changed the world for the better, but it also looks at the dark side of the net too. I went to the event last year and found the talks insightful and engaging. A lot of the events are free such as the Southbank Minecraft build but there are also ticketed events such as a talk with Julian Assange, creator of Wikileaks. If you are free and have some time why not head down?

The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo

The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo is a text-based horror game by programmer Michael Lutz and illustrator Kimberly Parker. It is a surreal trip back to middle school which explores the nostalgia tinged memories of a friend with connections, yup, connections with Nintendo and all that it entails. The game is free to play in-browser and through the use of sound and imagery will haunt you for some time after you have seen the various game endings.

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Downton Does Star Wars

There are a few mash-ups that make sense, like peanuts and gum... together at last. But Downton and Star Wars was a weird one. It's all been done by Rob James-Collier (Thomas Barrow) to raise £10,000 for Chilterns MS Centre. He filmed the entire mash-up on his mobile phone and the result is fun. Check it out below, to see part 2 Rob has said that if the money is raised he will publish it online. All for a good cause eh!

Pulp Computer Game Art

Pulp books had a certain style and colour to them that made them stand out in book shops, they were printed on cheap paper and thus the off yellow mustard colour. Well artist and designer Joshua Ketchen has used these books from the 60's and 70's to inspire him to create computer game covers in the style of these books and the effect is rather pleasing. check out the link below to go to his website to see his artwork.

Oscilloscope Quake

Finnish programmer Pekker Vaananen has ported the classic shooter Quake to a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope. He has provided a detailed breakdown of the process he went through for the technically minded but for most the video of the game running is what will astonish and excite you. Episode One Map One in bright phosphorous green wireframe is something to behold!

The Apple Watch, Wearable Watches and Tech

The Apple watch has been announced and obviously there is much furore surrounding this product from the church of Apple, pre-orders of the product have sold out across the world already! Well, this got me thinking about wearable tech, is the Apple watch worth it? Well time will tell and the marketing campaign has been suitably slick...  however a couple of years ago Samsung created a Galaxy Gear watch and produced a brilliant advert to promote it using famous tech watches including Dick Tracy, Inspector Gadget and Michael Knight from Knightrider. An impressive cast list indeed

What I'm more interested in is the hackable Apple II watch which Instructable member Aleator777 has created. It looks like a marvelous piece of hackable tech and even got the seal of approval from the Great and Powerful Woz himself (Apple II creator Steve Wozniak). Wearable tech may be the next big thing but in the meantime, let's enjoy the wacky inventors and innovators doing their own thing!

Fan Made ZX81 Dragons Lair

Jim Bagley has been making computer games for nearly 30 years. and he has worked on many different systems including the Spectrum, Game Boy and iOS. An incredibly talented coder who worked for Ocean, amongst other publishers, Bagley has turned his attention to recreating the laserdisc game Dragons Lair into a working ZX81 title and what he has achieved is truly breathtaking. It is still a work in progress but as you can see in the video below a remarkable one on a system which is very limited.

Superhero Post-It Mural

Post- It Notes are amazing, as well as providing us with a useful space to write bits of information and and sticking it somewhere to serve as a reminder, they are also brilliant as a medium for artistic endeavours. A few years ago I made a Space Invader Post-It mural to brighten up an office I shared in Phnom Penh.

Simple but effective, it certainly brightened up our office.

But this team at The Shop SF have done something remarkable. Check it out, interior decoration on the cheap and awesome!

Wrestling Isn't Wrestling

I've been a big fan of Max Landis ever since I saw his excellent parody of the Death and Return of Superman. Now he's returned with a new short film called Wrestling Isn't Wrestling,  The film is a parody that zips through Triple H's career as 13 time world wrestling champion but what is more interesting is his incisive breakdown of how wrestling is more than just wrestling; it's a powerful and exciting storytelling medium. He opines that humans crave melodrama and that's why humans crave fiction as it simulates bigger emotions and larger narratives. The human capacity for empathy is astounding and we love watching people grow, change and struggle. Thus Wrestling Isn't Wrestling... it's... life.

Monaddigital

Matthieu Delaourme founded Monaddigital.net as an art platform to promote "forward-thinking contemporary art." Kim Laughton has contributed a series of austere, almost haunting looking landscape images from GTAV. The images were stripped of their textures and reduced to merely depth masks but are still recognisable as Los Santos. In my mind it recalls Magic Eye pictures and Lotte Reiniger. If I've piqued your curiosity take a look at the website linked below.

We Go Forward

Games are entertaining, there's no doubt about that. But games can also make you think about greater aspects of life. I've already written quite a few articles on what games can teach us, where games can help society and what games mean to me but in a short 8-bit film by pipokaVFX (from an original comic by Shen) life is summed up pretty succinctly. Enjoy!

Video Game Hyperlapse

Time lapses photography has been around for ages, think back to all those nature documentaries of your youth when David Attenborough would be talking about plants growing over many months and you'd see a long process of growth shown in a few minutes. Well Hyperlapse is an exposure technique in time-lapse photography, in which the position of the camera is being changed between each exposure in order to create a tracking shot in timelapse sequences.

pipokaVFX has created a brilliant computer game Hyperlapse using footage from a wide variety of game including Alan Wake, Bioshock Infinite,  Zelda: Ocarina of Time and many others. Have a look as it is a thing of beauty. The patience required to make this movie must have been monumental, I would have glitched it myself as heck I'm just not that patient!