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October 20, 2006
Games - Great Blogs, User Generated Content Resources
I've discovered a few new games related blogs really interesting, insightful and thorough. Try: Wonderland, written by Alice Taylor, a BBC VP researching games and entertainment and Cross Gamer by a Dan Roy, an MIT grad student exploring the intersection of my two passions - mobile and virtual worlds.
The Game Tycoon blog is written by Microsoft Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live David Edery, has a section tagged User Generated Content I recommend with a great post here of reasons it's a valuable approach with links to examples ot support it.
Speaking of Xbox live, I met Aaron Fothergill, MD of game developers Strange Flavour a few weeks ago at the London Games Festival where he was showcasing his just released free game on Xbox Live which uses the new Xbox Live Vision Cam as input to play the game. He had all of us jumping around together to try and roll the totem in the game. Great room energizer. I'd like to try that sometime in the middle of a speech or workshop! The game is Totemball, here's an overview. A video of game play will be available soon.
The ancient Ptolmec tribe were a musical people who invented many things in their time. Unfortunately, due to accidentally inventing gunpowder and the barbeque at the same time, all of their musical totems have been scattered through the jungle!Pterry the Pturtle has been challenged with rolling around to retrieve the lost totems and bring the music to the party. Using your Xbox Live Vision camera, control Pterry by moving your arms. As you roll over mountains, islands, rope bridges, and giant pinball games, you help Pterry pick up musical totems, creating your own “totem” beat.
Great to see new forms of game play!
Here's a grainy video of the group trying to play together.
Posted by Ron Edwards at 05:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 11, 2006
G Man Sings the Blues
I've seen more interest lately in the UK for Machinima, which is using video games to create videos. The Red vs. Blue (based on Halo, in it's 5th season with an estimated 1 million viewers, 1500 comments on last week's episode alone!) creators were at the Edinburgh festival and last week's London Games Festival had a few screenings although the ones I saw at the Dana Centre which were supposed to be highlights were simply game play videos set to related music - not near as creative as getting the game characters to act out what you want with voice overs. My favourite has been The Strangerhood, based on The Sims.
I found this video on You Tube. It's a music video created by using scenes in Half Life 2 and a mod to get the G Man to sing a power ballad! It cracks me up (it's a little out of character for him). Apparently this video has been played on MTV as well. Great example of games being platforms for creativity beyond the initial development for anyone.
If you liked that, you'll love A Few Good G Men, based on the film of a similar name with the voices of Cruise and Nicholson.
Speaking of Half Life 2, has anyone noticed that this building in Manchester looks like the Citadel?
Posted by Ron Edwards at 12:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack