OMGWTFGAMES!!1! » culture

Pixel art : just nostalgia ?

perry — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:21:25 +0000

Pixel art seemed to capture the attention of parts of the blogosphere earlier this week. Lots of people were asking the question: Is pixel art just about nostalgia & video game fanboyism, or is it something more ? In my opinion this ‘debate’ is about as dumb as the “Are videogames art ?” debate. Of course videogames can be art, and of course pixel art is about more than nostalgia. Duh.

Anyhow, here’s a little link-o-rama with some views ….

(a shoutout to the memecore blog, run by a GrandMasterPixel player that found this video right about the same time I did)

And .. in response, a series of tweets, in reverse chronological order, by Sean Howard, the creator of the web comic A Modest Destiny and sharer of wicked cool ideas in game design.

sqorgar tweets:

Point 5: Nostalgia is certainly part of pixel art, but it is not the purpose. It doesn’t justify it, explain it, or define it.about 3 hours ago via web

Point 4: Rather than pixel art being an abstraction of reality, pixel art is a self contained reality in which the art happens.about 3 hours ago via web

Point 3: For some people, pixel art is a type of expression. For others, it is a type of autism. It makes sense in ways other forms do not.about 3 hours ago via web

Point 2: Consoles weren’t the only things to game on. I learned pixel art from Fat Bits on a Mac Plus. My pixels weren’t blurry.about 3 hours ago via web

Point 1: Jason Rohrer is always wrong. His opinion has anti-meaning. It’s not even correct by accident. It sucks beauty from the world.about 3 hours ago via web

This irritated me. Pixel: A Retarded Documentary:http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/05/ pixel_an_art_documentary.htmlabout 4 hours ago via web

I don’t quite get the antipathy towards Jason Rohrer. I like his work, although I haven’t heard him speak much. Sean has a point though about consoles vs. computers – I never had a real gaming console, but I did play with non-blurry pixels on a computer as a kid.

Ars Technica also chimes in with some views – summary: pixel art remains popular because it’s an interesting art form and a useful form of communication – the nostalgia factor is just a bonus.

Two adventure games for fans of lowres pixel art

Highlight games at the Game On exhibition

perry — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:39:59 +0000

The Game On exhibition has been on at ACMI in Melbourne (Fed Square) for about 4 months now. A few months ago, I was lucky enough to exhibit our Atari 2600 collection as part of a collectors event … unfortunately I didn’t get any photos of it in a glass museum case. It was fun spending an afternoon chatting to other collectors (several that collected Japanese games and paraphenalia, one guy who collected old boxed Sierra PC adventure games, and a jacket with just about every Activision patch ever released etc). We played on my Sheen Pong console with kids and parents that came by to chat about our collection, which was a blast. The organisers at ACMI were kind enough to give us free passes to the exhibition (where you can play 120+ games) and a copy of Atari Classics Evolved signed by Al Alcorn (creator of the original Pong arcade machine) !

So, the other day we got a chance to use our free passes to the Game On game exhibition. I would have been happy to pay entry … we played games for 5 hours across basically every platform that mattered in the history of video games !

Highlight games I’d never played, but liked:

Loco Roco (PSP) … innovative type of platformer (”plopformer?”) with a cute and clean graphical style. Great fun, and may actually sway me to buy a PSP if I find one or two more decent games on that platform.
Super Smash Bros (GameCube) … I might buy the Wii version, for a bit of mindless multiplayer fun.
Eyetoy on the PS2 … probably wouldn’t hold my attention in the long term, but it was good (exhausting) fun playing the simplified Eye Toy versions of Virtua Fighter and House of the Dead.
Tempest 2000 (Atari Jaguar) by Llamasoft. Sort of like an updated Beamrider, with psychadelic visuals. Similar to Kenta Cho’s Torus Trooper. Zappo !
Junkbot (PC). It’s a Lego francise puzzle game. Simple, smart and effective.
Warning Forever. I’m usually not a fan of boss battles, and this game is actually one big boss battle, but it works somehow.
The famous Katamari Damacy (PS2, Japanese version). Would have liked more time playing it, but I can see what all the fuss was about, it is innovative.
Rez (on PS2) … psychdelic, and quite trippy once you get into it.
The Discs of Tron. Tricky control scheme (left hand knob, right hand two button joystick), but fun.
Garou: Mark_of_the_Wolves (SNK arcade version).. yet another fight game, but certainly very playable. Some “Street Fighter II compatible” special moves makes it easy to pick up. … eg |\- punch … Wouldn’t be any good on a console (like Wii Virtual Console, which has quite a few SNK fight games available now), unless you have two arcade style fighting sticks (both SNK and Hori have released Wii fight sticks).

Some games I had played various versions of, but stood out for being great implementations:

The original Asteriods arcade machine. The bullets are bright.
Beserk. I’d played the Atari 2600 version, but the arcade version rocks ! It’s much faster and has excellent robot voice samples.
Star Wars, the arcade vector graphics version where you attack the Death Star in an X-Wing. The graphics, sound and yoke control all add up to a great experience.

What sucked:

Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, multiplayer deathmatch (for some reason not actually named deathmatch in the game). There should be a standard extra peripheral for first person shooters on consoles … they are next to unplayable with two analogue thumbsticks. Even if you get the hang of it, they just don’t compare to a mouse+keyboard combination.
Broken controllers … there are a lot of machines here to keep running, especially since many are home consoles that are getting several lifetimes of play a month. I guess at any one time, it’s expected that something will be broken.
Greasy controllers touched by hundreds of nose-picking kids. Keep your hands away from your mouth, and wash them afterwards. Twice, with soap.

Considering entry to the Game On exhibition only costs about the same as seeing a movie at the cinema, I might even go back for another session before it closes in about 2 weeks.

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8-bit : the film

perry — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:09:10 +0000

I went to the Australian Premier (and I expect only screening) of the film 8-bit last night at ACMI last night. It’s essentially a film about the intersection of 8-bit 80 culture video games and art, with a distinct focus in chiptune performers in New York city and various parts of Europe.

I was great … a wicked chiptune soundtrack, lots of video of guys playing Gameboys as synthesizers live, nostalgic “Cracked by … ” title screens from the old BBS cracking days, and some smart (and some wanky) digital art. I stayed around for the Q & A with the Director (who incidently doesn’t own any videogame consoles, or a TV). Oh, and I can’t forget to mention the thumping 8-bit sample infused intro music performed live by DJ Trip (that wasn’t part of the actual film, just a special live set for the ACMI screening).

Well worth a look if you get the chance … the film doesn’t have distribution yet, so I’m not sure where you can actually see it (it took ~ 2 years to make it to Australia, but still seems to be touring various video game and film festivals). Maybe check the screenings page at the official 8-bit site. There was also some pre-screening coverage at Kotaku which has some more info about the film.

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