Category: Pop Culture

  • OTAKU PLAY Preview

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    Editor: Disclaimer – I have a track on here. Yea self promotion.

    GameSetWatch writes:

    Romanian publication Otaku Magazine — an “independent platform [designed to promote] visual art from national and international artists” — announced its fifth issue, titled Otaku Play, which looks to explore “the universe of players and play of all kinds”, “how and when you play”, and “what you learn while playing and where … you risk arriving when you remain blocked within the same play”.

    The 132-page, English-language issue includes articles “Virtual Worlds Unplugged”, “A Short Visual History of Videogame, NES Coffee table” and an interview with chiptune artist Nullsleep.

    Otaku Play also comes with “New York Poster” (photo past the post break), a fabulous pixel cityscape from renown pixel art group eBoy, though its a quarter of the original print’s size.

    While Otaku is only printing 350 copies of the issue, each copy will come with an interactive DVD packed with chiptune music, live performance video from Blip Festival events, and trailers for indie games like Blueberry Garden, Osmos, Cletus Clay, and more.

    More Details after the jump:
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  • The Making of OutRun at NowGamer

    390_7837_review_screen_03Another interesting behind the scenes, with loads  of details on the creative aspects of creating one of the all time classic racing games. And time is paid to the awesome soundtrack in this excerpt:

    Although the other programmers and graphics designers working on OutRun appear, according to Suzuki, to have had scant influence on shaping the game, one man – Hiroshi Kawaguchi the artist formerly known as Hiroshi Miyauchi – had a tremendous effect on what has become one of the most highly regarded aspects of OutRun’s production: its music. Kawaguchi joined Sega as a programmer in 1984, coding alongside Yuji Naka on the SG-1000 game Girl’s Garden while writing music purely as a hobby outside of work. Suzuki heard some of Kawaguchi’s tunes and was so impressed that he commissioned him to produce the soundtrack for Hang-On, after which Kawaguchi quit his role as a programmer and became a full-time in-house composer at Sega.

    via The Making of OutRun | NowGamer.

  • One Thousand Stars by The Black Comets

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    Nice Final Fantasy tribute (a game i’ve never gotten into) that gives me an thin excuse to post some garage rock on the blog.

  • Cringe in Horror Theater

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    HEY NINTENDO!

    Thanks for :

    • Continuing to be associated with kitschy mario jump sounds.
    • By ignoring all the cool stuff being done without your help (homebrew) and with it (ds-10) and focusing on gimmicky things that no one will use after owning the DSi for more than 18 seconds.
    • For making me learn who Jamie Liddel is.

    That being said I do appreciate the cat sounds.

  • Wired on: The $12 computer for developing nations project

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    Also just an excuse for me to publish this picture. Article features appearences from starpause and NO CARRIER. Interesting argument in the comments about the role of 8bit computers as a real world tool..