The stark simplicity and darkly menacing architecture that is standard in almost every FPS actually seems to have a real-life counterpart in this fantastic Soviet submarine facility. It looks like it might even pre-date DOOM (which, in other news is getting nicely recursive as well as morbidly self-referential). Which is nice, because the genre can use a few new ideas.
I just saw this crazy/awesome piece of performance art on Boing Boing:
Guillaume Reymond and his collaborators at NOTsoNOISY created this amazing stop-motion video of space invaders. Sixty-seven people act as the “pixels.” The three minute video took 4 hours to film. It was a project for the festival Belluard Bollwerk International earlier this month in Fribourg, Switzerland. Last year, the group produced a similar piece based on Pong.
Link to video on YouTube, Link to project page
Honest, that’s what they claim!
Actually, all the silliness and “You look like a real jerk!” voiceover aside, it seems really foreign to me that Pole Position was advertised in this TV spot as being even semi-realistic, as implied by the frequent comparisons to the open-wheelers. I always thought it was an F1 game too but perhaps they couldn’t afford F1 footage (or it might have been my assumption due to not being American). Anyway, the comparisons between the (lousy SFX) and the game just blow my mind now, how could you even think to make the comparison?!
It makes me wonder what we will think about the current generation of games in 20 years time. I suspect we will be amazed at how realistic they look, and be perplexed at how slavishly we tried to imitate reality and movies instead of devising our own interesting stylistic metaphors that are unique to games.
It always comes as a pleasant surprise to stumble onto a blog that illustrated the “games can be art” perspective that I talk about occasionally, so I thought I’d share another that Bruce Cooner wrote last year. I, too loved that holding a girl’s hand could be made to have such meaning (in Ico) and while I’ve not played Shadow of the Colossus, I’m very tempted now from Bruce’s description: (more…)
