CANABALT
A giant robot battle rages in the city around you. Trapped on a high floor of an office building, you can feel the structure is about to give way. The only way to escape is to run. Run! Run run run!
Very similar gameplay to Robot Unicorn Attack (this one came first), but even more minimal: your only button is jump, and there is no double jumping. The terrain is the roofs and hallways of buildings, and the occasional building cranem so it's basically flat, with the only variations being in building height. Scoring is completely by distance traveled, with no bonuses. On the other hand, there are small obstacles that slow you down if you run into them, crumbling buildings start to collapse as you run across them, the bombs will sometimes land on the rooftops, making instant obstacles, and for really tall buildings you have to aim for and smash through windows, action movie style. The graphics, while entirely grayscale, are surprisingly sophisticated and evocative: birds on rooftops take wing when you land a jump, the silhouettes of hulking mecha wander among clouds of billowing smoke in the background, aircraft buzz by overhead, and glass shatters into bouncing bits. And the music, an ominous chiptune with IDM-like snare rushes, is fantastic.
It doesn't have the over-the-top campy charm of RUA, but it's a great little indie game.
A giant robot battle rages in the city around you. Trapped on a high floor of an office building, you can feel the structure is about to give way. The only way to escape is to run. Run! Run run run!
Very similar gameplay to Robot Unicorn Attack (this one came first), but even more minimal: your only button is jump, and there is no double jumping. The terrain is the roofs and hallways of buildings, and the occasional building cranem so it's basically flat, with the only variations being in building height. Scoring is completely by distance traveled, with no bonuses. On the other hand, there are small obstacles that slow you down if you run into them, crumbling buildings start to collapse as you run across them, the bombs will sometimes land on the rooftops, making instant obstacles, and for really tall buildings you have to aim for and smash through windows, action movie style. The graphics, while entirely grayscale, are surprisingly sophisticated and evocative: birds on rooftops take wing when you land a jump, the silhouettes of hulking mecha wander among clouds of billowing smoke in the background, aircraft buzz by overhead, and glass shatters into bouncing bits. And the music, an ominous chiptune with IDM-like snare rushes, is fantastic.
It doesn't have the over-the-top campy charm of RUA, but it's a great little indie game.
I finally got badgered into getting a Facebook profile.
I have no idea what I intend to do with it, and it'll probably go the way of my MySpace page (which I check about once a year, when I remember it exists). But still, yep, there it is.
I have no idea what I intend to do with it, and it'll probably go the way of my MySpace page (which I check about once a year, when I remember it exists). But still, yep, there it is.
Food for Internets
Sep. 2nd, 2009 04:27 pmTwo foodstuffs no internaut should be without: bacon in a can and pirate root beer. Tastes like meme spirit!
ROOOOOOOAAAAARRRR
Apr. 6th, 2009 10:40 pmrooaar roar ROOOAAARRRR roooaarr jokermage RRRRROAAR, rooooaaar roar ROOOAR flash roooooarr
RROOOOOAAAAAARRR!
(pew pew!)
RROOOOOAAAAAARRR!
(pew pew!)
A coworker sent me this link. I wonder if these guys know they've been immortalized by Google?
Go up and down the street and it makes a mini-movie!
Go up and down the street and it makes a mini-movie!
Lost things and the end of snivelyzashuns
Nov. 14th, 2008 09:05 pmThere is a piano in my room. I do not play. It is old, and has not been tuned during my lifetime. It belongs to the landlord, who lived upstairs but didn't want to pay movers to move it up there. Or rather, it belonged to the old landlord, and it may belong to the new landlord, because the new landlord is the daughter of the old landlord and the old landlord doesn't live upstairs anymore on account of being dead.
The piano is in the corner behind a trunk and my TV cabinet.
A few days ago my cat decided that she wanted to be on top of the piano. My cat is not the most graceful of her species. She is a little chunky. She sometimes undershoots when she jumps. When she doesn't make her jumps onto a bed, she claws her way up the blanket.
There are things on top of the piano. Some of them are books. Some are papers. None are blankets.
So I went behind the TV cabinet to retrieve the things that had been on top of the piano, and found several that had apparently fallen in between some time before. There was an album I'd been looking for—Il Berlione's self-titled debut—and old programs from the Cal Animage anime club, which I was a member of when I was in high school and anime fandom still involved a lot of tape trading. And flyers from old animation festivals.
When I was a child my parents would sometimes take me to animation festivals at the local art house: the late, lamented UC Theater. I remember watching shorts like Pixar's Luxo Jr., Aardman Animation's Creature Comforts, Bill Plympton's Your Face, the Oscar-winning Balance, and several less well-known pieces.
I picked up one flyer and opened it. Right in front of me was a still from a short I had been looking for off and on for years, and had thought of as recently as this Halloween. I had been unsuccessful in my search because I could only remember that it was stop-motion, creepy, and titled Door—not the most helpful search string. But here, listed under the title, was the animator: David Anderson. I now had enough information to find it online.
And I did.
It is strange, funny, and unsettling. The visual of keys skittering across the ground like insects has stayed with me all these years.
Enjoy.
The piano is in the corner behind a trunk and my TV cabinet.
A few days ago my cat decided that she wanted to be on top of the piano. My cat is not the most graceful of her species. She is a little chunky. She sometimes undershoots when she jumps. When she doesn't make her jumps onto a bed, she claws her way up the blanket.
There are things on top of the piano. Some of them are books. Some are papers. None are blankets.
So I went behind the TV cabinet to retrieve the things that had been on top of the piano, and found several that had apparently fallen in between some time before. There was an album I'd been looking for—Il Berlione's self-titled debut—and old programs from the Cal Animage anime club, which I was a member of when I was in high school and anime fandom still involved a lot of tape trading. And flyers from old animation festivals.
When I was a child my parents would sometimes take me to animation festivals at the local art house: the late, lamented UC Theater. I remember watching shorts like Pixar's Luxo Jr., Aardman Animation's Creature Comforts, Bill Plympton's Your Face, the Oscar-winning Balance, and several less well-known pieces.
I picked up one flyer and opened it. Right in front of me was a still from a short I had been looking for off and on for years, and had thought of as recently as this Halloween. I had been unsuccessful in my search because I could only remember that it was stop-motion, creepy, and titled Door—not the most helpful search string. But here, listed under the title, was the animator: David Anderson. I now had enough information to find it online.
And I did.
It is strange, funny, and unsettling. The visual of keys skittering across the ground like insects has stayed with me all these years.
Enjoy.
Evolution of logos
Nov. 13th, 2008 10:00 pmevolution of corporate logos
Just something a coworker gave me a link to. It's actually pretty interesting. The Nazi origins of Volkswagon are pretty obvious in their original logo. And I had no idea the Mitsubishi logo was actually based on the crests of two Japanese families (one is a stack of three rhombuses, the other is three tea leaves in a star shape; the corporate logo splits the difference and uses the rhombuses from the one in the arrangement of the other).
Just something a coworker gave me a link to. It's actually pretty interesting. The Nazi origins of Volkswagon are pretty obvious in their original logo. And I had no idea the Mitsubishi logo was actually based on the crests of two Japanese families (one is a stack of three rhombuses, the other is three tea leaves in a star shape; the corporate logo splits the difference and uses the rhombuses from the one in the arrangement of the other).