Pyro Board

An interesting new way to visualize your music:

Side Scrolling on the Streets

Christian Åslund is a Stockholm-based photographer who turned the streets of Tokyo into side scrolling games screens. Great tribute to retro video games.

Check out his website: http://www.christian.se/commercial

Games as an Artform # 2

Botanicula (PC, Mac) is a beautiful 2D handdrawn game with cute and weird characters, funny scenes and loads of adventures in a lush environment. The game's basic style is point and click with exploration with the occasional puzzle solving, but it's all done in a real artistic way, you feel like you're inside an indie animated feature while you are playing, check it out:

Tearaway (PS Vita) hasn't been released yet, though I've seen the first images and videos about it more than a year ago - and mind you, this is not a GTA style huge game, it's for a handheld console, so it should take a lot less time to produce it. The interesting thing for me in this game is not only the style, but the way you play it. The PS Vita has a touch-screen like surface at the bottom of it and utilizing that you can "reach" into the game and interact with the characters in completely new way. I don't have a PS Vita myself but this game itself looks promising enough to make me interested.

Lastly here is Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery (PC, Mac,  Linux), it's also a point and click exploration style game but with pixel graphics.

The look of the game is amazing, every location is different and though graphically it's simple still there are enough details to keep you sucked in as you try to find your way out. Very cool little game, check it out:

Rayman Legends

Rayman Origins was a great and fun game when it came out, it was like an interactive beautiful cartoon that you can play with, be a part of. Now here is the sequel, Rayman Legends, and it looks even better than the previous one. Check it out if you're into cartoon style and platform games.

Contre temps - animated short

Here is a beautiful little animated short from French artists. The backgrounds and the scenery is hand painted I guess and the characters and some of the objects are in 3D, but with a cool cartoonish cell shading, so they don't stick out as much. The basic idea is really good but I think the screenplay could have been a lot better and the characters look a bit general to me, but the world and the images are really cool to look at, the atmosphere is there and it was a graduation film, so actually I really shouldn't complain. Check it out:

2 minute extract on youtube

or you can watch the full short on vimeo:

 https://vimeo.com/71695621