I love corncob 3D. Several years ago (2007 or 2008?) I tried to email the developer about the flat aesthetic and the sense of space in the game, but he never responded. Really I just wanted to conduct a general interview about the making of the game, but I had ulterior motives.

7D beings reminds me that in the late 90s/early- 00s I had Bill Laswell and Pete Namlook and (I think) Praxis CDs that had music on them, but when you put them in your computer they were also CD-roms (I think they were called CD+s sometimes), and the main feature on each was a fractal program. I could get different effects with different equations, but I didn't understand the math behind it. A teacher in a 6th grade math class that I help out in has been teaching the kids all about fractals. They made Sierpinski fractals and I think one other kind of fractal, and they learned about the exponential progression behind them. I wish I learned all that when I was a kid. I was on math team and I was in a good program, so I shouldn't be envious about the education these kids have.
 
I had quite a few CD+'s now that I think of it. I had a couple of Pere Ubu CDs like that. I think I had a Residents CD+. And maybe there were a couple of Mekons CDs like this?
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXg2Rr_osYs

For some reason this crpg addict page came up when I was looking for that Pete Namlook CD. The Namlook brings back white-blue computer glow memories for me. The music is as compelling and annoying as I remember. Like sub-Automatic Writing with some moody new age synth brass and this Hunter PI rhythm section that turns kind of acid. It's getting less annoying now. I should re-listen to this whole thing.
 
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2011/07/game-61-star-command-1988.html
 
Around the same time period I played a lot on my sister's Mac, or at least I played on a PC in my sister's old room after she moved out for college. We were really into SimCopter and its weird fake jazz and fake sim-language. We also played this roller coaster designing game that had a lot of classic designs such as the Matterhorn built in. It allowed you to ride the coasters in a primitive first person mode, and when you finished there was a panel of about 6 people who would review your coaster; if it made them want to throw up, it was really good. They had a few different faces for how they felt about the coasters. The throw up people would have their hair sticking out and they had wild-looking eyes, and then on the other end of the rating scale they looked really bored. I couldn't figure out why the Matterhorn was so ralph-worthy but our crazy coasters barely got raised eyebrows.
 
A month ago I rode the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and now I think I have a better idea about ralph-worthy coasters and boring coasters. It's incredible that the designers designed this thing in 1924 and had some idea of how it would feel without being able to simulate it first.

http://digital.mica.edu/courses/ff/spring/ff210_12/mgould01/final/index.html
 
hmmmm

That monster sprite repository is cool.
 
I miss towlr games, as a thing. I like inscrutable games. It seems like touch phones, with their gyros and buttons and microphones and everything, would make good platforms for inscrutable puzzle things.

This is a pretty good shitty unity game:
 
http://ruthieswebsite.com/menagerie/
 
I've gotten the mouse and the elephant out. The giant gorilla is already out. For some reason he crashed into a car and flew off the world of his own volition. The zooming effect is appropriately confusing and vertiginous. The elephant can't jump over a brick, but the little mouse can. I like that the view box gets smaller and larger, depending on which animal you possess, but the animals all feel the same: they all feel like characters moving in a unity game. Someone should put together a resource for making unity games not feel like unity games, especially for the way player characters move.
 
Another thing I like about Menagerie is the shape of the zoo itself. I think the people who made this might have a knack for making spaces that are fun to explore and move around in, and I'd like to see what they could do with more than 48 hours to make a game.
 
update: the reason the gorilla seems to fly off on his own has something to do with the collision physics between objects. When you, as the gorilla, smash into a car, the car launches with an improbable momentum, but when a car ricochets off of something and hits YOU, you launch with an improbable momentum. You can use this to make tall, pointless, go-nowhere leaps. I've experimented with getting the lion and the giraffe out by knocking cars into the zoo, but it's really hard to make a clean middle-distance shot, and even with cars in their cages, they still might be stuck.
 
Broken shitty unity games are their own genre now.

I've mentioned The Inexplicable Houseball and Don't Fall out of the House here before, both of which are superlative examples of the shitty unity game-space genre. I like them much better than two of last year's shitty unity game-space representatives, Room of 1000 Snakes and Bubsy 3D, which are self-conscious about their shittiness, and I think it's this self-consciousness, if not irony, this preoccupation with digital spaces as "art," that makes them less enjoyable for me. The Inexplicable Houseball and Don't Fall out of the House are fully (and only) invested in the spaces they present. They don't care about any narrative or messages except those that are incidental or emergent. They're not ironic or intertextual or "weird" (although they're weird). The mysterious author of both seems to have sincere intentions of making beautiful and unutterable things, and it's their single-minded attention to little platforms of digital space, absent of story, context, function, and action, that helps them fulfill those intentions. It's Manny Farber's elephant art v. termite art dichotomy again. Bubsy 3D is elephant art and The Inexplicable Houseball is termite art. 
 
None of this takes away how much fun the gothic bobsled portion of Bubsy 3D is.

http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/multimedia/alive.shtml

"

• a video game which you must play to get out of
• the band's animated Badmotorfinger logo"

God damn that is awful and wonderful.

omg that awful eurodance
 
 
dance of another kind:
http://mikudance.info/models/others/links2.html
 
update:
 
 

I have retired from MMD and uninstalled the program. 

This site will be taken down on or after 26 May 2014.

 

I am late to the game on finding out about PuLiRuLa
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvsuLn7tjU8

I can't figure out what to call this game. GERMS Town Takeover or something like that? Video requires registration.
 
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm3771696

one of retroyou's hacks of acclaim's re-volt

a blurry youtube with awkward video effects and soul sucking faux energetic music, depicting an ugly cartoon kid skittering through a maze of nondescript dungeon spaces and crisp grasslands. hittin a lot of salty points there
 
i've heard it translated The Targeted Town too.

dunno where to put this (not about Phoenix 2772 so much as it's about the spokesperson hawking toons "just for kids" with this utopian, progressivist ad copy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOQ3bSdjMb4