Froggle

A nifty little game from team HardCode, a group of DigiPen students. Directly from their site:

"You control a small frog-like creature that can use his extraordinarily long tongue to grapple, bounce and swing around a world of beautiful terrariums. Navigate and explore a variety of picturesque environments, complete different sets of entertaining challenges, all while licking flies and flicking other froggles. The interactive cartoon world of Froggle comes to life as you discover where your tongue can take you."



Team HardCode also submitted it to the IGF for the students' showcase...

Wario Land: Shake It creative advertising

This is something that HAD to be shared:
http://it.youtube.com/experiencewii
Let the video run for at least 20 seconds and you'll see...

Beside the very funny commercial, I love this game. Too bad that the first reviews say that it's a little bit short...

On board of the spore mania

As a big fan as I am of game editors, I couldn't resist to give Spore Creature Creator a try.
For those who don't know the game, Spore is a simulator game in which you build your creature and then take it through all the stages of evolution. The game is full of editors to create your creature, buildings, spaceships and so on, and Creature Creator is one of them.
What I didn't knew though is how powerful the editor is. It lets the user assemble a monster in so many ways that it's simply overwhelming. Also from a technical point of view, it's also an enourmous accomplishment in character animation since every creature that you do, no matter if the legs are stitched on the forehead, animates properly, walks, jumps, and so on. Even the textures stretch to fit the form YOU created, not some shape that the developers thought of in advance. It's complete freedom. Well not 100% complete, but you get the point.

I thank God I only have the Demo edition so the pieces to create my creatures are limited, otherwise I could spend days creating the latest fashion in monsters.

Speaking about Spore, I once had an interesting conversation with my uncle about why he didn't like videogames. He said that games are only a big, very big bunch of predetermined game states, and playing is only going through them. What he meant is that games aren't interesting because you're essentially doing something that someone else set for you, in a way he had already predicted.
While I see this is ultimately true, I don't see this as a problem... after all, games are like a story that the developers are telling us, so it's ok if they know how we're going to play it.
With Spore though, I think that even the developers haven't foreseen every possibility. And I think it's the first time in the history of games... well ok, maybe I'm too excited about it and I forget other games who had editors before it, but seriously: try Spore Creature Creator Demo.

PS: did I mention that Spore CC lets you take screenshots and videos of your creations and upload them on Youtube directly from within the game? Here's my latest one:

Oh my I also forgot another thing. The creature creator features dynamic simplicistic music, that changes based on the action you do. There's a basic beat and then the music changes when the game is loading a texture or you attach a part to the creature... Spore's dynamic music is poetry for me...

UPDATE: I just found this nice article on Spore's dynamically generated music.