Is the games industry missing an opportunity to let concept artists rule the roost? In his latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column, Jim Rossignol points to both success stories and missed opportunities where letting artists spearhead the game either did bring or should have brought the game closer to art, and calls for a new industry arms race to create the best “watercolour FPS games, painterly RTS games, and oil-painting strategies.”
Elsewhere, 09/09/09 was a double-header day in games: less celebrated for the 10th anniversary of the cut-down-in-its-prime Dreamcast, which Sega celebrated by announcing a return to Sonic the Hedgehog’s roots with a new hi-def 2D game due in 2010, while a group of indies announced Rush Rush Rally Racing, the first new Western-made game for the console in many years.
But 09/09′s more prevalent significance to The Beatles didn’t go unnoticed by groups other than Harmonix (with the unleashing of The Beatles: Rock Band), as chiptune collective 8-Bit Operators unveiled “WANNA HLD YR HANDHELD”, a 20-track 8-bit Beatles cover compilation, nearly half of which they’re streaming ahead of its release.
Finally, we listed the 4 things gamers need to know about Apple’s Rock’n'Roll keynote, saw two years of glorious technical failures in the making of Polytron’s Fez (above), heard Montreal art/game collective Kokoromi would be bringing their indie showcase to GDC, and our ‘one shot’s: Silent Hill artist Takayoshi Sato does Salome, and a look at the anatomical/biological innards of the Wii-mote.
Would 8-bit fans just rather listen to everything redone as a chiptune? Seriously, some things don’t need to be covered as if it were an NES soundtrack.