The true magic of LittleBigPlanet -- the PS3 debut from former Lionhead designers at then upstart Media Molecule -- wasn't fully understood until the game was in our collective hands for some time after its initial release.

What was then (mis-)understood as the videogame that would let us design our own videogames turned out to be one level abstracted from that. LittleBigPlanet had no intention of letting us faithfully recreate Mario's World 1-1 or Sonic's Green Hill Zone with pixel precision. Instead, what it does is take us back to the childhoods where we built those levels -- and every other bit of the world around us -- with the only materials we had at the time: markerpens, cardboard, felt and stickers.

And that's precisely what gives the game -- still continuing to grow and evolve both on the backs of its dedicated community (last reported to have created some 1.3 million levels) and through updates from MM themselves (their upcoming water pack has caused more excitement over a ubiquitous liquid than anyone imagined) -- its peerless charm.

That's not to discount the brilliance of its digital puppetry -- turning your tiny plush avatar into something you actually embody rather than simply propel forward -- or the delicate balance of its 'co-opertition' (as you attempt to hinder your friends' race toward score bubbles as evenly as you beg for their help). But it's the naive and innocent joy inherent in a game that's at heart about the arbitrary rules of the real-world games we created as kids ('you can only walk on the couch cushions, the floor is made of lava') as it is about its own crafted experience that's made it a modern classic.

So, in celebration of its recent first birthday, and its even Littler debut on the PlayStation Portable, below is a collection of the concepts and sketches (happily provided by its relaunched community site) that trace how the game's little pan-planet were cut-out constructed.

Marc Owens's augmented reality project "Avatar Machine" puts its users in VR helmets that display the world around them as though they were playing a third-person game, so that their own body is seen from behind. Owens theorizes that "The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment."

Avatar Machine (via Beyond the Beyond)

What's the best way to pick up a D&D player?
If you're a geek and you see a girl geek browsing the comic books and players' manuals, don't make assumptions. Nothing irritates me more than having someone tell me what I'm holding. I know what I'm holding. Aside from the fact that I came in here specifically looking for it, I CAN READ. Instead, try a trivia tidbit or a commentary on the quality/author/whatever. Your goal is to sound interested, not condescending. For the non-geek, we're really not that strange and different, but we tend to be a little defensive. Be willing to listen, stumble through some conversation you don't have the lingo for. Don't mock. Unless your romantic candidate starts talking about their characters in detail. No one finds that interesting. Really. Get out while you still can.

Last month, I wrote about a Japanese husband who confessed to his wife that he had a virtual girlfriend, a character from an addictive Nintendo DS game called Love Plus. Now, another man is planning to hold a wedding ceremony with his Love Plus girlfriend this coming Sunday. The man, who calls himself SAL9000, was so in love with Nene Anegasaki that he decided to marry her and take her on a honeymoon to Guam. Of course, this means that he literally just took his Nintendo DS to Guam... while there, he took photos, livecast their adventures on popular video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga, and documented their adventures using the augmented reality iPhone app Sekai Camera. In any case, the guy plans on having a public reception in Tokyo this Sunday. It will be livecast on Nico Nico Douga, but in case you miss it, we'll be bringing you an update early next week. Stay tuned!

via IT Media News (Japanese)

It's a sure sign it's gearing up to the holidays when the games start pouring in thick and fast, and this week saw the high profile release of two just as highly-anticipated (and by all accounts excellent) sequels: the renaissance stealth of Assassin's Creed II to the dirty Delta zombie-slaughter of Left 4 Dead 2, but there's one return that's captured more of my time than all the above.

A new video game called Mass: We Pray brings new family fun to those who can't wait until Sunday to go to church. It has a cross-shaped motion-sensing controller reminiscent of a Wiimote, and you can collect "grace points" in order to unlock holy mysteries. The release date is slated for Spring 2010, but it's available for pre-order now.

Mass: We Pray main page via The Raw Feed

For his latest project, British art director Adam Richardson used Photoshop to superimpose Space Invader characters onto pics he took in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Adam Richardson main page via NotCot

Here's a mid-1980s CBC News scare-story about Dungeons and Dragons driving kids to suicide featuring (at 2:49 onwards) me and my classmates (the video is dated 1985, but I'm pretty sure this couldn't have been later than my graduation from Junior High in 1984). Ignoring the crazy-ass fearmongering, it's incredibly nostalgic to see all those kids I grew up with, playing with their minis and rolling their dice.

Dungeons & Dragons D&D Canadian Doc 1985 Part #2 (Thanks, Tim!)

Video link. From James and Peter Serafinowicz.

But it's not just a matter of dressing up. A successful pretending object has to delicately balance pretending affordance with not making you look like an idiot. That's why so many successful pretending objects are also highly functional. As anyone who's been down the Tactical Pants rabbit-hole can tell you it's easy to obsess for ages about exactly the right trouser configuration for your equipment (ooh-er), all with a perfectly straight face. But every now and then you have a moment of self-awareness and realise you're just pretending to be a cop or a soldier from the future or Val Kilmer.

And of course, what you're really doing is both things at once. You're being practical and thinking about function and you're pretending. But you need some plausible deniability - the functional stuff needs to be credible. Which is why pretending objects that are too obvious don't work. You're no longer pretending in your own head, you're play acting in the world.

Another thing - I've always wondered why software/OS makers don't do more with the power of pretending. Look, for instance, at the average desktop. It's using a pretending metaphor - but it's not much of an imaginative leap is it? It's a desktop on your desk. I can see how this would have been useful in the early days, getting people used to interfaces and everything, but surely there's more opportunity to have some fun now - to make software more compelling by adding some pretending value to it.

For most, there will have been only one game released this week (and that most includes a number of major publishers, who, gun-shy from the competition, have pushed their own releases to Q1 of next year): Infinity Ward's return to the Modern Warfare franchise they laid down in 2007.

Modern Warfare 2 [Infinity Ward, PC/PS3/Xbox 360]

The developer has twice courted controversy in recent weeks, one for the very unfortunately devised viral video gag (for which IW has yet to offer a formal apology), and the second with early leaked video of what it surely intended as its most emotionally charged level -- a scene in which an agent embedded with an arms trafficker is present for a civilian massacre.

I owe the Hacklab.to people an apology. Last spring I ran this post about how they'd tuned the motor on their laser cutter to play the Super Mario Theme as it repositioned itself, and I mentioned that it was too perfect, and wondered "if it's not just some video of a laser cutter with a flanged-out version of the theme cut into the soundtrack."

Yesterday, I dropped in at the Hacklab in Kensington Market (it's an amazing place), and saw the laser cutter do its thing. And you know what? It plays an absolutely perfect Super Mario Theme. Seriously.

Laser etcher plays Super Mario. It's real! Hacklab.to, Kensington Market, Toronto, ON, Canada.avi

The Roomba Pac Man uses indoor location sensors and Unmanned Aerial System software to create a playable (albeit slow) PacMan built on repurposed autonomous vacuum cleaners.

Roomba Pac-Man (via Wonderland)

The story of Tim Langdell's relentless and darkly fascinating trademark fight against any and all users of the name 'Edge' has been quietly storming under the surface for the better part of this year.

In a nutshell: Langdell's Edge Games, a UK-based publisher in the earliest days of home computer games, has tirelessly struggled to maintain ownership over the word against any would-be competitor, regardless of discipline, growing more convoluted and ludicrous the farther down the rabbit hole you go (the Chaos Edge blog is the most damning at documenting just how bizarre it's become).

For nearly two decades, it seemed to work. Edge Games successfully struck settlements with movie and comic book companies, further strengthening his grip on the four-letter word, but then Langdell attempted to swat down what should have been his easiest target: tiny French indie developer Mobigame, and their iPhone debut, titled, of course, Edge (pictured left).

After successfully managing to get the game removed from the App Store, Langdell butted up against what could prove to be his downfall: the collective, unshakable 'might' of the indie game community, who've coalesced around the Mobigame struggle and mounted reams of evidence and circumstantial quotes about Langdell's business practices in his early days, seeking to shred the paper tiger and expose what little claim Edge Games has over the trademark.

Now with the legal might of no less than Electronic Arts behind them (who recently filed this scathing suit against Edge Games after Langdell seemed to be targeting EA's Mirror's Edge, using much of the evidence gathered by the indies), and with Edge Games now having successfully convinced Apple to remove Killer Edge Racing from the App Store, the indie community has served its latest sardonic volley against Langdell, rallying together to show support for 'the fallen' by incorporating the name into their own games.

Below, then, a gallery of all the participants' parodies. Whether the 'troll day' has any effect other than situation-awareness and to what end the community will take its efforts remains to be seen, but either way it's a heartening reminder of the size and solidarity of the indie games movement.

The title is a mouthful: Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy of legerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly, and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection of the same, after a little practise.

The publication date is 1634. Although it's the earliest book devoted to magic as a performing art, it apparently takes its text almost exactly from a 1584 book called The Discoverie of Witchcraft. The Witchcraft book was meant to be a debunking text, proving to people that witches didn't exist and, thus, that we shouldn't go about condemning other people for witchcraft. Hocus Pocus Junior took the chapters on sleight of hand and slightly (heh) reworked them as an instructional manual.

Comparing Hocus Pocus Junior and the Discoverie of Witchcraft at Early Modern Whale.
Two Posts on the History of Hocus Pocus Junior from Bookride.com

Thanks to Holly Tucker!

(via Wonderland)

Adam 'Atomic' Saltman's one-button action-opus Canabalt (covered earlier in a previous column) will likely go down as 2009's biggest viral surprise -- to no less even than Saltsman himself, who admitted at this year's Austin GDC Indie Games Fest to squandering and then scrambling to capitalize on the success the game near instantly saw (the first 120,000 players the game captured by its second day, and subsequent 650,000 by the week's end, saw none of the cross-indie/Twitter/iPhone port promotions subsequently rolled out as quickly as possible).

But there's almost no one in the industry that hasn't taken serious note of its acclaim and wondered what magic formula there might be hidden in its design that can be replicated elsewhere. And so -- in service to fans, would-be devs and established designers alike -- Saltsman has provided us with his sketches and notes, illustrating each leap to logical leap he made in finishing that first version.

Interestingly -- though maybe not so surprisingly, given that the game was created for the Experimental Gameplay's 'Bare Minimum' challenge -- the documents show a game more complex than what we eventually received, with its anonymous runner able to pull off sliding ducks on top of his now-singular jump, and 'edit' and 'profile' modes obviously stripped from the game (indeed, the entire game seems to now live inside what Saltsman originally had planned as a 'quick race' option).

And so, what follows is the necessarily brief notes and calculations for a necessarily brief production, neither any less worse off for it: let us know if you crack Saltsman's magic code.

[Canabalt fan art at top by Georgia 'garlicbug' Hurbgljjsa, via Pauli MadamLuna Kohberger's BBS, via Saltsman]

Space Mountain is a notorious slow loader (all coasters are, since they can't do that lovely continuous belt thing that characterizes, say, the Haunted Mansion; nor do they support giant boats like Pirates of the Caribbean). Anything to make the queue less dull is great news!

Walt Disney World's Classic Space Mountain Attraction to Reopen with a Few Surprises

Geek Craft: Super Mario knitted flower gloves (via Wonderland)

I've written and even taught a whole lot about interactive narrative over the years, but rarely have the chance to play with this stuff. So last year, when a Canadian games company rang to see if I'd be interested in collaborating with them on developing stories for a giant, multi-dimensional gaming universe, I jumped. It was like I was being given the chance to live out Jack Kirby's dream of world-building with Robert Anton Wilson's vision of multiple and overlapping perspectives.

The early results are finally making it online as the preview of a graphic novel, which spills out into the trailhead of at least one Alternate Reality Game, and also comprises the back story of the coming videogame series. This is a big big universe - a giant war for the future of humanity, of course - with maybe one overall timeline but many different pathways through the material. So people might follow my characters through a series of graphic novels, and learn something about them that they can then use in the games, or an artifact they find in the game might help them decode something in the comics. And even the ARG that people are beginning to play right now - through which they are "finding the others," and forging coalitions with other gamers in their own parts of the world to solve certain challenges - is a set-up for the bigger game, where these larger groups will be responsible for various aspects of the coming war.

The object of the game right now is for the players to build the "Darknet," an alternative network through which a global resistance can operate, and people can begin to piece together why NASA scientists are being rounded up and what the hell happened over the skies in Los Angeles.

Though for die-hard RPG nuts it'll have been a red letter week with the release of Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, it hasn't been enough to wean me off my daily regimen of pushing further into the Borderlands and compulsively playing through the two levels that make up the Left 4 Dead 2 demo (above, now fully released to the public) with each character, hoping for just one more scrap of rarely-triggered dialogue to more fully flesh out just who these characters are that I'll be spending most of the winter with.

But it's without any facetiousness that I admit that there's one game release this week that's particularly pricked my ear:

Guido Núñez-Mujica, a 26-year-old Boing Boing reader in Venezuela who is an avid gamer, writes in with this extensive personal observation piece about a new law that widely criminalizes video games in the South American country. As you read the piece, please also bear in mind that publishing this sort of thing under one's full name is not done without personal risk.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

Iphone game developer Storm8 exploited an "electronic backdoor" to learn the phone numbers of players, according to a class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco.

Filed on behalf of Lynnwood, WA resident Michael Turner, the suit claims that the practice is not authorized by Apple and involves the execution of "malicious software code."

As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure.

It's a genre that -- if you grew up gaming -- probably makes up some of your earliest memories: my own definitely revolve around waiting impatiently for the TI99/4A's cassette deck to finish screeching its way through loading Scott Adams' Adventure series (now playable online here) and pondering the etymology of "pieces of eight", continuing through my teens to the unmistakably British worlds of Graham Cluely's Jacaranda Jim and Humbug (the games that first taught me the word 'whinge').

And it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition), and the tireless work of people like Emily Short, but it took an Indiecade finalist and an iPhone app to hook me back in, with a short-list of the top games to try included below the fold.

With gaming's current trend toward the nostalgic taking us on Bit.Trips and Extreme invasions, and with indies giving us de-made versions of modern classics, it more or less follows logically that we'd eventually see the imageat top.

Recognize it? Likely not off the bat, but you'd be surprised what a little motion and original sound can do to a 15-pixel panorama. Below the fold, then, the answer to the riddle plus several handfuls more in the lowest-res high-res gallery you'll ever witness, courtesy UK animation group Alaskan Military School and their viral videos for just-completed British games festival GameCity.

Halloween 2009: Making Mario (Thanks, Jim!)

Head (Flickr) (Thanks, Eric!)

Sisters and brothers, these are the first days of a new golden age of kipple.

Ban Hammer: 3D printed (Thanks, Chris!)

Were it any other week I might be lamenting the lack of high profile retail releases, but as it happens, both the release of a demo for Valve's upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 and one other game have been eating up nearly all my spare time (and a good deal of non-spare-time as well), that game being:

Borderlands [Gearbox, Xbox 360/PS3/PC]

Gearbox's promise to deliver the first person, dungeon crawling shooter that Hellgate: London was panned for falling short of appears to have gone without a hitch -- the result is one of the most compulsive plays I've accidentally fallen into since I first thought I'd see what this whole 'Fallout 3' deal was.

Take that game and add in a dash of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (for its less overtly emphasized narrative structure, though its own barren post-apocalyptic world is more Mad Max wildstyle to the former's dreary Chernobyl hot zone) and you've got a game that's split into a series of "one more go" pursuits, as you push yourself past that next hill and then the next, hoping to stumble across that next, procedurally generated, best-gun-ever, which in turn leads you to pushing on to just see what that one is capable of.

Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Adam Smith... Sure, they were all great thinkers, but how long would they have lasted in Ulduar?

Continuing with the ongoing Popular Culture and Philosophy series, World of Warcraft and Philosophy, (Wrath of the Philosopher King) will be hitting bookshelves on November 1st. This collection of essays and short fiction addresses the ethics, economics, and metaphysics of Azeroth and its inhabitants. Along the way, the collection takes quick excursions on issues of gender identity, leadership, hate speech, and the likelihood of the IRS auditing a troll. Add in shoutouts to Machiavelli, Gary Gygax, and Thomas Jefferson (and, yes, even Cory Doctorow) and you've you might find yourself leveling up in intellect as well as your combat skills.

San Francisco's recent Alternative Press Expo was the last place I expected to turn up videogames, but it took less than a few minutes of circulating amongst the self-published sprawl until I stumbled on my first controller. I suppose it shouldn't have been as much a surprise as it was: the phoenix-like rise and return of indie/self-published and otherwise bedroom-coded gaming has followed near identical trajectories as indie music and publishing, it's just taken a bit longer to get here.

But surprisingly, few indies have fully mastered the art of cross-media, whether by lack of interest, resources or knowledge, even though all of the necessary tools and channels are already directly in their hands.

The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn't yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don't want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn't really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they're posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

Though it's nearly impossible to find a tidy way to sum the work of LucasArts adventure vet and Double Fine head Tim Schafer -- with a catalog that ranges from de los Muertos noir to deep-psyche introspec-/explora-tion and now to a heavy metal heaven/hell (depending on your attitudes toward the genre's aesthetic) -- one undeniable trait rings consistently true through all.

Schafer and his stellar team of artists and writers know character, and put character above all, a philosophy that lets players navigate some of gaming's most preposterous landscapes and peculiar conceits always feeling entirely grounded by the essential humanity around them.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the ancient Rock realm to which you travel in Brütal Legend: an epically monumental world inspired by the stormily apocalyptic vistas of classic metal album covers, now fully explorable and brought fantastically to life by the Bay Area studio.

And so, following the short trailer below that gives you a taste of how Legends's world would eventually form: a look at the original conceptual design behind those vistas, and especially the characters that inhabit them -- every bit as instantly recognizable (in their leather and spikes, worn-through denim and low-top All Stars) as they are awesomely ridiculous -- from Double Fine artists Scott C, Peter Chan, Nathan Stapley, Levi Ryken, Razmig Mavlian, and Mark Hamer.

セガハードメモリアルジッポーライター (via Wonderland)

Meet Koh and Yurie. They're a happily married young Japanese couple who moved from Tokyo to San Francisco a year ago due to a job transfer. In early September, while on a business trip back home, Koh bought a new game cartridge for his Nintendo DS. It was mostly out of curiosity — the Japanese Twitterati were all abuzz over a new dating sim called Love Plus, and he just wanted to see what the hype was about. "I've tried the other dating sims before just for kicks, but I never got hooked," he says. "I didn't expect this to be any different." He was wrong.

During that one week in Tokyo, Koh found himself fully committed to his virtual relationship with Rinko, a pouty, hard-ass high school girl who hung out at the library. The relationship was formal at first, consisting of awkward whispered conversations in which she sent mixed signals and called him by his last name. As things got more heated, though, she started calling him Kohichi (calling someone by the first name still carries a degree of intimacy in Japan) and became more demanding of his attention. "I felt like I might get sucked into this world," Koh, who is an engineer at a major game manufacturer by day, tells me. "It's not like any dating sim with young girls in it becomes a hit, but this one is really well-made."

An article posted on a Japanese tech site in September told the story of several women who had complained on an online bulletin about how their family lives were disrupted by husbands addicted to Konami's hit game. Last weekend, I invited Koh and Yurie over to my house to talk about Koh's virtual relationship with Rinko, and how — if at all — it had impacted their real world husband-and-wife dynamic.

We wanted a ceremony that reflected our geeky, romantic, pink aesthetic, while at the same time being profound and meaningful. Our ceremony was themed around the video game Portal and the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena.

We incorporated lots of geeky details, from the table names (Revolution, Sierra, Katara and GLaDOS) to the choice of music. We also kept several traditional elements such as bouquets, dresses and bridesmaids. However, we both walked down the aisle unaccompanied and skipped the garter/bouquet toss.

A team of artists in Toronto created this giant rendition of The Last Supper using over 4,000 Rubik's Cubes.

Cube Works via Popped Cullture

MODERN as tomorrow morning's headlines, a newly simplified form of the game of chess has for its game board the Modern World, and for its pieces Farmers, Mechanics, Engineers and even Agitators struggling against forces symbolized by opposing Armies, Bankers, Radio, Press, Law and Middlemen trying to become Rankers.

The play, which is solely a matter of skill, centers around opposing forces trying to dominate one neutral piece called Government while either the red or white side, as the antagonists are named, is in power.

The game may be played by either two, three, or four persons and is substantially like chess. But gone are the Pawns, the Knights, and the Kings and Queens,

This week has seen a number of excellent and much publicized and high profile releases -- Rockstar's conversion of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars from DS to PSP and Gearbox's post-apocalyptic co-op sandbox shooter Borderlands -- but no game has eaten as much of my time this week than a downsized iPhone version of a rhythm favorite.

Rock Band [Harmonix/EA Mobile, iPhone]

EA Mobile's downsized port of Harmonix's rhythm-standard enters an App Store dominated by clones and competitors (the Tap Tap series chief among them), and what sets Rock Band apart from the rest is a subtle but massively important distinction. With Harmonix's access to a staggeringly large library of original masters, the iPhone game is able to do what none of the others can: make the music itself reactive to your play.

By comparison, Tap Tap plays as a transparent overlay on top of any given track: keep your hands away from the screen and the music cheerily plays on, unperturbed by your quiet failing. That Rock Band gives you its now embarrassingly too-familiar skronk on every missed note is key to sustaining the illusion that you're participating in the performance, even just by slapping a thumb onto a glass sheet.

The object is to drag colored dots of various sizes to matching colored rectangles around the perimeter of the screen. When dragging a dot you aren't allowed to bump into a dot or rectangle of a different color, or you will lose health or lives. There's more to it, of course, and the game becomes more challenging each level. The nice thing is that you can learn the rules pretty quickly by just playing it. My six-year-old caught on to the object of the game and its rules faster than I did.

DodgeDot works with the Jampaq Network (free, and accessible in the app), which gives players the ability to Follow and be Followed. Most importantly, it gives the game a new round each Sunday at midnight before Monday. All of the levels get new starting patterns (dot sizes, positions, and speeds), which really makes a huge difference in keeping the game fresh, and then we have new rankings for each Round," says Jim.

Now that my kids are in bed, I have it all to myself until morning.

DodgeDot | Follow on Twitter here

This is obviously a labor of love, as the developer knows her stuff. This game is highly allusive and drops constant references to other works like its Gaiman's Sandman. Super Mario World is its core, but set pieces, backgrounds, and enemies from assorted titles and other Mario games all make appearances. These additions are far from being a cut-and-paste hodgepodge though, as they're carefully woven together to create an enthralling experience. The nod to Tarantino and Shinichiro Watanabe is duly earned. Instead of being a pure homage, though, the game throws constant curveballs at you. I played one level where the On/Off switch actually changed the enemies in the level, and another one that was fully destructible via Mario's fireballs. These subversive quirks are made all the more apparent because they're within the Super Mario World engine, something that is so well-known and played.

The boss battles are what this hack is best known for, and they're reason enough for a download. Bosses are typically the one shortcoming in the Mario franchise, but not here. There are dozens of encounters and they're all throwbacks to various 16-bit games. Oh, and they are a lot of fun too. There is the occasional level that drags a bit, but other than that Super Nintendo fans shouldn't pass this up.

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

We're publishing an 8-part series of videos profiling the winners. Today, meet 16 year old Harry Lee of Melbourne Australia. He talks with us about his "Sneaky Card" game concept, which explores social interactions between people. He was inspired by ARG and indie projects like "Bite Me," by Gamelab, and Jane McGonigal's Top Secret Dance-Off, both of which we've covered previously on Boing Boing.

"I love index cards," says Harry, "And I was thinking -- hmm, how can I incorporate them into a project?" So he designed and printed these game cards, and "spread the seeds of sneakiness and espionage" into the unsuspecting pockets, math books, binders and bags and jackets of his schoolmates.

I tracked most of the cards and found, with much satisfaction, that a majority of them had been passed down at least three times. The most successful story is of the card passed from student to student three times before ending up in a math teacher's jacket. The teacher found it and gave it to another math teacher, who inserted it into a student's corrected test before giving it back to him. The card passed hands once again before I lost track of it.

Gaming blog UK Resistance has obtained several present-day photos of a depressingly bare, archaic video game arcade in Pyongyang. The person who took and submitted the photos chose to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

Speaking of North Korea, the current issue of The Paris Review has an amazing article by Barbara Demick about two young North Koreans who risked their lives to make a romantic relationship work.

Inside a North Korean arcade

Tankard O' Terror Replica Stein (via Geekologie)

He's made of 386 granny squares, each one representing 1 pixel (3.5" each) that makes up Raccoon Mario. I learned to crochet in February by watching youtube videos and recently watched another video for granny squares and got started on this project right away. I had originally thought that it would take me over 1 month to complete if I made about 10 granny squares per day.

Even in their inauspicious mobile-focused beginnings, it was clear from the start that Toronto indie Cabybara Games had a keen eye for pushing the visual boundaries on whatever platform they were given. The pixels of the handset and later iPhone version of their original debut puzzler Critter Crunch popped aggressively with a pastel palette against its warmer autumnal backgrounds, an art direction that helped earn the game its fair share of mobile awards.

More recently given the chance to bring that sensibility to the PlayStation 3, though, the team took the risk of not simply cheaply upscaling their vision to the wide-screen, but to give the game a top to toe graphic overhaul and create a full HD-res 2D animated game.

The results -- put plainly -- are basically staggering, with the soft and surreal wonder of Studio Ghibli-esque backdrops underscoring the hectic hand-animated critter-bursts on top, and are even more impressive when you learn that they're not the work of (as you might assume) a field of tirelessly slaving outsourced animators. In fact, nearly all of what you see in the game is largely the output of just two compatriots (or -- as Capy co-founder and president Nathan Vella terms them -- '2 radical dudes'): Nick "Qiqo" Stephan and Sylvain "Sylve" Coutouly, respectively responsible for character animation and background/world map art.

Documenting just what heights a tiny team can reach with vision and proper passion, then, posted here is a rare look into the conception and evolution of the world of Krunchatoa and its creatures within (and a special bonus look at main character Biggs invading other Sony/PlayStation classics), alongside the theatrical-quality animation produced by Capy to surround the launch of the game, available now on the PlayStation Network (with the launch of its free demo version due tomorrow, Oct. 22nd).

As alluded to last week with the release of Amanita's hand-drawn opus Machinarium, the era of the point and click adventure -- which reached its pinnacle throughout the 90s thanks to genre-defining works by LucasArts, Sierra and Cyan -- seemed all but forever over in the decade following, as PC prowess pushed first- and third-person to the fore.

But a new wave of adventures has recently arisen, ushered in by the re-introduction of more cursor-y consoles and handhelds (think: the literal pointing and touching of both the Wii and the iPhone), the proliferation of digital distribution channels (lowering the barrier away from gun-shy publishers unwilling to invest heavily in 'nostalgia'), and a dedicated core that's never let the classics die (via grey market ports of Lucas's SCUMM engine to basically every piece of hardware with a display device).

And so, a brief introduction to those new adventurers, and a quick guide to re-playing the classics in new ways.

Ben There, Dan That / Time Gentlemen, Please [Zombie Cow, PC]

Apart from Amanita (covered exhaustively last week), the top team keeping the spirit of click alive is the UK's Zombie Cow -- founded by Dan Marshall and aided by a small crew of consultants, most notably co-writer and -designer Ben Ward.

The pair are, as you might have guessed, the stars of Zombie Cow's first adventure outing, Ben There, Dan That, a game that manages to infuse the best of indie spirit (lean, economical, and highly stylized art and design) with the best of what LucasArts taught us made these journeys so great: razor-sharp wit and dialogue, self-aware and -referencing (and, here, Lucas-classics referencing as well) at every turn, never afraid to break the fourth wall and let the player in on the jokes.

The duo have followed in that same tradition with the recently released Time Gentlemen, Please a sequel that can be demo'd and purchased either from Zombie Cow itself or via Valve's Steam (BT,DT remains a free download). Both come highly, highly recommended, and serve as a nice tide-over while you await the studio's third chronicle: Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican.

Kicking off a new series of weekly round-ups of the most essential just-released games (spanning retail, indie, downloadable, iPhone, freeware, and all otherwise), this week takes us on a trip through heavy metal fantasy, jellybean puzzle solving, rusted robot worlds, and Indian-spiced psychadelic shooters.

Brutal Legend (Double Fine, PS3/Xbox 360)

Certainly one of the highest profile games of the season, Double Fine's Brutal Legend (at top) has been garnering all the media acclaim it richly deserves following its release earlier this week.

Created by former LucasArts adventure vet Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango) and starring Jack Black alongside a league of metal legends (Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and, of course, Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne), the studio's open-world/driving/lite real-time-strategy opus is every medieval-apocalypse album cover brought to glorious life, finally fulfilling the wishes of two generations of disaffected patched-jean-jacketed and notebook-cover-doodling Hessians.

Tank's team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball's movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers' virtual reality software -- a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it "a mini-IMAX theater." Mice in the study ran through a virtual maze designed in the open source Quake game editor, but rather than earning points or power-ups, they were rewarded with sips of water from a head-side nozzle.

Into the hippocampus of each mouse the researchers inserted a glass capillary just one micron wide at its tip and filled with salt water. Known as a whole-cell patch recorder, it detects electrical currents as they pulse through individual cells.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how the dynamics of electrical activity within single neurons is related to firing patterns among collections of neurons that accompany the performance of complex tasks," wrote Douglas Nitz, a University of California at San Diego cognitive scientist, in a commentary accompanying the findings.

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake