Burst Attention Span

Jeff Minter is a clever man indeed. Tripped-out musical and visual genius, creator of numerous addictive and offbeat (to say the least) games, all-round ovine enthusiast and designer of the 360 visualiser: his new Tempest-alike game, Space Giraffe has been announced for release on XBox Live later this year.

Live is the perfect distribution channel for Minter’s output. Not only could Space Giraffe be a massive moneyspinner, but his whole back catalogue of Llama madness. I would definitely pay to play Tempest2000 again – without the massive Jaguar pad this time…

There are some expletive-laden screenshots on the quartertothree forums, which brings us to Minter’s second piece of genius… Why are the screenshots full of words like “horse smegma” and “otter spunk”? Forum member, Naked explains:

“[Jeff] uses the foul language to prevent sites like IGN posting shots like this (essentially WIP/Tech Test images he posts on his blog/forum) as ‘exclusive shots of Jeff Minter’s new game’ when they’re not exactly representative of everything he’s going for. It happened on Unity, leading to a bunch of silliness, so now he throws in some NSFW language as a (tongue in cheek) safeguard.”

Absolutely brilliant!

I don’t normally play flash games, I’d pretty much written them off as unfulfilling time-wasters with repetitive gameplay poorly derived from 80s ‘classics’ written purely to serve a cynical marketing plot…

But, despite being a viral, and being from Sony, Toon Crisis is actually rather good. As you would expect from a music player advert the ‘toons’ from Gogol Bordello are brilliant, setting a manic ‘Turkish bazaar’ background to the 2.5D shoot-em-up action. I’m definitely gonna get some of their track for my iPod :)

I haven’t had this much fun with a flash game since that monkey asked me to spank him…

When Nintendo announced that the console we had come to know as Revolution was to adopt a more dimunitive moniker, many people were surprised. More people were amused.

I refrained from joining in the clamour of puns and jokes that took the piss out of Nintendo's 'Wii'naming of the hugely anticipated games machine, waiting until I could find something really funny to say. Eventually I gave up and just decided to post this:

Noticed while reading a back issue of EDGE on the toilet (where best to contemplate the Wii?), this interview with Miyamoto predates the new name, but I've brought it up to date…

By November you'll all want to come over and play with my Wii, it's gonna be HUGE.