Channel Frederator Blog

Extra Life is a 24-hour gaming marathon to fund pediatric cancer research and treatment taking place this Saturday, October 17th starting at 8am in your respective time zone.

For more information on how you can participate, visit the Extra Life FAQ page.

You can do it in your jammies, in front of your game console, with the energy beverage of your choice in hand. Find a sponsor and start playing!

Do it, gamer. Do it for the kids.

-Bailee DesRocher

I’m a big fan of the music of Jonathan Coulton, a musician who actually encourages people to make their own video versions of his songs. (For example, there was this contest to create a video for “I Feel Fantastic”.)

A guy who goes by the name Spiff has created a slew of these videos using World of Warcraft. His Machinima videos (that’s animation made using video games) are very entertaining. He also has a page on his site with detailed explanations of how to make them—featuring two methods: easy and hard.

Here’s an interview with the man himself from Nerdabout New York (a Discovery Channel blog).

The video above is for the song “Codemonkey”. After the jump, his latest: “Tom Cruise Crazy”. [Read more…]

This was recently posted over at CGTalk. There are so many video games produced each year, that many of them go unnoticed. This is a great compilation of animation from Nintendo Wii’s EA title “Boogie Superstar”.

 From Lloyd J Colaco:

Here are some of the animations I did for EA’s Boogie Superstar.

A little info on the game…
It’s a dance game designed exclusively for the Wii and targeted towards tween girls. It also features Karaoke in the gameplay. The game involves players waggling the Wii Remote to simple two-beat prompts, such as swinging the Remote side-to side or up and down in time to on screen directions.
I would like to mention that I have ONLY done the Animation. The rigs, models, concepts, characters were done by the Boogie team at EA Montréal, I’m thankful to be part of such a talented group. Kudos to Luis Alonso for setting up some cool animation friendly [Read more…]

GAME OVER is just one of several art projects developed by the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, working with the NOTsoNOISY creative agency. The piece is a series of short films, each one based on a different early video game. Instead of pixels, we see humans in colored shirts moving from seat to seat in a theater.

Other films in the series include Pole Position, Pong, and Tetris.

-Floyd Bishop

You have to see this to believe it. It is hard to explain without ruining it. If you are a YouTube user (and who isn’t), then you will want to watch this.

The marketing people at Nintendo knocked this one out of the park.

-Floyd Bishop

If only I had this back in the 80’s, I would have a whole lot more quarters than I do now. YouTube user NightmareTX has created an annotated video that shows which buttons you need to press, and when you need to press them, in order to complete Don Bluth’s “Dragon’s Lair”. This game was always more fun to watch than play, in my opinion. Now you can watch it al the way through, and know what the player is doing to get past some of the harder bits.-Floyd Bishop 

Chris Prynoski (creator of MTV Downtown, among other things) has curated a show honoring gaming god and father of Dungeons and Dragons Gary Gygax. It opened last Saturday and will be up until September 27th at Titmouse Studio (6616 Lexington Avenue, Los Angeles). Lots of my old friends from MTV Animation have contributed artwork. Just a few of the participating gang of geeky alum (and I mean that in a loving way): Christy Karacas (Superjail), George “not a typo” Krstic and Jody Schaeffer (Megas XLR), Kaori Humara, Richard Mather, Cheese Hasselberger, and Antonio Cannobio. Plus, that guy who created The Tick. And Gabe Swarr, who is everywhere.

—Anne D. Bernstein

If you’re a fan of video games, live in Los Angeles, and enjoy being packed, sardine-like, into gallery spaces with hoards of fellow pop culture fanatics, then you might want to check out the opening of the fourth annual I Am 8-Bit show. The event is at the World of Wonder Storefront Gallery at 6650 Hollywood Boulevard, this Thursday (August 14th) from 8 until midnight.

The official website currently offers minimal specifics, but you can get an idea of what’s in store by perusing this photo gallery of last year’s opening, as covered by i-mockery.com.

A collection of artwork from previous shows was published by Chronicle Books back in 2006. I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the 80s is available from the publisher’s website for $22.95. An additional volume will come out in 2009.

Despite the lack of a contributor list, if you just can’t wait, some of the artist’s involved have posted pix of their creations in advance of the opening. Click here for a sneak peek at Joystiq.

PS: World of Wonder is the production company responsible for many reality television “classics” such as Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, One Punk, Under God, and Wife, Mom, Bounty Hunter, as well as some serious docs. Seem like cool people, actually…

Find out how Tori Spelling is currently connected to geekdom, after the jump… [Read more…]

The San Diego Comic Con has come and gone. It was pretty busy, with the entire show selling out. Preview Night was just as busy (if not more so) than any other day. I would love to see some sort of expansion of the Con to cut back on crowd size. Maybe a professionals only night, or perhaps making the Con a full week?

[Read more…]

Have a look at this trailer for the upcoming “Wario Land Shake It!” game for the Wii. It’s nice to see a modern game with solid 2D animation. In a way, it kind of reminds me a bit of the animation from the “Metal Slug” series.

-Floyd Bishop