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This Kinect installation turns normal human beings into freaky flower gods

Le Vent Nous Portera, or The Wind Will Carry Us, is an absolutely wonderful Kinect installation that takes you to a surreal forest with a billion stars in the open sky where you masquerade as a mud-person who casts glowing hydrangeas from your palms. It’s like the moment right before you die after your life flashes before your eyes, without the actual dying part. 

This luminous forest scene of two moonlighting pagan gods was engineered and designed by Alexander Letcius and Bulat Sharipov of the art collective TUNDRA from Saint Petersburg, who seem to specialize in creating surreal audiovisual mind-fucks, like this social experiment that uses strobing lights to induce terror. 

Check out their stuff below.

via Creative Applications

Watch Monochroma's forboding new cinematic teaser

The world is not as black and white as you think.

Here’s why the Klobb in Goldeneye was the worst gun ever

The Klobb in GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 was pure, unabashed Czechoslovakian garbage. You really might as well go gunless into a gunfight rather than pick it up off the concrete slab. It was so bad that it wouldn’t be right to let it slip from our memory without understanding why it’s so fucking awful, so a writer at Edge has dug deep into what makes the submachine gun in the best James Bond game notoriously pathetic. The reason, as explained by the game’s director Martin Hollis, is that it was designed after a real-life crappy gun, the Skorpion VZ/61. His account of the awfulness is just priceless.

There are a few scenarios in which it’s possible to pick up two Klobbs and dual-wield them. When you do so, it makes an awesome sound and feels fantastic. You think to yourself, "Oh, yeah! I’m the shit." Until you actually try to shoot an enemy with the gun, that is, and realize that it’s a bit like a noisy water pistol.

Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing at Edge.  

Fearless Fantasy is a truly WTF-worthy RPG

Fearless Fantasy is a game that will make you question if everything you knew about good turn-based RPGs is wrong. It’s lightning fast instead of calculated and methodical. Instead of the normal tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-taping, there are gesture controls. The gargantuan foes you encounter, paradoxically, are brutishly ugly, despite being well drawn. 

Then, there’s the story: the party of heroes who look like LARPers are off to rescue the princess from an abusive marriage. Instead of the usually operatics, it has something resembling comedy of the Adult Swim kind. But don’t worry. It hasn’t scrapped those excessive battle grunts. 

All things considered, this is looking to be a ridiculously good time and nice change of pace when it hits Steam later this year.

Very first virtual world, from 1978, acquired by Stanford; librarians to get their mob-slaying on

Stanford has gotten its grubby archival hands on the source code for MUD1, which was the first online virtual world and great grandpapa of big, life-consuming MMOs like World of Warcraft as well as computer-simulated communities like Second Life. 

For those of you who aren’t exceedingly old, a little history lesson: MUDs, or multi-user dungeons, are part BBS, part texted-based Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying, and part interactive fiction, which if you do the math adds up to all very nerdy, but in the respected, historical sense of nerdy.

Not to be confused with MUD2, or the outburst of copycats that came after it, MUD1 was the original, created in 1978 at the University of Essex by a couple of Brits who deserve to be knighted if they haven’t already been. Stanford says they are planning to make the source code available online, so this won’t be tucked away in a file cabinet.  

Glitch art meets noise in Memory of a Broken Dimension creator’s latest

As far as we know, no actual meth was inhaled during the making of this sonically glitchy, visually twisting interactive art project. Methlab Agency is just the name of the label that Memory of a Broken Dimension’s Ezra Hanson, a.k.a. XRA, collaborated with to bring together shrill, metallic-sounding beats with his trademark swirl of hypnotic, abstract, grayscale software. From poking around Methlab's website, they remind me of a noisy Planet Mu if that helps any. 

The project, simply called Methlab // XRA Interactive Collaboration, is not dissimilar from many others like it where you navigate cool-looking abstract shapes while listening to cool-sounding electronic music. But the differentiator is that this one is engineered by XRA who has art house skills at stitching together glitchy, digital wefts from binary code.

You can check it out below then play it here.

Newest update establishes Vampire: The Masquerade as cult-classic-of-the-forever

After ten years of werewolf attacks on urbane vampire covens, the little known but much-loved RPG Vampire: The Masquerade, Bloodlines has received a healthy update. Patch 9.0 (yes, 9.0!) adds a bountiful number of improvements, despite the fact that the developer Troika officially went out of business not soon after its release, and despite the fact that the game very much looks like a PC game from the early aughts. 

The way I see it, this puts it in the same ship with cult films like The Big Lebowski and El Topo, works that initially underwhelmed mainstream audiences but struck a cord with a dedicated fan-base and grew to become cultural icons. This is doubly impressive for Bloodlines as videogames are a medium that resists cult classics, since generally by the time a title has been around long enough to be considered classic the technology is outdated or the systems are unavailable. Still, we have a few great ones, like this one.  

This book dares to document Eve Online's sprawling history

Writing a book on the infinitely fascinating virtual world of EVE Online sounds slightly less daunting than writing a book on the history of human civilization or something. Still, one journalist is undertaking that difficult task and documenting the long history, backhanded politics, void nullsecs, and armageddons over petty debts the space fleet MMO is famous for. 

A History of the Great Empires of Eve Online is currently being Kickstarted by its author Andrew Groen in order to fund the first print run, and the book sounds great. It features interviews with EVE godheads such as Goonswarm’s The Mittani, accounts of the Great Wars, and an art direction that captures that inimitable style of Eve propaganda. It sounds like required reading for catching up on the venerable game’s 11 year history. 

New PBS Game/Show asks if JRPGs necessarily have to be Japanese

With a name like Japanese role-playing games, you’d think the genre would be geographically bound to the land of soba noodles and adorable lucky cat shrines. But recently there have been a slew of games that play more or less exactly like JRPGs, but with one major difference: they’re not made in Japan. To name a few, Citizens of Earth takes cues from Earthbound; Celestian Tales: Old North has Suikoden written all over it; and Ubisoft’s Child of Light is an homage to the JRPGs project director Patrick Plourde played on a CRT in his youth.

This week Jamin looks at this new wave of non-Japanese JRPGs alongside our old sweethearts and asks if we should consider them canon. 

Check out the episode on YouTube, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Scrambled books of Shakespeare illustrate the travesty of digital photos

Digital photos are great, except when they’re not. As this series of books containing digitally compressed copies of Romeo and Juliet show, Jpegs are gradually turning the Web into a sinkhole of blurry, bad photography. 

Because Jpegs are lossy, whenever you save or edit a digital photo in the format, a smidgen of the original quality is degraded. That’s why Google images is flooded with such crap. 

But the phenomena is hard to pinpoint in photos because it happens so gradually, so the hactivist artist Tom Scott scanned the pages of Romeo and Juliet and transcribed them in a series of six books. 

The first contains the Bard’s play in its original, uncompressed glory. Each preceding copy has the compression bumped up a notch, proceeding from the first book, which looks somewhat confused, like a thing E. E. Cummings would write, to an entirely illegible final volume, which would only be at home in a fictional library of Borges.

You can download the ebook versions here.