News You Can Bruise for 2008 April 25 (entry 0)

(3) Fri Apr 25 2008 06:37: I couldn't sleep, and my upgrade to Hardy broke my test suite runner, so you get a weblog entry. Sumana was laughing it up at re-titled Atari cartridge cover art. They're pretty good and they gave me a couple ideas.

There's an art game similar to Telephone where Alice describes a picture, Bob draws a picture from the description, Carol describes Bob's picture, Dale draws a picture from Carol's description, and so on. This page is basically one step in a similar meta-game played with video games. There was a design document for a game called "Casino" which got turned into a 2600 game and a cover art painting. The cover art image was doctored to depict another game called "I Am A Vegas Showgirl". That implies a very different game, which once made would have different cover art. And a game made from that cover art would be Deja Vu or something.

Second, "Salvador Dali's Pinball Thrills" is a great game idea. Short-, medium-, and long-time readers will know that I generally prefer Dada to surrealism, parce que je n'aime pas l'amour. But any pinball table is already a work of surrealist art, so why not do one themed around, say, The Temptation of St. Anthony? And now that we have good-looking software pinball, we could create a pinball board that's a dreamworld of shifting symbols.

I'm also wondering what's with the 1910s theme in several of those Atari cover art paintings. Not a time remembered fondly (or at all) by your typical Atari 2600 purchaser.

Comments:

Posted by Susie at Fri Apr 25 2008 11:10

I've done rec therapy groups where people have to describe line drawings for other people to draw. Like circles with lines across them. It's harder than it sounds. For people in rec groups at least.

Posted by anonymous at Fri Apr 25 2008 22:16

The re-titled cartridge art is _hilarious_

Especially good: "It's Fucking Checkers"

Posted by CastleZZT at Sat Apr 26 2008 04:20

http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/10.html

One picture/text that survives telephone pictionary remarkably intact is "penguins watching TV"