This isn’t the newest fantastic piece of animation around, but we haven’t mentioned it here yet – and it’s well worth watching. Produced by Sugimoto Kousuke (director) and Manabe Takayuki (music), it’s an excellent example of carefully combining sweet animation with thumping beats.
How you can not watch something with a scene like this? I don’t know. Click through to see the video.
Forget King Kong atop the Empire State Building, long live Donkey Kong!
Check out the wholly destruction based fantasy of long time gamers in this video, when New York has everything 8-bit unleashed upon it:
[Courtesy of Gizmodo AU]
It’s been a crazy week for fans of the Portal that have been following the gaming press. After last patching the game with minor fixes in June 2009, Valve have pushed two cryptic updates live for the game this week, both of which made changes to the game itself.
The first added several radios to the game’s levels in addition to the ones already present in the game. Usually these just play some fairly crazy, mexican sounding musak, but several forum-posters on various sites have found that placing these radios on the various red buttons scattered throughout the game as part of the game mechanics, causes them to broadcast a new series of signals.
Things only get crazier from there. Portal fans from a bunch of fan forums, bless ‘em, have examined the transmissions and managed to decode them into morse code and images of security camera footage from Aperture Labs – the installation the game takes place in. The rabbit hole went further, though, as an MD5 hashed phone number for an old-school Bulletin Board Service was found in the images which itself had MORE cryptic images.
Kotaku‘s Michael McWhertor has a great write-up of the findings.
I love that Valve put this stuff out there knowing that their fans are crazy enough to do the work. I guess that’s what happens when you have to wait so long for sequel announcements! <cough>Episode 3</cough>
The second update to the game, which JUST went live actually changed the game’s ending – albeit very slightly.
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but if you HAVE finished the game, you can see the updated ending over at Giant Bomb.
All of this looks like it points to an announcement for Portal 2 at the GDC next week where Valve’s Gabe Newell is receiving the Pioneer Award for the Game Developers Choice Awards 2010.
People couldn’t pronounce the word Pepsi in Argentina so the brand changed it’s name to something they could pronounce…Pecsi. Love it.
Here’s a nice banner concept from Burger King that uses augmented reality. Grab a dollar bill, hold it in front of your webcam and see what appears. Nice.
Via Pophangover
This breathtaking video was made by coordinating dozens of fans of the Japanese music group Sour. The only way I can think of describing it is “webcam synchronised swimming”. Watch it. It is pure genius.
Posted by @eunmac
10 million viral Wedding views in a week on Youtube can do wonders for music sales, even if you’re Chris Brown languishing in a career low point (here). Neilsen points out (here) that Brown’s track Forever from 2008 was nowhere to be seen until this week, but is now in the top 10 for the US and Australia. The only possible reason being the Viral Wedding video which has a link to the track on iTunes. It raises some interesting points on the usage rights. Several people here pointed out that many similar videos have had the audio stripped by YouTube for copyright violation, yet this is a clear case of win-win for everyone involved. A clear indication to the Music industry that a social media model for music sales exists.
Posted by @eunmac
Click image above to watch the video
OK, Urlesque put this list up in April, but I couldn’t let it go unblogged. The 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos. They’re all here. Star Wars Kid, Lazy Sunday, Numa Numa, Tron Guy, etc.
You can eat the list in bite-sized chunks of 5, or digest the whole list in one sitting.
Here’s a taste:
Yes. You DO want it that way.
Be warned, though, that some of the videos are in Hulu, so people outside the US will be out of luck.
(Side note: Hey, Hulu. I’ll pay you 10 bucks a month to let me watch, k? Thnx)
Millions of people have been drawn to this footage which shows a shadowy figure walk across the hallway in Neverland during the filming of Larry King live. Full screen and speakers up to get the best out of this version which reveals a new audible piece of evidence:
Rest in peace MJ.