Nightly News Roundup: 03.16.2012

Forget about this year’s disappointing British Academy VGAs– the rest of tonight’s news will fix you right up.

By Katharine Byrne. Posted 03/16/2012 23:00 5 Comments     ShareThis

Nightly News Roundup

Mario gets his own gallery in The Art of Video Games exhibition

For those of you lucky enough to live in Washington D.C, the Smithsonian American Art Gallery is holding a new exhibit called The Art of Video Games. Exploring the forty year history of video games as an artistic medium, it features some of the most influential artists and game designers right from the earliest pioneers to the familiar faces of game development today (hint: Nintendo is very much included in both of those categories).


Guests will be able to play classic Super Mario Bros.

Running from March 16th (today!) until September 30th, eighty games have been selected to help demonstrate how games have evolved since the bleeps and bloops of their birth, and you’ll be able to experience the journey through large prints of in-game screenshots, video footage, historic consoles, and interviews with twenty developers and artists. To see a sneak-peak of the gallery, be sure to check out Smithsonian’s Flickr account. Even better, get down there yourself!

Source: Smithsonian American Art Gallery


Nintendo wins…nothing at the British Academy Video Game Awards

Sometimes I’m rather ashamed of my home country. They just don’t know great games when they seem them. While only a few Nintendo games were nominated at this year’s British Academy Video Game Awards, each one was resolutely trounced by its competition.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was up for Best Game, Innovation and the GAME Award of 2011 (the latter of which was voted for by the public), Super Mario 3D Land had its sights set on the Design and Mobile/Handheld categories, and Mario Kart 7 was bizarrely placed in the Family category.

Unfortunately they were beaten by the likes of Battlefield 3, LittleBigPlanet 2, Portal 2, and… Peggle HD. On the upside, Rayman Origins won the Artistic Achievement category, a win that’s truly deserved (unlike some of the others!).

For a full list of winners, head on over the BAFTA website and despair at British gaming tastes.

Source: BAFTA


Peter Molydeux game jam now official

Some of you may be familiar with British developer Peter Molyneux. He’s pretty famous, having created gaming classics such as Fable, Theme Park and Black and White, and he recently announced his departure from Lionhead Studios to go and work for a new company called 22 Cans. He’s also pretty famous for promising the earth in his video games and then not quite delivering said earth (or only delivering something considerably less…earthy). His outlandish promises soon spawned an entirely fake and unrelated doppelgänger on Twitter called PeterMolydeux, and he too (if Molydeux is indeed a “he”) also came up with some pretty wacky game design ideas.

This is just one of them: “FPS War game: you control the teddy bear of a child who has just escaped a death camp. Help them find their mother using your wits”. Pretty out there, right?

At first it was all in jest– a kind of tribute to the original Molyneux. Only now they’re getting turned into actual games. First proposed by Double Fine programmer Anna Kipnis on Twitter only three days ago, her idea of Molyneux and Molydeux teaming up has quickly gathered a lot of steam, so much so that it’s now become an official game jam. After all, what would Molydeux?

Taking place over the weekend of 31st March and 1st April in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, it looks set to create some truly bizarre, but brilliant games. Developers can choose from game description gems such as “Survival Horror combined with Bowling”, or “Imagine a game in which you have to join protests to make changes to the rules within the game’s world”.

So if you thought innovation was dead, think again. Personally I can’t wait to see “a fighting game where the mechanic was to ‘colour in’ parts of your enemy to create your own weak spots”. Which one do you want to see? For a full list of suggested ideas, hit the Molydeux Tumblr page.

Source: What Would Molydeux? via Kotaku

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