Oh my....... Read the rest

Stevedore Comedy talks about climate change as if it were real in "News From a World Where People Aren't Complete Idiots." Wake up America! Read the rest

Robert Penney created a pixel-perfect animation of Stranger Things as a turn-of-the-1990s adventure game a la Secret of Monkey Island. Turns out that he's got a knack for these displaced artifacts, each pulled from a parallel universe where 20th century game systems still received rushed, sloppy games based on inappropriate movies and shows.

Here, for example, is an 8-bit game of Stephen King's IT made by a team that perhaps got to watch one trailer, on mute, before getting cracking in time for Christmas...

And here's Alejandro González Iñárritu's Gravity as a dismally bad genre platformer. Watch out for snakes!

Here's Scarif Resort Simulator, a Sim City clone crudely tied-in to the Star Wars universe.

Penney's Fictional Bad Games YouTube channel looks like a good one to follow. It's such incredible work I wondered if he had to code quasi-games to get such a convincing replica of bad, glitchy gameplay, but Penney writes that he makes each animation in Photoshop:

Yes it was incredibly laborious! But AfterEffects and Flash etc can’t really get that clunky awkward feel that a frame by frame animation can! I also created all the music and sound effects.  It was all inspired by an older project I created in a similar vein, but just box art - http://penneydesign.com/retro-games-with-modern-themes

You've seen Primitive Technology; now see Even Primitiver Technology. A fine spoof of an excellent YouTube series. Read the rest

Agonizingly, the Stranger Things game—a point-and-click adventure in the style of Lucasarts' late-eighties classic such as Zak McKraken and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade—is just a spoof. It's so detailed and pixel-perfect, though, they it seems they must have made the game, complete with ridiculously precise and incomprehensible puzzles, just to record to video of it. Read the rest

At first glance, thedatadrive appears to be a charming cartoon version of Facebook. But it soon turns into a nightmare, distilled from the social network's brain-drilling efforts to force your attention to BRANDS. It's impossible to tell if and when the joke dissolves and actual marketing, presented as adbusters-esque antimarketing, starts up again. Which is the point, I guess! It's impossible to know, now that we are all living in the last chuckle of a dead French philosopher.

Turns out, though, that the spoof's heart is in the right place: it's the work of Daniel Kolitz, Adrian Chen, Alix Rule and Sam Lavigne, who are launching a new publishing venture—Useless Press— which promises "high-quality internet things."

Good luck! Read the rest