In 2008, game designer Jonathan Blow released Braid for the Xbox 360, which was quickly celebrated as a landmark achievement for independent game developers. A mix of Mario Bros.-inspired platforming and inventive time-shifting puzzles, Braid has gone on to be one of the best-reviewed and highest-selling Xbox Live Arcade titles to date. Since then, fans have been anxiously awaiting Blow’s next game, The Witness, which has only been vaguely described as an “exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island.”
Little was known about the “philosophical and quiet” game until Blow debuted it last week at Penny Arcade Expo in the most fitting way possible – he didn’t say a word about it. Located next to other like-minded indie titles by Chris Hecker (Spy Party) and Andy Schatz (Monaco), The Witness was shown off for the first time ever to the public, albeit with unfinished puzzles and rough graphics that Blow dubbed “programmer art.” Kotaku‘s Stephen Totilo was one of the few game journalists to notice The Witness, and he just posted his first thoughts on the game.
Marketing-wise, this was an absolutely perfect debut for a product like The Witness for a few reasons:
Connect with the Core Audience – By showing the game off without any pretense, the only people who knew what they were playing were either such diehard fans they recognized it from the concept art or recognized Jonathan Blow himself standing in the background.
Get Honest Opinions – Blow was more likely to get realistic reactions to his project by making this hugely anticipated game completely anonymous. Signs next to such an early version of the game saying “From the developer of Braid” would only hurt the title in the long run.
Create a Story – Video game conventions like PAX revolve around massive spectacle to attract eyeballs. By bucking the norm and going low-key, The Witness already has a built-in attraction for writers looking for a unique story from the convention.
This week was all about Apple, who announced the newest updates to their products at a music-themed event on Wednesday. Updates to iPods (touchscreens! buttons (again)! they’re still tiny!) abounded, as well as the announcement of their own social network, Ping. Apple’s trademark “One More Thing” turned out to be the newly-refreshed refreshed AppleTV. A $99 cloud-based media streaming center, the AppleTV will let you rent TV shows and Movies via iTunes, as well as pull off nifty party tricks by zipping video content from your iPhone/iPad to your TV at the push of a button. Pretty great stuff, but we’re still more interested in the upcoming Boxee Box, as well as SageTV’s newly-revealed HD Theater 300, which does (pretty much) all of the above and some even cooler stuff, too. Now if we could just find the free time to actually watch all of this content on our awesome AV setups, we’d be golden.
Apex staffer Gabo’s band Kordan were just added to Filter’s Culture Collide festival in LA, and while we can’t make it out there, we’re bugging our LA friends to check out the show. Deli Mag said their “fuzz-drenched guitars and the droney melodies are reminiscent of late 80s/early 90s shoegazer” and we’ve gotta agree. RIYL My Bloody Valentine, A Place to Bury Strangers, Jesus and Mary Chain, and other bands you already should be into.
Sorry to cut this week’s post so short, but in case you weren’t aware, there’s a hurricane coming, and we’re trying to make it out of here while it’s still mostly dry outside. We’ve prepared, have you? We’ll leave you with our favorite video that’s made the rounds this week so you can at least have some entertainment in your storm shelter. (Quasi-NSFW for those of you offended by hilariousness.)
If you haven’t seen the video yet, it’s a user experience dream! They pretty much created an interactive, multi-window, data-driven video that uses the user’s information (particularly your address) to personalize the video. Part of the Chrome Experiment, they utilized HTML5 technologies to make this work. This pretty much means you should definitely watch it on Google Chrome (as they point out in their disclaimer). I don’t want to give it away, I’ll just say you should check it out!
This week the weather in NYC did its best to remind us to enjoy summer, with a Monday and Tuesday straight out of mid-October. Best hit the beach and make it to a few cookouts in the next week; summer’s over, kids.
Regardless, we had more interesting stuff going on this week than just dreary weather. For starters, Barracuda-rockers Heart answered MOG.com readers’ love and music questions. Need to charm that special someone? Lost that special songwriting spark? They’ll help you out.
For you fashionistas out there, the second annual Fashion’s Night Out was announced this week with an enthusiastic PSA that was released this week featuring all of fashions top models. This year’s event takes place on September 10th. Not in New York? This year the event is going to be taking place in 16 different countries all to support the shops and fashion in their market. You can follow FNO over on Twitter.
Next week marks the release of the 40th anniversary reissue of Miles Davis’ landmark album Bitches Brew, and Josh, our resident jazz fanatic, is stoked.Huge Miles fans themselves, Dogfishhead Brewery are commemorating the album by releasing their own Bitches Brew Ale, which Slashfood and NY Press named as the “Beer of the Week.” We’re anxious to give it a taste while listening to “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”
This weekend, we’re looking forward to checking out Make Out with Violence, an indie film from Nashville that’s opening up down the street at the reRun Gastropub. As one of Apex’s resident former Tennesseans, I’m all about supporting Music City where possible. NY Times‘s review summed up the plot to the coming-of-age/zombie flick (common pairing, right?) pretty perfectly, and check out the trailer below.
Filled with clear, bright images and moments of skewed genius, this delicate debut effortlessly evokes those languid summer doldrums, when even a rotting girlfriend is better than no girlfriend at all.
Update: Um… oh yeah, that Star Wars Uncut thing that I was in that got nominated for an Emmy for Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Fiction? It kindasortawon. Massive crazy-huge congrats to the SW Uncut team: Casey Pugh, Annelise Pruitt, Jamie Wilkinson, Chad Pugh, Aaron Valdez, Bryan Pugh, and Justin Hanney. I’ve never been prouder to serve as a mustachioed Princess Leia.
This week saw so many cool things! Manly in the internet. For one, Facebook decided that it’s cool for ALL your friends to know where you are ALL THE TIME (?!?!?!?!). That’s right!! With Facebook Places, you can now tag your location and even your friends can tag you. So if you lied to your friends and told them you can’t go out, just because you secretly wanted to go to the Ice Capades, well now your little 14 year-old cousin can be all like “I was sooo happy to see my cousin at the Ice Capades!! He looked especially cute when he cryed ” on her wall.
And yes, she can tag you all through that! Awesome!! So now, not only people can tag our pictures and our profiles and pages, they can also let everyone know where you are. I won’t weight-in into the subject (although, it does seem like I have) but there have been many articles for and against this feature. I’ll let all of you be the judge.
Also, you can now (finally) see the entire version of the Star Wars Uncut Movie! It’s particularly exciting to us, as one of our own participates in the feature!
It’s also really exciting to now that it’s now been nominated to an Emmy! Nice going, Davis! You’ll be a super “Star” (Wars?)!
Well, that’s our week! Now, go out and get some sun or something. You’re getting to pale from all the staying inside and watching a computer screen all day.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with the FunnyorDie.com exclusive: “Pranah 3D: For Your Consideration”.
It seemed like this week was all about people quitting their jobs, with workingman’s hero Steven Slater giving some Jetblue passengers an honest slice of his mind before jumping out of a plane, double-fisted beers in-hand (or maybe not). JetBlue responded with quite possibly the best PR response ever, managing to reference Office Space and well… the entire internet.
TheChive.com was able to briefly one-up Slater with their own “I QUIT” story and in the process pulled a fast one on basically everybody. Regardless, HOPA has now entered the cultural lexicon forever.
Continuing with the theme of people exiting jobs this week, our very own Christina Marcus set sail for other waters, but not before writing up a pretty fantastic post on Wednesday. While she didn’t leave with two beers in hand or with a Farmville revelation, Christina will be missed. You can keep up with her over on Twitter and Tumblr.
As for this upcoming weekend, I’ve got an unintentionally nerd-tastic few days ahead of me, with Scott Pilgrim tonight, 8-bit rockers Anamanaguchi playing tomorrow, and the Mega Man-inspired power-metal rock-opera of The Protomen on Sunday. Josh will be Easy Riding his way down to DC on PorkChop, his 1985 Honda Magna, while Gabo will be playing it low-key before playing a show on Sunday.
That was the week, and it was awesome. We’ll leave you with this terrifying flight in a glass-bottomed hot air balloon. Don’t let the peaceful piano music fool you: you’d be hugging the sides and crying for mommy if you could see the ground a couple hundred feet directly below you.
This week started with one of the most hilarious news articles we’ve seen in a bit. Steven Slater’s dramatic resignation has to be in the list of top resignation moments of all history. The man, a 20+ year flight attendant, finally got fed up after being cursed at and assaulted by a passenger. Shortly after this, he picked up the speaker phone cursed out the passenger, opened the escape shoot, took two beers, his bag and slid down the escape ramp… AMAZING!
As crazy as this may seem, it must take a lot of guts (or a mental disorder) to “quit” your job in such a manner, especially when you’re breaking all sorts of federal rules and regulations. It’s become such a phenomena that, as Yahoo! Stated:
“He is now, for better or for worse, THE JetBlue flight attendant, with the now-infamous tarmac incident dominating the list of top Yahoo! searches. (Among the variations: “jet blue flight attendant,” up 9,175% in one day; “steven slater jet blue”; and “fed up attendant jet blue.”) And the term “JetBlue flight attendant” is still the top search term on Twitter as of this writing at noon Eastern the day after the fact, not to mention the outpouring of support he’s received on Facebook.”
For this, our bosses here at Apex have forbidden us to leave the office, if not by, at least, opening a window and sliding down an emergency slide…with two beers on-hand. If not, they’ll never forgive us. In any case, even though he’s been considered crazy by some, for others, he’s considered a:
Sooo! Many things happened this week! We were glad to see our business cards finally got here! We’re so excited that we can finally go up to people and seem like we’re professional adults with business cards (this one’s for you mom and dad!). It’s like we gained a super power or something. They look all stylish and cool, they have our new logo and a bunch of little details that will distract you for minutes at a time while working.
On the music side of things, The Arcade Fire came out with their much anticipated third album, The Suburbs, and also sold out two dates at Madison Square Garden. One of which, was streamed live and directed by the one and only Terry Gilliam! Check it out!
Davis and Gabo continue arguing about stuff. This time, they were going at it about Inception. Each of them presented some very pseudo-intellectual interesting arguments about why one of them thought it was amazing (Davis) and why the other thought it was a bit over rated (Gabo). Of course, Gabo won, but regardless, it was entertaining to watch.
Hey, remember when your only options for purchasing music online were overpriced monthly subscriptions or DRM-laden files? Y’know, way back in the dark ages of 2003? Apparently Brilliant Digital Entertainment does, because that’s exactly the model they’re following with the newly re-launched Kazaa. $15 gets you a month’s worth of browser-only streaming and DRM’ed MP3s for purchase, a move that feels about half a decade too late to gain any kind of a following.
Ironically, the original founders of Kazaa, Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström, are also the founders of new service Rdio.com, which opened to the public earlier this week. They offer unlimited streaming (mobile and browser – even when you’re offline via some kind of witchery) and a solid set of social features, such as musical suggestions, friend-created and sharable playlists. I was able to play with Rdio while it was still in beta, and after just a few hours of use I’m considering ponying up the $5 per month subscription fee.
Even though all of us here are HUGE fans of music, sometimes we’re not the best at actually being able to play it. That’s why we not only get our clients featured on sites that make sense, we also take advantage of the fact they could teach us something new.
With that in mind, Hanson just recorded a video tutorial for Ultimate-Guitar to teach us their new single, “Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’”! With their newest album Shout it Out hitting stores last month and a North American tour kicking off tomorrow, they’ve certainly kept busy. We took advantage of Isaac Hanson’s amazing guitar-shredding skills to learn a thing or two about music, guitars and we even learned a cool song along the way! Check out the first episode of Isaac’s guitar lesson over at Ultimate-Guitar.TV.
” on her wall.
