If nothing else, the above (admittedly crappy) cameraphone photo at least proves that someone in New York is reading this blog. Specifically someone(s) at The Orchard’s offices overlooking Lafayette Street, who have a thing for decorative Post-It Noting of the windows.

How do I know they read my previous post on this NoHo sighting? Because that paper-pixelated “Pac-Man” used to be a peach:

Accordingly, I guess I’m wrong about that pixelated fruit being the bonus-points orange from “Pac-Man”. It’s actually The Orchard’s corporate logo, which, from the looks of it, is supposed to be a peach. That would make sense, as peaches do grow in orchards, while oranges grow in groves. (Although this Post-It creation could be doubling as both, just to fit in better with the “Space Invaders” alien and spaceship.)

So either I was right in the first place, and that really was an orange all along, or else they’re just screwing around. If they’re taking requests, the next oldschool blocky videogame I’d like to see represented is “Robotron: 2084″…

Yesterday, an uptick of traffic to this old post and its related Flickr page solved the mystery behind the above photo. Turns out that those strategically-placed Post-It Notes belong to The Orchard, a big-time music and video licensing company. Their offices are behind those windows on Lafayette Street (although their actual physical address is around the corner, on 4th Street).

Accordingly, I guess I’m wrong about that pixelated fruit being the bonus-points orange from “Pac-Man”. It’s actually The Orchard’s corporate logo, which, from the looks of it, is supposed to be a peach. That would make sense, as peaches do grow in orchards, while oranges grow in groves. (Although this Post-It creation could be doubling as both, just to fit in better with the “Space Invaders” alien and spaceship.)

This art display was still in place as of a couple of days ago, which is the last time I walked past. Hopefully my online exposure won’t spook them into tearing it all down.

Fresh off working on the new videogame adaptation of Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis is up for pixelating another one of his old movies:

“A ‘Stripes‘ first-person shooter could be interesting,” he says.

Ramis no doubt had tongue implanted firmly in cheek with that comment. Still, a “Doom”-meets-slacker-comedy angle would be amusing. Better yet, make it a “Grand Theft Auto” expansion pack — that would blend in the recreational sex better…

And of course, bonus points for taking out Sergeant Hulka in the obstacle course stage.

There’s no shortage of blogs chronicling “Sims”-generated storylines. But Alice and Kev takes frivolous avatar-watching to a more sobering level:

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. It’s based on the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3’s living neighborhood features.

I’m no “Sims” expert, but I’m guessing those “living neighborhood features” are meant to emulate real-life human societal interactions. If so, I’m sure the other characters in this “Sims 3″ scenario will encounter Alice and/or Kev sporting some new trinket, and automatically assume that the homeless bit is a scam…

I’ll admit, I took notice of that squiggly-lined blue backdrop on the new “Tonight Show” set. It’s visible only during Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue, but since that’s a mostly-static bloc of several minutes, it’s hard not to zoom in on that visual.

I didn’t make the connection with Nintendo’s oldschool “Super Mario Bros.”, but Serious Lunch did, and created the above animated GIF to illustrate the findings. And I’m glad for it.

No, the mash-up of various pixelated elements does not represent an actual Super Mario screenshot. But that doesn’t mean the outlines weren’t inspired directly by the videogame. It’s not like those mushroom blocks, clouds, etc. needed to be shoehorned into the Conan outlines — they fit perfectly. I’m fairly convinced that NBC’s designers took their cue from the game.

Nintendo of America agrees, and endorses the borrow. Heck, I’d have thought some conspiracy theory would have sprouted from this, i.e. that it’s subliminal late-night product placement, designed to juice Wii sales to sleep-deprived consumers.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that premise is used for the upcoming in-show skit reacting to this development. Expect Conan to stick a fake black mustache under his lip and do a Mario schtick (with Andy Richter doing likewise for his Luigi impression).

The chief reason why I never sought out to play “Guitar Hero” or “Rock Band” was because, frankly, I considered gyrating with that plastic guitar controller to be extremely dorky, no better than air-guitaring.

But a videogame-enabled plastic oldstyle vinyl-record turntable, hearkening back to the golden age of rap? That I’ll gladly indulge in, via the musical fantasy-fulfillment spin-off (pun!) “DJ Hero”. No, nothing at all dorky about simulated needle-scratchin’…

I’m actually not running out to buy this game kit, along with a current-generation gaming console on which to play it. But plenty of other wannabe DJs will, which is what’s prompting Jay-Z, Eminem, and other musicians to contribute their work into this outlet:

The complete list of tracks the rappers are providing is still being worked out. Jay-Z plans on including Izzo (H.O.V.A.) and Dirt Off Your Shoulder for sure. Also possible: tracks from his in-the-works Blueprint 3 album. “I have a ton of content, I just need the pipeline,” he says. “I love the freedom of (DJ Hero). I could wake up tomorrow morning with the idea for a song and call the guys at Activision and start working on getting it out.”

Jay-Z has certainly gotten the religion about videogames as an effective and lucrative channel for delivering music. That pipeline seems like a goldmine, despite a recent slump in the genre’s sales.

What I find most amusing: That a good chunk of the fans playing “DJ Hero” will never have come in contact with a turntable in any other context, given the demise of mass-market vinyl. I’m sure the youngest of tykes will assume that it was never anything else but a videogames controller.

I had absolutely no intention of Twitter-following Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor.

But that was before I saw that he was using a Robotron: 2084 graphic for his @trent_reznor avatar. Since I’m rather fond of that game myself, and like to use the above screenshot image detail as a default glyph for this blog’s Videogames category, that was enough for me to click on the Follow button.

I don’t know how often Reznor switches out his avatar. I suppose as soon as he does, I’ll have an excuse to unfollow him. Wouldn’t be the first time I determined what appears in my Twitter-stream content on the basis of those little pictures.

The last half-dozen times I’ve walked by 401 Lafayette Street, I’ve tried to take a decent photo of the scene above: Two office windows on the building’s second floor, festooned with colored Post-It Notes arranged to resemble oldschool videogame elements from “Space Invaders” and “Pac-Man” (I’m assuming that that orange is one of the fruit bonus-points that appear in that game).

This picture, taken today, is the best I could do, sadly. The old cameraphone just isn’t up to decent image capture in this case. This vantage point from across the street is too far away, while the sidewalk right in front of the building would be way too close; I think I’d have to stand in the middle of the road in order to get a good shot, and I’m not that desperate to get it right.

Anyway, I applaud the intricate work with the sticky-paper. Probably the best use for those scraps I’ve come across yet.

In an effort to break through the clutter of videogame promotional giveaways, EA unwittingly resorted to street-weapon contraband:

The game in question: Godfather II, a Grand Theft Auto-style adventure based on the famous movie. The offending item: a set of brass knuckles, mailed to video games journalists together with other goodies including a cigar, a silk handkerchief, and a book of matches. But while it nicely complements the game’s mafiosi theme, it also had the unfortunate side-effect of turning recipients of the mailing into criminals, as mere possession of brass knuckles is illegal in many states and can carry hefty penalties.

I imagine the marketing wonks at Electronic Arts figured the brass handgear would be the least-questionable option. Likely rejected trinkets: An authentic-looking handgun, and probably a severed horse’s head (but only because of shipping logistics).

Actually, has anyone checked on the origin of that swag-box cigar? Since part of “The Godfather II” takes place in Cuba, you never know if EA’s lack of due diligence led to further authenticity in the form of a genuine Cuban stogie — which of course would be illegal in the United States.

If you ask me, the reason why the professional videogame league circuit is tanking is because of embarassingly geeky-goony team names like “Chicago Chimera” and “LA Complexity”.

But actually, the official reason is The Economy, Stupid:

Major companies have pulled sponsorships and several tournaments have folded. And in November, News Corporation and DirecTV unexpectedly shut down the Championship Gaming Series…

For years, video gamers sharpened their skills for fun wherever they could find competition — in basements, dorm rooms and even big-box stores. Companies recognized the potential of marketing products to this vast informal community, and a sport began to grow. Tournaments were created and existing ones expanded. Events appeared on cable television and on the Internet. Leagues formed, and players received exclusive contracts. But the recession has left only one significant competitive circuit in North America, Major League Gaming.

I still question just how effective a sponsorship channel this is. Pro-level videogame tournaments as spectator sport? To me, the effectiveness of this medium as a marketing platform is the in-game advertising play — and that works best when you’re playing the game yourself, versus watching someone else playing it. At best, league and tournament events are an indirect way to get the eyeballs onto the screen, where the action (both gameplay and ad placement) is.

Interesting coda for the defunct CGS: Its URL, along with those of each of its former franchises, come up completely blank in the browser — no error message, no redirects, just an untitled white blank page. A total wipe-through. You’d think the corporate overlords would be sports about it, and plaster a big “GAME OVER” message…

Figuring that fans of music videogames like Guitar Hero and Rock Band can’t get enough via offline console play, new social networking site Loudcrowd seeks to bring such gamers online in a Facebook/MySpace-like setting:

[Conduit Labs] is billing Loudcrowd as a place where you can listen to original music from new artists and play a game that lets can express yourself through dance and your taste in music. When you log onto the site, music starts playing. Everyone hears the same song, like with a radio station. You can rate the song and chat about it.

Sound idea. Except that it appears that the once-hot plastic-guitar riffing gamespace is cooling off:

Viacom Inc., whose MTV division owns the rights to the Rock Band franchise, said last month that sales of Rock Band 2 were lower than it had hoped and cut into the company’s profit.

Music games are “certainly losing steam,” said Evan Wilson, senior research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. “This year will establish the direction that this genre will go. Maybe it continues to take off. Maybe it tops out at 15% of the software market. Or it could just turn out to be a fad. I think the latter two scenarios are most likely.”

So how loud will Loudcrowd get if the underpinnings to its fanbase start to erode? Could become a case of spectacularly bad timing.

“Split/Second” is not only a highly-polished car-racing videogame, it also represents Disney’s doubling-down on its in-house gaming development studio:

The title is part of Disney Interactive Studios’ strategy of injecting around 20% of its investment dollars into new intellectual property. The company invested about $170 million in overall game development last year and plans to increase that by $40 million to $50 million this year.

The video game market continues to expand even as music and DVD sales slump.

San Diego-based consultancy DFC Intelligence predicts that the worldwide video game market — including consoles, portable machines, their software and PC games — will hit a record of $57 billion this year, up from $33 billion just three years ago.

Nintendo Co.’s success with the Wii, which helped to expand the market beyond “hard core” gamers over the past few years, could play nicely into Disney’s reputation for family-focused material. In fact, Disney has had mixed success with a mature-rated game, Turok, a violent shooter game that was distributed under the Touchstone label. [Disney Interactive head Graham] Hopper declined to comment on reports that a sequel to Turok had been scrapped, but he said that building a big Touchstone game portfolio was not a priority “right now.”

Disney is taking more production in-house, rather than licensing its own characters and content to other developers. It rejected a pitch from its longtime video game partner THQ Inc. — which made the games based on Disney’s Ratatouille and Cars movies — to create the game for the upcoming Toy Story 3 film.

The company has a goal of self-publishing 80% to 90% of games, acquiring five development studios in recent years, including Black Rock and Austin, Texas-based Junction Point Studios.

It’s a big shift. Instead of merely repackaging movie, music, and other intellectual property into outsourced software (almost as a merchandising afterthought), Disney is essentially melding the creative process behind gaming with its other content production. They aren’t the first to do it, but they’re probably the biggest Hollywood studio to make this move. It’s probably the first step toward a full integration of digital media with old mass-market forms — “Disney Interactive Studios” will simply become Disney Studios, releasing content packages that are a blend of interactive media.

All that said, Disney’s current strategy shouldn’t be construed as another example of videogames “overtaking” the movie biz. Because dollar-for-dollar, it hasn’t, as we all know.

Way back in the 8-bit day, the biggest health risk from compulsive videogaming was the carpal-tunnel scourge of Space Invaders wrist.

Nearly thirty years later, the physical trauma from console controller-clutching has skin-crawled down to the sweaty palms, and been dermatologically dubbed “PlayStation palmar hidradenitis”.

I’m not sure what the physiological progression is from here: Are we looking at bloodstream disorders next, from overexposure to Wii-ing?

Given that everyone and their monkey now carries around a wireless phone, and that those phones are increasingly coming equipped with online-enabled navigational elements (whether we want them or not), we’re probably not too far away from relying upon them to enhance what we see with our unaided eyes:

Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera…

“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”

In other words, a fulfillment of the old concept of “immersive” virtual reality, but without the dorky headgear from the early ’90s. (Although upon further review, I guess the dorkiness evolved into today’s Bluetooth earpieces.)

Coincidentally, I’ve been eyeing an App Store game for my iTouch that mimics this sort of experience, albeit in pure fantasy terms. Ghost Buddy from Quinnscape looks like a slightly rough product, but it’s fairly high-concept: Position your iPod/iPhone so that it behaves as a viewfinder-window into a parallel world that still accounts for real-world gravity and scale. I guess I should go ahead and buy it and start getting used to this hint of real-world things to come…

Coming soon to an Olympics near you (yes, seriously), it’s yoga as practiced in competition.

The rules have to get around the challenge of achieving mind-body harmony within the competitive arena:

The end goal of all yoga is to get to samadhi, a state of enlightened bliss where the ego separates from the self and the practitioner realizes that he’s powerless to control the vagaries of an endlessly shifting universe. Obviously, this can’t be quantified. Instead, yoga competitions involve various asanas, or poses, within hatha, the physical branch of yoga. As in diving, figure skating, or Platonic philosophy, there’s an ideal form.

The competition involves five compulsory poses: standing-head-to-knee, which goes just as it sounds; standing bow, in which you balance on one leg with one arm extended forward and the other arm drawing back the lifted leg; bow pose, in which, on the floor, you grab both feet with your hands and arch back; “rabbit,” which involves scrunching up into a little ball; and a seated forward stretch. After that, the competitors get to pick two optional poses, where they can really strut. They have three minutes to complete the routine, or else they get penalized.

I’m imagining much chest-bumping after your synchronized yogi-mate nails that rabbit pose.

Two thoughts from me:

1. Suddenly, Wii Fit Yoga — which I had considered antithetical by nature of combining videogaming with a meditative-based regimen — makes a lot of sense.

2. For some reason, I want to see what would happen if the Master of the Flying Guillotine were to bust in on one of these yoga-thons.

What prompted me to post this ancient videogame screenshot in response to this geeky BuzzFeed contribution of a Space Shuttle cockpit photo?

For some reason, that photo of the real thing triggered my memory of the long-ago Atari 2600 game. And that’s without me ever actually playing the old Activision title. It came out in 1984, pretty much at the very end of the 2600’s active lifecycle, so it was pretty hard to track down thanks to stores eliminating their stocks of Atari merchandise. It was also kinda expensive, as I recall — something like 60 bucks, in mid-1980s dollars (so about double that in today’s money).

Why did I retain any memory of this elusive vintage cartridge? Because it allowed the granddaddy of consoles to go out with a bang. It was alleged to be the most technically-ambitious piece of software ever produced for the 2600, creating a gaming experience that really stretched the capabilities of the old 8-bit beast. I’m guessing it probably doesn’t come close to emulating modern-day flight simulators, but for its day, it was supposed to be the bomb.

Part of the reason “Space Shuttle” got so much notice is in the way that Activision made up of every available inch of the 2600’s hardware to pull of the complex maneuvers within the game. Since the native one-button joystick controller wasn’t going to cut it, they employed the various control switches on the face of the console itself: The reset button, difficulty setting, etc. were overriden to accomplish tasks like engine firing, cargo-door/landing gear deployment, and so on. They even provided specialized overlay grids for this purpose.

And, as you can see from the pic above, the on-screen payoff was a pixelated, primary-color view of near-terrestrial orbit. With a view of Skylab, to boot — anachronistically so, since this was several years after NASA’s old space station crashed back to Earth in 1979. Or else that’s Mir…

Bailout economics come to the iPhone/iPod Touch — in game form. “Bailout World” is a new App Store entry that simulates today’s prevailing macroeconomic stimulus planning:

- You have $10 trillion to bailout.

- The world money is $100 trillion at the beginning and $0 at the end if no bailout is made.

- In every 5 seconds, one continent randomly enters the recession featured by blinking and beeping with an accelerated pace.

- By tapping the recession continent, you pump the money into it and reverse the recession.

Who knew trillion-dollar global economic repair could be so effortless? I think the World Bank should adopt this interface for its efforts.

Even though this gamelet costs only 99 cents, I think my own, more modest cash reserves could be put to better use in this recessionary climate than to be spent on some slapdash map-tapping shovelware.

Let’s face it: There’s a reason why they coined the idiom “like a bull in a china shop”. And no mythological merger between human and bovine is going to temper that bullish behavior enough to justify a career path in the handling of fragile finery.

At least, not without taking out beaucoup damage insurance. Luckily, the kicking-in of said insurance looks to be the main fun in online videogame Minotaur China Shop:

Serve fine china to discerning mythological customers. Breaking items will cost you money. However, break LOTS of items and you’ll enter Minotaur Rage, a crippling psychological condition. Your insurance will reimburse you for any items broken while enraged.

Check out the all-too-predictable service-sector carnage:

[Minotaur China Shop Trailer from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo]

And get further insight into this struggle with anger-management by reading the literally-bullheaded shopowner’s own personal diary:

It’s my damned arms. They’re what got me into trouble in the first place, what always get me in trouble. They’re just slightly bigger than I know what to do with, and with my dyspraxia, sometimes when I turn around I lose track of how close I am to something. Things get knocked over. I just get so mad at myself! If I just slow down, calm myself, and think straight, it’s fine. But when I break something I feel so guilty, I feel so worthless, and I just start to see red.

I don’t see why it should happen to me. I never did anything wrong. I’ve been a decent minotaur — I never asked to be this way. It’s my pervert mother’s fault. That FREAK. What was she even thinking? I mean, seriously. And then my bastard father puts me in a labyrinth because he doesn’t have any parenting skills.

Tea, sympathy, and rage against the espresso machine. Add that all up into videogaming fun!

Actually, I haven’t played the game. It’s not a regular-issue Flash-driven app, but rather requires a plugin called Unity, and I’m not inclined to install yet another browser add-on. Plus, gameplay looks a little too complex for my tastes, especially when the shop-wrecking payoff is all I’d be after anyway. Maybe when/if they port it to the iTouch.

Somewhere or other, I read about the iPhone acting as a classic low-end disruptor in the smartphone space, basically a more accessible mass-market option to a BlackBerry and the ilk.

But that’s just the phone part. A couple of news items point to Apple’s slim devices disrupting other media, effectively extending the definition of a “media player”. (That’s “devices” plural, because the iPod Touch runs on the same software platform and can do essentially the same non-telecom tasks as the iPhone).

- While the e-book publishing format is expanding, and most associated with dedicated hardware like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader, the iPhone/iTouch is actually having a more measurable impact on adoption:

Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin…

Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format.

I don’t see how the e-book readers can compete, frankly. Why lug around an extra, oversized display screen when you can carry around your library in your pocket? Obviously screen-size is sacrificed, but most people are accustomed to reading off their phone screens by now. If anything, I see the Kindle, Reader, et al becoming niche products, for those who can’t do without large-print reading; everyone else will do their e-book reading via iPhone/iTouch. The disruption comes from including the e-book capabilities in the price of the device, versus shelling out a few hundred dollars for a separate reader.

- Videogames are the more obvious non-phone and non-music media applications that Apple is targeting (with the App Store providing a seamless pipeline for free/cheap games). In fact, it looks like the iPhone/iTouch platform is already helping to do in a previous leader in handheld gaming:

But then, set the [Sony PlayStation Portable] next to the iPhone or iPod Touch, the year’s other big winner in portable gaming, and the PSP’s hardware design suddenly looks old hat. Where’s the touchscreen? What are all these buttons for? What on earth is the point of this useless analog nub of a joystick? And why, in an age when flash memory is so cheap it practically comes in Cheerios boxes, are we still stuck with a huge, bulky, slow, and noisy optical drive? If you’re going to compete by offering a powerful hardware platform, you actually need to outperform the competition. As the iPhone steps into the portable gaming ring, it’s already got the PSP on the ropes.

Again, the disruption comes in baked-in cost savings: Why buy a separate, dedicated gaming machine if your existing phone/media player can already provide you with videogaming fun? Along with all the other media playback that the PSP does, mainly as a response to Apple’s player.

And this is on top of the music, Web access and other functions the iPhone/iTouch offers. Taken all together, it’s an impressive display of disruptive technology in digital media.

It’s Christmas Day, and I can’t think of a better way to waste a chunk of it than by playing IconNicholson’s holiday ecard Flash game, Snowcraft.

I’ll take a virtual snowball fight over a real one any day — less cold and wet and miserable. Plus I love that snippet of “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” wild-west theme music between rounds.

You can go to the interactive agency’s source page, or else experience this vintage version as embedded below. Have a Merry!

EDIT: Sorry, it didn’t register that the applet obnoxiously autostarts, with sound. I blame the eggnog. I tinkered with the embed code, but doesn’t look like there’s a way to kill either the autostart nor the sound. So just click through the links if you want to play.

I’ve stumbled upon another sorta-Easter Egg for the iPod Touch, to go with the two-button screenshot trick. I’m not sure how “hidden” this stuff is, but I do know that Apple doesn’t make it explicit as to their existence, so I’ll note this one here:

Some (probably most) games available through the App Store, when launched, will cut off music that’s already playing on the iTouch. It’s an annoyance for me — my primary use for the media player is to hear music, and I don’t expect any other function on it to override that primary purpose. For instance, booting up applications like Safari, Contacts, or the Calendar doesn’t stop the music from seamlessly playing. So why should some game?

Granted, some games are playable only if the sound effects are enabled. But most aren’t; they just have non-essential soundtrack music to go with the gameplay. I’d prefer the audio to be my choice. It had gotten to the point where I’d make it a determining factor on whether or not to download a game, since compartmentalizing gameplay and music-listening would effectively lessen the amount of time I’d be spending with the new game.

But I’ve since discovered, via Touch Arcade commenting, a rather obvious way to keep my music playing regardless of which game is on the screen:

1. Start the playlist
2. Fire up the game, for most games this is going to fade out and pause your music, don’t panic
3. Turn off the in-game music
4. Double click the home button to bring up the music control box (this works anywhere in the iphone os)
5. Tap play and enjoy your game

I guess I should have known about this. I already knew about the double-press home button maneuver for popping up the music control. But I didn’t make the connection on bringing it back up after a game seemingly overrode the playlist. Maybe that’s obvious to others, but I missed it.

From the limited experimentation I’ve done on the games I have loaded on my iTouch, it seems like you don’t necessarily have to bother with Step 3 above — the playlist should take over as soon as you hit Play on the control box. This might vary from game-to-game, although as noted, the control box is a key OS feature (probably on the same function level as incoming phone calls on the iPhone), so I’d be surprised if it didn’t work universally. And some games automatically allow your own music to be played over them, with the added advantage of preserving the game’s native sound effects (which I prefer, although that might peeve some people).

Another iTouch mystery solved. Makes it that much more functional. Unfortunately, it also eliminates a built-in excuse to curb my App Store game purchases…