sony play station: flower.

This is pretty amazing. “Flower” is a new game for Play Station 3 that’s breaking the mould of the typical first-person run and shoot fest. Helmed by lead creative designer Jenova Chen (watch an excellent video of Chen himself narrating a demo of the game on Gamespot), each level starts with a lonely flower sitting on the windowsill of a grey urban apartment.

The game begins, poetically, inside each “flower’s dream.” Your job is to guide petals from the flower across different landscapes by tilting the controller. That’s it. As Joystiq wrote: “There’s no time limit, no hazards, no points system and, really, no way to fail.” It’s not so much as game as a beautiful zen relaxation exercise.

Check out this fan-created trailer for the game, fortuitously set to one of my fave songs of all time “Gold In The Air Of Summer” by Kings of Convenience. It’s so austere and lovely, and could completely be a music video or animated short. The quality and detail of the graphic animation is unreal. Definitely click on the HD button to get the full effect…

“Flower” is being released in the U.S. and Europe on February 12.

Via Towleroad

the game over project: human tetris.

It’s been a fruitful week in my on-going quest to dig up all things Tetris. The cultural obsession surrounding the little game that could knows no bounds. First, we had Mikontalo Tetris. Now we’ve discovered the old skool arcade glory that is Swiss artist/designer Guillaume Reymond’s Game Over Project.

The Game Over Project is a series of stop-motion video performance pieces where Reymond re-enacts classic games with real live humans as pixels. It’s almost hypnotically entertaining – much like playing Tetris itself. I also have no words to express how happy it makes me that someone (in my mind, it’s Reymond himself) physically sings the little Russian folk ditty/ Tetris song. It’s familiarity is immediate and nostalgic to the max.

It took over four hours of shooting 88 people to get the 880 shots that comprise the Tetris video. But it gets better. Earlier installations in the series include Space Invaders, Pole Position, and – get ready for it – Pong. That’s right. People Pong.

See the full four Game Over Project videos by reading on.

Via Queerty