With the E3 buzz over: I was watching the fake outtakes at the end of A Bug’s Life, where we see the mistakes made by the animated characters during the “shooting” of the movie.
So what would fake video game outtakes be like?
I bring you the hitherto unseen outtakes from Space Invaders:
(Click on applet to play, move with cursor keys, shoot with Ctrl or Space.)
Legal: This game is a parody. All sounds and graphics copyright Taito 1978.
Level 5 is by far the most diffucult :-)
Good one…altough I must express some frustration regarding my death on level 5 >:^(.
Yeah, I almost thought I had level 5 beat until, well, you know… I played it. Good stuff!
That’s hilarious, gorgeous, and beautiful! During the first seconds I didn’t know what the point was, but then, well, everything went wrong. Simply great! Tnx a lot!
Perhaps I should put up the outtakes outtakes at one point – you don’t wanna see those!
We DEFINITELY want to see the outtakes outtakes! Put ’em up. I now am going back and try to get beyond level 5 …
Excellent idea. Maybe you could post also a log of developpment bloopers, something like :
“Monday 3:25 am. : I’ve searching a bug for two days and I don’t find it, i’m in the border of suicide!”
“Thursday 4:00 am : I’ve found it! It was a mistake between an “i” and a “j”.!”
I like this as an academic joke, but I have to say that CG outtakes really annoy me. Outtakes are amusing because of their spontanuity. CG outtakes are contrived – fake fuckups.
Problem with CGI outtakes is that they are too techie for general audiences: flipped normals, oversized teeth/eyeballs, exploding cloth & physics, that kind of stuff.
In games you have stuff like missing spawn positions in deathmatch leading to chain telefrags at (0,0,0), typos in damage numbers turning a simple grenade into a nuclear device… I’m sure the Sims had a huge array of funny things happening during development. Problem is that including those in a game is an organizational nightmare. So we use easter eggs and cheat codes instead.
The best I ever had was the -miniplayers command line switch in NBA Inside Drive 2000, which rescaled all players to kid size; originally written to stress-test the animation / IK systems, I think it made it to the final product.
Yeah, some things are just more funny than others.
Truth be told, some of the outtake outtakes looked like the real thing – Invaders that followed the normal path; shots that killed one and only one invader; mortal invaders.
Great idea!
Made me think back to three days before E3 2000. We were preparing the playable demo for Hitman:Codename 47, but one bug was hard to iron out: Whenever shooting erupted all civilians would sit down in a way that made you want to show them the nearest toilet. So Tobias Rieper aka Hitman and the bad guys would be killing each other in a room full af people shitting on the floor. Maybe we laughed because it was too realistic…