Had a day off yesterday. Took the kids on a couple of errands, and went through Fed Square to visit ACMI.
I never fail to be impressed with ACMI, especially since I discovered their Games Lab. Last time I was there they had old Commodore 64 games. This time they were highlighting some of the best indie games from the recent Independent Games Festival, a kind of TropFest for games.
In the video game world, many games are churned out by the big Hollywood-style production houses, coded by drones (as so famously documented in EA Spouse: The Human Story). What we saw showed some nice innovations that you might not get out of those big companies, and it was good to see that small-scale game writing didn’t die with the 80s.
We played a few of them, and ended up downloading one, And Yet It Moves when we got home. A quirky rendition of one of my favourite genres, the 2-D platformer.
We’d really gone for the Pixar exhibit mind you. Which was very interesting, with a lot of material from a variety of their films. What really caught the kids’ imagination was the Zoetrope — loads of Toy Story models loaded onto a turntable, which span around and at top speed was accompanied by rapidly flickering lights to animate it. Very very cool. The admission fee wasn’t overly cheap, but seeing that on top of all the other stuff definitely made it worth it.
One reply on “Finding Pixar”
Finally SOMEONE saw it. Glad you liked it. I saw this while I was in Scotland. Thought it was cool – then again, I liked the concept art more than anything else on show and I wasn’t disappointed because that’s what I actually wanted to see anyway.