Lost in the Static is visually striking game, quite unlike anything you've seen before. As you can immediately understand from the screenshot. Right?
Well, no, you can't. Let's try again. Lost in the Static is a conventional, short, enjoyable platformer with nothing particularly innovative about the gameplay. But the mechanism by which it produces its images is highly unusual, with effective music that (purposefully, one assumes) carries a sense of the static you might get by playing music on an old AM radio or a 45 turntable, providing an interesting and artistic emotional frame for the game itself.
The basic visual technique is this: the background is randomly generated static that is moving continuously and smoothly; the foreground--both your character at the obstacles you face--either do not move, or move differently from the background, but are themselves shapes filled with static. During play, it is easy for the eye to pick out these shapes against the moving background, but ultimately, everything is constructed of visual noise--and if you take a screenshot, which inherently is a single instant with no motion, all you'll see is visual static from which no shapes can be distinguished.
It's a bit of a hat-trick -- hard to see this spawning imitators. And yet the hat-trick itself is interesting, and worth experiencing. And the actual game itself is a moderately fun platformer that won't take you forever to complete.
(Thanks to Grand Text Auto.)
Static
The static is a minor stroke of genius. I particularly like how the player is quickly familiarized with the different "flavors" of static; one is deadly, one is just decoration, etc..
Suddenly I have this urge to create a "stereogram" game...
Stereogram
I seem to remember the Bullfrog classic, Magic Carpet had a stereogram mode ... it was about as unplayable as you might imagine.
The game is interesting, a
The game is interesting, a nice little challenge, but it kind of gave me a headache after about five stages. Came back, headache after six stages. :) But, it is really cool how it looks and plays, specially when you die.
Just finished that game (I'm
Just finished that game (I'm persistent). Pretty good, I can see that it is mostly a platformer that doesn't really make anything new, except for the use of static for graphics. Interesting, the levels were almost beautiful in places.
Incredible
It is awing how a game made entirely from static can be one of the most beautiful games I've played this year. Obviously that's not a huge commitment at this point, but nevertheless it's quite an impressive feat from my point of view.
Perhaps I just needed a break from the cartoon-colors of video games. No matter how simple or short, an innovative game is always a breath of fresh air.
Loved it! Great concept. I
Loved it! Great concept. I was a bit disspointed by the length, and by how straightforward it was, but it was fun for a short platformer. The atmosphere created by the static and music is really well-tuned. Definitely give it a try!