The shuttering of latest York’s Chinatown Fair back in March marked the tip of an era for town — a final vestige of a time when social gaming meant greater than just going surfing to Xbox Live . The arcade experience hasn’t completely disappeared form the metropolitan map, however — in recent times, a brand new crop of venues have remixed the idea of yesterday’s arcades, places like Brooklyn’s Barcade, a shrine to 80s gaming machines that does brisk business serving spirits to Williamsburg’s 21 and up crowd. Launched in Ridgewood, Queens by game developers Kunal Gupta and Syed Salahuddin, Babycastles takes the re-invention a step further, offering up something between an arcade space and an art gallery.
Babycastles serves as an extraordinary opportunity for independent game developers to showcase their projects in a public, playable forum. The team describes the vision thusly on its Kickstarter page, “the principle goal of Babycastles is to set up independently developed games as a viable type of social culture for brand spanking new York City and its youth.”
Earlier this month, we caught up with Gupta and Salahuddin for the grand opening of Future Babycastles, a brand new music venue / arcade located around the street from Brooklyn’s historic Domino Sugar factory, in a rapidly gentrifying area of Williamsburg. The duo celebrated the launch well-liked, with a collection from local indie rock darlings Vivian Girls, a DJ, and a few homemade deep-fried chicken — it was a paranormal synthesis between divergent art forms that share little greater than a DIY spirit and (often times) a zipper code.
As those in attendance at either the grand opening and the live taping of this month’s Engadget Show can let you know, the games themselves are both thematically and stylistically pretty far far from those that populated the arcades that we grew up in , featuring unfamiliar titles and pieced-together homemade arcade cabinets to compare.
Take Osama’s Dead, Baby, created by Ivan Safrin, a playable version of the viral YouTube video featuring a person shooting a gun from a moving riding lawnmower, shortly after bin Laden’s death. Also present at our live taping was Noah Sasso’s Miracle Adventures in 2113, an unofficial sequel to the 80s Famicom title Miracle Ropit’s Adventure in 2100, featuring this kind of throwback graphics that outline a good share of indie gaming titles.
Tim got some serious on-screen hands-on time with Hot Throttle, a game developed by Doomlaser and Cactus, centered around a unadorned guy who thinks he’s a car. The sport was developed for Adultswim.com, after the team’s original concept, which involved much more poop, was rejected for obvious reasons. The sport, including the remainder of Babycastles’ lineup prove once and for all that the arcade isn’t dead, it’s just naked, runs around a track, and makes a lot of engine noises with its mouth.
OMAP 5′s dual A15 cores wipe the ground with four A9s in browsing benchmark
The winners of the 2011 Engadget Awards — Readers’ Choice
