This year for Game Over IV an upcoming show at Giant Robot San Francisco, Jude Buffum has created a more G-rated art pieces, also inspired by Super Mario and Legend of Zelda, namely 8-bit terrariums. Jude was inspired by his own terrariums and the imagination of how the plants from videogames would look like in a terrarium.

Toadstool Terrarium

The above terrarium is my favorite one out of the three that Jude created. It contains clouds, the climbing tree and many plants you encounter early on in the first NES Mario Bros game, call it nostalgia.

Hyrule Terrarium

I’m not very familiar with Zelda, a quick Google search made me aware that Hyrule is from Zelda. This also made me realise you have to be a fan of the game to appreciate the art of it.

Belmont Terrarium

The last one is from Castlevania, which I have never heard of, but the name reminds me of the game, ‘Duck Tales’.

Read more about these pixel terrariums and view photos of real ones at Jude’s weblog.

Mimeo (even the name) started as a Mario clone with a twist: instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and down-sampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.

I said it before I’m not a gamer, up until today I have owned one game console and that was the NES. The first Mario Bros. was and still is my favorite game. So needless to say I’m looking forward to Mimeo. I have no idea if I’ll be able to play it well on the iPhone as up until know the few games I have I’m no table to play them “fluently”.

Check out this demo on how the game is played.

Shaun keeps a development weblog detailing the progress of the game and the technical details that are involved in creating this game. Besides, designing, programming and creating the scenario, Shaun also composes and produces the music himself. If you browse the development blog you will find some sound bits.

For a non-gamer I have been keeping up to date with the development progress. Although less with iPad version. I just don’t see the iPad as a gaming device, it is so big, and with my small hands I wouldn’t manage to use the controls without dropping the iPad. In any case I’m looking forward to the release of Mimeo so I have more to do on the iPhone when underway or lying in bed in the morning then just reading email, feeds, tweets and news.

Game website: Mimeoverse: Mimeo and the Kleptopus King

The title gives a clue: this is a 32×32 pixel editor with a pretty intuitive interface that lets you map out thoughts in grayscale pretty quickly.

The idea is that you sketch out ideas on the move, then sync up and use more advanced software on your laptop or PC to do stuff such as color, animation and so on.

The beauty of good iPhone apps is that they do something simple and niche and they do it well. Instead of adding lots of bulky features that would only slow the app down and probably waste battery life, Caffeine Monster Software has stuck with the important functions.

Take a look at CreativeApplications’ demo video:

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