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Seeing as today is the birthday of 88-year-old Ralph Baer -- creator of the first video game console (Magnavox Odyssey) and considered by many as the
"father of video games" -- now seems the perfect time to share some fanart for the celebrated figure.

The piece above drops Baer next to a Super Mario Bros. question block and some sort of terrifying beast fashioned together with elements from the Nintendo series. Artist Ashley Anderson created it for a silent auction by "taking photographed imagery, scanned imagery, and digitally hand drawn imagery and forcing them all to sit in the same pictorial space".

She adds that the pixelated figured behind Baer is the ghost of William Higinbotham, creator of Tennis for Two, which, having debuted in 1958, is the first known precursor of Pong. This isn't the only tribute I have to share today for Baer; After the break, I've included another illustration of the inventor taken from a series devoted to notable game industry stars from artist Bartotainment.

Lazy 8 Studios's Cogs -- recently shortlisted for the 2010 Independent Games Festival's Excellence in Design category -- is now available on iPhonefor $.99 (11 levels, with four additional 10-stage downloadable packs at $.99 each).

As with the PC version (download a free demo here), Cogs for iPhone challenges players with a series of 2D and 3D puzzles in which you slide tiles containing gears, pipes, balloons, chimes, wheels, and more to build different contraptions. The game features three modes: the standard Inventor Mode; Time Challenge mode, for solving puzzles in 30 seconds, and Move Challenge, for finding 10-move solutions.

The iPhone edition also includes several social gaming features such as challenges, achievements, leaderboards, and integration with social networks, made possible with the integration of Chillingo's Crystal platform. You can see more screenshots of Cogs at publisher Chillingo's site.

Vessel is the first project from Strange Loop Games, a Seattle-based studio founded by two Pandemic Studios Brisbane veterans, John Krajewski and Martin Farren. We recently had a chat with John to find out more about the IGF 2010 Technical Excellence award nominee, and he accomodated us with some very revealing answers on why this game should be on everyone's radars in the coming months.

Hi John, can you provide a little background on Strange Loop Games and your upcoming release, Vessel?

Strange Loop Games is what we're calling the new studio that I'm starting with my partner Martin Farren. The idea behind our studio is a game company that puts the power of modern hardware towards gameplay, not just graphics, and Vessel is our first game with that idea in mind. It's a 2d action/puzzle game set in a physically simulated universe, meaning everything is maximally interactive. One of the unique things we're doing is our fluid simulation, and the way we form characters out of this simulated fluid.

What is the story in Vessel about?

The game will be about a lot of things, but at the most surface level it's about an inventor named Arkwright who has created this new device, the mechanized-fluid automaton (known as Fluros for short) that has revolutionized the world by providing free labor. Those are the fluid creatures you see in the trailer. That's where the game starts, and through the course of the game two major things are happening - the Fluros are beginning to grow minds of their own, evolving and turning on their owners, and Arkwright is developing his next great invention, The Device. These plotlines intertwine and merge, as Arkwright uses the evolutions of the Fluros in development of his invention, leading up what will hopefully be a grand conclusion. Continue reading

Step aside Avatar, there's a new 3D game in town, and he's indie! OK, so Matt Simmonds' Depth doesn't work with those new fangled 3D glasses, but it does use the old school red/cyan type.

It's a vertical shmup which apparently uses the 3D effect as 'an integral part of the gameplay'. If you've got a pair of those glasses handy, even the above trailer is in 3D! You can follow development of the game on his blog.

(And for those into chiptunes and the demo-scene, you might know Matt as 4Mat [interview], the 'inventor' of tracker-based chiptunes on the Amiga by looping short samples to create tones, and a seminal chiptune music maker in his own right.) Continue reading

Telltale’s Wallace and Gromit: The Last Resort is a hilarious adventure game. In this installment, Wallace and Gromit plan a holiday at the seaside only to be derailed by some bad weather. Not only is the holiday off, but Wallace and Gromit’s basement is flooded by plumbing problems. In true Wallace fashion, the underappreciated inventor [...] Continue reading

Puzzle Bots is a puzzle game where players take an adventure with robots. A brilliant, but absent minded, inventor created a new robot. The robot was great and did everything that was asked, but when the inventor went away the robot led the other robots on an adventure. The adventure leads to so many questions that [...] Continue reading

Happier than you” is a game wrapped in a message of peace and happiness, hidden under bad graphics and unique gameplay. At its core, HTY is a game designed to teach empathy. Managing the needs and delights of multiple people and sharing resources for the common good. It is also, however, a game of “graph management” [...] Continue reading