Arcade Fire - The Wilderness Downtown Chrome Experiment - A Cool Personalised Music Video

The Wilderness Downtown by Arcade Fire is a lovely Chrome Experiment (so you will need to be using an up-to-date Chrome browser – probably – I can’t be bothered trying it using any of the others.  You should be using it anyway.  It is the best.) 

The first thing you are asked to do is to enter the address of the house that you grew up in.  It will use this address along with Streetview, some cool animations and videos and lots of windows, to create your own personalised music video.

here

The video in action

RecordTripping - Abstract Mouse Wheel Fun and Games

Record tripping is an extremely well designed and original game by the Bell Brothers who have a penchant for picture frames. It is also a very deserving winner of both a Webby Award and an FWA Site of the Day.

The idea of the game is to use your mouse wheel to manipulate a variety of devices including a safe, a clock and a windmill in order to affect displayed scene.

To make this cleaer, take a look at the following:

Here you spin the windmill clockwise or anti-clockwise to affect the air current so as to blast a falling seed with the object of landing it into a receptacle of earth, whence forth a lovely flower sprouts.

Also:

On this level you must spin the dial on the safe in the correct direction until it clicks into place. When you complete the relevant number of clicks, the safe pops open.

This is all accompanied to either the default Alice in Wonderland track or to another track that you can download, the sound being scratched by your mouse wheel jiggery.

I know it all sounds a little strange, but it is quite good fun for ten minutes or so.

Grotrian Piano Toy - Crazy experimental piano toy - give it a try

Grotrian Pianos is a very groovy musical toy – and a little bit crazy at that. You start off by choosing your composition. There are 4 to try…Beethoven, Satie and Loh and their own mad piece (the game is made by an old skool piano making company). Once you have chosen then the fun begins.

You are given an abstract board of moving squares that allow you to manipulate the tune in lots of trippy ways. It is a little hard to describe with no musical vocabulary, but you basically move the squares around in different ways to distort the composition to your liking. You can also choose the tone, rhythm and tempo of your masterpiece.

Just like many of the toys featured on this site, it is difficult to explain….you need to experience it.

Give it a try here

Hoogerbrugge - Crazed Neurotic Interactive Flash Animations

This Hoogerbrugge fellow is one mad son of a gun. I wish I had his imagination. Over the years he has created some very weird interactive animations. His Modern Living series, which he created over a 3 year period includes features a crazy bloke ripping his face off to reveal a swarm of flies underneath and he stumbles about drunk, hiccuping and puking. His Nails series features another man and a load more strangeness. He headbutts himself, acts like a dog on a car bonnet and pulls himself into his legs and begins dancing.

Disappearing horses

Legs!

Waste half an hour here.

SamePhysics - A Kool tetris style game with shake funk

I am just starting a new post whence I am attempting to write a game a week for the next year. You can find my very basic blog here. For my first week I have nicked a load of code from Emanuele Feronato's blog. E has been writing this blog for 3 years and has just got into the top 40,000 websites in the world. That might not seem like much, but if you consider there are 7,003,343,3223,223,222,113 websites in the world I reckon that is a pretty good achievement.

So to help get E a couple more hits, this is SamePhysics, a difficult tetris-ish style game in which you attempt to get rid of connecting blocks of the same colour. If you get into trouble then you use the Shake-o-meter (patent-thingied (c) - Liveo). Give it a try.

here.

Stacker - Funky stack toy - stack those buggers high

I've been away for a while. I have 3 wives - you know how it is. This is a toy suggested by my new good friend @Arandu. You have to stack stuff. Sounds simple???? You need to be as brainy as me to get far. Much gud fun to be had...

Oh bugger!!!

Headache!

here.

Crazy Hailstorm - Destroy buildings with giant balls of ice

This is a very original and unique little toy. You control a little wind cursor thangie-ma-jig and try to hold a piece of hail (is that the correct term) in the air until it is big enough to smash a building up. Again, my command of the english language has failed me. Just try it for yourself.


here.

Tweetgrid - Train yourself to absorb more information than ever before

This is a crazy info gathering tool. It consists of a grid of 9 Twitter feeds. Enter a term in each search element, lie back and absorb. It makes me feel like that robot from that film.... you know the one.... No. 5 is Alive....

here.

Some strange experiments with Flash - A fun toy!

I can't be bothered explaining it. Just see it for yourself....

Wave Machine

Those crazy goddamn patterns.

Some multiplying blobs

here.

The crazy interactive never Flash ending page

This lovely example of what Flash can do seems to go on forever. If anybody finds out if it does can you Twitter me. It contains loads of little interactive toys and funnies. My favourites are the breakdancing monkey....


The groovy ice-cream man....



and the yo-ing yo-yo-er....


here.