Interesting aesthetics in video games

Couple of unusual aesthetic experiments floating round the web at the moment (both of these are courtesy of fort90.com). One is an example video of fish-eye lens projection for a 3d environement, as used for the much-sought after rarity Sonic X-treme, a cancelled Saturn title with an extremely peculiar history and dedicated set of treasure hunters searching for existing prototypes. Have a look at the video here, and you can really see how unusual the aesthetic is when playing a 3d game with this kind of projection - it looks utterly surreal but (in my opinion) refreshing and really visually pleasing. It gives all straight edges a peculiar curved edge, and makes the world feel completely different as so much changes visually as you navigate the space.

Secondly is "Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha", an OSX game taking a rather fetching sketchbook style, the kind of additive-induced hallucination a bored 8-year old with ADT might encounter in a paritucularly uninspiring maths class. You can watch videos of it here. I love the explosions