nDreams Challenges You To Ansada Fone
Information courtesy of Patrick O’Luanaigh, nDreams CEO; commentary by NorseGamer
There are certain Home developers I’ve always had a particular fondness for; nDreams is near the top of that list for me.
To me, nDreams is Home viewed through the prism of Terry Gilliam’s mind; from Aurora to Xi, they just seem to have a knack for turning Home inside-out. There’s a whimsy to their work that I find endearing; every time nDreams comes out with something, it’s like virtual reality put through a funhouse mirror.
And certainly, their latest offering is no exception to this: Ansada Fone.
From Patrick O’Luanaigh, nDreams CEO:
This truly unique apartment is unlike anything you have seen before in Home. The Ansada Fone apartment is a massive 4-storey cartoon house viewed with a unique side-on camera, where you can play a frantic 4 player mini game with your friends or chill out and redecorate. Will you get there in time to Ansada Fone?
A while back, HomeStation wrote about the growing trend in Home towards innovations in personal estate design, and the absolute necessity for this trend to continue. It was a different story back when Home only had a couple of personal apartments; now, on the other hand, there’s such a wide selection of estates to choose from that a new space really needs to offer something different or unique — extra interactive functionality, mini-games, etc. — in order to earn my money.
And, to be fair, developers really have stepped up to the plate with experimenting in different options for personal estates. Sony tried interconnected personal estates with the Mansion. Lockwood baked in the fantastic TankTop minigame into their Blaster’s Paradise apartment. Hellfire Games offered a zero-G simulator in the Officer’s Quarters apartment. LOOT introduced day/night cycles and EOD to the Sunset Yacht. And nDreams, of course, gave us the wonderfully delightful Musicality Apartment. The list goes on at length.
Will Ansada Fone be nothing more than a flash-in-the-pan curiosity, or will it be a bona fide hit? My gut tells me the latter is more likely. And, further, Ansada Fone is a perfect example of a question HSM has been asking for nearly a year now: why does virtual reality have to conform to actual reality? Why not play with the rules and come up with something different?
I’m still waiting for the day when somebody develops an Escher-inspired personal estate, or something with a Monet-like impressionist motif. Such things may never happen. That said, however, I love it when a developer plays with the boundaries of How Things Ought To Be, because it’s a gentle reminder to us all that “reality” is sometimes little more than what we’ve collectively agreed to believe in. And virtual reality lets us rewrite the things we have to believe in.
So — will you Ansada Fone?
September 29th, 2011 by NorseGamer | 5 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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And extra congratulations needs to go out to the gang at nDreams for being named one of the top five technology businesses in the UK by smarta.com!
I think this looks like a very interesting new take on personal spaces, one that I hope they continue. As you said there are many of them right now and in order for me to be interested in getting one it has to have a unique and interesting space for some reason. This seems to fit that bill. Adding a mini game to it is just icing on the cake, or ice cream on the pie for those pie enthusiasts out there.
Now THIS is awesome. Keep it comin’ nDreams.
OMG! an escher apartment would be SWEEEET!!!! time to drag me back to my hippy days! BLACK LIGHTS AND LAVA LAMPS, BABY!!
Nice article Norse.
I had seen the video of this space on youtube last week and it looked like a cute idea. I heard the multi-player game is fun and so I will see about getting a tour of it. Even though I don’t really buy personal spaces, I can still appreciate how new ones can be different and this one is definitely different. ^__^