The blog of a person....yeah that sounds good.

Friday, June 08, 2012

but if I eat too much fudge then I get a pudge and can't budge

Diablo 3 is out. Been watching my friend Mike play it as the Witchdoctor. Game has alot of good stuff to it but its also pretty damn short. Particularly when compared to the old games. Usually when a game is short I can attribute the fault from so much production time being spent on the graphics engine and visuals. And true, Diablo 3 looks pretty nice despite no normal maps on the ground textures.
Still can't escape that sinking feeling the game was quickly remade at the last minute after the Blizzard North team died and the old Diablo3 alpha died with them. But regardless, Diablo 3 is loads of fun.

Apparently Nintendo is making a Star Fox / Metroid crossover game. Retro Studios is producing it which is good news because Retro are brilliant and pretty much every web they weave is made of pure golden silk. At the same time however: what the fuck. Metroid games take place in very industrial and often decrepit enviroments with the rare times you seeing human space colonies it gives you a very 'blade runner' cyberpunk feel. Star Fox takes place in a very colorful militarized galaxy run by giant talking dogs, monkeys, rabbits, etc. This crossover is going to look weird as fuck.

And what about me? What have I been up to?
Well a couple of things, actually. For starters I was going to make a cartoon for Weebl about shrimp but he got GreasyMoose to do it instead. So for me, I am currently working on a pixel animation for a chiptune song Weebl made.

That said, I still have the sketches here for the shrimp thing.

And sketch number 2
Anyway yeah.
This isn't happening but I am making a pixel animation now instead.
It's no "Trucker's Delight" but it is oddly liberating to do something so different for the first time in quite some time.

 Heres some screenshots from the pixel animation.
Should be online sometime soon.







Other than that however I did make a new 'film' of sorts. Like alot of people I have and remain very skeptical of the new Spider-Man film. From the inorganic web-shooters to the handsome actor poorly portraying the 'geeky' peter parker, to Gwen. The film seems like it's trying its best to turn Spiderman into something serious and grimdark. Which if comics have proven time and time again, doesn't work. Unless its Kraven. Anyway, the villain of the film is the Lizard. And he looks dumb as hell. No amount of CGI can make his design look good, and one can only hope the exceptional actor playing him will be able to save it.

But rather than actually wait for the film and watch it before passing my judgement upon it, I have done what all fat nerds do and opted to instead make fun of it long before its initial release! And in that vein I have made this video:


Despite having made this video as a joke it has already gotten 4,000 views on Youtube. Which brings me such evil glee.

In other news I made a logo for a company run by my friend Rob. Here is the "evolution" of the logo so you can see how we slowly arrived at the finished product.

Rob is creating some sort of javascript client utility thing.
He wanted a serif logo with some sort of relation to a toolbox.
So I whipped up a few small simple logos with the flurry of ideas that came to mind.
Rob liked the bottom right one the most. But still wanted some sort of toolbox idea like the bottom left one.
I suggested putting a toolbox next to the logo like an icon.

The toolbox seemed a bit too complex plus Rob really wanted the l to look like a ruler.
Which lead to this design:
Next step was to put items into the toolbox.
And a bit more detail on the ruler L.
With that finished we realigned the notches on the L, moved the tools around a bit, shortened the screwdriver, and then I added an outline so the tools would stick out a bit more. And thus we arrived at the final design.
And that is how a logo is made!
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E3 happened this week.
It wasnt as embarrassingly bad this year. No WAN MIRRION TWOOPS. No luchadores slapping each other on stage. No full grown adults tumbling around the audience with nerf guns trying to look like their laser tag game requires skill. No handheld videogame consoles chained to supermodels. No small children pretending to interact with a poorly rendered animal on a tv screen. No hyperactive hosts making loud obnoxious sounds into their microphones.

Yes this year's E3 was not the media circus that many probably hoped for. Actually it was quite the opposite. It was pretty boring. Maybe the humiliation of last years E3 spurned the companies to take a more conservative route with their presentations? Can't be sure. It was boring though.


Microsoft did exactly what everyone expected. They talked about themselves and their mild success. They eventually showed off the oddly colorful new Halo 4.

Electronic Arts showed off 4 or 5 new shooter games. They all looked exactly the same. All were brown. All were fiercely american. All had the same guns, same controls, same physics, same visual style, same damage indicators. And for the most part they all had the same HUD. It was pretty awful and just served as another example of how EA is a cancer killing the game industry.

Ubisoft wasnt much better but Ubisoft actually showed off games that looked fun. The particular highlights were The Last of Us and Rayman. Last of Us looked like the survival horror everyone has wanted for ages now. Post-apocalyptic environment. No infinite ammo. No auto-aim. No regenerating health. Intelligent artificial intelligence. A focus on exploration. It looks like the game that Resident Evil or Tomb Raider should have become. Sadly both of those franchises are ruined now. Rayman Legends was a new game for the WiiU from the developers of the original Rayman. 2D with hand-painted and hand-animated visuals. Looks ridiculously fun and weird. Seems very early in development. Probably not a launch title.

Konami's show was mostly prerecorded and had nothing of interest to show.

Nintendo's show was the most disappointing but also one of the best shows, next to Ubisofts. Disappointing in that, it SHOULD have been the best. Nintendo has a whole new console coming out. A console that is apparently very powerful and very flexible. This is NEW hardware. And they NEEDED to sell people on it. And they didn't. Reggie came on stage, talked about how they have 23 WiiU games to talk about. But we only saw but 1 or 2 seconds of each game. The show began with an enchanting and gorgeous presentation of Pikmin 3. However it ended with an incredibly boring 15 minute demo of a luigi's mansion themed pseudo-game in some horrible-looking game called Nintendoland. It really killed the excitement of the conference and left most people very disappointed.

That said, Pikmin 3 looks indescribably pretty and if Nintendo is lucky, it will be enough to move units on its own since I assume it's a launch title.


Theres also 2 new mario bros games coming out. They look cute. But then again its mario bros.

So that was E3. Delightfully mediocre with a smattering of highlights. A sad reflection of the current game industry. We truly live in dark times when we have 4 call of duty clones coming out at once while the source code for STALKER2 sits in a dump somewhere surrounded by cockroaches, pogs,  and aborted babies.


Anyway blah blah blah angst angst angst here have some disturbing-looking offmodel ponies I drew when I was bored today. Rainbowdash and Scootaloo respectively.
I love this show but jesus christ the fanbase is bad. It's remarkably managed to go beyond the stupidity of the Invader Zim and Sonic the Hedgehog fanbases. And those shows had years to fester. This show has barely existed. The fuck. Get your shit together, internet.


Oh yeah.
The trailer for Wreck-It Ralph is FINALLY out after a freaking year of waiting.
And hey it looks great thus far.

The very fact this trailer has the hatchet-wielding zombie from the first two House of the Dead games has already sold me. You've earned 10 of my movie dollars Disney. Good work.

Finally to end all this, here is a video of my father's parrot Rosa, being adorable.

1 comment:

VisitorsFromDreams said...

Hey man, good to see your alive and kicking and getting back into doing more animation. Love those shrimp designs, glad to see you doing some pixel animation tho. Its time consuming fun I tells ya.