I remember the first time an N64 controller was put in my hand. Granted, it wasn’t the first time I’d played video games before (Super Nintendo was my mistress once upon a childhood), but something about that Macaroni and Cheese yellow “M” shaped control blew my prepubescent mind, sending me on a journey of Gamerhood that would make me forever love those sweet sweet interacting pixels.

I remember a considerable amount of Golden Eye, and building my competitive gaming skill by kicking my dad’s ass with Big Head mode on (he might have let me win, but whatever ya know?).

Time went on, Banjo Kazooi became my muse, and suddenly, Game Cube came out. Hours of Super Smash and Luigi’s Mansion shaped me into a anxiety ridden youth (maybe?), but those were good times. There’s nothing that smells better than than a fresh Game Cube on your birthday, lemme tell ya.

 

Xbox came out, and I felt like I was cheating on the gamecube a bit. Morrowind was mainly what I got into, and of course some Halo.

Fast forward…

BOOM, XBOX 360. OBLIVION. BEAUTIFUL KATAMARI. GEARS OF WAR. HITMAN. BIOSHOCK. ASSASSIN’S CREED.

SKYRIM…’nuff said. Pretty much my evolution of games. It’s been a good ride, hopefully the new Hitman will reignite my love for gaming :3

So I’ll start off by saying I’ve kind of fallen out of love with the gaming realm. It’s an unfortunate realization, but a realization nonetheless. Between countless hours of Skyrim, many matches of team death match in Call of Duty, and a little bit of Beautiful Katamari to spice things up, I’ve kind of overdosed myself on games for the time being. That said, I have discovered one little gem that still keeps my attention, and that is “Plague, Inc.” for the iPod.

That’s a screen from a successful elimination of all man-kind I pulled off with a disease I named “Yolo”. The irony! HAZZAH.

Anyway, I found the game to have a nice RPG element (evolving the disease) as well as a cool turn based factor (you watch your disease spread, and have to pop certain bubbles to spread the disease into other countries). The news feed allows you to intelligently decide how to evolve your disease to continue the plague, and in the end, you end up feeling a bit like a maniacal genius considering this game is said to be based on “realism”…hopefully by playing we’re not all partaking in teaching some invisible party how to design a powerful human extinguishing disease. Definitely worth a dollar in my book.

Been a long time since I poked around on this bloggy bloggy doo doo. But today is a new day! Sorta. Ya know.

 

Anyway: I’m gonna go ahead and nip this in the bud, as efficiently as I can in terms of delivery, so here y’all go:

 

Critiques and thangs: 

 

Gonna start out by talking about my palpable nerd excitement for an upcoming title that I’ve had on reserve for awhile now, and that game, lady geeks and gentle-uh, geeks, is; Hitman: Absolution.

 

Now I’ve been waiting for another Hitman since the days of Blood Money, but their better than ever, new-and-improved deliciousness (design, graphics, etc.) made me cry…ya know, inside…cry out of pure joy (tears on the inside are good for maintaining a hydrated body and soul). 

 

Take a look at this tasty deliciousness: http://youtu.be/LU1z95zFH4g

 

There’s an awful part of me that wants to make a mission where you have to destroy all the old ladies like those little bastard shit wizard fairies from Adventure Time: http://youtu.be/73t6e7JrNGQ

 

Anyway, stoked for that. Looks gorgeous, looks intelligent, looks funner (should be a word) than ever and the design seems sleek and fluid, and who the hell doesn’t wanna be bald, look ultra swag in a suit all the time, and have a barcode on the back of their head?…oh, just me?…gotcha.

ONTO THE NEXT: My ten favorite games…

Poop shit, that is a toughy.

TEN: Chess

Why? Chess is probably the most fundamental and telling strategic games of all time. What I mean by that, is you can kind of tell a bit about a person by they play chess. Not only is it the ultimate psychological poker face game, it also relies on ones ability to predict, sacrifice, and outsmart their opponent. I have a tendency to walk away from a chess game, win or lose with some abstract (yet somehow tangible) Art of War (Sun Tzu) wisdom. I’d rank it higher, but I think chess is such a given, it could be ranked at any number amidst my favorites. 

NINE!: Super Smash Bros

Why? Pikachu, Down+B, C stick left and right…no better way to kick extreme amounts of ass and lose extreme amounts of respect for yourself at the same time. Always fun to play with friends, it’s deliciously extensive in terms of selection, and the variables of slow character vs. fast character with their signature moves is sorta like mixing a bunch of sodas together in a bottle, and shaking it up until it explodes with only one flavor prevailing. Awesome. Classic. Social. Fun.

EIGHT: Max Payne

And I mean the old and the new, I’ve been playing it since the days of old. When you’re a ten year old boy, and you see The Matrix for the first time, and then your (debatably moral) parent lets you play a shooter that has a bullet time element…not only are there pants to be pissed in, but the wildest of childhood fantasies of being a misunderstood alcoholic cop with a painkiller addiction, who can somehow slow time when he jumps and shoots guns, can FINALLY, FINALLY be satisfied.

SEVEN!: Grand Theft Auto

WHY?! Again, game I grew up with. The creme della creme of video game taboos, that rebellious yellow “Rockstar” logo on the front of the box that just screams “YOUR PARENTS DO NOT WANT YOU PLAYING THIS”. Rockstar does an amazing job with sandbox style games, and definitely has a monopoly on the “live vicariously through a criminal’s life” story telling down to a science. Immersive, detailed, edgy, and God damn is it violent.

 

SIX: Pokemon

Gotta catch ’em all. Combines strategy, elemental knowledge, leveling, traveling, and delicious rivalry all into a neat little 8 bit package that I will never get sick of. I’m twenty, I’ll still kick your ass with my Haunter any day of the week. ‘Nuff said.

FIVE!: Call of Duty

I can’t begin to even count the hours…nor would I want to, that I’ve spent as a collective, playing this game until my eyes dried up so bad and turned so red, that they spewed psychotic nerd rage focus lasers at my tv screen until I pwn’d the hell out of some scrub ass newbs. This FPS franchise has a brilliant incentivized competitive multiplayer aspect to it (scoreboards, and death matches), customization (weapons, classes, sensitivity, perks, kill streaks, etc.) and not to mention legitimate skill. I never get tired of shit talking prepubescent preteens while I lay waste to them with sub machine guns and predator missles. Never, ever, gets old.

FOUR!: Bioshock

Why: …beautiful environments, gripping steam punk style art direction, endless intensity. I’ve never been so terrified, yet so in love with a game before I’d played Bioshock. This game too allows the player to manipulate things with elemental abilities with the macabre lore of it all being in a post-disaster underwater paradise gone horribly, horribly corrupt. 

THREE: Assassin’s Creed

If you don’t like jumping from roof top to roof top in ancient rome, stealthily ending the lives of corrupt templar politicians with hidden blades in a massive conspiracy story that makes you question actual history…go play some Battle Toads man. This game is not for you. I’ve been enjoying this saga for the past couple years, and cannot wait for the next installment. Beautiful fighting and parkour fluidity, beautiful environments, rich story. Yes.

Two: Hitman

After a long day, coming home to my cat, a cup of tea, and some Hitman, makes me think it is one of the finer things in life. Hitman is another assassin genre game where the player must use their wit and stealthy strategy to be able to get away clean with “taking out the trash”. The premise is what keeps it so great I think, you feel so badass and spooky sneaking around, choking people with fiber wire, stealing their clothes, and casually using their disguise to gain entrance to the domain of your target. Just thrilling, challenging, taboo, yet delicious.

One! SKYRIM

Probably not a surprise! Level 64 dark elf. I find the leveling metrics, the beautiful environment, the radiant quests, the endless narrative, and free will of this massive sandbox epic to be…well epic. I type this as I look over at my Limited Edition dragon bust who rests proudly upon an ancient dov’ carving. Bethesda produces very immersive, very open, very livable games. Skyrim lets you go somewhere else, and be anybody else, satisfying any “I wonder what it’d be like if:” question that might come to mind and beyond (within the reason of the game of course). I have a proud/sad amount of hours pooped into this game, and the things I’ve learned from imagining the process of it’s creation have been invaluable to me. Without a doubt, my most sacred game (and RIP Alex Adamowicz, one of the head artists at Bethesda who passed away a few months back).

Anyway, onto some little pitches:

1. This one, I think is the one I’m going to shoot for: You’re a square, and you change color and must shoot your compliment amidst hordes of other colors. Power ups can turn all horde into the same anti-compliment for a limited amount of time, as well as other yet-to-be-decided power-ups to keep the pace of the game intense and changing.

2. Might be fun to do a classic storytelling type game: Path, A, B, or C, game that parallels those “choose your own adventure” books. Haven’t really fleshed out the deets, but a cute little nerd quest, fight some monsters as the awkward hero, wind up with cute girl (story of my life) kinda plot would be fun.

3. Goofy ass idea, probably the most nebulous in concept, is a beat boxing battle game. I’d like to make insanely bad beat boxing recordings of myself, and have a level-up type game where you use your beat boxing to somehow side scroll and kick asses. The more asses you kick, the more words become available, the more you find yourself laughing. I imagine it being poorly drawn and charmingly absurd.

P.S. I’m very aware of my language in this piece. Consider it a stylization of a stylization or some bullllshit like that 😀 Anyway, enjoy.

I’ll be mimicking Dr. Seuss for my final web comic. By that I mean I’m basically writing and illustrating a mini-book/webcomic that will talk about the end of this semester, my finals stress, and the importance of not stressing out and challenging yourself. Yes.

 

 

I’ll be writing rhymes,

they’ll be nice and loose!

To not disrespect,

the great man Dr. Seuss

Emulating webcomic http://harkavagrant.com/ the artists name is Kate Beaton, she’s a history major I believe, and her comics are HILARIOUS AND I LOVE THEM. Anyway, I had a lot of fun this time around. Fun ink times and stuff. Could not for the life of me figure out how to make this legible in the full composition, so my sketch pad scans are provided for fun times and legibility stuff YEAH. Gonna try to solve that problem soon, but as you can see by the comic, I’m a highly busy individual.

Notes to self: More bendy elbows, like spaghetti, hand drawn thicker frames, legible, hand drawn text, bigger and 1/3 of frame, upper.

After a solid hour and a half of flipping through web comics and drawing styles, literally at least a hundred of them I’ve looked at if not many many more, I’ve decided between two, and I’m sure I’ll be flipping that coin on which to emulate later today, but here are the websites to both, and some ideas on what I might document for Thursday:

A. I really enjoy the unique scroll flow of this comic, and the lack of understandable, yet entirely understandable (you’ll see if you check it out) dialogue: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/willymj/eekeemoo/series.php?view=single&ID=61768

B. This one……..countless times I had to quiet my laughter in the library to. Amazing humor, amazing ink wash technique and line work, just hilarious and fun…….and with that description I think I’ll shoot for this one, though time constrains may make me change my mind to the more simple style above (just being honest, I might cop out because I’m busy with other finals and this style would require more time than I’ve foolishly not allowed myself). Anyway, here’s what I was talking about http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=320

Events for next little comic doo-dad:

1. Maybe an ironic comic of how my last comic lead to me telling Charloette which Cintiq fell over, and the internal panic that ensued in muh brain.

2. Maybe I talk about my job? How I work at a shoe store? I dunno about that one, we’ll see.

(PROBABLY THIS ONE) 3. Finals! Maybe something about how finals are unfolding or something and how we all bitch and moan exactly the same, like an observational piece about how people deal with it differently (the one-uppers, the over-achievers, the quiet focused accomplishers, the perpetual panickers, and then make some funny illustration on how we’re all bitching regardless of our overall handling of the situation)

Gonna do some style testing later today, see if I can’t get within the ballpark of either of those two artists comics mentioned above.

I’m sure I’ll think of something.

So a friend who prefers to remain unnamed had an incident with a Cintiq this week (it didn’t blow up, but she knocked over the one behind her and such). It kinda made me realize how poorly I react in those situations. The style was a mimicking of Li Chen’s style from exocomics.com I hope to revisit this and improve it more, but the repeated use of the same drawing of myself is just supposed to exaggerate how stoic and emotionless I am when things like this happen……….the nuclear cloud, also an exaggeration.

 

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The one where I tell you that I’m not done yet, and assure you that the finished product will be up later today.

 

That being said, I’m not done yet, but I assure you the finished product will be up later.

 

This one is in the style of Li Chen, a popular webcomic artist/architect/badass. Here is here site and said style I will be attempting to mimic. Disappointed that I’m not done just yet? Me too man, me too. Almost pulled an all nighter, failed at that as well.

 

Li Chen: http://www.exocomics.com/206

 

I’ve never really taken a crack at anything like this, so I hope you all enjoy it. I was trying to emulate the style of Adventure time to a certain degree, but unfortunately, the venomous fangs of “little time and not enough know-how” sand deep into my delicate man neck and sucked all the smart out of my entire body, thus rendering me dumb and without enough time to figure out how to not be dumb anymore, which is to say I’m disappointed for having not known how to construct and include stylized backgrounds to further the emulation, but it’s something I’m hoping to revisit. Other than that, yeah, here it is.