Stylized Gravestones
Clint Hocking’s Twitter feed led me to this nifty service and its lovely cemetery icon. Seemed as good a subject as any to teach me more about pixel painting. Plus it felt kind of timely what with Halloween on the way and everything.
I was listening to a podcast recently (can’t remember which) when the hosts started discussing this Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare sequence wherein ***SPOILER ALERT!!!*** one of the six playable characters dies. Thinking back on this moment — one that the gaming community has almost universally heralded as unique — it suddenly occured to me I’d seen virtually the same thing before…only in another medium. Not that the death of a game’s protagonist isn’t original or shocking; it absolutely felt that way to me. But, from a purely narrative standpoint, the killing off of someone your audience has come to identify with happens in, perhaps most notably, ***SPOILER ALERT???*** Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Which got me thinking about other unusual storytelling revelations that might adapt well to video gaming.
Another Flipnote Studio project. This one is dramatically different from my first attempt and uses quite a few more frames of animation. Oddly enough, I’d consider it somewhat less ambitious and almost certainly vastly inferior.
Umberto Eco’s supplement to The Name of the Rose includes a great quote explaining his view of the postmodern condition. It’s pretty long, but I think it captures something we all feel, which is the presence of the past:
Flipnote Studio has GOT to be the greatest freebie in the history of downloads. Okay, so that’s hyberbole. But it’s pretty damn cool nonetheless.
The above link will take you to my first-ever animation. Hope you like it!
So much of the pleasure we derive from new experiences is wrapped up in how they’re presented. Take restaurants, for instance. An otherwise run-of-the-mill appetizer like spinach dip might, with just the right arrangement of (toasted?) pita wheels, turn out to look surprisingly interesting, and, as a result, could even taste markedly different.
Oddly enough, I had a similar experience with the Brütal Legend demo last week. Over the course of the first two or so minutes, I began to feel a bit underwhelmed with the game’s introductory cut sequence. It was doing an incredible job of characterizing Eddie Riggs, but, on the other hand, it was utterly failing to break new game-related ground. Then (and this was a small, small thing that changed my opinion entirely) time stopped and up popped a user-prompt. The miniature menu reminded me of a perfectly chosen freeze frame with voice-over narration. I won’t spoil what decision it was asking of me, but suffice it to say that the options presented were bound to have a not insignificant effect on subsequent in-game films.
There was more than one of these sudden promptings; I got a second before the trial ended. Both were fun and humorous, but the best thing about them had to be that they made the game feel self-aware and fresh. Brütal Legend may or may not be innovating in terms of game mechanics (much too soon for me to tell), but it’s definitely hit upon a means of presenting traditional video game storytelling with an utterly unique and satisfying twist.
Nuclear Power Pants
Here’s a portrait of one of Nuclear Power Pants’ Pyramid Head-style monsters. Watching one these ugly pretty things bop around the ring while playing an instrument was pretty rad.
