videogames

Dark Souls (PC)

Posted on by Chris

Please pardon the geeky, gamer note here but I just had to post something for the record books to commemorate my finally finishing the PC game Dark Souls last night.

The game was refreshingly difficult to beat, set in a beautifully-imagined (bleak) world and took a looooong time to beat (probably over 60 hours over course of a year and a half). This game will definitely go down in my top 5 or 10 games of all time. I do wish I had started it on the Xbox or PS3 because couch gaming is always better than PC/desk gaming IMHO – but it was still a great ride and I was able to use my Xbox controller on Windows 7 thankfully.

Check out some of my screenshots here – the quality of the graphics aren’t amazing maybe to modern day standards – but the design of the game world was so well done that with some of the modifications people have made for the game it looked just as good as any cutting-edge graphics game today (IMHO).

Special thanks to FROM SOFTWARE and Hidetaka Miyazaki for creating such an unconventional, non-mainstream masterpiece. It was a great escape and adventure and I can’t wait for the sequel!

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes Wallpaper

Posted on by Chris

A few days ago I read the announcment that a new Metal Gear Solid game is in development. Naturally I immediately did a Google images search to change my desktop’s wallpaper image. Since there weren’t any great wallpapers available at the time I booted up Photoshop and whipped up a temporary one myself (using the screenshot from the game below). It’s nothing special but feel free to grab if you’re a MGS fan and a desktop wallpaper nerd like me!

Original Screenshot

(For any lurking lawyers/etc… this is a super unnofficial, unlicensed, unapproval fan-based piece of artwork. All rights to Konami, Kojima Productions, etc!)

Zelda Skyward Sword

Posted on by Chris

Here’s one I worked on here and there over past few weeks. I have may issues w/it (primarily around my low competence in depicting realistic human form) and honestly almost didn’t post it … but I decided to post anyhow for the record books. I wanted to add more to this… some bad guys, more weapons/gear and other scenic elements from the game but I figured I should stop and move on to other things.

My artistic (in)abilities aside, Zelda Skyward Sword was a masterpiece of a video game and I had a blast playing (and winning!) it. This is my (humble) tribute to it.

The Super Mario Alphabet!

Posted on by Chris

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks. Here’s the reason I’ve been away … introducing the Mario Alphabet!

A few weeks ago I was reminded that Lincoln isn’t very good with lower case letters yet … and the thought popped into my head “I wonder if you could find a Mario character for every letter in the alphabet? … because if so, would there be a cooler/more fun way to learn the alphabet?!“.  Sure enough after checking online, I found there were more than enough Mario characters to do it (you could actually do over 5 alphabets and never repeat a character!).  After confirming it was possible I of course could have simple gone to Google images or other places to round up existing artwork and just copied/pasted them all into Photoshop … but then the artwork styles would have been inconsistent and worse the image quality would have been very poor for some of the less famous characters who only have teeny tiny thumbnails on the internet. So I decided to draw them all by hand on my iPad (~2 letters a day, 2 characters per letter). It took way longer than I had planned but it was a blast to do!

Please Note: In case it’s not obvious – I did not freehand draw any of these guys! I only traced and (lovingly) painted each one using whatever images I could find from the net. So I take very little credit for this project. The true brilliance here of course comes from Nintendo. Over the past few decades they have created a staggeringly long list of wonderful characters (each one with a great personality/story).  So here’s to Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto and the cast of talented artists/character designers who have built such an entertaining/creative body of work over the years that has and will continue to entertain kids and adults for years to come.

I may or may not do something w/the Zelda franchise once I recover from this – but this year’s Christmas card has to be my next project!

Want to print?

If you print this out you are super awesome. Take a photo of where/how you put it up and post a comment! 🙂

–> Horizontal Version (~80″ x 4.5″)

–> Square Version (~26″ x 19″)

Individual Cards Images

[miniflickr photoset_id=72157628096510710&sortby=date-posted-asc&per_page=50]

Reference: Photo set on Flickr

Super Mario gets an iPhone

Posted on by Chris

Continuing the trend of having an unpredictable/ odd selection of subject matter, here’s a new one – this time using the beloved Super Mario franchise I grew up with.
It’s pretty crazy that I still play Mario games even today considering I played my first one (Super Mario Bros [NES]) way back in the early 90s. I’m sure I over glamourize things like this but I often wonder what it would be like to be on a team producing/ developing a Mario game – I wonder what it feels like to be part of creating something with such a high bar of quality, creativity and ambition.