Your Homework Is...

When I sort of restarted this blog a few months ago, the plan was to not only give me the writing practice (you know, it's a blog), but also celebrate what I think are compelling or well-written stories from the internet. Many of them wound up being from similar sources because, well, I like specific writers and certain web sites do very good work (the features on Polygon, for example, are consistently good). Sometimes this slips away from me, and sometimes I just don't update for weeks at a time, but that just means that there should be plenty of stuff to look back on and point you toward. Typically, I would never include the location of today's homework.

Gametrailers.com is a website built initially for exactly what you'd expect; trailers for video games. Over the years, they've launched quite a variety of original content of what I can diplomatically call varying quality. Most of it really skews to taste; there's some fun industry stuff like Pach Attack and wacky talking head opinion-spewing like Final Bosman, and your interest in either example will depend on the kind of content you'd like to watch.

One of their "flagship" shows, though, is The Bonus Round hosted by games journo black belt/ lightning rod Goeff Keighley. Usually a panel discussion show (Wedbush Securities smartypants Michael Pachter is a regular guest), it's often filled with guests that range from industry analysts and insiders to camera-friendly seat fillers. It's usually a mishmash of softball questions, and while a lot of it is fun, it's rarely informative.

Not lately, though. In what I can only possibly think was the perfect storm of guests, Keighley tapped Pachter and also Naughty Dog co-founder and ex-THQ president Jason Rubin, as well as Seamus Blackley, a current mobile developer and one of the men instrumental for creating the original Xbox during his time at Microsoft. The first episode of the series (linked) takes place just as the PlayStation 4 was about to launch, and these three guys have an awful lot to say during it and subsequent chapters. The last of which will be on GT's site this weekend.

Again, it's all a matter of taste, but this particular panels is chock full of inside-baseball, and I love that shit. All three guests have very clear, yet often differing opinions about the nature of the big video game machine and the models that large companies need to adopt to be relevant in an increasingly gaming-diverse future. Keighley barely even speaks for most of the first episode. It's genius.

Happy Thanksgiving, my people.

I Don't Know Why You Say Goodbye

So after more than a week with my shiny new PlayStation 4 (it it certainly is shiny; I almost never want to touch it), I find that I have very little to say about it. Honestly, you can probably hit ever corner of the nerd internet over the last few weeks and find all of the opinions that confirm whatever stance you have about Sony's new console. None of what I could say would be particularly new or shocking, so I suppose we can just leave it at that.

But I pretty much never turn it on.

Weird, right? Not really, and it's mostly of my own volition. It's become common knowledge over the last several cycles that launch games are typically mediocre at best. Usually all of the good stuff can be had for older machines or wind up being elaborate tech demos banking on the promise of future fulfillment. Yes, the first Xbox had Halo, the Wii had Wii Sports, and we didn't even know any better when North America was blessed with Super Mario Bros. when the NES dropped in '85, but I call those singular examples. I have bought all of Sony's home consoles on (or close) to their launch, and every time I do, I find myself waiting about 6 months to buy something worthwhile. Neither the Sony gaming juggernaut nor me personally are alone here (it took me more than a year to buy a game for my 3DS, which I now play just about all the time). It's just the way these things sort of work.

But it's been a particularly long console cycle, and that makes the kick in the pants of so-so launch games more like a shove into traffic. No, I'm not exactly huffy over it, but I still find myself wishing that there was something really dazzling for me to take home and boot up after that midnight launch (which I arrived to drunk. The only way to do it). I'm certainly not looking the gift horse of Contrast, Warframe, DC Universe Online, or -especially- Resogun in the mouth, but none of those games have any real weeks-of-my-life-swallowed-whole meat to them. I finished Contrast, a better game than some of the reviews gave it credit, in less than a day. Warframe is fun, but awfully redundant. Resogun is wacky and beautiful, but it's five brief levels don't exactly make me want to call in sick to work and live on Chinese takeout. Next year certainly has some good stuff on the way, but like the rest of my early adopting brethren, I bought this new machine for the sake of promise, not instant gratification.

Ironically, in the days before the November 15 launch, I spent my free gaming time playing what I considered the high water mark of the previous generations, and completely independent of the fact that I knew I wasn't going to be blown away by the brand new stuff (ok, subconsciously, I probably did). I tore through the HD remake of Clover/ Capcom's Okami, which is still one of the best Zelda knockoffs you can find, if not the absolute king of them. Granted, it was the beautiful up-rezzed rerelease, but it's in my top 10 PlayStation 2 games, and was on sale a few weeks ago for a song. I loved playing it again so much that I even went through the rigamarole of obtaining the platinum trophy, too, which is something I think I've only done a few times, and I think it says something to its staying power.

But not nearly as much as Demon's Souls; unquestionably my favorite game of the last eight years. I'll concede that Dark Souls is a much better constructed game with it's interlocking environments, but DeS spoke to me on so many more levels than all of the other games that I claimed to enjoy over the last console cycle that I've gone through it close to 10 times, if not more (I've lost a few PS3s along the way). It's funny how the game has changed for me within that time. Originally, I slaved over 75+ hours of it, observing every crack in the wall and conversation with an NPC to help me through all of its punishment. It wasn't so much the need to finish as it was the will to win, which are two totally different things. When I finally hit the summit, I retired the game with my head held high, but weary. I've said this before, but going through this game the first time makes you feel like you've gone through some shit and came out the other end of it a different person. Repeat trips are different, though. The second trip became a matter of experimentation: How radical are the differences in play style? Will it make X location more easily traversed under Y conditions? How will I adapt under weaker or stronger scenarios? It was shorter, but I was smarter. Now, after so many runs through the game (with only one small section routinely giving me problems), I can successfully bum rush it in 8 hours or less depending on circumstances and a few very minor variables. It's become less of an exhaustive challenge and more like an elaborate puzzle. Almost Nietzschean, really. Since I know where the real dangers lie, the difficulty and joy is in figuring out the best way to become stronger faster. Last week, I took the grunt-level Royal and turned him into room-clearing warlock in no time flat. In comparison to the Wanderer that struggled through those first hours of my initial time with DeS and evolved into a walking wrecking ball after what felt like years of growth and learning, this new Royal was like third grader that could split atoms. Now that he's successfully helped to lull the Old One back to sleep, any further plays with him would simply exist to push his stats toward the ubermensch that brings that earlier, shakier metaphor home.

But that was over a week ago, and even after requisite weekly time with my old flame Third Strike, I needed something else. Last night, then, I convinced myself that it was time to go back to Skyrim, if only briefly (for now). See, I liked Fallout 3 an awful lot, but in general, I wasn't so much a Bethesda believer until my time with the Elder Scrolls V. Everything in their games seemed just undercooked enough that while the worlds were huge and fun to explore, they just seemed like empty husks populated by talking heads. Skyrim, to be fair, isn't that much different, but enough care went into making it that I'm still in awe of the majesty of its scope. Hundreds of hours drifted away while my High Elf Garbanzo Bean and I explored its frozen tundra, and it's always intimidated me to go back into it knowing how easily the time can slip by while I skin a freshly shot bear or dive into yet another spider-infested mine. But after yet another character build in Demon's Souls, I felt I'd try the same approach with Skyrim, so last night's Wood Elf will, hopefully, become next week's stealthy Robin Hood.

Of course, this could all change. I'm at the mercy of my patience at this point, and with holidays coming and family/ friends willing to give me the gift of interactive entertainment, there's every possibility that I'll be knee deep (or putting up) with Assassin's Creed IV or Need for Speed Rivals. Do I really want to play those games? Not especially, but I sure would like to put this new supercomputer sitting under my television through its paces.

Step 2: Inks Complete

So here it is with finished inks:

The picture robs you of some of the minute details, but I think you get the idea.

As usual, all of the tighter stuff pencil-wise wound up looking pretty good like the upper arm and the face. I pretty much wing it when it comes to cloth with a lot of black (as in the cape of this wizard/ ghost/ thing), but I think it looks fine here. I might go in with a whiteout pen and place in some cracks or little details in there, but I'm trying to let go and just let it live on its own. The ink I was using is pretty old, though so you can spot a lot of inconsistencies with the value of the blacks, but whatever.

I guess the only thing that really bugs me is that the swirling vortex of evil- sort of background wound up being a little bit busy and takes away from the foreground a little bit, but that's all because I decided to live on the edge and do that on the fly, too. Originally, it was just going to be blank back there with some detail lines and some sweat/ blood spurts to make it look like they were really going at it, but I thought that might be sort of chickening out. Not that this is the most elaborate background, but having nothing there at all seemed kind of weak.

Still, for the first pinup kind of thing I've done in a couple of years I think it wound up being ok. Now I have to decide if I'm going to color it, and I'm not so hot at that stuff. I can probably lay down some watercolor or marker and make it look ok, but I just don't have a lot of skill any more and I'm too afraid to blow it this far in.

Mighty

A few (read: many) years ago, a couple of musicians that I worked with decided that they would record a prog metal EP. Mostly, this was an ironic joke: all of them were trained jazz musicians (and pretty good ones) with the only earnest member of the ad hoc trio being a classic rock tone poem enthusiast as a kid, which found its way to inform his choice of profession. As you may have guessed, he was also the writer. So I how was I involved in this? Since I have pretty much zero talent for music, they thought it funny to have a sort of over -the-top Manowar-style sword and sorcery cover for the five or six discs they were planning on burning, so they asked me to throw something together. Here's what came out:

Yes, there's some strange anatomy going on right there. Since this is pushing 15 years old at this point, and everyone's their own worst critic, I don't think it's unfair to say that this is one of the butt ugliest things I've ever seen. Still, it was my way of learning some of the basics of Photoshop (many of which I've forgotten), and they really dug it, so it wasn't a total loss.

As another kind of gag, I put together two or three redone covers for the writer guy. The music industry of the late 90s/ early 2000s just loved to repackage recently released material with special covers, so I jumped on board and did this:

I liked this one better, but probably because it was just separate scans of other stuff I sketched out that I cobbled together on a computer. The guy in the back was colored with markers and the spiky haired dude in the foreground was all magic wand and paint can. Except he doesn't have any ears. That's a little strange.

Anyway, so I haven't even thought about these since I made them and they've recently kind of resurfaced. Me being a dope that just can't let go, I've been a little inspired in the last week to do a sort of weird follow up. Let's call it the art for their never-to-be-released anniversary boxed set:

 

I wish I would have taken a pic of this in its primordial sketch form. I'm not really a great inker to begin with, and penciled images just seem to have a different dynamic to me; they're more exciting. This isn't the clearest picture, but I was about half done with the inks before taking it. Since I don't have a ton of time on my hands anymore, I sometimes doodle this stuff out during my lunch breaks, which gives me a solid hour to nail down a composition and decide where things need to be tighter and which parts can be looser. The sketch happened on Monday, and the beginning ink section went down on Tuesday. I finished inking it yesterday, so I'll put up a pick of that sometime later today or tomorrow.