I have been making video games as a career for almost 6 years now, it’s really weird because I don’t actually play many video games.
This is odd because most people I know don’t put in a copy of their favourite game, only to turn it off knowing full well they’ll probably never play it again. I do that more often than I realise, yet I always believe that one day I will load it up and finish the whole thing. It hasn’t happened once.
So after a huge stint of not playing on my Playstation 3 and completely abandoning my xbox 360 in the basement of the office where I work, a friend gave me a copy of The Last Of Us a few days before it’s actual UK launch. Thank you! My love for consoles was momentarily re-ignited.
I have to say, I was pretty excited but I didn’t play it for 2 whole days after I was given it until tonight. I put the disc in and did a massive system update that took about 30 minutes, then I started to get into Naughty Dogs latest and greatest.
The cut scenes were slick, I kept hunting across every scene looking for weird texture bugs or inconsistencies in lighting. There were some, but not many, after a short time I stopped doing this over analysation and started to properly enjoy the game.
Then something happened. I kept getting scared of the enemies, this happens in every triple-A game I play. I hate the fact that at any time I can just be shot from a direction I wasn’t even aware was a threat and then I have to go through all that torture again after I’m inevitably killed.
No I won’t play on easy. Life ain’t easy so why should traversing a post apocalyptic landscape be easy? I’m playing on medium difficulty and to me that’s hard. I just can’t win.
Just like when in Elder Scrolls I got trapped in a cave of skeletons because I was too scared to leave. I abandoned my save leaving my character in this constant state of worry. I should have left him in a tavern supping on foamy brewskies but I didn’t. In The Last Of Us, I just run past the enemies because I because I can’t be bothered to do a full 360 scan of my environment. Watch where the enemies go, what their walk patterns are. Nothing that valuable is at stake, I’d rather just rambo it and a die few times before I glitch my way to the next checkpoint.
I get it, I’m a terrible gamer. I pick apart every detail, I let the (usually) subpar storylines affect my desire to continue playing, but most of all I can’t just do what I want. If I see a dumpster and the game designers have gone to a lot of effort to make this thing realistically move around, all I want to do is push it down a slight incline and jump in.
I worked this out, the reason why a game like The Last Of Us doesn’t appeal to me to me is because I want to play with a Yo Yo or a shine some light through a prism in my spare time. Playing as a man with some kind of pseudo daughter speaks almost nothing to me at all. I’d rather download 60 x $1 iPhone games and smile 3 times than crouch relentlessly behind yet another barrel with yet another weak character plot about some woman who’s head of a rebellious militia gang. I can’t do another weapon for girl trade. My heads in the clouds and I dream of giant monsters trying to chew the rubber off a silly little monster truck or like in Plunderland, I just wanna be a pirate being a bit reckless against a common enemy. The British Empire.
Saying that, I did really enjoy my brief few hours on The Last Of Us, the next game I’m looking forward to is simply, GTAV — I know that I’ll be able to traverse a fire escape on the side of a building or go swimming to admire the underwater cultures of fish, leaving the real world far behind but still getting up to all the mischief I can imagine.
At any point I want to leave the game behind. I want to disobey the mission structure and test the game to the most bizarre limits.
Hey, what do I know? I only make video games.
Another indian ink experiment, this its #outer #space #moon landing on ‘orrible old water colour card. Sometimes the shading makes it obvious its a complete free wheel.
This was for a game concept that I went way overboard with. In the end I dropped it back to just a blue ball for the player character. Sometimes I visualise things too much before it’s appropriate.
Automate export of images from Illustrator for iOS standard, @2x and @2x~ipad.
Illustrator CS6 → Presets → en_US → Scripts → iOS Export
This is an old comic idea I foound, it’s not meant to be anything other than an experiment in visual perspective and panels. But I like it.
A typography puke. I had been writing all day so I just had to create SOMETHING
