Penny Arcade

If Skyrim had come out a little earlier, say, anytime before Modern Warfare, it might have fared better with my cohort.  In Modern Warfare games, all you have to do is hold the right trigger down and seven hundred different bars go up, the culmination of each accompanied by a heavy-metal choir.

Skyrim demands effort.  In times past, I would certainly have taken an opportunity to shame him for avoiding it.  He and I have the same number of children, though; I know what it is to have less than an hour to yourself, and wonder how I should best invest this change.  It is sad, though.  What we call “Skyrim” is actually the point equidistant from

1. the product itself, and
2. your sentient mind.

None of it makes much sense individually - it’s the way a mind distills the point cloud into motivations and narratives that makes it special.  Which is to say, Skyrim is a collaboration. I was curious what he’d come up with.

Everywhere but its mobility stuff, Brink always had a kind of anachronistic, slightly askew-of-time feeling.  In a shooter, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  “Old school” is generally a term of endearment; we often like it when someone honors the ancient totems.  It launched somewhat raw in the middle, and I don’t know how well it stuck - my server browser shows a lot of ghost towns.  Observing the game’s fondness for couture unlocks and its “mingleplayer” ambitions, I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t have seen more success as free-to-play product than he traditional boxed shooter.  I love the bones of the game, and I think a reinterpretation along the lines of a Lord of the Rings Online would serve it very well.

Looking at the concurrency Call of Duty still has - with every title - I wonder if they don’t exert the same Dynastic force on shooters that World of Warcraft exerts on the Massive space.  Weirdo crap is perpetually crawling out of that cauldron, free to play and free to play conversions, because you need to assume your potential customer is already invested in that genre’s Khan.  As usual, Seal said it best.

(CW)TB out.

i want you crawling back to me

I’ve got another cool PA presents project to tell you about. This time we were approached by Capcom to create something for Asura’s Wrath. We ended up making a six page comic book that explores how Asura’s “wrath issues” effect his day to day life.

Our comic has been combined with a bunch of original concept and character art from Capcom to make one book.

If you’d like to get one of these you just need to pre-order the game from a Gamestop.

I should mention that I did have some help with this project. I am teaming up once again with the very talented Steve Hamaker for this comic. Steve is handling the colors and once again he’s doing a kick ass job.

I’d like to thank Capcom for the opportunity to play with their character’s like this. We got a chance to check out the game a while ago and and had a great time. I was surprised at how much I was laughing while we played. it’s a great action game but it definitely has a very over the top sense of humor. Hopefully we captured some of that in our comic.

-Gabe out

A brief repost follows.

Any preorders received before 11/20/11 will be signed by everybody here, just like last time around.  Here’s one of the bonus episodes, which is something like a Fourth Panel that didn’t result in a strip.  It’s my associate and I trying to figure out how to be better at our other job, which is “attempting to producing psychologically whole beings.”

Recall that you can preorder a couple different ways: the set itself, both seasons together, or with the shirt/mug if you so desire.

(CW)TB

A few months ago Nintendo approached us about doing a project for them. I was interested, but my schedule was full at the time. Then they told us it was Zelda. The business guys were hesitant to put any more work on my plate but I told them I had to do it. Like a little kid offering to do chores I promised I would work late and come in on the weekends. I had to draw Zelda!

Before anything was signed they needed to see how I would draw Link. They told me that my artwork would need to get approved by the artists on the Skyward Sword team as well as Mr. Aonuma himself. I was absolutely terrified. So I went to work and sent over some concept art. I had done a young almost Wind Waker style version of Link and they liked it but told me that Link was older in this game and so I needed to make him a teenager. Also Skyward Sword uses a really beautiful water color effect and they wanted to know if I could incorporate that.

So I went back to the drawing board. I actually bought some water colors and started doing tests. I knew that I’d be creating the comic in Photoshop but I figured a better understanding of the physical medium would help. I painted this:

I colored it again but this time using Photoshop and sent it over to Nintendo.


(click here for the High Res)

This is the message I got back:

“this is some great stuff. I was actually with Mr. Aonuma on Friday for the Zelda Symphony and we were able to quickly show him the first page, which he liked.”

I can not describe how incredible that made me feel. So I went to work on the rest of the pages determined to make this my best work to date.

We’ve done a lot of these PA presents projects over the years. I’m very proud of all of them but this is special. This is Zelda. Even as I’m typing this I’m getting a little emotional.

Wow.

This is Zelda.

-Gabe out