divine visitor

I quite like Xbox Live. Although I don't play games online as much as I used to, it's a good way to keep in touch with far away friends. Messing about in Halo 3 Forge while chatting rubbish with a couple of mates I don't get to see very often is a pretty cool experience.

As someone else mentioned too, I really like the fact that even the games with much smaller communities still get to keep their servers running. It annoys me when games that are specifically built to be played online have their servers shut down a couple of years later (at best), and then the game becomes pretty much useless.

After all the live-action footage, and the general photorealistic nature of the visuals, I thought the humans looked a bit too cartoony and didn't fit into the look of the movie very well.

A good film though, and seemed quite different to the sort of stuff Hollywood animated features have been pigeonholed into.

Btw, awesome stuff Lozzyboo, Broken Klassic.

Great composition on the bottom image, Remymaru

Any luck with this? No matter how long I spend playing about in Photoshop or Painter I can never get anything that "feels" right to draw with. I always end up back at pencil and paper and just scan that in instead of trying to draw stuff with the tablet.

I've made one or two brushes that seem decent enough, but proper pencil and paper is pretty hard to beat to be honest. For me, the standard set of brushes in Pshop are alright to paint with but not so much for drawing. I don't really use Painter much (the UI is too awkward), but the drawing tools do seem a lot better.

If I can help it though, I'll I usually start on paper too.

Nice pic, btw. I like the jelly guy's shadow

No idea why they got people like Angelina Jolie and Jackie Chan to do voices for characters that have like, two lines each.

Really enjoyed the film though. The 2D opening sequence in particular blew my mind.

Messing about with custom brushes I made in Photoshop. Trying to make something that behaves a little bit more like a pencil. Not quite there yet.

Edit: Yeah the medium sized brush is great, Gunstar. I've got all 3 of the brush sizes.

You don't need to buy the kit, you could just get some indian ink or even standard pentel ink and stick it in there. Or just fill it with water and use with any standard set of watercolour paints. Or even water-down some acrylic paint and stick it in there (although that might be a pain if it starts to dry inside the pen).

I played about with one of these Aquash in the artshop today. It let out a bit more water than I'd like but it was the tester for the general public so was probably a little fooked.

I've been looking for such a thing for years to use with watercolour pencils. It stops your art being 10% spit

I've been using those pens for years now (although I fill them with dark ink). Absolutely fantastic stuff. My favourite media by far.

I'm afraid I can't really offer any kind of explanation for it.

Looks fantastic. I always kinda hoped that developers would be able to make new 'old' games for any of the platforms on Virtual Console, and this seems close enough.

Features seem pretty good this month. Bit suprised with the Bourne score - I quite enjoyed the demo.

There are some magical moments in TP:

The dash into the city with the injured Midna, as the beautiful, haunting piano piece plays.

Cantering through Faron Woods, again with that eerily beautiful music.

The dungeons in general, but especially the wind turbine bridges in the first dungeon and the Desert Dungeon, where I got well and truly stuck.

The bosses. Best yet in my opinion.

The new items. Underused perhaps, but ingenious nonetheless. Spinner, Gale Boomerang, Mace thingy.

The final fight against Ganon.

The Twilight World. Unsettling and magical, especially seeing peoples' "ghosts".

And finally...

MALO MART!

I thought the final boss in Twilight Princess was kinda weak, myself. I much preferred the last boss in Wind Waker. The set up, the location, the music - everything was awesome.

Aww how sad for Okami, I'm really enjoying that at the moment. I wonder what the smash bros stats will be like and of course maybe GHWT will get even better for the Wii now they know how many/much people play it.

No doubt Smash Bros is going to have some HUGE numbers. Many of them contributed by me, in fact.

I still play loads of last-gen stuff, moreso than current stuff probably. I just started GTAIV, but after that I'll be going through Beyond Good & Evil on Xbox for the first time after picking it up for a hilarious £3.

Have you read Top Ten by ALan Moore?

Nope, never heard of it unfortunately. Why do you ask?

It'll be another twenty years before the Myspace/YouTube generation are as 'casual' as the current Wii market.

The positive reception towards things like the video sharing in Skate and Halo 3, as well as LittleBigPlanet shows that this kind of thing is going to be big in games in the next couple of years. Community is core to Microsoft's strategy, and I think they'll take their next Xbox in this direcition, with lots of text/picture/video sharing and a facebook style customable dashboards for each user.

They won't drop any of that lingo for fear of alienating their current fanbase.

Whatever they do, I'm struggling to see how they'll compete with an updated Wii-branded machine.

That kind of lingo is pretty common to the Myspace/YouTube generation. I don't think the Xbox 3 will necessarily be a response to the Wii as more of a response to Web 2.0. That's as casual as you like, yet not completely uncharted territory for Microsoft who've already started down that path with certain features of Xbox Live.

I don't think a new Xbox would be on the cards until late 2010.

I do wonder though, about games like Resident Evil 5. If it gets a 2009 release, do the developers then start planning RE6 for current generation, or for next? I doubt developers would like having spent so much money and resources on one game and then having to develop new tech all over again for the next gen.

Is it being published then, Minkee? Looks great so far. Some of the best illustration work is found in children's books, IMO.

Ah cheers. Sucks we have to wait for it. Still, I'm sure it'll be worth it.

We had to wait 'till October (IIRC) for Ratatouille last year, so one month after the US this time is pretty good.

Strangely enough, I went to see Hulk on the weekend and saw trailers for this and Kung Fu Panda. While there was some swooning from the ladies at the cuteness of it all in Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda definetely got the more enthusiastic reactions.

Done for a sketch challenge entitled 'genetics gone wrong'

Just finished Assassins Creed last night. The ending was a bit WTF, but other than that (and the crazy stupid amount of fighting that you gotta do in the final few hours of the game), I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Still also playing lots of multi-player Super Smash Bros Brawl.

YOJI SHINKAWAAAAAAAAAAAAA

o/\o

Yeah man, I'd much rather meet Mr Shinkawa (again) and demand he release another 'The Art of' book.

I've found that the games in which I care most about the story are the ones where I shape my own story through my chosen actions, the places I explore and and through the characters I talk to and build relationships with, but just as importantly the things I chose not to do, the areas I don't explore and characters I don't interact with.

Thinking about it, Super Metriod, Zelda: Majora's Mask, Zelda: Link's Awakening, and Bioshock are a few games in which I cared a lot the story, because I was in the action and experiencing the it as an unedited series of events, rather than through a carefully controlled, well-directed story told primarily through cuts-scenes where I had no choice in what information I wanted to form my story from.

In Majora's Mask for example, I understood the urgency of the scenario I was placed in (the fact that the moon was coming crashing down in 3 days and that it would be a terrible disaster) from talking to the people in the town and seeing or being told how scared they were and it's going to affect them personally. Not just by being fed a cinematic cut-scene of the moon from a worm's eye view, looking all mean and evil with some scary music in the background.

And the fact that some of these characters don't ever speak, they may as well not even be there. As far as I'm concerned, the NPCs are speaking to me.

I enjoy the games that use a more cinematic approach, but I'm aware that the kind of connection I feel towards the story in these games are the much more similar to that of a film. It's more of an overall interest, in the scenario as a whole. And I reckon it's to down to the use of cut-scenes as the primary method of storytelling in these games that I feel a lot less connected to my character. Cut-scenes can whisk me away from my character to another time or place where I'm able to learn information that he/she doesn't know. It strengthens my involvement with the story, but disconnects me somewhat from my avatar or any other character since we're all reading the story from different pages, if you know what I mean. And so I remain a spectator rather than a participant. It's still cool, and it's something that games can do very well, but it's a different kind of connection.

Metal Gear is kinda cool because although its use of cut-scenes to narate keeps me at a distance from being fully involved as a participant in the story, its constant 4th-wall breaking craziness and acknowledgment of me as a player totally involves me as a participant of the game. It's the fact that all the Metal Gear games are so aware of themselves as games makes it unfair to criticize them for being mere interactive movies in my opinion, but at the same time it's bizzare that the game and story elements are kept so seperate.