Lara Croft 8Bit Animated

Edit: To see the unanimated version of her, check it out here.
I finally got around to animating one of these. Turns out it doesn't look half bad. My only other attempts at animating some 8bit stuff is some Toasty stuff. Oh and the shoddy glowy Cortana, but I don't count that one. It feels good to get back into animation. At the end of 2008 I wrote myself a time capsule that the Headspace gapyear people held onto for me. They sent it to me late last year. One of the questions was what I expected to be doing right now. I answered that I was going to be doing animation. Design was a career choice that was lurking in the wings the whole time, but animation felt like my calling. I trolled a couple different animation places but there were two problems.
1. Most of the courses only used 2D as a stepping stone to 3D (and as we all know, 3D is laaaame in comparison to 2D. It just lacks soul.)
2. No one was coming away with a job afterwards. One of my friends that did 3D ended up just selling insurance over in Australia.
So then I looked into design. I wanted a course that covered pretty much everything. You're shooting yourself in the foot if you decide to JUST do print design in my opinion. Massey had the best looking course, so I went for it. Unfortunatly the Auckland department of design didn't quite offer as many papers as Wellington. But Wellington is an awful long way from Auckland. So there was no way I was commuting there everyday.
I left it way to late and applied the day after submissions closed. Most of my Headspace mates had already gotten their act together before they even left. I was happy just running around in unwashed clothes making videos instead.
Since I applied late I needed to see some sort of Uni Rep who would check me out personally to see if I was worth pushing through the system. She asked what I thought Design was. I said it was a visual way of telling a story to someone in one glimpse. She was stoked with that answer and sent me to one of the heads of the design school. Me and that dude shot the shit about how lame it was that Macromedia had been bought out by Adobe.
The rest is history. Please note, history is a very judgey place. Forgive its prudishness.

Resident Evil 8bit Girls & Scarlett

From left: Ada Wong, Jill Valentine, and Claire Redfield. I cherry picked from different Resident evils to get them in the outfits I felt were the most iconic and had resounded with the community the most. Coming from an entirely uneducated background in the Resident Evil series I must admit. I could have easily missed the mark. When I first started researching Ada Wong I was convinced it was Anna Williams from Tekken. I guess all Femme Fatales look the same. I used the outfit from Resident Evil 5.

Ol' Jilly was used from Resident Evil 2. A lot of fans found that outfit to be too much fan service. But it's the one that's most recognizable. And besides. Her latest outfit looks like Nina Williams.

Claire Redfield was picked from RE: Operation Raccoon City. If I wanted to make an ominous sounding title I probably wouldn't have included any fuzzy animals in it. But hey, what do I know?

I feel like this next bit holds some relation to the sort of figures I've been posting recently. Crazily proportioned chicks are sort of my thing. Whoever worked on the poster of Scarlett looks like they discovered the Pinch and Bulge tool on photoshop for the first time. It's pretty messed up. You can see that they bulged her chesticals till they started doing that weird flat effect. And her waist and hips are punched so far in that it's given her shoulders and head comical proportions.

Come on guys. You had a picture of Scarlett Johanson in skin tight clothes. You don't muck around with that stuff because your job has already been done for you. It's like using bleach to get rid of those annoying stains on the Shroud of Turin. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed.

Skye & Autumn - Sanctum 2

I only played a bit of this game. My friends got totally hooked on it. Unfortunately for me I wasn't great and didn't have the inclination to get better. Tower defence doesn't do it for me. But it's a cool remix on the genre. I loved the art for the game. The stylisation was rad.

Lara Croft - Tomb Raider

Edit: Since I've done this I've also done an animated version of her. Go check it out.

I don't enjoy Tomb Raider. There. I said it. I'm sick of tapping X to open doors, or holding X to unleash awesome burning mechanics to get the gears or whatever I need to unlock something on my weapon. I tried glossing through this game as fast as possible. I haven't finished it, and I probably never will. One of my friends described it best as a "poor mans Uncharted". Tomb Raider has been playing catch up with Uncharted ever since it came out. I tried playing Underworld, which came out a year after Uncharted 1, and it felt really bad. Just everything about how it moved and acted. Uncharted 1 feels pretty old. But it's pretty solid. Underworld just feels shonky.

You could say that comparing the two is a little unfair. But since the reboot came out, not many have been able to deny the cinematic approach the two games have made.

To be fair, the two games have to stretch out to a decently long game. In Tomb Raider this means you're constantly trying to save someone who dies as soon as you get within eye shot of them. In Uncharted you find a secret tomb that hasn't been entered in a billion years, only for it to be stocked with dead WWII soldiers and crack troops of your main adversary. You follow the secret tunnel until it inexplicably just turns into an egress which points you towards another similiarly stocked secret tunnel.

Oh yeah, and what's up with the Maori/Hawaiian dude (That has absolutely no Maori accent) supporting a rugby team that doesn't even exist?

There are also a horrific amount of bodies in this game. PILES and PILES of bodies. Farcry 3 had a decent amount, to show you it was serious. But Tomb Raider turns the bodies up to 11. Ambience = Bodies apparently. It kind of just becomes funny after a while. At one point I was sneaking under an enemy encampment that was on water. Pretty much the houses were on stilts with barrels and stuff packed under there. No ones going down here any time soon. But that didn't stop them from tying a body with no arms or head to the underside of their own home. How many people wash up on this island? Apparently all the victims from Germanys eugenics program did, plus a whole ton of fresh ones. All the surviving cultists should have died of all sorts of funky diseases by now.

I made Becky play a bit of it. She isn't particularly savvy with the puzzles or anything, but I told her the best way to play was to just wander around till you hit a cut scene.

All this bitching didn't stop me from taking a bunch of screen shots though! I'll drop some more later.

Trying to shoot someone at point blank range is harder than it looks for Lara.

Eliza - Tekken Revolution

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9

Eliza is a brand new character for Tekken. Chosen by the people of some convention. The other choice that almost won was "Sexy Female Tekken Force" & some schoolboy who totally didn't have a chance. Even further back in the running was a zombie bride. You can check out the rest of the girls here.

Today at work My boss was killing some time by looking up Reporters goofed interviews.

Boss "Man this is crazy, this interviewer confused Lawrence Fishburn & Samuel L Jackson."
Me "Ha! That's hilarious! How could he mix that up? One of them is Morpheus and the other one is God."
Boss "What?"
Me "Oh wait shit."

Flappy Bird Resources

Download the .psd here

Now that Flappy birds is off the app store and google play, it's about time we start making the parody games. I think someone should make "Fappy Birds" Where the game is exactly the same except the background is replaced with a very slow moving photoset of a lady undressing. At about the 100th pipe you might start to see some boob.

I personally think that Dong Nguyen can do whatever he likes with his games, It's really his prerogative. It kind of sucks that he wasn't ready for the Eye of Sauran to be turned on him, and it probably sucks even more for him right now trying to escape it. The more you thrash on the internet, the more people look. Right now there are a billion people in the press and on twitter spamming him with messages asking why he can't handle the jandle (With little to no self awareness to the irony, heck I guess even this post is contributing to the noise.)

If you ever read this dude, let the haters hate, and do whatever it is that makes you happy.

Bravely Default & Chainmail Bikinis

Agnès Oblige

edea lee

While I've never fully appreciated Final Fantasy as a game, I have enjoyed it as a cultural phenomenon and a piece of art. I find the hand drawn whispy stuff very evocative. Also the costumes can be pretty cool. Pitty I don't have a 3DS to try Bravely Default on. Although I suspect that the fighting would be far to slow for me. I played games like pokemon on an emulator on my PC. I constantly had the speed button held down so I could play at a pace that would grip my ADD attention.
What sort of name is Bravely Default anyway? It's like calling it "Stoic Beige" or "Valiant Sigh". I guess something was lost in translation.

I've just been thinking about chainmail bikinis. That last sentence should definitely not be extrapolated upon, let alone uttered in the first place. I think some people are unaware of the history of it. Many assume it was made up by horny fantasy artists for the covers of 70s paperbacks, usually portraying a muscled bowl cut aryan being clutched by the aforementioned chainmail bikini wearer.
Its first appearance was during the Gothic War (535-554AD) between the eastern Romans and the crude Ostrogoths. The babarian hordes, near the end of the first phase of the war, were running out of supplies and men. Their hardy women stepped up to the plate, and alongside their menfolk, got slaughtered. Although by the end of the war Italy had been devastated and would eventually crumble to the Lombards, another germanic tribe which went on to rule Italy for 200 years. The last fighters were said to be wearing nothing but torn chainmail, resembling thongs and bikinis.
Bikinis as a concept wasn't going to be popularised until the 1940s but there are early mosaics and art from the Greco-Roman world portraying women in bikini like undergarments, predating the Gothic War by 200 years.
In certain accounts during the wars Roman generals would command their men not to harm the lady warriors because "it boosted morale for pretty much everyone." and gave rise to the mythos that chainmail bikinis were in fact, pretty good at protecting their wearer, because generally the chicks were the last ones to get shot or chopped in half.
It should be noted, that while the chainmail bikinis are a mainstay in oldschool D&D artwork, running around in your undies in 4th edition earns you absolutely no AC.