I just realized while playing a bit of Soul Calibur 4 at work that the Apprentice (or whatever Jr. McEmo’s name is) is really nothing more than a re-inventing of Luke Skywalker.
Granted, he looks nothing like Luke, but he’s young, emotionally driven, and pouts when he loses.  I fully expect him to whine about wanting [...]

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More general design nonsense tonight (it comes back to gaming eventually, stick with me here), but I was smiling walking out of seeing Wall-E thinking about the character designs for Wall-E and Eva. On the surface, they’re simple enough. One’s a boy. The other a girl. One’s old. One’s new. [...]

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I really, really want to get my hands on some kind of Euphoria demo, in order to either support or assuage my fears regarding the “better than rag doll” solution that Natural Motion has come out with, but I just can’t get over all of the tiny voices in the back of my head that [...]

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A friend of mine interviewed awhile back for a position as a major recent 3rd Person Shooter’s Lead Animator position, and he recently told me about how surprised he was that their pipeline for putting animations into the game consisted entirely of keyframed animations. While this might seem odd to you, as a game [...]

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Not to single out any of the characters in TF2 (they’re all fantastic personalities), but I’ve been playing a lot of Pyro lately, mainly because once you learn how to play it it can be a pretty brainless class if you want it to be. I haven’t had a ton of time to play [...]

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Commenter Harvey James posted an interesting image earlier about his own research he started doing after seeing the GLaDOS Bondage piece from earlier this week, and I wanted to link it here, because as it turns out, Valve did use Botticelli’s Venus as their inspiration (as the director’s commentary stated) for GLaDOS.  It’s just really [...]

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The first time I saw GlaDOS in Portal, I was overcome with a distinct sensation that I was in the presence of someone in pain. Troubled. At the very least, immense frustration. At first I wasn’t sure if it was the gyrations of the physical construct of GlaDOS, or if it was [...]

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Okay, so the Daily Mail’s review of violent video games might be the most laughable tripe that side of the pond, but oh sweet zombie jebus, their photoshop skills are worse. They ran this image of Anne Diamond, their “expert” on violent video games (can you hear my eyes rolling?), which on the surface [...]

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Awhile back, when Super Street fighter II Turbo HD Remix (ST HD for short) announced and started showing their newly drawn sprites, I had two reactions, in this order:

Holy shit!
How are they going to animate that?

Evidently I wasn’t the only one wondering, because they’ve just announced that their outsourcers couldn’t handle the 6 tones per [...]

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