History 3 - Facial Awesomification

               I want to talk about art styles in this modern generation of gaming. It’s always something I’m interested in. When a game dares to go away from a realistic art style and make something interesting and new, I always love it.

 The first thing that comes to mind is Legend of Zelda Wind Waker for the Nintendo Gamecube. When it was released in 2002 and 2003 at first the Nintendo community was outraged. They didn’t want the cartoony cell-shaded art style, although now it has a lot of love. The reason for this is that Nintendo gamers were promised far more when it came to the Gamecube’s Zelda title. At the Spaceworld event in 2000 gamers were shown this ; 

 A 3D Link with a similar design to the Link players knew and loved from the N64 era, looking marvelous in the new Gamecube graphics. But instead we got who is now lovingly called Toon Link. 

Using cell shading technology the Great Ocean in Wind Waker looked like a cartoon world, every character full of emotion. While gamers were outraged at the time, now Wind Waker is loved so much it got re released in HD on the Wii U (which doesn’t seem entire necessary but sure does it sell).

 Even though its not such a dirastic change, the art style in Bioshock Infinite is devine, and not just because it’s currently my favourite game of all time. The game was first designed with far more realistic faces and proportions on characters, but it was all changed for one reason. Emotion. Ken Levine, developer of Irrational Games and Bioshock Infinite decided to scrap using Motion Capture for the faces of the characters because he believed that animating the facial features of Elizabeth by hand would make her have far more character and emotion. You can see her more proportioned face before hand in early art and oddly enough in the televised trailer for Bioshock Infinite. 

 Personaly, I think this choice was amazing. Elizabeth, your companion throughout the whole game, is entirely important to the game, and her emotions doubly so. At any time in the game you can look at her and just see the look in her Disney like eyes and see her point of view. Brilliant choice.

 Similiarly, in Bethesda’s game Dishonoured every character has a far more caricature like appearance and the entire world has a more painted look. This graphical style makes the game far more interesting and stopped it from blending into obscurity.

 It’s interesting to me how now a practically photo-realistic human could be made in video games and yet sometimes going away from that look can make a far more interesting graphical style.

History 2 - RAW! JAGUAR!

 In the early 90s the video game market was owned by Nintendo and Sega. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis were the two major consoles on the market, both consoles being 16 bit systems. The early 90s was a period of time called the Bit Wars by some. Many people didn't even know what Bits were aside from better graphics, but they knew they wanted more bits. In basic terms, having the amount of bits a system had meant how many bits one element could handle at a time, more bits meant a faster system with better capabilities. This meant that advertising was filled by talk of bits.

Now Atari in the past used to be king of the video game industry, but were falling behind in the Console wars right now. But just like in life, in the console wars when you play the game of thrones you win or you die. But Atari had experience and age on their side. Their attempt to get back the crown of console gaming, which currently was being shared by mostly Nintendo and Sega, is something that really interests me. That's mostly why I'm doing one of these big blog posts about it, obviously.

 The Atari Jaguar!

 First of all, what a brilliant name for a console. It sounded aggressive and badass, the perfect name for a console trying to regain the crown! It was released over a year between 1993 and 1994 with a mass of advertising campaigns, all boasting one key thing about the Jaguar. It was a 64 bit console. This first came out in America far before the Sony Playstation which was still only a 32 bit system, and the N64 another 64 bit system wouldn't come out for a couple more years. So obviously they wanted to advertise the 64 bit system! And they did. Hilariously.

They even insulted the other systems:

 Now why wasn't the Jaguar a super success? Because it wasn't actually 64 bit. Well, it was and it wasn't . Technically, the Jaguar did have 64 bits of processing power, but it actually used a mix of processors, 32 and 16 bit, to add up to 64 bit. This ended up making the console actually weaker than the 32 bit Playstation, which Atari's CEO even admitted. So, people didn't like it. In 1995 after the release, Atari lost over half of their revenue. The stockholders were so frustrated Atari released this message to them :

From the introduction of Jaguar in late 1993 through the end of 1995, Atari sold approximately 125,000 units of Jaguar. As of December 31, 1995, Atari had approximately 100,000 units of Jaguar in inventory.

You would think after being so central to the Video Game Crash of the 80s that Atari would know better and would be able to avoid such a universal failure. That being said however, supposedly the Jaguar still has a very active fan-base, and home made games are still made for the system. So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

Now I need more practice in 3Ds Max. That much is obvious. But if you consider I've only been using the program for about 6 weeks, I think I'm doing rather okay. I just finished my old building project; I had chosen the stupidest building to build though. 

 (the photoshop overlays I used for the textures wont remove from the render though, so thats a slight worry.)

 I think its okay. It's not industry standard but it's okay, considering I'm still a student and all. I made alot of mistakes but really, if you don't make the mistakes how will you know how to avoid them? That's how I'm looking at it anyway. Next on my list is to watch a bunch of Mike Pickton videos on unwrapping and texturing, as for now that seems to be how I keep messing up. 

I need to get better at not losing things. This is like the 4th time I've left or lost a USB stick with work on it. Really what this SHOULD teach me is to back up my work more often so when this does happen, it wont waste about 4 hours of work. Ah well, at least I can learn some new things by re-doing it. Look on the bright side of life and all that jazz.

The end of Gamings honeymoon phase

 The British public information series Protect and Survive, made in the late 1970s during the nuclear threat of the cold war, was voted number 89 in a Channel 4 poll of 100 scariest moments. This was above even Dracula. During the 1980s the cold war was terrifying, and at any time the entire world could of been obliterated in nuclear hellfire. I for one, am not interested in living in the Fallout Universe as a Ghoul.

 And that's what we're here to talk about isn't it? Video games. I already talked about the Magnavox Odyssey and how it shaped the gaming industry (sort of). Truth is the Odyssey started the idea of a cartridge based gaming system, which was then elevated to the level of godhood by the Atari 2600. In the early 80s the Arcades were the homeland of gaming.  Companies all over the world were trying to get in on the Arcade money by making home consoles. Everyone wanted to take the Arcade experience home, and with home consoles like the Atari 2600 that was possible!

 Unfortunately as everyone was trying to get in on taking the home console money, that lead to everyone making their own consoles. So many consoles being made is one of the key reasons for the 1983 Video Game crash, although there were other key factors of course.  One of the most hilarious reasons to me is the E.T. Game. Not only was this game so bad that most copies of the game were dumped in the desert, but it also cost Atari somewhere between 20-25 million dollars in trying to get the rights for the game.

 Out of the ashes came the Nintendo Entertainment System, the all holy NES. This started a key change in the market, where the main video game consoles were American in origin to Japanese, which didn't change back for some time. Now part of the problem with Atari is that almost anyone could make an Atari game and sell it en masse. Many games were literal advertisements, such as the Kool-Aid Man game, made purely to sell a product. Nintendo solved this problem by checking all third party developers and keeping them on a leash. Of course unlicensed games were still made, but Nintendo's efforts are thought to have stopped a second Market crash.

 Another great survivor of the Market Crash was the PC. Gaming as we know today formed from the 80s with the steps made by Nintendo and the new PC gaming industry. Such historic games as Zork and The Legend of Zelda started to form genres that we know and love today! PC's got more and more powerful, media PC's with more powerful screens and speakers made gaming on PC more and more able, eventually leading to games such as ID Softwares Wolfenstein 3D (which may of been made in 1992 but its pretty important), which were revolutionary and brilliant at the time. This generation of games with its monumental lows and highs set the stage for gaming for THE REST OF TIME!

So I just had my first big 3D Max crash. Luckily not too much work was lost, only like 1 hour as opposed to an entire lost project.