Sunday Songs: Indie Game The Movie - The Red Bull

This is from the soundtrack to Indie Game: The Movie, composed by Jim Guthrie. Guthrie is famous for a lot of albums, but I know him as the guy behind Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP's soundtrack, The Ballad of the Space Babies. His music was a perfect tie for Indie Game: The Movie, which is an unmissable documentary about the personal experiences of four indie game developers trying to navigate a corporation-dominated game design world. The movie is amazing, and its Special Edition recently released, and that's just as amazing. If you have the movie on Steam, the SE bonus stuff is available as "DLC" for it, which is super cool.

Links:
Maybe You'll Get Some, Maybe You Won't
A Row of Circles
Proof of Something
Last We Spoke
Lobby Music
My Deepest Flaws and Vulnerabilities (this is named for one of my absolute favorite quotes in the movie)
I discussed Sword & Sworcery in an early Sunday Songs here, with a lot of links by the same musician!

Please. Go watch the movie.

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August of Games: Day 4 - Super Meat Boy

Love this soundtrack!

Super Meat Boy
Developer: Team Meat (Edmund McMillen & Tommy Refenes)
Genre (Setting): Retro
Genre (Gameplay): Platformer
What is this game: You play as a cube of meat whose girlfriend has been stolen by Doctor Fetus. You progress through ever-more-difficult platforming challenges until you finally win. The concept is dirt simple, but don't knock it for that.
The story of the game's development was chronicled in Indie Game The Movie! Go watch that movie.

What's great about it: It all comes down to precise controls and excellent level design. No matter how difficult the game gets, when you die, it's your fault - the controls are very well-tuned. There are a lot of levels, and some of the last ones are unbelievably hard (I should mention that I haven't beaten all the stages, not by a longshot). The levels never really get stale, always either introducing new obstacles or using the existing ones in new ways and combinations. There's a good deal of collectibles and alternate characters who function completely differently. And even once you've played all the levels, there's a decently sized community dedicated to completing levels with low death numbers or absurdly fast. Like Isaac, the Danny Baranowsky soundtrack is really really good.

How do I get it: On Steam, for $15. Also on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 Microsoft points.

Today's a short day it seems :3. Sometimes these games are just so easy to explain and what makes it amazing is something so basic and central that it doesn't take much to praise it!

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Pixel Art Lesson: Kick by cristinalubas (Anatomy, large smooth surfaces)

I have a little treasure trove of amazing songs from Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Solid State Society to post, and I'm basically just gonna abuse the fact that posts aren't Songaday and start using them when I can't think of anything else to use. This comes from Solid State Society and features one of Yoko Kanno (the general composer)'s main three singers. She uses Origa a lot, as well as Scott Matthew, but this is Ilaria Graziano! I honestly have no idea what language she's singing though - Kanno's music switches a lot, between Japanese, English, Russian, and Latin mostly, sometimes within a single song.

Today's a short one!
So this is actually pretty good! Before I get to the lesson, this may be Cristina's first submission to PixelJoint, but her deviantart (linked in her profile) shows that she's got some pretty good talent going on! Here you go Cristina, have some free publicity:
http://cristinalubas.deviantart.com/gallery/
I like this one in particular:

 

So cool art gal!

Anyway, back to Kick!

"Kick" by cristinalubas

Major Themes: Anatomy, Large Smooth Surfaces

First pixel work!
I'm still trying to get everything right, keeping practicing. Crits well seen!

So I came in after a couple of good comments by other people!
ErekT said:

Nice shading, chr design and pose :) Anatomy proportions are a bit off in some places; the shins and upper left arm (her left) are too long, while the left lower arm is too short. The hand has a painful-looking angle too. Not sure what's going on in the neck area. I think you could probably clean up some black outlines, make em continuous.

And Epoxy said:

Cool pose, but her waist is pinched and twisted at a funny angle and she seems to lack the abdominal muscles that would allow someone to do this kick.

Which are both excellent advices on anatomy. Here's what I posted to add on!

Erek and Epoxy are right that the anatomy is kinda weird - I don't have much to add in that department.
In the pixel department, it's generally pretty decent. The lightsource is kind of all over the place, coming from the left, from the right, from the top, from straight on - it's pretty inconsistent. Here, I labeled some light dirctions:

There's also a pretty good deal of banding. This results from the way you're outlining - it's not super bad or anything, but it does drag down some of the piece's aesthetic. Here's some particular spots:

The biggest issue is just the way you're handling the large stretches of similar shades, such as the arms and legs. Where things are more intricate, such as in the crotch, abdomen, or face, things look pretty great. But I think you're trying to fill space with the excessive lighting on the arms and legs. Admittedly, large smooth surfaces like those are vert difficult to make look textured. My biggest recommendation is to look carefully at fighting game sprites - I advise Street Fighter III, I think it has some visual ideas you could use. Look at Remy's images in particular - his pants are similar in style to this girl's, and could give you some ideas about how to add some visual interest without making things look kinda blob-ish.

I like the action and attitude in the piece though, and where your pixel work is more focused it gets pretty excellent, especially for a first pixel! Keep it up, I'd love to see more cool stuff from you in the future. :)

It would appear that lightsource and banding are my main things when it comes to critique. Anyway, the big thing to understand with this piece is that your context can have some major impact on what you're doing. This, while not literally a fighting game sprite, is going to be judged against its peers in the fighting game sprite world because of the similarity of subject matter, and that means knowing what you should get right. One thing that fighting game sprites are pretty awesome at is nailing anatomy. It's important to them, and they often exaggerate anatomy (see: Blanka), but it still looks "right" because it's rooted firmly in how things really would be.
But you shouldn't only be looking at fighting game sprites to compare yourself to, but also as a lesson in themselves!
Here's Remy, the guy I recommended Cristina look at:

Now, I would rather you NOT look at his jacket. Or the hair. They're banded and pillow-shaded to hell and back to give the impression of "shiny", which was really really not a good idea. Because they displayed at 2x usually on-screen, the banding doesn't pop out as atrocious, but seriously it's pretty atrocious. There are better ways. the PANTS, however, show us a very important thing: that even just plain old jeans can have all sorts of visual interest on them that catch light in various ways. This is important because of what it lets you avoid: large smooth surfaces.
Why do we want to avoid large smooth surfaces? Well, in my opinion, they're among the hardest thing in pixel art to do well. It's why faces in pixel art are hard to make look natural, because you can't smooth them easily. Our best tools are to use a million colors (bad choice), to dither (very very difficult), or to cel-shade (not always appropriate looking). If we have tricks to NOT do large flat surfaces, we should use them. And the best trick in the book is to make it not a large smooth surface, adding visual interest while remaining realistic-looking.

So that's my bit for today. I've actually been trying to improve my skill at Soul Caliber a bit lately, mostly after EVO a couple weeks ago reminded me of the depth you can go to with fighting game mechanics.
Later.

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August of Games: Day 3 - The Binding of Isaac

I feature this piece from the soundtrack for a very particular reason: to highlight one of the reasons I love Danny Baranowsky. So, this song only came into the game in Wrath of the Lamb. Now, you see, there's this guy on Youtube who does game music guitar covers and he's crazy skilled, and Danny actually included a couple of his remixes on game soundtrack albums, including Super Meat Boy! And so his guitars were so cool and Danny loved 'em so much and Jules loved Binding of Isaac a ton so Danny invited him to play the guitars for the very final boss track of the game. That's this track. Thank you Danny for being a huge badass, and thank you Jules for rockin' hard. You can find Familyjules7x at http://www.youtube.com/user/FamilyJules7X, a new cover every week!

Saturday, so it's the first Indie game! So I went with my favorite. This game easily shoves itself into contending for my top spots of games even among the triple-As, and by playtime easily exceeds them.

The Binding of Isaac
Developer: Edmund McMillen & Florian Himsl
Genre (Setting): Modern, Bodily Horror
Genre (Gameplay): Roguelike-inspired Adventure
What is this game: This is a game where you play through a modern telling of the horrifying Bible story of the same name about being willing to kill one's children as a test of faith to God. You play a little boy exploring the basement and trying to get deeper and deeper to avoid his murderous mother, overcoming any threats in his path using his tears as bullets. It uses randomized dungeons and item appearance and gameplay styled after the dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda. It is a hodgepodge of references and has no qualms about going to places most consider gross. Bodily materials are slung everywhere. Also it is very very hard when you first start - only a third of players on Steam beat the first playthrough, and there are over a dozen playthroughs to even find all the ending cutscenes.
 
What's great about it: I should pre-empt this by saying that I've played more Binding of Isaac than any other single game, ever. My Steam account has registered, as of right now, 576 hours of playtime. I have over 70 hours of recorded footage that I still need to work on before posting. I love love love this game, despite its flaws.
EDIT: Since writing this a few days ago, I've now got 580 hours.

It is hard to explain what is amazing about this game. As an Edmund McMillen game, it's well-designed and inventive, even if relatively simple in form. I think the best thing the game has going for it is sheer replayability. For a simple general mechanic, you can get quite a lot of skill at it, so you get a lot of practice. There are hundreds of items, and you'll only get a couple dozen at the most in a single run. There are a huge number of endings, and over half a dozen characters to beat everything as, each requiring their own playstyles. And because the dungeons are randomized, every playthrough goes noticeably differently. The game is nuanced and addicting, despite the issues caused by being made in Flash. There also was an enormous expansion that came out called Wrath of the Lamb, almost doubling the amount of sheer content in the game. Oh, and the music is great stuff by Danny Baranowsky.
You should see the review I posted about it way back before Wrath of the Lamb was a thing, I gush about the game and why it's great. HERE IS THAT POST
 
How do I get it: It's on Steam! For the enormous price of $5, and it is put on sale extremely often. It has periodically been a participant in the Humble Indie Bundles. The expansion costs $3, and is also often on sale. It is currently being entirely remade in dedicated language rather than Flash, with another WotL-size update. This game, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, is 16-bit and completely rebalance the power scale of the game as well as adding a huge host of new features, and will be available on PS3, Vita, Steam, and potentially Xbox 360, 3DS, and iOS. It is expected to come out in early 2014, so perhaps wait for that, but the game is so dirt cheap most of the time that you might as well try it out.

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Art: Anna Paquin's Rogue in Charcoal

EDIT: Whoops, forgot a song! this is from Shadowrun Returns, which I haven't played yet, but its soundtrack is pretty good, especially when it's action-y.

So, I went to see The Wolverine yesterday. It was good - not incredible, but good. Much much better than Origins Wolverine or X3, and a different beast than the (also excellent) First Class. In excitement for going, I watched the first two X-Men movies the night before, and still liked them. All in all, they got me very excited for next year's Days of Future Past movie. My favorite character is coming back! And if you read the title, you know it's Rogue. I really like the movie Rogue, and having not had her in the X-Men movies since 2006, it'll be super good to see her again. And Magneto has all his power back now, so Rogue probably does too, though honestly I don't care because silly high school drama between her, Bobby, and Kitty was absolutely the best part of X3 (though that's not saying much :/).

Oh wait, this post is about art.
Well, here, for reference, let's have a screenshot of movie Rogue. I think it's from the end of the first movie, but it's off of Google so I can't be sure.

I was feeling art-y at the time, and I guess I was feeling a bit confident/ambitious too, because trying to capture an actress' likeness isn't a thing I've tried really doing before. I did some life drawing in my Drawing class, but that's not quite the same. I don't think I did perfect, but I think I did well!

The actual image is very very big, but click on it if you want! I'm pretty happy with it. I hope you agree. Maybe I'll take on a different real person sometime. I don't think I quite nailed the expression, but it's pretty decent still, even in that regard.
It's charcoal on paper (if I'd known it would've been a real project I would've used something with a bit more texture - charcoal gives those weird streaks you see in the hair on paper), with a mild amount of color-correction in GIMP to adjust weird photograph stuff.

August of Games: Day 2 - Mass Effect 2

I've always loved the club music in the Mass Effect games, and the clubs in Mass Effect 2 are the best. Upper Afterlife and Dark Star are the sweet as hell.

Mass Effect 2
Developer: Bioware (EA)
Genre (Setting): Science Fiction (Futuristic)
Genre (Gameplay): Third-Person Shooter, RPG 
What is this game: In this game you play as a famous soldier who joins a radical group (who might be terrorists) to prevent galactic destruction. You collect a whole lot of crew members and develop your relationships with them while investigating mass abductions of human colonies. There are a lot of aliens and a very large sense of scale. You have lots of conversations with a lot of branching options with lots and lots and LOTS of lore, you shoot things as a fairly traditional 3rd-person cover shooter, your decisions in the previous game affect the circumstances of this one and your choices in this one have large impacts on the following, with lots of different paths for the story to take.
 
What's great about it: Extraordinary sci-fi character design, both in the design of the species and in the design of individuals. Gun design, environment design, whatever, this is a very carefully thought out game, and there is an amazing artbook called The Art of the Mass Effect Universe released by Dark Horse Comics (same folks who do Naughty Dogs' artbooks). As a shooter, it's basically average, though enjoyable, and not quite intense in the same way as Gears of War. The real power of the game comes from building connections with your crew. Each has a distinct and memorable personality (minus Jacob :/), and if you take the time to keep going and talking to them, it becomes a very fulfilling experience. Some feel it's just one long party-building quest without a decent number of things to do with those crew members, and that's a valid complaint, but especially when taken in combination with the others in the trilogy it isn't really an issue.
It is the other side of the tie with Metroid Prime for my favorite game.
 
How do I get it: You can buy Mass Effect 1 and 2 on Steam, and all of them of Origin, Xbox 360, and PS3. Mass Effect 3 is also on the Wii U. They also sell a "Mass Effect Trilogy" collection of all the games on 360, PC, and PS3, with different amounts of DLC pre-installed depending on the platform (PS3 has the most). Independently, Mass Effect 1 costs $15 on Origin and $20 on Steam, Mass Effect 2 costs $20 on both Origin and Steam, and Mass Effect 3 costs $20 on Origin. The Trilogy costs $40, regardless of platform, which, frankly, is a pretty good deal on PS3 for 3 great games and all of the important DLC from Mass Effect 2.

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August of Games: Day One - Metroid Prime

Phendrana Drifts remains one of my favorite game locales, and the song has a lot to do with that.

Summer. Traditionally a season opened with the excitement of E3 (or at least it's supposed to be exciting - this year it was at least! Even if all the excitement was at Microsoft's expense), and then characterized by a distinct drought of games releases. It's not empty of games, especially as the console generation winds down and everyone wants to get their games out before the PS4 comes out for the holiday and overshadows everything (okay yeah the Xbox One releases too but does anyone care at this point?). It's still pretty dry though. Of course I'll talk about things as they show up (and then not buy them because my money goes elsewhere) but that's not the main theme of this month! The daily event for this month is going to be about games that already came out that I want to praise and talk about without writing big review posts!
Every day I will feature one game, discussing, without going off the deep end of analysis, the pros and cons of the game and why you should totally play it. I'll be featuring some of my favorite stuff, but it won't be in any particular order. There is a caveat, however! I'm pretty into the indie video game scene, and I think that a lot of those games could use the extra exposure, and you readers coud use some games that maybe you haven't heard of before. For those purposes, I've reserved Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays for indie titles.
31 days. 31 games. 18 mainstream, 13 from the independent world, all high quality affairs.
This isn't Songaday at its heart. However, my standard habit of posting a song at the top of every post and posting daily means that this will have the same outcome: 31 songs, without overlapping sources. I'm not elaborating on them though, and not adding links. Sunday Songs is still on track to happen every week.

Metroid Prime
Developer: Retro Studios (Nintendo)
Genre (Setting): Science Fiction (Futuristic)
Genre (Gameplay): First Person Shooter, heavy Adventure elements
What is this game: This is a game where you play as a lady in a robosuit and investigate a space pirate facility and a meteor that is spreading horrible radiation and mutation all over the planet. You shoot things with a variety of beams and look around with a variety of visors and do a lot of exploring. There's Samus and Space Pirates and Ridley and metroids and chozo and a lot of lore and reading if you want to learn lots of things and be immersed in the world.
What's great about it: The shooter stuff is pretty decent, though why they didn't use the second analog stick for looking around is beyond me. The lock-on is good, the exploration is interesting, the art design is incredible and makes the outdated-by-now graphics still look really really nice. The music is great, and as a guy who's a HUGE sucker for lore-heavy sci-fi, the enormous Logbook is, like, the best thing ever. It was good enough to inspire me to name my blog for it. The story is extremely loose if you don't scan stuff, but leads well into the events of the other two games in the Metroid Prime series. The game is even better in retrospect now that we've seen the third, as it shows the foreshadowing and planning that went into the series.
Metroid Prime Trilogy improved it further by taking the somewhat iffy aiming mechanic and twisting it into a much more natural light-gun style mechanic for the Wii. Trilogy is pretty much the best thing ever and it is currently tied in the top spot as my Favorite Game.
Oh, and the soundtrack is pitch-perfect in the first, and still excellent in the follow-ups.
How do I get it: On the Gamecube? Well, it was Player's Choice so it was just $20 for a long time. Finding a new Gamecube copy could be pretty tough now if not impossible. However, a used copy is probably quite cheap, if you don't mind a weirder control scheme.
On the Wii you can buy Metroid Prime Trilogy, with all three games on one disc with the new control scheme from 3. It's fantastic. It does, however, seem to be out of print, which means that a lot of the time it gets sold for LOTS. It has the advantage of being playable on the Wii U still, since Gamecube discs aren't compatible. If we're very, very lucky, maybe they'll start putting Gamecube games on the Virtual Console and put this up. And as Nintendo has been discovering with Wind Waker HD, converting games to HD can be HARD (if you actually put work into it like they tend to), so I kinda doubt they'll be up for a real update anytime soon.

Seeya tomorrow!
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