Dave McKean

This guy, I completely adore and admire as an artist. His style is so different and unique. 
The thing that got me hooked to him was a film called Mirrormask based on a story by Neil Gaiman along side Dave McKean make an amazing team. 



In a fantasy world of opposing kingdoms, a 15-year old girl named Helena who works at the family circus with her father and mother, who wishes--quite ironically--that she could run away from the circus and join 'real life'. But such is not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into the Dark Lands, a fantastic landscape filled with giants, Monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. She must find the fabled MirrorMask in order to save the kingdom and get back home.

Through out the film you can see his work in every pixel, the colours the ideas the dark and eeriness of the characters. His style is so child like but it's as if it has a dark side to it. Something that you would find hiding under the bed at night. 
I like the way how bold the line work is and also the scratchy technique. But then he layers up alot of his work with images and colour and helps to blend and creates more from a simple image to an entire world.


   

Game journalism...

Game journalism hasn't exactly been something I have ever take a thought to think about, not really something that floats about my brain of clouds, zombies, gore and unicorns. From what I have read game journalism seems to be a stupidly hard and fast job to even begin with. Having to review games after games after games and not actually having the right amount of time to actually give a full and well thought out review.
Game journalists have been seen as 'corrupt, lazy and fundamentally stupid' well to be entirely honest do you blame them at all? they aren't really that lazy just they seemed to be crammed with constant amount of work. Although this does give a bad impression, it seems that a journalist needs to be able to relate to the game as a gamer so that the audience can get the good and the bad aspect or otherwise it would become biased and unfair depending on what side they have taken.
Without game journalism we wouldn't get the wide variety of knowledge of games that are on release or even games that have been out for a while and they are re-reviewing it, this can help the game get back into popularity or to show people that there are other styles and types of games out there. This is another point about how game journalism helps, it gives the audience a quick over view of something that they might want to try out but are unsure and that extra push or kick. I know for a fact that I have been influenced by game reviews to by games such as assassins creed. It wasn't really something that interested me until I read about it in a games magazine, not just by reading a review helps but also the rating like 10 out of 10 or 4 out of 5 stars. This can give the audience an idea of how amazing the game is but can't this be misleading? Just because a certain game has 9 out of 10 doesn't necessarily mean that its going to 9 out of 10 for the audience, everyone has their own opinion on something and no one is going to have the exact same thought.
Thinking about objective and subjective, can there actually be a subjective and objective view on games? To be honest not really, like I said not every game is going to make every gamer love them, for example not everyone love Call of Duty or even Skyrim, but i'm sure if you said this out loud that Skyrim sucks then you might get a bottle thrown at your head, (I know that is something that could possibly happen in class) but its true not everyone is going to like everything, its not possible.

New Game Journalism...urm what is that?

I have actually only just found out about this as been told to write this blog. New game journalism or NGJ is what I think better, its being told you as the audience what the game is like for the gamer and how it feels to play it, instead of it being statistically being reviewed. It seems so much easier to understand a review when it has been written this way, it reaches out to the audiences better; well in my opinion and for me it is.

Hmmm what sort of person am I? I can say I'm more of a subjective person, I like to speak my mind and just say what I think and not effectively have the influence of others. I've been told to write this blog but its my blog and my own personal space, so I can right it in the way I want to, even if the grammar is slightly bad and doesn't quiet make sense.

Personal gaming history

One of the most earliest and memorable game that come to my mind straight away would be Gods created by The Bitmap Brothers, and playing it on my Grandpa's Amiga. Gods was a simple jump and run platform game, but it seemed so much more than that. The player is the character Hercules and they fight their way through 4 levels. At the end of each level there was a boss that you had to defeat, the fun behind trying to defeat the bosses was that they started to learn what abilities you had such as bouncing axes to fireballs, which you had earlier attained during the game.

    
Using a Joystick to maneuver Hercules was quite difficult, you had to jump at the right time and shoot at oncoming enemies. The music for this makes me instantly remember, spending all the time I was at my Grandparents playing this or another memorable game. The other game most memorable to me was Discworld, from the Terry Pratchett series;


A point and click adventure game as the not so magical Rincewind the wizard (voiced by Eric Idle). The game itself is so brightly colourful and well created in my mind. The characters are amazing and you can instantly tell they are from the eyes of Terry Pratchett; from the stupidity of Rincewind to the vulgar language from Death (who is my favourite character). Even though I was about 8 or 9 years old, my Grandpa still insisted I played along with the characters and followed the story and helped to discover the problems amongst the Unseen University and why there was a huge red dragon sitting on top of the Palace, which no one seemed to notice.

There are so many games! Age of Empires released in 1997 is a strategy based game. Choosing from a variety of civilisations and building up through the Stone age to the Iron age. There were two more expansions  to this game which made the game more varied, by adding new and different civilisations and being able to play online. The Age of Empires series has always been something that has been on my desktop. Age of Empires 2 is my favourite out of the series of the three main games. Even though the graphics are not amazing, its something that I am used to. Even now I set up multi-player games across 4 computers in my house with my brothers, its so much fun; Building and creating your empire and then creating an army and taking out the opponent.

Diablo and Diablo 2 created by Blizzard was something I spent hours just sitting and watching my dad play, it fascinated me with the idea of being a hero and killing different types and styles of monsters and having to keep your life and mana up. I finally plucked up the courage and asked my dad if I could play, even though it was rated a 15 I think I started playing it when I was about 9 or 10. Just thinking now... How long is it taking until Blizzard release Diable 3? Its taking for ever.

Moving onto a different console, Playstaion is one of my favourite consoles to date. I just find it amazing, the first games I got with my bundle that I can remember are; Spyro, Crashbandicoot, Gex and Tecken. I still have all of my Playstation kit and games, refusing to sell any of it...maybe because I still play most of the games. After the Playstation I upgraded and bought a Playstaion 2 and with that the games consisted of Spyro (i have a passion and love for spyro the dragon, even thought the PS2 games were very bad) Crash, Kingdom Hearts (my love for disney), Final Fantasy, Sonic and Rayman.

Online gaming is something I have done, and yes its World Of Warcraft. I don't actually know how long I have been playing 'wow', I have acquired four level 85 characters, and a fair few other lower characters which contain a level 75 druid and a 70 death knight. I actually love the game but for the questing, exploring and the ideas. But recently I have started to lack interest because of the amount of changes and add-ons Blizzard have done to it. They have made the game much easier than the original 'vanilla wow' (first game it started with).



The reason behind why I became interested in playing World of Warcraft was before this there was a game called Warcraft. Just like the idea of Age of Empires this contained different races such as night elves and orcs. Looking back at it now, the expansion packs that the original game had are the story line in which the online game has acquired.

I also play Xbox 360 games such as; Call of Duty, Gears of War, Skyrim, Fable and Final Fantasy. I think the Xbox 360 is amazing, the general quality of graphics is amazing as I've just looked back on what I used to play. I'm the sort of person that would try any game out before judging it, even if it has bad reviews or other people have said its not worth the time.
In the future of gaming I hope that there will always be different styles of graphics (finding it hard to explain) and that not everything will look the same. I think there is going to be something amazing, like actually being able to be within the game and becoming your own character. Games have just become more and more amazing, and I don't think there is anything in the way stopping them to keep on being unpredictable and new and fresh.