Back in 2006, I was getting back into painting - something I hadn't done in almost 10 years. I had been looking at a lot of early American painters and had been interested in a certain period of (mostly New-England) portraiture and was looking to do something similar. The "I am 8-Bit" art show had come out the previous year and I got to thinking about the great portraits of the Punch-Out fighters in the between-rounds screens. In less than a month I knocked out this series of 11 paintings. They are all oil on canvas board. Each opponent is 8" x 10" and the portrait of Mac and Doc is 12" x 16". Enjoy:


You can see some of the process these went through here if you're interested.

In a recent article, With Obama election comes the return of the vampire, San Diego Tribune's Peter Rowe theorizes that the popularity of Zombie and Vampire movies come in waves based on which political party controls the government. He argues that Obama's win ushers in a new age of vampire fiction, pointing to True Blood and Twilight as early indicartors.

“Democrats, who want to redistribute wealth to 'Main Street,' fear the Wall Street vampires who bleed the nation dry,” Newitz argued, noting that Dracula and his ilk arose from the aristocracy. “Republicans fear a revolt of the poor and disenfranchised, dressed in rags and coming to the White House to eat their brains.”

Even if he's right, I'm not sure if the same thing works with games. The first Castlevania games came out during Reagan's Presidency and Resident Evil came out at the end Clinton's first term. Both are Japanese though, so it's hard to argue that American politics would have had a role in inspiring them except for maybe a role in influencing their US sales.

I think overall, zombies are more interesting for games, especially when game AI is rarely smarter then your average zombie. Most vampire games I can think of are Japanese except the Buffy and White Wolf games. Bethesda puts vampires in their games, but I can't think of anything that's been announced that will feature them heavily in the next few years.  Anyone know of any upcoming titles that might hint at a trend?

At the time they were released, both Half-Life games, to some degree, led first-person shooters into new and somewhat unexpected directions.

While a few previous games had incorporated narrative elements successfully, Half-Life brought a sense of realism to its world with the use of simple non-combatant non-player characters and Half-Life 2 expanded on the believability of those NPCs and incorporated physics and environmental interaction to a greater degree than any other game of its time.

While the Half-Life 2 episodes have been able to extend Gordon Freeman's world and continue to make use of the once-innovative physics gameplay of the source engine and Portal pushed the use of the engine in impressive new ways, the series is still essentially rooted in linear level design and storytelling.

Now with even first-person games like Far Cry 2 and Crysis making use of the kind of open world  and non-linear, mission-based gameplay that has defined a whole genre of third person games like GTA and Mercenaries, is it possible for the Half-Life series to innovate in any way while still sticking to a linear style of gameplay and narrative? Is it possible to advance the story of Gordon Freeman in an open world or would that diminish the series as a whole?

I don't know what Valve has in store for Gordon Freeman and his associates in their long awaited sequel. I'm assuming new technologes like the gravity gun and portal gun will play a significant role. The people at Valve are incredibly talented and I feel like they will be able to do something big and new with the game's third installment, but I worry that by the time we get to the game's release, that a linear, first-person shooter will feel like a dinosaur.

Though stealth games seem to be in a sort of decline of their own as the Metal Gear games add more action sequences and Splinter Cell moves in a direction more in-line with Assassin's Creed, tracing the path of Tenchu's decline from its humble beginnings on the PlayStation to the frustrating mess that was Tenchu Z on the 360 is a pretty sad endeavor.

Historically, video games have enjoyed a great wealth of titles starring ninjas, but most, like the Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi games, have relied on over-the-top action and martial arts combat. Released the same year as the original Metal Gear: Solid, but drawing heavily from gameplay developed in the 2D Metal Gear games, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins was the first ninja game to allow players to feel like a true ninja assassin. Stealth gameplay has been featured in small doses in everything from Zelda games to survival horror, but Tenchu offered a quality of pure stealth gameplay that was second only to the MGS series and totally unique in its setting and atmosphere.

The series peaked with its third installment which was released on the PS2 as Wrath of Heaven and later on the XBOX as Return from Darkness. With the graphic power of the PS2, the game captured the essence of the PS1 games with tight controls, exciting stealth kills and a satisfying co-op mode.
Subsequent releases, including portable ones on the DS and PSP, have only served to disappoint fans of the originals with lazy programming, frustrating controls, pointless features like build-a-character and storylines that drift ever further away from the one established in the first 3 games.

In the time since Tenchu Z's release, franchise owner From Software has addressed the decline of the series and expressed a desire to put the game in the hands of different developers. This year, the release of Tenchu 4, developed for the Wii by Acquire, the company that delivered the original Japanese version of Stealth Assassins known as Dimensional Ninja Action Movie: Tenchu, will serve as the final test of whether this series, and possibly if pure stealth games as a whole, can survive in the current generation.