In which our hero finally stopped screwing around and finally became something of a pseudo-professional freelance art-schmuck...

"Jesus Christ, Bill, where the hell have you been for the past four months?" everybody keeps asking me.

"I've been drinking martinis and crashing BMWs into busloads of retarded kids" has been my stock reply, though in this case "drinking martinis" is really just code for "designing murals for Hudson Entertainment's Bay Area headquarters" and "crashing BMWs" really just means "crafting hurriedly-rendered illustrations for the August issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly". I suppose the bit about retarded kids may be code for "drawing a kids' book about pirates", but I'm not allowed to talk about that just yet.

Anyway, here's proof that I've been doing things other than playing monstrous amounts of Halo and Catan since March:

Bioshock comes out in less than a month. Who knows if it'll be any good or not, but the production design for the game is pretty swell. It's not surprising that so many goofballs like myself are cranking out fanart for the game despite the fact that no one other than the developers (and a handful of press folk) has even played the goddamned thing yet:



You may've heard that the Super Mario 2 (the most mind-bogglingly underrated Mario game ever made) finally popped up on the Virtual Console a few weeks ago - this is me celebrating with a few vegetable-enriched doodles:







In the August issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (with Soul Caliber IV on the cover), there's a two-page splash illustration that EGM staffer Michael Donahoe and I whipped up for the burgeoning/toungue-in-cheek puzzles n' games section in the back of the magazine. Can you guess the names of the 20 videogames hidden within the illustration?



...and here's some rough sketches I cooked up while brainstorming material for the piece:







Back in May I was asked by one of the head honchos at Hudson Entertainment (the US subsidiary of the company that gave us Bomberman and Bonk) to create a mural for their Bay Area headquarters, and lo and behold, this is what they had up on their walls just in time for the Bomberman Live press event in early June:





Oh, and here's a Deathly Hallows-related doodle I pooped out last night. Turns out that Neville Longbottom is EVERYBODY'S homeslice:

Happy Valentine's Day! Oh, wait.

So yeah, I'm two weeks late. OR AM I 50 WEEKS EARLY FOR NEXT YEAR'S VALENTINE'S DAY, HMMMMMM? (Actually, this *did* make the rounds on time on the 14th, only I was two busy watching a long-term project that I'd been hired on to illustrate slowly collapse from under my feet, which was pretty entertaining, but that's a post for another day.)

And hey, whaddaya know - Minus World just keeps trucking along, and this week everybody is on their way to to the Game Develeper's Conference in San Francisco:



In other news, it seems that i'll be designing t-shirts and (I kid you not) a 10 foot x 10 foot mural for the offices of a major gaming studio sometime in the near future, so huzzah for me, fellas. (Now let's hope I didn't just jinx myself by mentioning all that out loud.)

And though this isn't particularly gaming-related (though it IS pretty geeky), here's the results of my first stab at Adobe Illustrator:



For the painfully unhip, that's a re-rendering of a photo from last Halloween depicting Dylan Meconis all dolled up as Nymphadora Tonks. Yeah, yeah, I'm retarded that way.

A month late and more than a few dollars short.

So, yeah, I'm allowed to take a month off from posting, aren't I? I've actually been busy as hell since 2007 kicked in (proof of this being the launch of Minus World over at ModernTales), so God knows I'm not lacking for content to post here - unfortunately, Minus World has been eating up most of the free time I was hoping to use to create more gaming-realated artwork to post here in this blog, so...yeah. You'll have to settle for non-gaming-related stuff like this for now (nearly all of them being pieces recently commissioned from me):



A slightly spoilerish-piece related to this summer's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.



A piece for the wonderful Brenna Zedan, whose boyfriend commissioned this as a Christmas gift for her. Seriously. She digs Judge Dredd that much. She has impeccable taste, to sya the very least.



It's Logan from Veronica Mars and Willow from Buffy done up as Star Trek folk. I would have never have thought of drawing anything like this in a million goddamned years unless someone had asked me to. And that is why the internet can sometimes - sometimes - a force for very silly good in the universe.



Hellboy. Just felt like drawin' him.



I was hired by a rug-making company to design a "videogame"-themed rug for them, practically overnight. I'm lukewarm on how it came out, but considering the time constraints I was dealing with, I suppose I could've done a lot worse.

A miserable pile of secrets. (And half-eaten pork buns.)

Happy New Year, everybody.



I also managed to whup both Dracula's and Death's asses last night in Catlevania: Portrait of Ruin, so hooray for me. That being said, I'm trying to figure out how in the hell to open up the much ballyhooed Sister's Mode that Jeremy Parish was yapping about, which sounds pretty goddamned nifty (it can't be any worse than Dawn of Sorrow's lame "TRACE THE PENTAGRAM OR DIE!"-styled use of the DS stylus. Argh.)

While we're on the subject, am I crazy, or did Portrait of Ruin's Shop Mode make the last quarter of the game a total cake walk (no pun intended)? I didn't even touch the mode until a few days ago, but once I did, I became so utterly flush with cash and rare dry goods that I was able to power my way through the last batch of bosses almost entirely on the strength of whatever cheesecakes, porterhouse steaks and strawberries I had in my possession.

(Now that I think about it, the fact that your vampire-crushing alter-ego regularly stops to chow down on a ridiculous variety of tasty foodstuffs dropped by rotting corpses...well, that may be the coolest, most ridiculous contribution to the Castlevania franchise that Iga-san has made during his decade-long tenure on the veberable series. I mean, c'mon - pausing your fight with death incarnate to gorge yourself on a bucket full of pudding? That's fucking priceless.)