Skeleton dance

Just a few more doodles celebrating the season:

Nimble little minx, ain't she?

The closer it gets to Halloween the harder it's gonna be to keep from drawing Frankensteins, vampires and Hellboys every day.

Note to self:

I need to draw a real comic about Mega Man cannibalizing other robots Hannibal Lector-style someday (I like the idea that the boss robots from all the Mega Man games have merely been innocent victims of MM's violent, insatiable lust for silicon and energy tanks).

Ker-boom

A promotional doodle I whipped up for a long-brewing comic of mine called Anne Frank Conquers the Moon Nazis - this will probably show up in a pitch package before the end of the year.

Pretty self-explanatory.

Professor Layton and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls

While illustrating a few kids' books this past winter, I blew off steam by tearing my way through both Assassin's Creed and Professor Layton at the same damned time. The funny part is that I didn't get a chance to finish either of them after I was completely sideswiped by The World Ends With You (which hadn't even been on my radar until I saw a Jeremy Parish-powered preview for the game on the 1up Show), but that's another post for another day.

I HAVE TRAVELED A YEAR AND ONE DAY INTO THE FUTURE!

Funny how I was thinking about how I hadn't updated this blog in a while when I suddenly realized that yesterday was the one-year anniversary since I'd posted anything here at all. OY.

Anyway, at least I have an excuse as I've been one hell of a busy bee these past 12 months, as this trio of double-page spreads that I concocted for EGM can attest to:







I have a ton more stuff to post (some of it gaming-related, some of it not), which is handy since I plan on posting much more regularly from here on out.

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.)

God bless the Xbox Live Marketplace.

One of thew things that sucks about being a freelance artist (aside from the burpy cash flow) is that it leaves little time for actually playing games, especially anything as long-winded as Twilight Princess (which has been collecting dust for the better part of a month).

I have been tinkering around with quite a bit of Wii Sports however (199 bowling score last night, BOOYEAH!), some Virtual Console games, and much more importantly - my brand-spanking new Xbox 360. The funny thing about that is that because my time (and cash flow) has been so scattershot recently, I've been using the console almost exclusively to download bite-sized game demos, who'se 10-15 minute-time-duration is custom suited to my current work schedule. (That didn't keep me from picking up a used $15 of Perfect Dark Zero, though, which is a sordid tale in of itself. Bleh.)

Anyway, a quick recap of my most recent week in gaming:

- Lost Planet (XB360): A fucking fantastic little demo, despite the fact that combat with ice monsters ("shoot the glowing spot!") and energy-lozenge/health system is about as sophisticated as anything you'd see in a 20 year old NES game. The game's graphics (and creature animation, in particular) are fantastic, and the sound design is top-notch. I only hope the finished game features as much mech-based combat as the demo does. Christ, I sound like a plant.

- Gunstar Heroes (VC): Hey, this game actually lives up to some of the hype spewed by it's rabid cult following! It's the lovechild that Contra/Ninja Gaiden/Metal Slug would've producedh after a 3-day long clusterfuck in the Bahamas.

- Alien Crush (VC): Only one pinball map for $6? Feh!

- Ice Hockey (VC): Not nearly as good as my 12-year-old self remembers it being, but what can you do? The Skinny/Medium/Fat team-building dynamic still cracks me up, though.

- Dead Rising (XB360): Holy fucking Christ on a crutch, folks werent kidding when they were kicking and screaming about how stupidly small the text in this game is. How hard would it have been for Capcom to let the player toggle the text output depending on his/her television's resolution? Again, feh.

That said, the demo of Dead Rising is pretty fantastic (bowling balls! baseball bats! katanas!), though I have the sneaking suspicion that the full game is little more than the demo spread across more mall acreage and punctuated with more god-awful cutscenes. Thanks, but no thanks.

- Perfect Dark Zero (XB360): Yeah, I went ahead and picked this up despite all warnings to the contrary - what can I say? I was a huge fan of Goldeneye/PD on the N64, and I thought this game might recapture at least a little bit of that magic, but all it really does is make my ass itch.

The funny thing is that PDZ's gameplay isn't really bad at all (crummy level design aside) - it's just that everything *surrounding* the gameplay in seems custom-designed to rape your eyeballs and make you wish you were dead. I know that this was a first-generation game and that Rare was hoping to make as much use of the 360's graphical effects as possible, but why did that mean that every single goddamned texture in the game has look like it'd been shrink-wrapped in 6 inches of plastic wrap? And sure, the writing/story in the first PD game was silly, but PDZ sets a operatic standard for amaingly bad storytelling (a bad guy named "Killlian"> Are you fucking kidding me?)

And don't even get me started about the game's character designs - the simple fact that when you boot up PDZ's deathmatch mode you find yourself in the guise of a goggle-eyed teenaged girl wearing Chuck Taylors and 15 pounds of bangles BENEATH some hilariously stupid-looking Lazer Tag armor (complete with bicycle helmet!)...well, that pretty much says everthing about the game you'd ever need to know.

That said, I DID have a pretty productive week on the art side of things, and managed to finish a few strips that'll be part of a new game-related webcomic that I'll be launching on Christmas day:

They call me Mister Aids.

So, November was a crazy gaming month here at the Purple Palace - not only are we hosts to those two brand-new Wiis that I mentioned before, but Anne and I also managed to scoop up one of those much-sought after $100 Xbox 360 core units that nearly brought Amazon.com to it's knees a few weeks ago.

Even cooler is that Joshin picked up a 360 harddrive as a birthday gift for yours truly, so I've been spending a ridiculous portion of the past few days getting my ass kicked in Halo 2 by foul-mouthed children from all over the world.

In other news: the Wii forum for which I created some avatar artwork has gone live, so check it out if you're starving for up-to-the-minute Wii-related-news throughout the day. (And I guess this as good a time as any to post the artwork I created for said site):

Mr. Tinkles was the kind of guy that rooted for bad guys in the movies.

As far back as I can remember....




...I always wanted to be a small, strangely-hatted dwarf living in a community populated solely by gibberish-spewing animals.







To me, being a small, strangely-hatted dwarf living in a community
populated solely by gibberish-spewing animals was better than being
president of the United States.



Even before I went to Tom Nooks
for an after-school job...



...I knew I wanted to be a part of them.




It was there that I knew I belonged.
To me, it meant being somebody.....in a neighborhood full of nobodies.

They weren't like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted. They
trampled Miss Kitty's flowerbed and stole her fruit. They crafted
constellation designs of an unspeakably pornographic nature. They
chopped down their neighbors' trees and left leaf-shaped garbage
strewn all over the beach.

When they played K.K. Samba all night....
...nobody ever called the cops.



So, the day I got busted for posession of stolen fruit was a busy day. I had tod drop a Thanksgiving-themed sofa off at Jimmy's to match the curtains he had. I had to pick up my townmate from the train station, and on the way home, plant some flower seeds for Tom Nook. On top of all that, I had a shipment of dinosaur bones from Mr. Snuffles that needed to be delivered to that damned owl at the museum...



Now here I am, in facing 13 charges of flower trampling, accepting stolen stationary from Poopytown, and defacing Stink City's public message board.

So unless an advance copy of Animal Crossing DS graces my mailbox this week, I'll have to wait around to relive the good ol' days like everyone else. Hell, I can't even get a decent Gyroid these days - right after I got here, I asked for a mini Gargloid, and instead I was given a Drinky Bird toy with a "Happy Birthday" song-chip buried in it's miserable little head. I'm an average nobody... get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.