Cups of Tea 0562 - 0570

Missing days again... dew dew. Yesterday was a wasted day in terms of productive graphic design as I couldn't sleep the night before... I woke up uber late and then as the day was already gone, Read the entirety of Scott Pilgrim 1 - 6 (as I finally got the 6th one 'delivered') and then went for a productive run. Managed 5k in 28 minutes, not only improving my average time per km from last week, but also the distance... which is looovely.

So today, I was determined to do something remotely productive... I finished mapping out Lenna in the squared notebook (for scale) to scan and vector tomorrow (as each initial draft are on post-its) and read a quarter of "The Music Industry - Music in the Cloud", a book about how the music business is changing in the digital age for the dissertation. Its quite eye opening, I'm considering tweaking my question already as a result of it. This is the last week of casual design anyways, next week its back nose to the grindstone... Although i've been playing about, I've not really dedicated myself to getting better like I feel I should have.



Other than the work I did, I downloaded and played the new XBLA title, Limbo. Visually, the game is absolutely stunning. The simple, black and white tonal pallet really draws you into the title. It instills a feeling of uncertainty and dread into the player (especially in the earlier stages) as to what is lurking in the shadows. The gameplay is unforgiving, one small step out of line and you're dead baby, and when I say dead, I mean dismembered, impaled, beheaded and sawed into tiny chunks of shadowy boy (it's got a pegi rating of 18+). Luckily, regular checkpoints are in play so the game doesn't get too frustrating, even into the later portions of the game. It's about 4 - 5 hours gameplay depending on how proficient you are with puzzlers and for 1200 (about a tenner) to some it really won't appear to be worth it. But I implore you to try the demo, it really is a breath-taking game that you need to experience to believe.

But one thing I found strange with the game is it helped clarify a conversation I'd had with Gem earlier in the week about "feel" v.s. plot, we decided that a great movie is made up of the right mixture of a great plot and it's own style, ergo artistic direction must go hand in hand with dialogue, characters etc. I argued the importance of the writing over style but the Limbo came and slapped me with a wet fish. The game has absolutely no plot. Other than its gameplay, the sole selling point of the game is how beautiful it looks. The same goes for Flowers on PSN and a whole lot of other smaller studio titles currently being released... Proving me wrong like the world really likes to do, what makes Limbo a fun game is that it isn't bogged down with a "THIS BOY HAS TO TRAVEL THROUGH SEVERAL MAGIC WORLDS TO DEFEAT EVIL!" type story, cinematic or celebrity voice acting. It's fun because the gameplay is challenging and it's style sets the tone.

Other than that, caught this off a tweet from Adrian Shaughnessy (who seems to be creeping up in this blog an awful lot lately...). Looks very interesting, he's even hinted it may challenge the future of publishing. (top tweet).



Anyways, enough babbling... night all!

M x

p.s. I've added share buttons, tweet / facebook etc. if you want ;)