Articles tagged with: Videogames

I love the first two Dead Space videogames, and I've finished the main trilogy plus another one released on iOS. This art book contains concept art, drawings and lore about the 3 main titles and bits from two small comic book series.

Essentially, if you liked the games you will enjoy the pictures and the companion text. It tells many small details about most topics, from the whys and hows of the weapons to the suit designs, the different enemies, and of course the markers. It does contain huge spoilers so you should be careful with that, but after beating the games, it is a must read to expand the lore.

To complain about something, that there seems to be more content about the third game than the first two, and at least for me those are the best titles. I'd love to have seen even more about the Ishimura ship... but even with that it is worth it for fans.

Posted on 2018-06-12

I've grown playing Blizzard videogames, so The Art of Blizzard Entertainment was an easy choice. Although the first Starcraft didn't impressed me so much, the second part was much better. Diablo, I've poured hundreds of hours on each game of the trilogy and Diablo II was one of the first videogames that we played on our LAN-parties. And then Warcraft... videogames I've played once and again (especially Warcraft & Warcraft III), in single and multiplayer, and even played World of Warcraft for a few months (until was requiring too much time).

All of the previous paragraph is to remark that I cannot be objective as those games have been among my favourites for decades. And this book delivers, oh yes it delivers.

From pencil sketches to fully colored drawings, from small details to huge scenarios, from characters to double-page scenes, it is a visual pleasure to see each page. There are commentaries also, but they are so secondary nothing will happen if you miss them. It is also a big and heavy book, which I like because that means the pictures are big and many details can be appreciated.

If you like WoW or Diablo in general, you will really enjoy the artwork.

Posted on 2018-01-03

The end of July and beginning of August has been busy, but I managed to squeeze some time to play and even paint. I'm slowly shifting towards more painting and less playing but summer vacations mean no painting either. Anyway this is what I've mostly been doing (apart from farming Zelda components to max out almost all clothing):

I'm playing again Space Hulk Deathwing main campaign, and I have to test the cooperative mode now that has been improved. The game came out a bit unpolished and I paid the hype price, but still the atmosphere it's impressive and I'm enjoying the second run (with graphic options almost maxed out as framerate is better).

I bought Dawn of War III with a heavy discount, and how lucky I was, because the game has been somewhat a dissapointment... The multiplayer component is great, even skirmishes against the computer. You have three elites who level up, three battle doctrines (modifiers for unit types or special general weapons) and basically looks like the best representation of Warhammer 40,000: Big battles with dozens of units (a lot more than DoW 2 and also more than the original DoW), amazing graphics, imperial Knights and the Eldar & ork equivalents (well, almost, a Gorkanaut instead of a Stompa... meh, sounds like a GW-imposed choice), bases and many, many nice looking and intense battles. On that regard it is a great game, and with a decent graphics card it looks amazing, just like the miniatures. But on the other hand the campaign is... a waste of time and effort. It is a forced, badly written and dumb story that looks made only to let you know how every unit of the game works of the three factions. And even that is in my opinion wrongly executed, as you forcibly have to switch faction on every mission (each mission is tied to a faction, that is), and some of the missions are really boring. Combined with decent voice acting but poor dialogs (between predictable, silly and sometimes absurd) and some nasty gameplay bugs that force you to repeat the level if you encounter one... For the first time in the franchise I haven't finish the campaign, as I got tired when I hit another bug just in the final level. It is too uninteresting. It is a pity because it could have really had been great, and after the previous games I can only guess that there were budget constraints on the development because it looks only really polished on the multiplayer part, and there are almost no NPC factions/units (on the later levels it is quite noticeable they even reused 3D models instead of adding more variety). I don't regret the buy as I already poured in around 20h and will probably play some CPU skirmishes in the future, but it is a wasted opportunity of delivering a great game, bringing instead a "just nice" one. Still, some of the videos have really cool images:

And finally, apart from small progress on painting Nagash (I'm on the 3rd layer of bone colouring, and I expect at least one or two more), I grabbed two of the Betrayal at Calth models and did some dark washing on them to prepare to paint them. I'm not going to go for anything really hard so will just highlight with Mephiston Red and maybe some touches of orange. And I should definetly finish the basing of my Imperial Knight, it is only missing that and the decals to be finished...

Posted on 2017-08-08

I am starting to play Dawn of War III. After the previous titles I thought I would wait until got cheap, but Steam summer sales made Amazon put it around 45% cheaper, so I ended up buying it. Just started the campaign and tried a multiplayer skirmish against computer AI controlled foe and battles can be so long now! I ended up defeated as I didn't even knew what buildings and units I can have, but it is really fun to call into battle an imperial knight, and as there are quite a few elites (special characters) on all three factions, it looks I'm going to have fun for a long time.

I am also back at hitting hard Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because first DLC came out, so apart from playing the new content and quests, I'm trying to finish all secondary "quests" (fully upgrade all clothing and armours, get many korok seeds...). I'm 2/3 through the Master Sword Trials, easy ones were quite easy, medium ones were a bit of a challenge on the first levels as you start naked, but once you grab some weapons and a shield... are doable.

Still regarding videogames, I finished an X-Com 2 walkthrough. While not technically an RPG (despite the soldier stats and upgrades), it is a turn-based tactical game so if I talk about Warhammer 40k why not about it? I loved the game, it is a nice kind-of-adaptation of V, with aliens having won the original battle and convinced humans they're here to help but a resistance fighting back to uncover the dark truth. It is a very hard game (on the normal difficulty setting), mid-game you start to not suffer on every battle but at first it is hard and I restarted twice due to fatal mistakes (I played in "ironman mode" where you only have an automatic savegame and cannot go back).

As Warhammer 40,000 8th edition came out, I bought some Dark Imperium plague marines cheap from eBay and assembled them. Primaris Space Marines are not bad, but I both dislike the lore additions to justify them and prefer to keep my old miniatures instead of mixing both. I might buy a small squad of them in the future but only for painting, and surely not for my Dark Angels (I only see them for now as "new" Ultramarines). I'd prefered just a model change, but I get the commercial justifications behind it... why just replacing models if you can have both and slowly make people move towards the new ones without explicitly retiring old ones? Also they get to sell space marine players lots and lots of new minis! Is a great strategy from Games Workshop, that's for sure. Anyway, thanks to internet I have the cool models I wanted, the plage chaos marines are so awesome...

And finally, I'm retaking some old hobbies and after a bit of a cleanup of LEGO pieces, I'm assembling and programming a Star Wars R2-D2 with the Mindstorms EV3 "computer". My plan is to fully add to id original sounds and the like, but for now the prototype works and is just missing a few more pieces plus the logic:

Sadly, all this means my painting has been on hold, and as summer is here, having both at July an August vacations, I'll do my best but don't expect to advance much on the painting topic.

Posted on 2017-07-03

I tried to resist. I really tried to be strong and not buy the Nintendo Switch just for the new Zelda videogame. I started to play and finally finish all previous titles. I actually finished Zelda (the NES original) and A Link Between Worlds, and started playing Zelda II and Ocarina of Time (3DS enhanced version).

But it was futile. All those reviews praising the game so much and even my girlfriend encouraging me to go for it were too much. And I can't be happier of the decision. The videogame is such a masterpiece, such a carefully designed and crafter open-world Zelda experience, that I have just stopped most of my other hobbies because all I want to do right now is to go explore more of Hylure.

Around 50 hours put at it and still so much to discover and do, it already nears Fallout 3 and GTA V on my "most time spent at" top (apart from the original Quake, that is). So probably don't expect to see much painting photos here during around one month!

Update: I finished the game and although I'm still finishing all secondary quests, upgrading all armours and trying to expand a bit the inventory (700 seeds is too much "exploring" for my taste), I added some screen captures of my adventures to the Assorted gallery. Some are spoilers so... beware ;)

Posted on 2017-04-08