If there’s one thing I hate to do it’s to travel to the Javits Center in NYC: There’s no subway near by and even taking a cab can be painful. However I have to say that for the New York Comics Con the trip was well worth it this year. The first thing that impressed me is that most conventions don’t fill up the place, however the Comics Con took up pretty much every inch of floor space. The result is about two city blocks packed with everything a fanboy might want to see – a sort of mega shopping mall turned into a comic book store.
However it’s not just the scale of the evnt that I enjoyed, but the sheer diversity. Yes there was the usual things that you’d expect to see: booths for marvel and DC and rows of tables filled with vintage goodies from days of yore sealed in plastic bags. But the extra zing at the event was the number of toy companies, video distributors, indie artists and even podcasters to be found while roving around the floor. And while I did see the usual promotional material of superheroes running around in their underwear, I also found a wealth of comics from local small presses, and places ranging from France to Korea.
What’s also amazing to me is that given I wasn’t keeping a high profile I managed to run into quite a few friends going back to my art school and early multimedia career in the 90s. In fact I was really pleased to see a good representation of the local scene which featured a table crammed with students from the School of Visual Arts to MoCCA pushing their upcoming show in June. Although as I stolled through the artist’s alley it was fun to meet artists who came from every where from Canada to Tokyo, which made the thought of my cab ride quite a bit less labored.
Side-scrolling shooters are certainly the bread and butter of arcade games. They are fast, simple, and eat quarters like Kirstie Alley on a Twinkie high. The only really thing separating one for another is the window dressing. The graphics and whatever plot they can loosely hang onto them.
Tengai is certainly just another shallow shooter, but damned if it doesn’t look pretty. Plus, it’s not often that you get to use the phrase “mid-evil Japanese steam punk,” but that’s exactly what Tengai is going for.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 18, 2008 in Comic Books
As part of our ongoing campaign to support the destruction of superheroes I’ve decided to shine some light on publisher :01 First Second books. What I like about these folks is that they’ve done an amazing job bringing high quality yet quirky graphic novels to a world that’s been lost to the epic battle of comic book clichés. So here’s a title from their back catalog which I think is worth checking out:
What I like about Gene Luen Yang’s work is that he’s telling a very personal story drawing on his own past and surrounding Chinese-American culture. Even though he’s telling his own story I found quite a few nerd architypes that other fanboys can relate in the book touching on age old geek themes like High School isolation and dealing with everyone from bullies to a crush on a pretty classmate:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 17, 2008 in Science
I love all the breakthroughs that we’re seeing in astronomy these days, but the idea of taking the first steps to making interstellar travel excite the fanboy in me:
“Engineer Neil Wallace peers into a huge vacuum chamber designed to replicate – as far as possible – the conditions of space. Cryogenic pumps can be heard in the background, whistling away like tiny steam engines. Using helium gas as a coolant, they can bring down the temperature in the vacuum chamber to an incredibly chilly 20 Kelvin (-253C). The pressure, meanwhile, can drop to a millionth of an atmosphere. This laboratory in a leafy part of Hampshire is where defence and security firm Qinetiq develops and tests its ion engines – a technology that will take spacecraft to the planets, powered by the Sun.”
For many a geeky gamer, the 1990’s were the ear of the fighter. You were either a Mortal Kombat fan or a Street Fighter supporter. There could be only one.
Both games spawned equally heinous films, but fanboy being fanboys, they have both gone on to find their respective cult followings. In 1995, Capcom released their game based on the film based on the game, appropriately titled Street Fighter: The Movie. The game replaced the usual cartoony character models with the real-world actors from the film. Such luminaries as Ming-Na, Kylis Minogue, Raul Julia and star Jean-Claude Van Damme were digitized and placed into the roles of fan favorites.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 17, 2008 in Pulp Fiction
Shown above is a 1963 painting of a space station by German illustrator and futurist Klaus Bürgle. Bürgle was born in 1926 in Stuttgart and started illustrating magazines in 1953. He focused on technical and scientific illustrations and did quite a bit of work for the publicationDas Neue Universum.
Below is an illustration of a future subway system from 1967 and a 1959 painting showing traffic of the future:
While the table-top pen and paper world of Dungeons & Dragons has certainly seen a successful adaptation in the world of computer gaming, it’s had a much tougher time making it into the arcades. It should be obvious but the slow moving, story drivin gaming system just can’t keep up with the quarter swallowing demands of the arcade. That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 16, 2008 in Comic Books
As part of our ongoing campaign to support the destruction of superheroes I’ve decided to shine some light on publisher :01 First Second books. What I like about these folks is that they’ve done an amazing job bringing high quality yet quirky graphic novels to a world that’s been lost to the epic battle of comic book clichés. So here’s a title from their back catalog which I think is worth checking out:
Lewis Trondheim is the pen name for Laurent Chabosy, a well known French cartoonist whose previous work has made the jump to animation in Europe. The first thing I liked about this book is that sort of reminds me a great deal of Krazy Kat in that you have a set of silent characters wandering around a surrealist (and somewhat alien) landscape:
I sometimes find it interesting to see what lengths a developer will go to in order to get a gamer to play the same old games over and over again. Usually it’s just something like tacking a 2 or III at the end of a popular name and sprucing up the old graphics. Sometime it’s adding a new character or plot line. It’s not often that it’s disco:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 15, 2008 in Videogames
The Third Relay Space Station: Tokio is a new Japanese point-and-click game created by Bianco-Bianco, who is also created Dreamland and Ranch Escape. The game is set in the space station Tokio where you play the chef of the Casablanca Restaurant. When you wake up, you realize that you are locked in your room and have to escape by solving a series of puzzles.
“One sure measure of a great anime series (or any great work for that matter) is the creative energy it imparts to its viewers and the lengths to which they go to express their dedication. Over the last three decades, a great many Star Blazers fans have elevated themselves to the level of Superfan; those who take their creative energy so far that they add new dimensions to the experience, expanding it beyond its original scope. This was certainly the case with two of the show’s earliest superfans: Michael Pinto and Brian Cirulnick.”
Brought to us by the team that did similar light-gun shooters like “Crossbow” and “Crackshot”, “Chiller” takes a major right-turn down the path to hell. Set in the bowels of some sort of castle/mansion/yermom’sbasement environment, “Chiller” runs through four stages featuring various degrees of torture and man’s inhumanity to man…and woman.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 14, 2008 in Animation
Vampz is a entertaining short animated student film from France. This movie is the work of three students of the EESA school: Adrien Barbier Lambert, Adrien Annesley and Lâm Le Thanh. Collaborating on music was Olivier Michelot, and the sound design is by Tamara Demicheli.
Even before you know anything about the game, the title Cadillacs and Dinosaurs makes an impact. It screams B-movie hokeyness, two extremes that should never be combined.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 13, 2008 in Comic Books
When I’m looking for inspiration (or just for a cool gift) I always find myself wandering over to the MoMA giftshop here in Soho, New York. This is always a dangerous activity as in their basement they have an amazing mini-book store which is crammed with all sorts of goodies — which are mostly oversized expensive art books. However I was recently pleased to come across this cute little book put out by Spanish publisher (or maybe they’re a design firm?) Pepe Gimeno:
I did some searching on the net, but sadly I couldn’t find out anything more about the illustrator of the book who is just credited as Vane. I wish I could find out more becuse while the artwork had that typical hipster feel on the surface, the sense of surrealism reminded me of a Fellini film:
Sometimes simply mashing two good ideas together is enough to bring the fun back to otherwise tired modes of play. Take the block breaking action of “Breakout,” add the vertical down-scroll of “Tetris,” some head-to-head action and sprinkle it with lots of pink and blue glitter and a stereotypical anime school-girl, and you have “Blocken.”
It’s no surprise that there are exactly 1,035,648,399 different clones of the original Space Invaders. Today, I’m taking a look at one of them, Taito’s Akkanvader from 1995. It’s colorful, cute, and best of all, fun!
What happens when you mix Robocop with ummm, well I’m not quite sure! I think the true test of a great B movie is if you can’t tell the trailer is real or if it’s a parody — and the Demolitionist (from 1995) succeeds!
“A new stereo view of Phobos, the larger and inner of Mars’ two tiny moons, has been captured by a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took two images of Phobos 10 minutes apart on March 23. Scientists combined the images for a stereo view.
“Phobos is of great interest because it may be rich in water ice and carbon-rich materials,” said Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, Tucson. ”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 10, 2008 in Science
What’s amazing about this vehicle is that the living quarters being carried around by this lunar robot will weigh 15 tons. What’s great about this concept is that the same technology could be used to construct a base on Mars in advance of human explorers reaching the planet:
“NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometres across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site. In a 2005 report about its exploration plans, NASA said it wanted to set up a base at a fixed location on the Moon after initially returning humans there in 2020.
But a gargantuan robotic vehicle called ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) could change that. Measuring about 7.5 metres wide, with legs more than 6 metres long, the robot could act essentially like a turtle, carrying the astronauts’ living quarters around on its back. It was designed by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, US, who are now testing two small-scale prototypes of the robot.”
