More drawings

I finished my drawing tablet— 29 drawings in all. (I threw out one page; an idea I had didn’t work.) Here’s the best of the second half of the tablet. The last one is NSFW.

I think this turned out well. (That’s Natalie Merchant, of course.) Well, except that I couldn’t get a deeper black with my pencil.

WordPress used to insert a link to a large-scale version of the picture, but it no longer does. So here’s a close-up which gives a better idea of how these look on the paper.

I thought I should draw a horse. This is the first time I’ve drawn a non-cartoon horse. It turns out that, with a good model, almost anything is drawable. Who knew?

This is Jade from Beyond Good & Evil. Curious thing: if you do a Google image search for “woman sitting”, almost every result is at least somewhat sexualized, as if the photographer kept saying “Be more feminine!” Finally I searched for “tired woman sitting” and got the reference pose I wanted.

I like the shading on this one. Drawing the back is a good study for shading, because there’s muscles and bones and stuff, but not much that you can indicate just with lines.

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One point perspective

You may have seen this on the Twitters. Manga artist Ikku Masa pointed out that this still from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro has two vanishing points where you would expect one:

I thought it’d be interesting to “correct” the perspective.  This is more or less what the image would look like in one-point perspective:

(Yes, I had to take the sliding doors off. Just take it as necessary to show what the entire room looks like.)

Now, why did the background artist “cheat” the perspective? I think the best way to understand this is to concentrate on the blue lines. Moving the vanishing point left, to the center of the back wall, means the lines have to spread out more. That in turn means that the left wall gets a lot bigger. The right wall is bigger too, though not by as much.

The middle frame ends up smaller, including on top, so we see more of the partial wall at the top.  (And because this frame is narrower, including the doors would block most of the far part of the room.)

The overall effect is to make the room look smaller. You don’t feel like you’re looking into an expansive room; it’s more like standing in a tunnel.

What would you actually see in the room?  Well, not quite either view. For one thing, you have two eyes, which see slightly different views. For another,  the moment you turn your head, you’re not getting a one-point perspective at all, but a two-point perspective. Once you look at the left wall, you see it as facing you, not slanting toward the distance.

On the other hand, you wouldn’t see the Ghibli view either. The artist’s choice emphasizes the walls facing us and the floor leading to it. Plus it creates a maximally wide space for the characters to move in.

(One more thought: the tatami mats on the floor, in the original, don’t lead to either vanishing point— or to a single point at all.)

Anyway, it’s a really interesting example of an artist straying from camera realism and getting a nicer result by doing so.

My video games, ranked

I saw that PC Gamer has a list of their top 100 video games. This is a profoundly silly idea, since they change it every year, making it unstable even as a record of their own opinions. But making lists is fun and I thought I’d try it.

Big warning: this is strictly for fun and I may not be any better than PC Gamer at sticking to these opinions in a year.

Part of the amusement value is precisely in the absurd comparisons– trying to decide if (say) The Stanley Parable is better or worse than Fallout New Vegas.

Some reflections, and responses to your shocked protestations, after the list.

Arkham City
Overwatch
Saints Row IV
Civilization 2
Dishonored 2 (incl. Billie Lurk DLC)
Borderlands 2
Mirror’s Edge
Portal 2
Saints Row The Third
Arkham Asylum
Team Fortress 2
Katamari Damacy
Beyond Good & Evil
Borderlands
Empyrion: Galactic Survival
Dishonored (incl. Daud DLC)
Civilization 3
Half-Life 2
Fallout 3
Portal
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell
Kings Bounty Armored Princess
Jade Empire
Conan Exiles
Oblivion
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
The Stanley Parable
Mass Effect 2
Fallout New Vegas
Tomb Raider (2013)
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Left 4 Dead
Arkham Knight
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Jazzpunk
Gotham City Impostors
Left 4 Dead 2
Bayonetta
Heroes of the Storm
80 Days
Kings Bounty Dark Side
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Civilization 4
What Remains of Edith Finch
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Sim City 2000
West of Loathing
Superhot
Rise of the Tomb Raider
League of Legends
Viscera Cleanup Detail
Kentucky Route Zero
Gunpoint
Space Colony
Mass Effect 1
To Be or Not To Be
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
No Man’s Sky
Witcher 3
Arkham Origins
Telling Lies
Grim Fandango
Tacoma
Nier Automata
Singularity
Skyrim
Dragon Age Origins
Tomb Raider Underworld
Sim City 3000
Fable III
Hydrophobia: Prophecy
Gone Home
Tropico 1
Remember Me
Dungeons of Dredmor
Saints Row 2
Zeno Clash
Gorogoa
Sam & Max (Telltale)
Secret World Legends
Dead Space
Chronicles of Riddick
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
Californium
Dreamfall
Bioshock
Bugdom
Fallout 4
Half-Life Deathmatch
Destiny 2
RAGE
Sunset
Monaco
World of Goo
Assassin’s Creed 1
The Longest Journey
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Sleeping Dogs
Max Payne 2
Torchlight
Kings Bounty: Warriors of the North
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Torchlight II
Agents of Mayhem
Don’t Starve
Grand Theft Auto IV
Dota 2
Dead Island
Silk Road Online
Kerbal Space Program
Black Desert Online
Braid
Cloudbuilt

Some explanations:

• I rank replayability very highly. I’m not one of those people who say “I’ve played this game for 200 hours but it sucks!” If I’ve played a game that long, it’s doing a great job as a game— even if I have a list of complaints about it.
• Contrariwise, if I liked a game but have no desire to play it again, it’ll be ranked lower than games that invite replays.
• I’m a sucker for a really original setting or bit of gameplay.  This is mostly important in the middle of the list– things like VTM Bloodlines or 80 Days or Kentucky Route Zero are pretty high just because they’re so dang creative.
• I tend to get bored with sequels. Some are far better than the original (note how far down Saints Row 2 is), but there’s a certain novelty that makes a game great. And with some series, like Civ, I played the earlier ones so damn much that I can’t even finish a game in the latest editions.
• That goes for genre too. That’s just bad luck for a lot of games where I played something like it before.
• I rank a game way down if I haven’t finished it. It’s hard to claim that a game is compelling to me if, y’know, it doesn’t compel me to keep going at it. In some cases, like Fallout 4, I could explain why I was disappointed; in others, like Witcher 3, I’m not even sure.
• It’s hard to evaluate co-op and team games, because so much of the fun depends on your friends. Just on a gameplay level, I’ve probably overrated the Borderlands games, but I they’re up there because I had so much fun playing with my friend Ash. On the other hand, playing against your friends can be really painful when there’s a huge skill gap, which is why I soured on Left 4 Dead.
• This list covers several decades.  As noted, I have no interest in Civ now, but I played the hell out of it in the 90s.
• I really don’t like platformers.

You have to get almost to the bottom of the list before getting to games I actually disliked. If I really bounce hard off a game, I just don’t spend much time on it.

There’s a few games that I installed and tried, but either hated them so much I got a refund, or just realized they weren’t for me (e.g. Dead Souls, SpyParty). I didn’t put them in the list because I don’t want to imply that I have an actual judgment on them.

If you want to write a game that rockets to the top of this list, extremely neat gameplay might be enough (Portal 2, Mirror’s Edge), but balanced variety will really help. The mix of stealth and combat helps send Arkham City to the top, and it’s why games like Beyond Good & Evil and Saints Row IV are so high up there. They’re not only fun, they’re fun in different ways at different times. (The “balanced” bit is important: if you have two types of activities but one isn’t much fun, that’s not great.)

I’ve probably reviewed most of these games on my site or on the blog– use the custom search feature on zompist.com.

Finally, most of the fun of these lists is in disagreeing with them. So I encourage you to take some time to make your own list!