I have been playing some Atari 50. It’s part game, part documentary, part interactive museum highlighting some slices over the 50 year history of Atari. It is packed with high resolution scans of game manuals and marketing materials. Most of them are what you would expect. Flyers filled with details about cabinets for arcade owners to peruse when making purchasing decisions, complete with the requisite amount of hype. I find all of this historical miscellany fascinating. This is the sort of stuff that typically gets tossed, since it doesn’t offer much value to the company. Not much money to be made with a flyer for an arcade machine that isn’t being produced or sold anymore. It’s even more difficult for people to see any value in artifacts created for temporary commercial purposes within their own lifetimes. The first Coca Cola logo ever produced is historically interesting, some slight change to that logo produced in the last five months is not. Maybe it should be. Maybe we should celebrate these small artifacts. Small works.

Best Games - Retro Game Challenge (GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjo) For the last twenty years the show GameCenter CX has played on Fuji TV One in Japan. It’s a comedy show where Shinya Arino attempts to play, and beat, old video games. Arino is an affable man, usually quick with a joke, who suffers the task of playing these games at the behest of the CX company, a company that gleefully promotes and demotes him based on his performance in the games, but one that he also appears to run. His assistants will show up to alternately help or torment him, whichever is funnier in the moment.

I don’t really have a style. I have a way that I draw or model or design characters, but I don’t really have a style. I was watching an artist on YouTube, something I do quite a lot, and they were trying something a little outside of their ordinary, but they said that they were adapting it to their own style.

I had reason to think recently about the way that art is taught. I think there are a lot of art teachers, instructors, and professors out there that do a fantastic job. You can even find many of them on YouTube or various art instruction channels.

Best Games - Shatterhand (Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain) By 1991 the last nails were already being driven into the coffin of the NES. The console wouldn’t actually be discontinued for years, and in its home market of Japan, a full decade. Games would continue to trickle out during those years (there are still games being made for the old Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System), but releasing a game for that machine in 1991 was just asking for it to be forgotten.

I hope you have, or have had, a good Thanksgiving. If you are American, and you have your Thanksgiving one week before Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever, what are you doing. Spread your family holidays out a bit. That’s just wacky. ​

I’m fighting a battle against pixels and I’m losing. Maybe I’m winning. It’s hard to tell. My pixel art game project is sort of stuck, but the wheels are still spinning.

Best Games - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin The Intellivision video game console started development in 1977. The state of consumer processors in 1977 wasn’t really geared toward high fidelity gaming experiences. A lot of arcade machines of the time were still black and white and the most common video game that the public was familiar with was Pong. Pong isn’t a bad game, but no one would describe it as deep or dynamic.

Recently, I tried drawing on actual paper. I mean, this isn’t a new thing. I used to draw on paper. I still scratch things out on paper all the time. Just rough notepad sketches when I’m testing out an idea or figuring out a shape. But I never actually draw on paper anymore. Not proper drawing. Not something I want to finish. It feels a little strange.

An update from the writing front. I only have one story out for submission as I type this (though when you read this, it will probably be at least two). So that isn’t great. But I did enter a new story writing contest, so that’s a bit better. Story writing contests are a bit weird.

I put up an image a few weeks ago. It was a screen capture of a game I have been working on for a little bit. Here it is again. That shot was from the old version of the game.

Best Games - Elevator Action Returns Elevator Action is a classic arcade game from 1983, where you play as a spy infiltrating an office tower. Your mission involves ascending that tower to search for secret documents, and that will require the use of a lot of elevators. All the while, patrolling enemies will attempt to thwart your efforts. You have a few ways to fight them, but using the elevators against them is probably the most fun. It’s a great game. That’s not the game I’m writing about here.

During the Alberta Game Jam, Kyle Nissen and I created this nightmare. You are tasked with cleaning a set of teeth that will not stop chomping down on trash food. You can play it here.

​Everything I have ever learned about logo design, I learned by tracing. I’ve dealt with a lot of logos. I’ve probably only designed a few. More than ten, less than twenty, maybe. Might be more, but not a ton more. The amount of logos I have dealt with, I couldn’t even begin to count. And so very many of those I traced.

Neon Noodles, the game I did most of the art for, came out in full release this week. I think you should play it. You can find it here Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/990900/Neon_Noodles__Cyberpunk_Kitchen_Automation/