Gamertell

The Nintendo DS is a tricky little system. It has found a place in the hearts of not only hardcore gamers but casual players as well. As such, it has become home to a wide variety of not-game games. One of the newest pioneers in that field is Paint by DS, which should be released before the end of 2007 in North America. The game functions exactly like the ‘paint by numbers’ sets that can be found in craft stores.

Paint by DS is billed as a “digital coloring book.” The program supplies template paintings by famous artists like Vincent Van Gogh, P.J. Redoute and Katsushika Hokusai. The player can then color in the painting as they please with the stylus, using a mix of oil and water based paints or colored pencils. After a painting is finished, the game offers a review of the painting. There are also four mini-games included, which can unlock extra paintings, different kinds of paper, and more colors.

This isn’t such a bad idea. It seems soothing. Just like Electroplankton. I mean you probably wouldn’t want to spend a whole day playing Paint by DS, but it could be a nice little escape from a stressful day.

Read [DS Fanboy] Site [Mercury Games]

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No matter where you fall on the videogames as art debate, there is still plenty of respectable work being done by professional artists for videogames. To celebrate some of the often unseen and under appreciated masterpieces created for games, Midway has released the full-color, flatbound paperback book, The Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons published by Design Studio Press.

The 160-page book collects more than 200 illustrations works that include paintings, pencil sketches, ink and digital creations for five games: Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat, Psi-Ops, Stranglehold and The Suffering. Many of the woks are presented in full-bleed format (8 1/2 x 11 in.) or spanning across the fold or wider works, with comments either by the artist or of the game’s lead artist. The last chapter also includes art from the company’s archive that was no used in any game.

All of the art in the book, save one pixelated image, is represented in high detail with lush colors. A few are so big you almost wish they had included some of those annoying fold-out pages so you could appreciate the massive scope of the work. There is a decent mix of character designs, concept art and background images used to study color treatments, lighting and textures for possible use in games.

The nice thing, this is not packed with images of scantily clad hotties you’d find in many so many so-called “art books.” Instead, it offers pages of intricate images you can study for hours, wondering how these artists produce such beautiful images in such short time (often a day or two each) that, if they’re lucky, are marred by a few editor’s scribbles and end up in a vault.

The art ranges from smaller sketches to large environments drawn on dozens of pieces of paper and then pieced together like an oversized puzzle. Again, you’ll wish a few works folded out for more detailed views. Styles also range from pencil to digital creations, showing than artists need to be able to work in many media even when the end result will be a purely a digital production.

Most gamers will certainly appreciate this as a nice coffee table book that guest can thumb through, picking out the Mortal Kombat character designs in the first chapter by Vince Proce, Angie Lange, Luis Mangeubat and Pav Kovacik. With four artists taking stabs at iconic characters, it becomes clear that most of these are group projects.

The most impressive art are the backgrounds and environment treatments for Stranglehold by several artists including Stephan Martiniere. The same chapter also features a hyper-realistic character designs by Vince Proce who took countless images of staff members and professional models and melded them into people you’d swear you’d seen in movies or even walking down the street.

Artist comments are also pretty interesting, especially those by Ben Olson for The Suffering. The most memorable lines are about to Swam Borrower, a character design that didn’t make it into the game, that reads, “I still think the idea of having a tube hooked up to your face that leads to your own swollen man boob is pretty twisted. Does he drink how own breast milk> Or maybe he’s an aquatic creature he fills his boob full of sea water so that he can breathe on land? Yea maybe it’s kind of a goofy idea.” The creative process can certainly take an artist into the strangest of places in his or her mind. Horror fans will appreciate Olson’s other works in the book often meld fleshy creatures with spikes, tubes and various weapons.

For anyone studying videogames or simply appreciating various art forms, definitely grab this book and give it a lengthy gander.

Site [The Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons] Read [The Gamer Gene] Also Read [Destructiod]

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