Channel Frederator Blog

This is the extended trailer for the upcoming Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet game by Michel Gagné.  You have probably seen his work before, in films such as The Iron Giant, Osmosis Jones, Ratatouille, and many others.

This game, in the same classic side scrolling shooter vein as Defender or Gradius, looks to bring every ounce of Michel Gagné’s signature art style to the genre. It is a marriage that looks beautiful.

-Floyd Bishop

Michael Hickox has done a great new short that takes people back to their arcade days in Lego Arcade. This was a lot of work, and the results are great.

-Floyd Bishop

NFG World has a great post about how new televisions interpret “old” technology. Between screen curvature, aspect ratios, and scan lines, television displays have changed quite a bit in the last few years. The post outlines the changes that have happened, and fixes to settings you can adjust to help emulate the experience you had the first time around.

 -Floyd Bishop

This was recently posted over at CGTalk. There are so many video games produced each year, that many of them go unnoticed. This is a great compilation of animation from Nintendo Wii’s EA title “Boogie Superstar”.

 From Lloyd J Colaco:

Here are some of the animations I did for EA’s Boogie Superstar.

A little info on the game…
It’s a dance game designed exclusively for the Wii and targeted towards tween girls. It also features Karaoke in the gameplay. The game involves players waggling the Wii Remote to simple two-beat prompts, such as swinging the Remote side-to side or up and down in time to on screen directions.
I would like to mention that I have ONLY done the Animation. The rigs, models, concepts, characters were done by the Boogie team at EA Montréal, I’m thankful to be part of such a talented group. Kudos to Luis Alonso for setting up some cool animation friendly [Read more…]

This isn’t exactly how motion capture works, but Jack Black does a pretty funny job of it in these promos for the Spike Video Game Awards.

They use the pooping ping pong ball gag more than once, but it’s pretty funny both times.

Be sure to watch the Spike Video Game Awards Sunday, December 14th at 9 PM.

-Floyd Bishop

In the vein of classic zombie films like “Night of the Living Dead”, “Dawn of the Dead”, or anything George Romero,  the upcoming survival horror game “Left 4 Dead” would look right at home on the screen of a late night drive in movie. It looks as though EA, Valve, and Turtle Rock have done everything right. This opening cinematic does a great job of showing the character types and their interaction as they just try to survive.

With areas to explore like an old railroad bridge, a hospitol, and even an expansive forest, you have many ways to have your own zombie experience. The voice acting and animation seem to be top notch. I think a feature in this style of this caliber could do well.

Look for “Left 4 Dead” on November 18th.

-Floyd Bishop

GAME OVER is just one of several art projects developed by the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, working with the NOTsoNOISY creative agency. The piece is a series of short films, each one based on a different early video game. Instead of pixels, we see humans in colored shirts moving from seat to seat in a theater.

Other films in the series include Pole Position, Pong, and Tetris.

-Floyd Bishop

If only I had this back in the 80’s, I would have a whole lot more quarters than I do now. YouTube user NightmareTX has created an annotated video that shows which buttons you need to press, and when you need to press them, in order to complete Don Bluth’s “Dragon’s Lair”. This game was always more fun to watch than play, in my opinion. Now you can watch it al the way through, and know what the player is doing to get past some of the harder bits.-Floyd Bishop 

With I am 8Bit’s Opening on the horizon, tomorrow… I thought I’d share Friend of Frederator Gabe Swarr’s Brothers Mario pieces.
They came out very cool, and he actually cut out individual pieces in wood.

[Read more…]

Head on over to the Japanese site for “Street Fighter IV”  to see a great animated intro for the game. There are quite a few clips on there, some of which feature elements of gameplay. Rumor has it that the game will be playable at the Capcom booth at the San Diego Comic-Con later this summer. I don’t know if this animated piece is in the game in any form, but it’s awesome just the same.

-Floyd Bishop