vague reference to Christopher Walken on SNL

Hilarious! That was a great episode overall. Everything is better somehow with Christopher Walken in it.


Changing the topic, it is damn hot up here right now. It's funny how Canada often gets stereotyped as a cold country, but we really get all the extreme temperature. Turns out that my local area is actually, on average, 5 degrees (Celsius) hotter in summer than California. A couple of days ago, we hit 42^oC (that's 107.6 Farenheit to those of you in the US, Turkey, or Myanmar) and I think we're supposed to reach that again on Sunday. I got back to school at the end of lunch yesterday and there were two police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck out front because some other student collapsed from heat stroke during gym and had to be rushed to the hospital. We're getting some good thunderstorms, but somehow it's not really cooling anything off. Anybody else stuck in some bad weather right now?

I read about that explosion on Slashdot right after it happened. Nice to see that you're back though.
For a sec I was almost afraid that you'd moved again. It took me four years to find you after you left pixelation.cjb.net.

I never had the pleasure of playing the original "Beyond Good and Evil" (I will someday), but I agree 100% that the way games are trending towards to the gritty, gray and brown look is absolutely awful. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single one of those games that wouldn't benefit from some creative art direction or an extra little splash of colour. Super Mario Galaxy had some of my favourite graphics in recent gaming, mostly because of how awesomely vibrant everything was.

The state of game graphics today is disappointing to me in a way. My precious Wii is stuck with last-gen games for the most part because several companies keep trying to squeeze extra cash out by dumbing down the games to PS2-playable level while they're at it (and many of the others are half-assed minigame compilations, but that's irrelevant). On the other hand, most PS3 and 360 developers believe that they need to make "realistic games" with the extra power, resulting in a really boring colour scheme. So much wasted potential for everyone.

Sigh.

GAMES THAT I THINK ARE GETTING IT RIGHT:

Lostwinds (just nice overall)


Team Fortress 2 (this is what you could be doing with those fancy shaders!)


Super Mario Galaxy (colour everywhere!!)


Okami (creative art direction = win)


Crysis (proof that realism doesn't have to be drab)


THIS IS WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR!!

...Or at least what I'm looking for. Here ends my rant. I'll let someone else go.

     First I should point out that the quality of the program does not make the quality of the artist.

Amen to that, because I use MS Paint.

Before I get jumped on by the hordes waiting to tell me how crappy Paint is and how I should switch, I already know. I use Paint because it's what I've been using for years and I can operate it faster than I could hope to operate any other program in the relatively near future. I am ultra-comfortable with it, and to compensate for its shortcomings I usually keep GraphicsGale Free Edition (which I am slowly getting better with) open in the background, so that I can copy and paste things into it if I need any of the extra tools. Inefficient, but considering my work speed with Paint, it's still the fastest way for me to do it. For now at least.

I agree with brod's point about the white lines. About the dithering on the cone, you should treat a dither just like an extra colour. You could fix it by making the dithering wider at the bottom and thinner at the top. Additionally, since the tip is a point, the different shades should meet right at the top (you have them meeting a few pixels down and to the left).