Paul Robertson

Well considering all the attention I give to pixel art and especially my enthusiasm for strange and unique pixel art it occurred to me that it's a little strange that I haven't mentioned a towering giant in the world of strange and unique pixel art and animations; Paul Robertson. You see Paul Robertson is a highly talented artist and animator with a truly idiosyncratic style and eccentric tastes to say the least. His work tends to range from the absurd to utterly obscene.

I guess the main reason I haven't posted about is because most of what I have been posting have been recent discoveries for me (or recent creations). I first discovered Paul's work when I saw Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 sometime in 2006. I downloaded it from this site because someone somewhere on the internet had made such a big deal over how cool it was. I don't remember who but I certainly did remember the video. It was highly entertaining but also violent and grotesque as well with exploding zombies being dismembered by the hundreds in a black and white display of pixelated gore. Clearly meant to resemble and pay homage to video games the movie is full of humor and strange little details. Some of the more grotesque moments even made me feel a little uncomfortable (like should I be enjoying this?) and come to think of it now I doubt I'd seen anything quite like it before.

Scene from Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006

I don't specifically remember when but quite some time passed before I knowingly ran into any more of Paul Robertson's work. When it did finally pop up again it was usually introduced on a blog or a forum as "something done by that guy who did the Pirate Baby Cabana Fight Thing". Eventually I went on to discover his other animations, illustrations, animated gifs, and even professional commercials that he worked on and most of it is outstanding work and, well, completely bizarre.

Paul Robertson's The Magic Touch

I could probably sit here and catalog Robertson's work for half the night from his insane pixel massacres such as the aforementioned Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 or his violent and outrageous masterpiece Kings of Power 4 Billion % (available for download here) to the more cool and quirky stuff like Do The Whirlwind and The Magic Touch (posted above) and more but I think I'll leave it to you to discover more if you're interested and you haven't already. Besides, I didn't set out to make a compendium of Paul Robertson's work with this post, I just wanted to highlight one of my favorite pixel artists and spotlight a little corner of his crazy world. :P

Paul Robertson's Live Journal
Paul Robertson's Deviant Art Profile
(these may contain offensive content)

Pixel art college webpage = awesome!

I just saw a post about this on Kotaku labeled The Bestest College Webpage Ever and I think I may have to agree with them.

Just go to the college's website here and you'll shortly be presented with a little retro styled video game-like land of animated people on a fanciful and colorful 8-bit college campus.

YAY! :D

You can scroll around the landscape just by moving your mouse cursor near the edge of the screen to reveal more and you'll see little guys doing things like rock climbing and playing sports and uh, hiding in a box . . .

Here are some full resolution detail shots:






And here is one of the little people
blown up to double resolution:

Hexstatic - Ninja Tune

NIIIIIINNNNNJAAAAAAA!!!!!


This is an awesome music video by Hexstatic using video footage and audio samples from a 1987 film titled The Ninja Showdown. If you like this sort of thing and you haven't heard of Hexstatic before I highly recommend checking them out for their often quirky yet grooving funky electro sounds and interesting music videos.

As for the ninja movie itself? I haven't seen it but it looks too corny to be true. Surely one of those 'so bad it's good' gems? Who knows, I may have to look into it but here is the plot summary from IMDB:

"A ruthless gang of Ninja marauders, a kidnapped maiden and a young man seeking vengeance set the stage for "The Ninja Showdown." Warlord boss Jing and his evil band of Purple Ninjas are unstoppable-hihgly trained assassins who ravage a peaceful town. But when the outlaw Ninjas abduct his girl, a wrathful Tony unleashes a furious assault with the help of Ninja Master Gordon. Together, these two men lay waste to Jing's army in a shattering battle to secure their honor and rescue the town from the clutches of a greedy and oppressive tyrant."

Front Mission

Wow, I've been playing Front Mission for the first time and it's pretty darn good and I'm wondering "How did I miss this?". Well I guess it's no wonder considering Square Enix (Square Soft at the time) never saw fit to publish the original game in the U.S. for the SuperNES and all I can say is it's a shame.

BOOM!

So there have been other Front Mission games that did make it stateside including a revamped release of the original for the Nintendo DS and Front Mission 3 and 4 for the PlayStation 2 and while the series isn't exactly the most obscure it's far from the forefront of mainstream gaming. I suppose if it were then Square would actually have plans to publish Front Mission 5 in the U.S. but as of writing this they do not.

Just look at those beautiful low res pictures! Pixel art in action.

Front Mission was originally released for the Super Famicom in Japan back in 1995 and it's a turn based strategy game in which you command an Oceania Community Union (OCU) mercenary unit in a war against the United States of the New Continent (USN) forces set on the fictional Huffman Island. But really with out getting too much into the politics or explaining all of the game's factions let's just get to the fun part; mechs! Apparently the principal fighting vehicle in this war are giant mechs (essentially walking tanks). At least that's what you'll be using and mostly dealing with during your campaign.

A large part of the game consists of customizing your team's mechs and making sure your unit is well rounded and the each mech is well suited to it's pilot's abilities. You can have mechs that specialize in long distance combat that mostly use missiles or grenade launchers, mechs that are heavy brawlers that basically use hand-to-hand combat, mechs that specialize in using 'close range' weapons such as machine guns or rifles, or balanced mechs that do well in a little bit of both close range and long range. In fact most of your close range mechs will probably have some form of long range attack for most of the game.

Even though the amount of customization you can do is fairly comprehensive it never really feels overwhelming once you get a feel for it. This is probably because you're only really setting them up to fulfill only 3 or maybe 4 roles in combat. That may not sound like much but it's actually just about right in my opinion. This is a good game to pick up if you want a decent amount of depth to the strategy but don't want to deal with something super complex that will eat up hours in just the planning phase of how you set up your team. I've played 'tactics' style strategy games where it does get to be rather overwhelming to set up all of your characters and if you put the game down for a while and pick it back up a few months later you really feel lost because you forgot what you were doing with your two dozen or so characters and whatnot.

As for the strategy game play itself it's pretty good. It certainly isn't the most difficult I've encountered but there are some missions that pose a decent challenge. You'll probably be fairly familiar with how the enemy AI behaves by the time you've progressed a good way through the game which will provide you with a distinct advantage in the face of superior firepower but even so a good grasp for tactics and planning how you will accomplish your goals is the most important key to victory. Just spreading your forces out and attacking at random is going to lead you into trouble. It really helps to know what each of your mechs is capable of so you can have them properly support one another in combat.

And once again I feel like the depth is just about right in terms of game play as well. It's a good introduction to this type of turn based strategy gaming or it could serve as a good strategy game for when you don't feel like getting into something so complicated it takes months to slough through. This is the type of game that if you play it for the first hour or so you'll likely come back until you finish it rather than getting bored and abandoning it half way through.

I definitely recommend this game to any strategy fan who gets a chance to play it. In addition to the solid game play and well managed depth it's a well polished game with a nice sense of atmosphere and aesthetics.

Now if only Square would get on that American release of Front Mission 5. I've heard it's probably one of the best in the series according to many.