This assignment was relatively straightforward. I was asked to create a mashup of two video game art covers, and I decided to pick two contrasting genres as I intended to make something that is light-hearted into a darker tale.
For the two games, I chose the new Kirby game: Kirby and the Forgotten Land and one of my favorite games: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. The original covers are shown below.
I still, unfortunately, have not gotten the hang of figuring out how to make background layers transparent… I think that’s the terminology. What I have gotten the hang of, however, is finding some user-intuitive program to solve the issue. This assignment was brought to you by Pixlr X, yes, that Photo Editor!
I found that if you used the cutting tool, you could alter the background, in this case, a plain white one, to become transparent. Making the final product was easy, but I would like to try to improve some of the touch-ups, and I think this would create an excellent assignment to try and perfect in the future.
I hope everyone is having a nice day. We’re in the home stretch of the semester!!! Summer is almost here!
For this 3 1/2 star mashup assignment, I had to “This assignment will be completed through the use of photoshop. Take two existing video game covers and mash them up so that both can be identified but in a different style. Try to be creative in the title and artistic design.” I decided to do a mashup of Call of Duty and Overwatch. I took an image of a character from Overwatch and combined it with the cover of Call of Duty Cold War to bring you “Call of Duty Black Ops Overwatch.
okay so this mashup assignment was really cool and also gimp and photo editing has kind of grown on me. I’m by no means an expert, but i can feel the progress and how much calmer i am while using it, which is super cool and makes me really happy. anyways! the assignment. This assignment was to mash up two different video game covers. Sticking with our 80s theme (because i’ve been a little slack on that lately) i decided to go for pacman and tetris, two of the most popular video games during the 80s. Here are the starter covers for each game!
and thus, pac-tris was born! i knew right away that i wanted to make the squares and rectangles of tetris the little maze thing in pac-man, honestly that was the main influence in my decision of which games to mash, i just thought that would super fun so i did it. and the final cover!
My cleanup work on the “tris” is a little bit messy, but i’m so happy with everything else that i’m not too pressed about it. I started out by copying the different shades of blue and slowly but surely making a gradient like the tetris cover, except sans the title of the game. I then proceeded to cover up all of my hard work (and i worked hard) with the orange pac-man block. In hindsite, not my best move. but oh well, nothing to be done. From there, i spent a lot of time scaling the logos, and the ghosts, and the man himself, from the pac-man art i had. I also tried my hand at the smudge tool, and i think you can tell i’m still a beginner at smudging lol. Once all my little characters were placed, i realized if i made the edges of my paintbrush hard, i could add little pac-man dots for my boy to follow! so i did! After all that, i realized i wanted to call the game pac-tris, not just pacman but on top of tetris, so i tried clearing out the blue from the tris, mostly successfully, and added it as a layer as the finishing touch.
Overall i’m super happy with how this turned out and also this sounds like a really fun game. Logistically i’m not sure how one would play it, maybe spend one round stacking and one round eating, but it feels like it would be a good time.
Pokemon and Super Smash Bros Ultimate are two of my favorite games so I added them together in this mash-up. I wanted to try Super Smash and Dragon Quest but I couldn’t find a good picture to mash up. But then I found this and I decided to go with Pokemon. The figures Mii Brawlers which are fighters on SSBU. Their skins (clothes) are based on Team Rocket, an organization bent on exploiting Pokemon. So it’s a whole mash-up that fits perfectly. And for the Remix of this assignment see if you can find Waldo, you know the one. So see if you can find Waldo.
For this assignment, Video Game Cover Mashup, I downloaded the picture and uploaded it to Pixlr. Then I added the different titles to it. After that, I uploaded it here using the Image button.
While looking through the list of mashup assignments, something that caught my attention (unsurprisingly) was the video game cover mashup (3.5 stars). Though not required, I thought I would tie this back to our 80s theme and bring in two well known franchises that originated in the 80s: The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987).
At first, I had to think about how I wanted to mash the titles together. My first idea was “The Final Legend of Zelda: Fantasy version,” but eventually settled on “The Legend of Zelda: Final Fantasy.” The reason is because I thought it would make more sense title wise since the Zelda games often come as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, just to name a few. Plus, mashing the titles the way I originally planned based on their fonts would be a terrible combination.
First, I downloaded png versions of The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy titles. The Final Fantasy series are known for their artwork that represent important symbols/people in the game, so I thought that I would do the same. I downloaded the symbol associated with the first Final Fantasy, and I downloaded a picture of Link and edited it to match the same color and aesthetic as the Final Fantasy logo–though it’s not perfect.
For the finishing touch to make it look like a game cover, I added the Nintendo Switch logo, the ERSB rating, and the Square Enix logo. I kept the backdrop white because it’s closer to the aesthetics of the Final Fantasy covers and some of the Legend of Zelda covers. Overall, I found this an enjoyable assignment to work on.
First assignment I’m making a post for this week is a video game cover mashup. I wasn’t sure what two games to use, so I decided to ask my girlfriend to give me two absolutely random games with no context.
I’m now bound by honour to use those two games. For reference, here are the covers:
(Sorry about the huge images, but you need to see the two of them to get the full effect)
So, I took the two covers into Paint.NET and got to work. I decided to use the Yoshi’s Story cover as the base I’d work on while adding elements from Dishonored to it. The mashed-up title became Yoshi’s Honor, since Disyoshid and Disstory don’t make too much sense. In the background of the Yoshi’s Story cover, there’s a Shy Guy wearing a mask. I thought this was perfect to replace with an Overseer’s mask, since Overseers are a major enemy in Dishonored. I reduced the saturation of the cover to match the grey bleakness of the Dishonored cover, though I didn’t make it fully greyscale, so it’d still be like Yoshi’s Story. In the background of the Dishonored cover, you can see several smokestacks, as the setting the game takes place in is an industrialising Victorian England-inspired city. I added some Mario warp pipes pumping out smog to the background to match. The cover ended up looking like:
(Click it for the full size)
I’m actually surprisingly pleased with how it turned out. When I got the two games I had to use, I wasn’t sure how they’d end up looking together, but I really like it.
“Take two existing video game covers and mash them up so that both can be identified but in a different style. Try to be creative in the title and artistic design.”
The Process
Wouldn’t this be an awesome game to play?! I know that this week’s DS106 assignment was supposed to explore our chosen theme, and video games are hardly related to photography, but I did have to manipulate photos! So in my opinion, it counts! First, I downloaded a picture of the Gear of War cover, featuring Marcus Fenix in the foreground, with Ben Carmine and Dom Santiago in the background. Using the retouch tool in the Photos app on my Macbook, I photoshopped them out, along with the “War” in the title. Then, I looked up some pictures of the Super Mario logo, along with Mario and Bowser, and overlaid them onto the new cover using PicMonkey! It didn’t take too long at all, and I was able to accomplish it without anything too fancy.
The Story
Super Mario 64 was my favorite video game as a child, and still totally my favorite now that I bought another Nintendo 64 after my parents so graciously “donated” my old one because I’d gotten “too old” or something. Anyway, Gears of War was also my favorite video game series as I got older and into high school and college, and both my Nintendo 64 and old-school XBOX 360 are sitting in my basement, ready to be played as soon as I’m done blogging about this. I haven’t been able to touch them for almost a year because I’ve either been out of town or too busy. Or too cold. Mostly that. Basements are chilly!
Anyway, I like video games, especially the simpler ones like Super Mario and Gears of War because they keep me thinking on my feet and help me adapt to lots of situations. I’ve always found that if I play video games regularly for a while, I get a little bit more street smart. Sometimes I’m prone to overthinking because I have too much of the book smart and not enough of the street smart, and then I just shut down because I never know what to do and it’s super not cool. Video games get a lot of flak from society because they’re supposedly bad for you, but recent studies have shown that they can actually be really beneficial for your cognitive development. Basically, they can help you improve your spatial perception, visual skills, hand-eye coordination, reaction time, ability to overcome challenges, and overall brain growth. Hear that, fellow gamers? Video games are good for you! No need to tell me twice. See you all later! I’ll be busy swinging Bowser by his tail and taking out Locusts with my chainsaw bayonet.
The third assignment I chose to accomplish this week is called Video Game and is worth three and a half stars. This assignment required me to create a video game logo using two different games or in other words making it look like the two games are one game. I had a lot of fun creating this assignment and looking through all the different video games I know about. I originally was going to use the video games fallout 4 and far cry 4 but I couldn’t figure out how to get them to fit together using pixlr. I had a friend tell me to use Skyrim and Gears of War and found that they fit well together.I would be cool having the two games actually be combined later on to see how they would work together. I have never played either of these games but I have heard about them and they both sound fun to play.  I used an online photo shopping website called pixlr  which made creating the mashed up photo very easy.
This mashup assignment is titled “Video Game Cover Mashup“, its instructions are as follows “this assignment will be completed through the use of photoshop. Take two existing video game covers and mash them up so that both can be identified but in a different style. Try to be creative in the title and artistic design.” It is currently rated 3.5/5 in regards to difficulty. My new video game is “Call of Duty Heroes”. It is available on the PS4 and XBOX1!
Finished project
The Story Behind The StoryÂ
Infinity ward and Activision have created a new video game, “Call of Duty Heroes”. Building off of the recent ISIS attacks, this game aims against ISIS. Within the campaign mode, the gamer can choose between the path of Superman or Batman and fight against ISIS. There is a different storyline for Batman and Superman, but the end goal is the same, to destroy ISIS. This game is available for Xbox 1 and PS4, pre-order a copy now and get 5% off!
The Process, NarratedÂ
I used two video game covers to create this mashup. Call of Duty Black Ops and Justice League Heroes. I found the images of these respective game covers that I liked and downloaded them. I dragged them into Photoshop from finder. I created new layers for each image. To combine the texts, I cut “heroes” from its layer and pasted it on top of “Ghosts”. I simply replaced heroes with ghosts. I did the same thing for the image of superman and batman. Using the box tool, I selected their bodies and cut it from its original layer and then pasted onto this new layer over the Call of Duty soldier image. I repeated this process for the rating pending, “infinity ward”, and “Activision”. I dragged each image off google and pasted it onto this layer. I minimized each image so it would appear that it was one image with the justice league heroes. Here a few photos to document my process.
Call of Duty; Smash Bros Edition! Fun for all ages! Bring back your childhood and play with one of the famous Mario characters or join the future and enjoy this first person shooter with plenty of exciting action and gore. I thought this would be great idea because the new “Call of Duty; Black ops 3” had just came out and I’ve been playing it non-stop. But I wanted to take this serious first person shooter and turn it into something funny and a bit more childish. So I mashed the two titles together, Call of Duty and Super Smash Bros 4. I took a game that I used to play all the time when I was younger, and mixed it with a game that I play now. I took a picture of the call of duty cover off of google, then used a picture editor on my phone to crop, each of the Smash Bros characters out and simply added them to the cover in places that matched up perfectly. After I just saved it to my phone and uploaded it to Flickr. Here is a screenshot of me editing the picture on the app.
