video games – Assignment Bank

INTE 5340: Week Five

DS106 Mashup: Gears of Mario

ge01-gears-of-war-cover_copy (1) — Welcome to my DS106 mashup assignment, Video Game Cover Mashup.

“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.

Teacher Candidate | Math
University of Colorado Denver
INTE 5340 | Summer 2016

Triple Troll Link

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When I saw this one, I just knew I had to do it. As a Redditor, it’s something I often see.

The assignment: Find an image of a well-known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure.

I thought long on what to do for this assignment. You just can’t beat Gandalf as Dumbledore quoting Yoda.

Movies and books are too plenty, so I started thinking about video games. Immediately, I thought of The Legend of Zelda.

How many people think that the main character of The Legend of Zelda is named Zelda?

So that’s how I came up with this one:

I tried to do a similar style to the Gandalf one because I think it’s more powerful and “realistic” looking…even with a video game character.

I began with this image. Since I wanted to imitate the Gandalf image, I got the color from the back with the dropper and filled the background of a new image, clean image.

Then I used the Magic Wand to get rid of the background from the Link image. I copied it to the dark background and erased any extra bits of white from him.

Then I used the Fixedsys font that I found from this Daily Create page. I gave Link some drop shadow, 3 distance and black multiply.

But then I realized that I didn’t quite follow the directions of this assignment. I was really supposed to have three different universes of characters.

So I went into Photoshop again and changed it around.

When my roommate dressed up as Peter Pan for Halloween, most people thought she was Robin Hood or Link from Legend of Zelda. So I think this works much better.

I just deleted the text from the other Photoshop file, and then added the new text with Chopin Script for the font. I made this distance 5.

I’m pretty happy with this last one, especially since I think a lot of people can relate to it!

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Yie Ar Kung-Fu GIFs

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This series of GIFs is in honor of the 1985 classic arcade game Yie Ar Kung-Fu. I’ve already written about my love for this game on the bava, so I’ll save you my usual flood of verbiage.

For the record, this series of GIFs took me way too long. Each animated fighter is its own GIF, and my strategy was to beat each and every character in the game and then steal his or her image as a GIF (a double beat down) That plan went well until I got to Tonfun, then it went to hell. I kept getting beat up by Tonfun, so in the interest of time and family relations I found this video of a perfect game and got the animated likeness of the Blues GIF there. Nothing like starting the New Year with a cheat!

One last thing, you may notice that each of these characters animations are the same as they are in the “Hot Fighting History Next Opponent” cut scene for each of them. Still stuck on the animated GIF cut scenes idea for class arcade games.

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Animate 2600: Haunted House

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I always knew Haunted House was a classic Atari 2600 game, what I didn’t know is that it inspired a whole new genre of survival horror video games! From the Wikipedia article:

Haunted House is an Atari 2600 video game, first released in 1982, in which the player (represented by a pair of eyes) must navigate the haunted mansion of the late Zachary Graves to recover the three pieces of an urn. The game was one of the first home video games to feature scrolling graphics and a multi-level playing field, and has been identified as one of the earliest examples of the survival horror genre by a GameSpy article.

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Electronic Games Animated Magazine Cover

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As soon as Jim created this assignment and seeded it with his terrific Famous Monsters of Filmland animated magazine cover, I knew I had to do it.

This is cover of the first issue of the fan magazine Electronic Games published in the Winter of 1981. Nightrob has a great set of EG cover art in his Flickr stream if you’d like to see some quintessential 80′s game art. The moving 8-bit creatures are from the famous game Space Invaders, sadly I was never particularly good at that game but I love the look of the graphics. Take a listen to some sounds from the original play – I love the old-school oscillators and beeps.

In the era of stand-up arcades, I played occasionally at a roller skating rink called Great American Skate (and yes I did skate too, badly). My favorite stand-up by far was Tempest which had a dial instead of a joystick to rotate a shooter about a variety of almost crystalline spaces. Various geometric objects would attempt to climb toward the exterior of the crystal and you were to shoot them back.

But I spent much more time playing games on the memorable consoles built by Atari, Colecovision, and Intellivision. I played a lot of 8-bit Donkey Kong, Pit Fall, and Pac-Man. But I didn’t really go over the gaming deep end until I bought my Commodore 64, a system that almost single-handedly destroyed the still young video game industry. The C64 used rewritable floppy disks, instead of ROM based cartridges which made it very easy to copy and trade games. I made an homage animated GIF for my favorite game on that platform – Karateka.

Probably for the better, I peaked as a gamer at around 13-14 years-old. I’m a total novice with games today and mastering a controller that requires every single one of my digits to perform independently isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Joystick #4life.

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I want a TRON Legacy Light Cycle!

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From Normal…

…To Extraordinary!

The Assignment:

Transform someone from normal to extraordinary.

The Process:

The original prompt says to use someone else, but I decided to just use myself. So, I took a picture of myself wearing a wig to edit in Photoshop. I enlarged the eyes using the liquify tool. Then, I went to the filter gallery and used 3 filters (I forget 2 of them, but 1 was the water paper affect). Additionally, I went into lens correction and messed with the vignette setting. Afterwards, I opened it in iPhoto to adjust the contrast, definition, and sharpness a bit more to enhance the graininess.

The Story:

Gamification. A key concept in one of Dr. Alexander’s predictions of the future. When hearing about the term, I immediately thought about TRON. So, I decided to do this TRON-inspired photo. I decided on old-school TRON rather than the newer version simply because I find the visual more humorous.

The internet is becoming more of a necessity in everyday life. People have a second- self online; this is how I imagine my online self might look like in old-school TRON form. Maybe one day we’ll actually have a tangible online dimension, similar to a TRON world-hopefully the new TRON world…old-school TRON world looked kinda clunky. : P

…This ‘after’ photo looks HILARIOUS!

~NOMNOMreeses~