Best Games - Elevator Action Returns
Elevator Action is a classic arcade game from 1983, where you play as a spy infiltrating an office tower. Your mission involves ascending that tower to search for secret documents, and that will require the use of a lot of elevators. All the while, patrolling enemies will attempt to thwart your efforts. You have a few ways to fight them, but using the elevators against them is probably the most fun. It’s a great game. That’s not the game I’m writing about here. In 1994, Taito released the sequel, Elevator Action Returns. Eleven years and many generations of computer technology later, Elevator Action Returns is as much a leap ahead as it is a throwback. It looks every bit a 1994 arcade game. Great character art, fantastic animation, gameplay action spread over beautiful levels that change dynamically. It looks that way, but it plays very much like a tuned up version of the original. Don’t get me wrong, it plays great, but so did the original. Had this sequel been made any sooner, it just wouldn’t have been the same. This is a dream remake of a game. When you play Elevator Action Returns, you can kind of imagine what was going on in the developer’s heads. It’s like they wanted to make the version of the game they remembered. The game they imagined in their childhood reveries. In place of the tiny, blocky spy character from Elevator Action, they imagined a trio of anime inspired action heroes. In place of the building, a set of sprawling levels in a continuous campaign. In place of the replicated, fedora wearing enemies from the original, they created a whole army of enemies with different looks, behaviours, and attacks. Older video games didn’t look very good. We can just accept that as fact. The resolution and color palettes of most games left a lot to the player’s imaginations. Characters and locations were representational glyphs, at best. When you play them, your brain sort of fills in the blanks. Making a sequel to a beloved game over a decade later, some things can remain the same, but others will require some translation. Elevator Action Returns is like the real working model based off the Elevator Action sketch. Similar, but fully realized. The elevators are still elevators. They go up and down, but that’s not all that they are for. It’s not long before you are using them not just to travel the various buildings, but as strategic weapons against an array of terrorist baddies. You probably won’t even play a full level before you are waiting for just the right moment to roll a barrel down on top of a group of enemies, lighting them all on fire, or tossing a grenade into an empty shaft to light a completely different group of enemies on fire. In no time, the motion of the elevators becomes your plaything. Some reviews at the time of Elevator Action Returns release weren’t particularly kind. There were some sentiments that the game was too simple, or not up to the level of its contemporaries. By 1994, the trend toward 3D was in full swing, and punched up versions of older game mechanics were very much not in fashion. Oddly enough, had the sequel been made even later, the reception for it may have been warmer. Now, Elevator Action Returns is pretty universally recognized as a lost gem. A game that did what it was intending to do so well that some many people missed out on it at the time. The only problem is, most people never really got around to playing it. It’s a sequel. It’s a remake. It’s a reimagining of what might have been, had the technology been available eleven years earlier. Elevator Action Returns is one of the Best Games.
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During the Alberta Game Jam, Kyle Nissen and I created this nightmare. You are tasked with cleaning a set of teeth that will not stop chomping down on trash food.
You can play it here. https://itch.io/jam/alberta-game-jam-2023/rate/2227895 Everything I have ever learned about logo design, I learned by tracing. I’ve dealt with a lot of logos. I’ve probably only designed a few. More than ten, less than twenty, maybe. Might be more, but not a ton more. The amount of logos I have dealt with, I couldn’t even begin to count. And so very many of those I traced. When you work in advertising or sign design (which, I suppose, is usually advertising too), you will get handed a lot of artwork. Companies will have existing designs and logos that they want put on whatever it is they have you making for them. From single page leaflets to magazine layouts to dimensional signs to enormous carvings to vehicle wraps to television commercials to full motion video billboards. The mediums and modes that advertising artwork can take are uncountable and ever expanding. Someone will hand you some artwork made with one of those mediums in mind and ask you to make it work on any of the others. All too often, that will mean recreating the artwork for that particular medium. You can, and will, ask them if they have their artwork in all the formats that you need. Most of the time they will say ‘no’, and send you a grainy jpeg sized for a letterhead, but what they need is a banner, or something that can look nice on the side of a bus. Here is a common example of what I mean. Imagine that you are asked to make a set of stickers from that grainy jpeg. There are a lot of ways to make stickers. You can print stickers onto some sticky backed surface, like paper or vinyl. The printer that you use might be something akin to the inkjet or laser printers that you are accustomed to, but it will likely not use the same type of ink. Industrial printers are made for industrial applications, and every printer uses a slightly different sort of ink and even sets of inks for the same printer can be slightly different. At the very least, the color of the artwork might have to change so that it can be properly reproduced by the printer. You could also use a thermal transfer printer that uses cartridges of specific colored films. Very durable, but much difficult to use. Using a thermal printer usually means that the artwork will have to be in a vector format or converted to a vector format. If the artwork that you have is that grainy jpeg, it will have to be rebuilt. Often, a sticker can be simply cut from the appropriate color vinyl. No printing necessary. That also means that the artwork needs to be converted to vector. Machines that drive cutting knives have no idea about color or pixels. They want paths to follow. You will have to redraw that artwork as a vector, AKA trace that thing. Some artwork is pretty easy to trace. Others, not so much. But tracing, what has to be literally hundreds of logos, can teach you a lot about what makes a good logo. And what doesn’t. You become accustomed to repeated shapes and recurrent arcs. Certain ways of composing and balancing. I think you could go to art school, study design, attend classes and lectures put on by the best designers in the world, and you still wouldn’t learn as much as you would by cleaning up or adapting artwork. Tracing. Tracing artwork, especially using vector tools, requires that you break down the original design process. You have to reverse engineer it. You have to understand how it was made in the first place. Am I a master logo designer? No, probably not. But I did design this. I think it’s pretty good. It’s balanced. There is a flow to it. You could scale it up to the size of a banner fairly easily, or cut it out with a vinyl plotter or cnc router, minus the glow effects of course. It could be a sticker or printed on clothing. I'm pretty certain it could be built from real neon or the led equivalent.
The only way I get from shaky legged art student to designing that with some confidence, is by tracing. A lot. There is your permission. Go and trace some artwork, and improve your own skills in the process. Neon Noodles, the game I did most of the art for, came out in full release this week. I think you should play it.
You can find it here Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/990900/Neon_Noodles__Cyberpunk_Kitchen_Automation/ Or here GOG https://www.gog.com/en/game/neon_noodles_cyberpunk_kitchen_automation Or here Epic https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/neon-noodles-cyberpunk-kitchen-automation-16a476 Or here Humble https://www.humblebundle.com/store/neon-noodles-cyberpunk-kitchen-automation Or here itch https://vividhelix.itch.io/neon-noodles |
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