Illustrated guide to video games part 3: Deus Ex

My latest videogame/drawing based thing for B4HD.com just went live.
you can see it right here

Score Tissue: parts 11-24

This is the final set of Score Tissue comics that I scribbled for Hi-score.co.uk. Read on in amazement as I take bold steps into the realm of video games based diary comics!

This could be the most heavily read comic I've ever drawn (which does make me wish it wasn't such a last minute rush job) thanks to a timely re-tweet by the official Capcom twitter account. I do like Hadokenening dudes though.

After how much attention the previous strip got, I decided to go all out with the art on this one. The fact that ODST was easily my favourite game of last year didn't exactly hurt my desire to "do it right" either.

I had a nasty man-flu during the week of this strip and this is all that I could manage. I'm less bitter about Super Street Fighter IV now... mainly because Capcom would've probably charged $100 for 10 characters worth of DLC if their pricing on the SFIV costume packs is anything to go by.

Japan scares me sometimes. And the reaction to the Love Plus games is especially scary. The anti-piracy measure in the new version is genius though... If the game detects that you're using a flash cart instead of a purchased copy of the game, none of the girls will ever fall in love with you. You will be friend-zoned forever and ever. Even after the 30 hours of courtship cut-scenes you just sat through. Crushing!

Some games are a lot of fun but just aren't very good (the Earth Defence Force and Just Cause games spring to mind)  but some games are clearly high quality, but just aren't as much fun as they should be.(Glares at Final Fantasy XIII) Brutal Legend wasn't fun enough for me in the end.

Let's imagine this horror movie version of Bobby Kotick stalking the halls with a chainsaw during the Infinity Ward meltdown. Good luck ever sleeping again.

It's alright. I don't expect you to understand the true horror of this comic unless you are a toy robot dork like me.

I do love Marvel and DC comics, but they don't always make it easy for fans like me. My absolute favourite recent run of comics is Marvel's Incredible Hercules (RIP). It's witty and intelligently written, beautifully drawn and brings up some genuinely interesting points about the modern super heroes replacing the Gods of myth and legend for a large percentage of modern society. It also features the best math battle you will ever see.

More hot Kotick action.

This was a bit of a rushed strip as I was packing for the trip while drawing it. True story though.

Another true story. Unfortunately.

My girlfriend (who cameos in this strip) got utterly addicted to Borderlands for a good four or five months. I dread to think what the sequel will do to her.

Because Square-Enix make the Final Fantasy games and those games frequently feature chracter with large swords and more belts than is traditional! Get it? I am a comedy genius.

At this point, Christmas 2009 was rushing towards me like a large truck. So I took an extended break from Score Tissue until the new year. Only to find on my return that Hi Score was on it's way out, due to the brains behind the site moving on to bigger and better things.


One of those bigger and better things was Resolution magazine's newly launched retro gaming site: B4HD.com, home of my new fortnightly thing: The Illustrated Guide to Retro Video Games.

Part 1 can be found here
and Part 2 is right here.

I'll probably post the occasional round-up of my most recent pieces for other websites onto this blog every now and then. So look forward to that, you lucky lucky people.

Score Tissue: parts 1-10

For six months last year I threw together a weekly videogame webcomic for the fine folks over at Hi-Score.co.uk. As that site is (sadly) no more, I'm going to re-host those strips here with a few additional notes.

Due to my *ahem* busy schedule, a lot of these early strips were written a couple of weeks before they went up, so obviously I wanted to avoid the usual webcomic tactic of trawling Joystiq that morning for the joke of the day as the strip would've been out of date before it went online.

Was this strip responsible for (the hopefully awesome) Sonic 4? I'd like to think so.

I have seen some mashing silliness on Soul Calibur over the years.

This strip guest stars my Girlfriends dog, Chester.

I love the traditional November gaming splurge, as it usually means that I have millions of cheap games to choose from by my birthday in late January.

I sneakily replaced the silhouettes of Noble Team with the characters from Team Fortress 2. I think I was too subtle for my own good.

Okay, so we're getting Sonic 4. Still waiting on that Star Wars movie and B&B machine though guys.

I still haven't bought Guitar Hero: Van Halen. And considering how much I like throwing myself at impossibly complex guitar wankery on the guitar hero games, that should speak volumes as to how dire the rest of the track list is.

This isn't getting any better. Games I still think of as "Next Gen" are having their tenth anniversary. Stupid ageing process.

This was so damn fun to draw.

I'm not sure if i should be proud or ashamed of "This months rent-boy".

The look of dread that enters my brothers eyes whenever anyone else asks him to fix their RROD leads me to believe that this comic is closer to the truth than I intended.

The next 20 strips will be uploaded tomorrow!