Sunday 4 December 2011

A breif history of Joe

Good day minions, today i thought i would regal you of my epic personal history. I have graced this fine earth for the last 19 years and its been a nice journey sometimes happy sometimes sad, but mostly game and art absorbed!
In my games history i started on the saga mega drive, at this point i was to young to remember the age i was when i got it or to appreciate the true value of early games, to be entirely honest with you the only parts that i remember are the small play through of sonic and street fighter. Both fantastic games in my opinion and have played through them a few times on emulators on my pc.
 Soon after we inherited a computer from some better off family friends from this i never knew about the gaming that could have been possible on this just playing the side games in accessories like pin ball and minesweeper, boring but fun to my own games development. I then swiftly moved on to games like Age of empires and Boldersgate as i started to love RPG and RTS games to an extreme, since then i have bought many of the games in that genre.
After a few years of just playing a very limited arsenal of games i moved swiftly, after a some encouragement from friends, to begin playing the life absorbing world of warcraft when it first came out and sadly sill play this today like some kind of drug. Still it has continued to influence my life as i have followed blizzards style and interoperated it into my own art work incorporating a cartoony and exaggerates reality.
Since then my gaming career has been quiet as i have leaked money to the monthly sub. However looking at my games library in front of me i can clearly see my roots and am passionate about my RPG games, even on my newly acquired Xbox i can only see myself spending my hard earned limited money on the games i love.
As for my artistic career, i have never had a specific talent and the only thing that i was ever told i was effective at is art. Since then i have practiced and trained and began to feel art work as a relaxing and enjoyable thing. I have been studying it since i was in junior school, i only hope that my skills have enhanced since then! I love using pencils and paint and getting messy creating whatever i want and love. I have my own ways of drawing that don’t necessarily get the best results but it gets the style and interpretation that i love.

Saturday 12 November 2011

A history of games 1990-2000

Hello, welcome to the next instalment of joes epic blog. Today i will be talking about the development of games and consoles between the 1990s – 2000s an interesting decade with terrible fashion and great music such as nirvana, public enemy and others !. the collapse of the soviet union in Russia and the first golf war.
This decade meant the sad demise of the arcade and the rise of the handheld and personal consol as in 1994 Sony released the play station 1 one of the modern day big 3, this meant the arrival of great games such as tomb raider, crash bandicoot and metal gear solid. Its rival arrived later with the Nintendo 64 with resident evil and others like Mario as you can see games were becoming big by this point as most reading this will know the consoles that i am mentioning games were becoming more and more revolutionary with golden eye released by rare and Zelda again coming to our homes.
Sadly in 1998 the dreamcast was born and sagas days as a consol manufacturer was dead as they turned there focus to just games however even thought the dreamcast was a failure few games like sonic adventure were gems in the turd.
Wars continued to ravage the modern world and influence the design of games such as the columbine killings and the war in the former Yugoslavia with the golf war continuing on. 

A history of games 1980-1990

Welcome back to Joes epic blog. This time ill be talking about the development of games between the 1980s-1990s. And how they have effected the recent platforms and games that we play and use now. Many things in this time frame affected the way that we play and the developments of computers, a lot of music was influential at this time in making us feel and imagine more. Also this was a key time for Briton as the conservatives took power and destroyed the country. As the cold war raged on and the miners went on strike all looked bleak. However this was also when the arcade came to the players livening room with the birth of consoles.
1982 saw the arrival of the Atari 5200 and there game Colico vision. That’s right the birth of the games giant Atari. This was the beginning of its long game history as people could finally play games in there home with there friends and family. Its rival arrived a year later in 83 as the Nintendo famicom came to fruition witch saw some of your favourite games come to life such as Mario and Zelda. Once again it could all be played in the comfort of your own home on compact platforms.
Then we move on to the birth of my first consol i ever got or played with the release of the saga genesis (mega drive in America and the EU) in 1988. This was truly a great platform my opinion may be bias but with the birth of sonic and street fighter both great concepts and successful games. Again the consoles became more and more stylised and compact until the triumphant released of the Nintendo game boy in 1989 witch meant you could take your favourite characters around with you like Mario and Zelda again and also the legendary tetras.
Consoles had finally made it into our home and the computer game was becoming more and more prominent as a money making product as the public adored the very idea of virtual entertainment who knows were it goes after this monumental decade, we will find out in the next instalment of Joes epic blog!. Joe out.

a history of games 1950-1970

Greetings and welcome to another entry to joe’s blog. I’m here now to tell you all a brief history lesson into computer games history from the very start i will cover from 1950 – 1970 in this post and i hope that you enjoy every word!.
Lets start off with the NBS Seac in 1950 witch was the first indication that computers were becoming more compact as we all know computers keep halving in size, I’m sure soon we will have ones the size of raisins!. The nbs seac was designed to be a computer that would be fast made whilst the National Bureau of Standards (the company that produced them) waited to produce more powerful expensive computers.
Now we move onto the Univac in 1952 witch was possibly the first computer to be able to store information to be reloaded at a later time, essentially it was the first save. However at this point the actual size of the computer was obscenely huge and impractical, still far off the desktops we have to present date.
Now we move onto an important development in the history of games, the Dec pdp-1 in 1960. This was the first prototype for desktop personal use with keyboard interface. This also was a all modular computer with Pong, one of the first computer games to grace the earth. Later this computer was used to develop Space war in 1962 the first real game on computers to use a 3D space!.
We reach the point now were computers are starting to get more and more accessible by normal people in 1965 when the Hp 2115 came out and began to transform the look of computers into the desktop look that we seem to have adapted to with modern computers. From this most companies followed the simple approach to input and output. 

Intro about joe

Hello, I’m Joe, and ill be writing in this blog about how i progress through my games art course at DMU. Ill be telling all of you about how i come across any ideas and how i get to complete the tasks that i am set through the course by my tutors. Obviously to do this course i have to be a gamer and i like to consider myself a keen one.
So a little bit about me, i have always found that i was quite good at drawing and got most of my good grades because of creative productions etc. I have a lot of fine art training having done it from the start of my secondary school career and also a lot of investment into art in my private time. As I said before I am a keen gamer and this being about my games art course I thought I would mention my favoured game, which has to be mass effect of course, all of the franchise.
To do with art and my favoured styles and medias i would say that i am a skilled sketcher and enjoy getting messy by using paints and pastels and have recently tried my hand at digital painting after purchasing my graphics tablet, still need a bit of work but i feel I’m progressing slowly.
Before i moved to Leicester to do this course i used to live in Birmingham witch i used as the root of most of my inspiration with classical art, hence why i would like to branch into environmental design within the game art industry. I enjoy capturing the moment in every picture i do so i can look back and remember the exact scene that i drew. I like to think of myself as an amateur photographer as well as i love nothing more than walking around and taking photos. I think i have a natural eye for photography which is also reinforced by my father’s past history as a photographer so i have always been growing up around cameras and other associated items.
Enough about me and i hope that you enjoy the contents of this blog, i may also personalise this by adding my own personal game reviews on games that i am currently playing, sadly because of limited resources and computing power most of said games will be Xbox versions, so for any PS3 and computer fans i apologise. Joe out.