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  "Out of this World" '80s digital artAug 12, 2013 10:46 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Image
 
^ Two and a half days left on the auction for this big original A* ink painting!
 
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I mentioned last week how three people had said to me separately that the A* color I was doing reminded them of the '80s, and I talked about how I was probably influenced by comic book coloring in the '80s, since that's when I started reading comics. But thinking about this more over the weekend, it struck me that at least two of those people were probably thinking of '80s color use in general, not just in comics. This slow train of thought was aided by a reader, who posted a couple nifty, definitely '80s palette illustrations on the forum.
 
It further occurred to me that color use in video games back then would probably have seeped into my brain too, to come out now in this 5-bit A* stuff I've just started doing; most of the games I was playing on my Amiga computers back then, for instance, were either 16 or 32 color affairs. The one that sprang right to mind when I got down this track was a slightly later, 16-color game, French designer Eric Chahi's Another World, started in 1989 and released in 1991, which I knew as Out of this World--the name had been changed in the US to avoid conflict with the Another World soap opera. : p Another World the video game proved quite popular, "selling around 1 million copies during the 1990s," and, as its platformer gameplay was on the brief and frustrating side, that was likely due to the style of its presentation, which was spare, smooth, atmospheric, and extremely stylish, accomplishing this with an innovative blend of vector animation and low-color bitmap backdrops accompanied by subtle sound effects and music that effectively brought an alien world to life in a dark, dangerous, sophisticated way that no other game to that point had.
 
Here's a screenshot from the opening cinematic
 
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and one from the brief cinematic sequence at the end of the first level
 
Image
 
Those big, flat, carefully toned colors were really striking, and their sharp-edged look is kinda reminiscent of the shapes cut by the Lasso Tool I use for delineating A*'s colored areas in Photoshop. Oh and those screenshots are from the PC demo of the game's 15th Anniversary Edition, which you can download from this page of Chahi's web site. The full 15th Anniversary version seems to have been pulled from its online digital vendors in favor of the more recent 20th Anniversary edition, currently available on Steam and mobile platforms.
 
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I got a bunch of visitors from the Something Awful forum today! : ) Thanks to the old hacker who linked to me over there. ; )
 
 
 
 
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