Video game textmode art part 23: Konami strikes back - Marvel vs. Capcom super-duper mega-tapestry

OK, it's been basically my most active month here at Pixel Pompeii -- the most posts, and consequently the most views! ... it's gratifying to see that others are enjoying my indulgent nostalgic explorations here, for which I basically never expected or dreamed of finding an audience. Recently I've been doing "roundup" posts, omnibus digests (is that a contradiction in terms?) seeking to exhaustively account for all known art on a given topic. It's interesting, it's more rigorously curated, and more ultimately useful, but it's kind of like work. The "video game textmode art" series was traditionally a fun and random grab-bag of just whatever it was I happened to come across. Can't I just post something easy?

Here, I've got just the thing: one last post about the textmode VG art of the artist sometimes known as Konami (sometimes as Dr. Shizuma). You've seen his work before -- basically, the only artist I've devoted multiple posts to -- and here we send him off with a grand parade. But it's just a single piece. A piece with a massive roster of characters -- the Arcade / PlayStation gestalt franchise Marvel Vs. Capcom! This piece appears to feature some characters who only first appear in 2000's Marvel vs. Capcom 2, so let's call it a celebration of that particular ensemble cast. I'll name them all but first I'll give you a chance to see how many you can pick out yourselves. (I needed the artist's help on a couple of them -- it turns out that my Marvel-fu is stronger than my Capcom-fu 8) Konami has not only redesigned all the characters in his personal cartoony style, but he's gone to lengths to minimise the presence of unused black space here, filling every nook and cranny with special effects, battle cries and little gags. Basically, it's awesome. You may want to open the image in another tab, so you can flip back and forth as you go down the roll call -- to facilitate which, you can find the file in its original context in a Mimic artpack over at Sixteen Colours.

So, what have we got here? It opens with an incongrous Konami company logo -- it's made by Capcom, friends, not Konami! But of course that's just a reflection of the artist's choice of nickname.

And there's Chun-Li, Chinese heroine of Street Fighter 2!

Next up, the Canadian mutant Logan, known as Weapon X and best known as Wolverine.

And there, MegaMan (AKA Rockman) of his eponymous series.

From android to cyborg, he's followed by the monarch of Latveria, Victor Von Doom aka Dr. Doom.

And from cyborg back to android, there's one of Bolivar Trask's giant mutant-hunting robots, The Sentinels.

Two Marvel characters in a row? Time for another Capcom hero! And here he is, the ninja Strider Hiryu (of the "Strider" games) whizzing by with a "ZING!"

Next up, Mojo's agent Spiral.

Then we have Akuma, originally appearing in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, with his standard kanji symbol 天, which means "ten" or "heaven, sky".

He is followed by Iron Man, then CAPtain COMmando, and then X-Man Rogue.

SNK-satirising fighter Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter Alpha comes next (what's he saying? Konami says "probably 'oyaji', or 'father' -- his whimpering battle cry"), and he is followed by sometimes X-Men leader Cyclops, letting loose an "Optic Blast!"

Then there is succubus Morrigan from Darkstalkers, followed by Cajun mutant Gambit from the X-Men, presented with the imagery of the playing card suits (♠ ♥ ♦ ♣) he is known to charge and throw.

From MegaMan Legends, next we see a Servbot, followed by Ken Masters from Street Fighter.

Then Captain America (with the tiniest possible ASCII American flag imaginable), proclaiming his cry of "Final Justice!"

British Special Forces agent Cammy White from Super Street Fighter II reports for duty next, and if you look carefully you can see that she is holding a chibi M. Bison doll.

Evil mutant master of menacing magnetism Magneto follows, a crackling nimbus of charged particles emanating from his clenched fist.

Then there is another man who knows more than a little about clenched fists, American soldier Guile from Street Fighter II.

Time-travelling mutant cyborg (it's all a little confusing, blame Rob Liefeld) Cable comes next, followed by Jin Saotom from Cyberbots (I don't know what he's saying and Konami has forgotten: "Jin, I don't know.. something that probably shows up in one of his supers. I could look it up." And I guess you could too, if you really need to know!)

Approaching the end now, we see African weather-controlling mutant and occasional X-Men leader Ororo Munroe aka Storm.

Then, Felicia the catgirl from Darkstalkers pounces into the frame.

The Demon Blackheart comes next -- a Marvel comics character I never knew about before playing these games.

Wrapping things up with some star power, Spiderman's Spidey-sense is tingling -- perhaps a consequence of his wearing Venom as a hat.

And last but not least, we have Ryu from Street Fighter, who is saying "shinku", as in shinku hadouken, as in... the logo at the bottom is the hadouken fireball being shot toward the viewer! Well played!

Thanks again to Konami for this tremendous tableau of fun characters served up in immaculate newschool ASCII with incomparable whimsy. And thanks to you for keeping up with us here! Cheers & see you next time!

This ascii from 10+ years ago, my only 1000 liner. If only I had even more space, would have had all 56 chars! https://t.co/vQuwBRMsNb

— Robin (@Konami707) July 26, 2016

Video Game Art on C64s part 4 - Tributes

Video game art on c64s
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

It's often said (by lying liars) that "art is the lie that tells the truth", by which we mean that it doesn't hold up a straight mirror to a situation, but conveys a feeling or experience more effectively than a dry documentation would. In this case, what the art is supposed to make you experience (as with the often-deceptive box art of the earliest home video games) is the feeling of playing one of these games. In any case, they're not start screens and couldn't in most cases be interpreted as samples of enhanced gameplay... but many (but not all) of the games referenced here did appear on the Commodore 64 platform. So they wouldn't fit in any of my previous C64 galleries, and so I throw them in here!

Here you go: Veto presents a piece titled such that little is left up to the imagination: "25 Years of Yie Ar Kung-Fu." I suppose this is as it might have appeared today if it was developed for the PlayStation 4.

Univerz presents the human side of the Space Invaders struggle.

Carrion gives us a 3D take on Bub and Bob from Bubble Bobble.

And here, a proof-of-concept by Mase for an extruded-pixels 3D version (like the recent 3DNES emulator) of Bruce Lee entitled "Brixels Don't Hit Back".

Buggyboy gives us "Bunker Party", with an all-star cast of retro gaming characters (including Mario, Pac-man, Space Invaders, and OK, plenty I can't name) as might be enjoyed... in a generator-powered post-apocalyptic scenario in a bomb shelter? (Perhaps I am reading too much into "bunker"?)

Mase gives us something entirely different from his previous offering, with a montage of Capcom promotional imagery. I'm letting us down here with my failure to immediately place all the mascots present: I see Ryu from Street Fighter, what I presume to be Arthur in gold armour from Super Ghouls and Ghosts, and a whole bunch of "huh, who's that?"s. History is slanted against Capcom here, with most of its biggest franchises emerging more recently than the C64 era (supposing that such a thing ever really drew to a close!) with, presumably, the montage not anachronistically including characters who never appeared on that platform -- so no Ace Attorney, no Resident Evil, where's Mega Man, what does the character from 194x even look like, really? If you can help me fill in these blanks, please weigh in! (Konami, ironically a Capcom expert as you shall soon learn for yourselves, covers a few more of the gaps: "bottom left is the blue soldier from Forgotten Worlds AKA Lost Worlds in Japan. The large fellow on the right is Strider, as he appeared in the original Strider games.")

And now we get to try this again, Mase providing another montage, this one featuring characters from games by more standard C64 developer System 3. It's easy to pick out characters from International Karate and of course their breakout hit The Last Ninja, also I see the dude from Vendetta and also there is, ahem, Flimbo. The car is from Turbo Charge, but who is NY Jacket Man and where is one of the Puttys? Drawing those is basically free.

Mirage shows us a souped-up Donkey Kong well in hand with a boosted Mario against him, in a piece entitled "Donkey Kong 1LifePal".

Calamity serves us up another Donkey Kong, DK Country-era, in this piece entitled "Fascinating".

I don't know that this piece by FIL is in reference to a particular game or just to the idea that life goes on after a game is done, with this piece entitled "Game Complete" -- the hazard-filled walls and corridors opening up, revealing a horizon of limitless possiblity.

Poison gives us a video game cargo cult with "I Pixel", wherein a ninja, kung-fu dude, a Bubble Bobble knockoff and a cute koala labour to construct a blocky statue of Mario. I wonder what will happen when he is completed? Will he come to life, jumping across the landscape in search of giant mushrooms? (I've gotta say, he is looking pretty complete already from what we can see, perhaps they are now hunkering down to work on a Princess Toadstool he will need to endlessly rescue?)

Yazoo doesn't appear entirely sure why they drew this picture of Mario, but nonetheless it was polished up with some logos and released under the name "Some Retro Shit". The modern platformer genre in a nutshell?

Big User gives us a taste of life in Mega Turrican. Hm, I think that this is simply a horizontally flipped and somewhat squashed alternate take on the game's box art.

And for those of you who just can't get enough Turrican (I think that perhaps enough time has passed for anyone to get their fill, but I seem to be in the minority here), here is another tribute by RadiantX.

Plastique delivers us "Kiss Me To Arcade". I don't know which gag to drop, something about Ms. Pac-man or perhaps the observation that he hasn't any lips? Either which way, he appears to be wearing a look of some consternation on his minimalist face.

Yippee Kai Ai, little pardner, Mirage shows us a buckaroo baffled by a seemingly hopeless predicament Mr. Pac-Man's insatiable hunger for fruit has led her into.

When you just feel like throwing in the towel, don't resort to profanity -- do like JSL suggests, and just say "Pac it"! The scenario is both unmistakable and quite fresh, Pac-Man's mazes not typically reduced to crumbling ruins, and the ghosts are both more horrifying than usual -- with a hint of the hunter-occupied pig skins from Princess Mononoke -- and more numerous than we have been conditioned to expect. No wonder Pac-Man (who must be quite hungry, he's slimmed down quite a bit) is so puzzled he has a little question mark over his head. (Also: perhaps the first time I've ever seen Pac-Man's nostrils! An historical first here, folks.)

And here Bren provides us a late piece for my C64 PETSCII video game art file, another Pac-Man (well, the piece is called "Pac-Maniac") and its story is... pretty straightforward. It looks like it's the ghost issuing its sheet-soiling epithet, but as it is not currently blue, as soon as Pac makes imminent contact with it, he'll be down a life!

Ilesj shows us how it feels to play Outrun, an idealized "cruising down the highway for pleasure" simulation, with a distinct bent toward arcade-style horizontal raster line aesthetic. The image is a gestalt of a couple of different platforms' box art (including, of course, the C64's) and you can learn a great deal about the creation of this image by reading a blog post by the artist on the subject!

We're just lucky that the protagonist of Space Harrier didn't actually take up as much of the screen real estate as SIT demonstrates here, else it would have been impossible to see approaching enemies or dodge incoming projectiles, view blocked by the hero's heroic posterior. But it's a nice likeness! (Stephen Ian Thomson reports: "Not seen that space harrier piccy for forever. Thanks for adding it. Was never finished hence the empty background." And now you know!)

War is hell, and Mirage wants you to appreciate the predicament of the human gunner in Space Invader's mobile turret.

Assassin gets top points here for celebrating Day of the Tentacle here, Purple Tentacle busy chasing uber-nerd Bernard. In the background, a meteor lights up the night sky in homage to the sinister purple meteor motivating the plot of the game that launched both characters, Maniac Mansion.

JSL here demonstrates what it feels like to play Pitfall! Take New World jungle ruins, add one archaeologist, et voila!

And with just a couple of (pointy) extra ingredients added to the mix, you can upgrade your Pitfall! to Tomb Raider, as JSL has done here!

Stepping forward quite some ways here, we've got Tychus Findlay from Blizzard's StarCraft 2 chewing up some scenery (and, OK, a cigar) in this piece by Arcane entitled "Hell, it's about time".

Finally, we arrive at a tormented dancing rabbid from Ubisoft's Rayman games, drawn by Yazoo.

As a special closing treat, I've just discovered (after most of these files had hung around in limbo for a year and a half) the works of Gergely Kwayne64 Sinkó, whose bio reads: "The guy who makes pictures of C64 games that probably won't ever exist." And for his proof of concept, here's a whole suite of awesome illustrations for the nonexistent C64 port of Accolade's Star Control 2. Ilwrath, Zot-Fot-Piq, Earthling, Utwig, Thraddash, Melnorme, Vux, and a full-fledged screen mockup with Spathi. It's a thing of beauty!

And that's all for me for now! I'm using these as spacers between my ANSI art posts, and I only have one more installment of C64 art to go... a very special omnibus. Stay tuned!

Video game art on c64s
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

Artscene roundup: Star Trek

Hirez of Spock by CatBones of ACiD

The computer art underground dug Star Wars, but that wasn't their only fandom! Carrying on from the survey of public domain textmode art of Star Trek, we proceed with ... further works on that theme from the artscene elites! No longer constrained to screens of a mere 25 lines length and more deeply concerned with the admixtures of colours possible with the F1-F4 two-tone "shading" characters, here at least they were finally free to really open up and go where no one had gone before!

OK, ok, to go where one man had gone before -- this picture, ostensibly by Mustang of Liquid, bears an eerie similarity to one of Noel Gamboa's illustrations in the previous post. In case it helps you to refresh your memory:

OK, so he airbrushed away the hand, bedazzled his alluring eyes, and drew the back of Spock's head (to say nothing of that solid gold original logo!), but the telltale signs remain -- the beauty mark over the eyebrow, the squiggle in the ear, the dip under the nose. In the scene, this is what was referred to as "ripping", and sadly, Mustang probably got away with it since March of 1994... until now! (His whole empire, crumbling away.) But in any event, these all serve to prove the same point: the socially shunned misfits in the digital underground identified most strongly with the outsider member of the Enterprise's crew, Science Officer Mister Spock. Even before last year's death of his actor Leonard Nimoy, he was far and away the most popular (practically the sole!) Star Trek subject for the underground artscene. D-Vibe, if you would please strike up the band:

There we go. We open with a peculiar piece from the February 1995 Freak artpack -- possibly, it's deeply unclear, also drawn by a profoundly egotistical artist called "Freak" -- illustrating what looks like a parodic "Mad Magazine" take on Mr. Spock, with some unorthodox outline style. Was it machine-converted? Hey, I can't be levelling accusations at every other piece in this gallery or I'm never going to get through! So let me not level aspersions at the good folks at Freak, and move right along...

This is a nice one by Snow Dog of MAX from back in 1993, showing a mismatched Enterprise-D (from STTNG) with a Mr. Spock circa the Star Trek movies, all capped off with a Starfleet emblem and a logo for a BBS with a Star Trek-themed name! Hat trick! While the previous piece had suspicious outlines, this hearkens back to the PD era of ANSI art (not so distant in 1993) which often failed to acknowledge the utility of black outlines at all.

And then... OK, a couple of decades without much activity. But when Leonard Nimoy died, long after the artscene itself (not unlike Trek fandom itself) virtually dwindled away into mere background radiation, the puissant remnants -- somebody please stop me before I make some comparison to the superdense remains at the heart of a white dwarf star -- emerged from the woodwork to give tribute. Here Realm Dweller commemorates the man's life and career with this ANSI of Spock chilling with some Tribbles, in the recent Blocktronics / Apathy reunion artpack:

And another textmode tribute, this one from Japan (where perhaps "A&D" translates to "AND"?) by the Shift-JIS artist known as Kalcha... who neatly in his small canvas manages to allude to the Vulcan salute with the "V" in "Live":

(He has composed at least three more Trek works in Shift-JIS, and lacking a graceful way to weave them in to the existing post, I'm just going to dump them in here:)

Plus this Tweet...

┈☆┈┈┈☆┈┈
┈┈┈☆┈┈┈┈
╭╭╮╭╭╮┈┈
┃┃┃┃┃┃☆┈
┃┃┃┃┃┃┈┈
┃┛┻┛┛┃╭╮
┃┈┈╱▔┃┃┃
┃┈╱┈┈┗╯┃
╰┳┊┊┳━━╯
┏┻━━┻┓┈☆
┃┈┈┈┈┃┈┈
┃┈┈#RIPSpock

— @tw1tt3rart (@tw1tt3rart) February 28, 2015

Edit: I located one more "Vulcan hand" ANSI and, despite belonging to the earlier Public Domain ANSI art tradition, opted to throw it in here where everyone else was drawing the shape also. "Spock's Adventure" by Michael Arnett:

This one situates Nimoy centrally surrounded by his castmates William Shatner and the late Deforest Kelley (or "Bones") in this monochrome ANSI, which placed 6th in the NVScene 2015 demoparty under the title "The Holy Trinity":

But TOS was not the only Star Trek, and these are not the only artscene Star Trek ANSIs! There is life beyond Spock! Puddlez of Nac, show us what you've got!

OK, I could tell you that everyone was drawing like that in July of 1995, but it'd be a dirty lie. But everyone had to start somewhere: the bottom rung of the underground artscene wasn't public domain, but sometimes it could be darned close! Now here's something you'll really like. In this piece, which hearkens back to the lower part of the Brunching Shuttlecocks' "Geek Hierarchy" chart, Haquisaq of that nifty computer art group I ran (and run again at present) called Mistigris drew a ... small but dense and complicated tableau, to serve the objectives of the weekly computer art improv competition known as the Blender (which, ahem, I have also revived), where participants were challenged to "blend" three disparate subjects into a unified whole under a strict time limit. On this occasion (which likely resulted in further such works potentially relevant to today's discussion, if only then-contest organizer Warpus hadn't gone AWOL without releasing the entries for this particular installment of the contest -- fie, Warpus! From Hell's heart I stab at thee!) the words to use included "starship", "walrus" and "industrial". Here Haquisaq has concocted a desperate pretense to merge the three elements into one indisputably Trek-y scene -- but hey, if Starfleet now has Klingons and androids under its umbrella, why not walrus-men? Perhaps they are capable of being elevated beyond the barbarism of the Tusken Raiders of Star Wars. (Or was that the place to make an Aqualish joke? OK, the moment has probably passed.)

It is worth noting, to establish just how impeccable Haquisaq's Trekker credentials are, that he has composed pop music in Klingon.

So here we are. It's come to this. Our survey has brought us from MiSTiGRiS all the way to RAiD -- two parties that haven't looked across the table at each other since they vied for domination of area code 604 in late 1994. (RAiD blinked first, for the record, even though in matters of ANSI they were arguably stronger. But I digress -- these contextual matters are of no interest to anyone other than myself, to whom they are endlessly fascinating.) Without further ado, here are two virtuous pieces by the bizarrely-named "Corn Dog": I'll warm you up with a pic of "Chief" Miles O'Brien, first Transporter Chief on the Enterprise-D in STTNG, then Chief Operations Officer aboard Deep Space 9, then... hero of Jon Adams' webcomic http://chiefobrienatwork.com/

Corn Dog Strikes Back with the ANSI subject everyone's been waiting for: Lieutenant Commander Deanna Troi, a lost opportunity for an artscene fixated on the Barbie bimbos of Image comics. An entire colour is reserved solely for the benefit of highlighting her cleavage! There's something a little "off" about the outlines here, especially around the lips, but ... I've said enough.

Now off we go, whisked forward in time to October of 1996, inside an RCA artpack, where Dry Ice has made a newschool ASCII of Captain Picard. Or, uh, caused to come into existence an ASCII of Captain Picard. I'm not here to ... well OK, hear me out: rendering 3D subjects in ASCII art is extremely difficult for a human to do (while when performed by a computer algorithm, the output contains telltale indications that it was untouched by human hands), and my only observation is that it is conspicuous that someone so good at executing this difficult 3D likeness in October of 1996 would have backslid so far as to have so much difficulty with relatively simpler 2D likenesses 5 months later in March of 1997. But it was released into the artscene, so here it is: a cautionary tale but a nice likeness.

This here is a depiction of the Enterprise-D from STTNG credited to StarLord of RCA -- the founder and leader of the same group that released the above ASCII art -- and it is a very frustrating piece for me to discuss because here again is a piece that purports to be something (hand-crafted, human-drawn ANSI art: "100% ORIGINAL PICTURE") that it is not. It is clearly and plainly output from some GIF2ANSI program, telegraphed by exclusive use of full-block characters with no appearance of the half-block characters essential to draw ANSI shapes with square rather than rectangular pixels. I'm sure he drew the header and footer fonts, but the filling in this sandwich is disappointing deception, bald-faced and red-handed. What is it about this Trek subject matter specifically that invites in so many would-be textmode art frauds and charlatans? It's really whipping me into a froth!

Here, I wasn't quite ready to skip past the end of STTNG yet, but circumstances have demanded we fast-forward to the DS9 era with this handy GIF2ANSI comparison piece conveniently released in the latest Blocktronics artpack, featuring Kirkman's (why yes, it is in reference to this context, thanks for asking!) machine-conversion of a picture of Science Officer Jadzia Dax (namesake of Kirkman's daughter! And you thought I was committed to my strange passions!) pitted against an artist's rendition of the same. (OK, and that artist also has a handle, and it is Filth. And Filth does very good work.) To an algorithm all details are equal, while an artist's eye is able to isolate and emphasize the elements the human mind rates as significant, producing a likeness with psychological content, not merely averaged picture cells. The difference is stark and the choice is clear: one of these is a work of art and one of them is a cruddy spreadsheet.

Everyone straight? OK? OK. So here we are, we've left behind TOS and TNG, and here we are in DS9. Deep Space 9. This is a related logo drawn by Access Denied from a 1465 Projekt (?) artpack -- not quite relevant, but not unrelated.

And the DS9 ANSI to beat really is The Extremist's picture of the Ferrengi businessman Quark, released in the Mistigris World Tour joint artpack with the Blade nation in December of 1996.

And though Star Trek trekked along, through Voyager and Enterprise, the underground artscene was dwindling away by the time they hit the airwaves, and as best as I can tell go completely unrepresented in the annals of the artscene. But I do have two more pieces for you. Like the final episode of STTNG, we'll wind the clock back and forth a bit: the first, not textmode at all but high resolution, comes from our kindred spirits in the Commodore 64 scene: this TOS picture of Kirk and Spock (from Star Trek: TMP Kirkman tells me) was drawn by Clone in 2007 and is a nice piece of work! (Star Trek has been a regular inspiration for other productions from our fellow travellers in the demoscene, which you can research on your own time, it's getting late here 8)

And saving the best for last, here is a masterful collaborative newschool ASCII (I know, you didn't get to see any of it until now, a real shame!) tribute to STTNG from memebers of Mimic, representing virtually all of the show's core cast members in an at turns hilarious, sassy and profane celebration of the sometimes inappropriate drives motivating the fans in their headcanon. That's all from me, and quite possibly the last word in Trek textmode art, so thanks for reading along. Beam me up, Scotty!

Showing I can't figure out how to quit while I'm ahead, here's a '90s piece of Trek hirez by Inferno from my own artgroup, Mistigris, I'd forgotten all about: