Aaaah… Rick Dangerous - there was a cracking (if frequently horrendously unfair) game. Fire button + Up to shoot, fire button + Down to set a bomb and accidentally blow yourself up while trying to go down a ladder.

But enough of the game, this is all about the character. And whilst he’s been squidged horribly into a square - his shoulders up by his ears and his hat pulled so far down that it rather implies that Rick has literally no forehead, he’s clearly supposed to be a sort of Indiana Jones type. Which would make him ripe for fan art…

But, no. It would appear that the artist behind the sprite, and the artist who drew the box art had rather different ideas about Rick’s character as I think this comparison rather neatly shows:

Box Art on left, Title Screen on right

Er, indeed. You thought you were buying a game with a hunky action hero in it, but when the game loaded you realised that actually it stars a very poorly drawn thug. Not so much Rick Dangerous as Biffa Bacon with a fedora hat on.

Still, if you owned the game on C64 you didn’t get that picture on the title screen, so we can live in denial and pretend it never happened.

Round #15 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

Download this outline, colour it,
and submit your entry in this thread!

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

We had great entries last round with contributions from many ColourThis first-timers! Ultimately, congratulations go to round #14 winner Nyu001 and his “runny-nosed, tam-o-shantered Scotsman”:

Check out previous winners here!

Join CGEmpire in appreciation for Sam (full name possibly Samuel - we’ll keep you posted on news developments on this one) Taylor (nice sturdy English name)!

Star of VideoJug videos across the Interweb, and professional Researcher (no doubt a tip top researcher, very thorough, climbing up the TV industry career ladder as we speak), Sam Taylor will be featuring on our TV screens just as soon as the Beeb (or perhaps as the new face of Channel4?) snap him up.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to contend ourselves with VideoJug:

Watch Sam remove evidence of grotty porn from his computer!
Watch Sam being tidy!
Watch Sam making a paper CD case!

Found more videos of Sam? Post links in our official Sam Taylor Fan Club thread!

UPDATE: Actual, real, in the flesh, Sam Taylor has deemed the CGEmpire (almost) official Sam Taylor Fan Club actually official! Hooray!

GameRecruiter have announced the first of their 3D artwork contests, the “Battle of the SuperModelers”.

It might sound like something from America’s Next Top Model (Mondays, 9pm, LIVING TV - I definitely do not watch this, okay?), but it’s not. With prizes from the likes of Alienware, Autodesk, Wacom (a Cintiq 12 WX, no less!) and Gnomon Workshop, if you’re a game artist, fancy yourself as “quite good, really”, and are based in the US or Canada, then it’s probably worth a shot.

Game artists are invited to create an original real-time character model of a monster, creature, robot or alien that might be found in a fantasy, sci-fi or horror game and submit their 3D art entry online by Friday, August 15, 2008. The contest Grand Prize Winner and three finalists will receive a combined total $50,000-worth of digital art tools and technology.

Real-Time Art Asset Budget:

10,000 tri-polys for everything: the creature and any minions (sidekick, friends, pets, parasites, etc). Also weapons, and objects, special effects and equipment, etc.

Required Maps:

1 x 2048 Color Map
1 x 2048 Normal Map

Additional Optional Maps:

1 x 2048 Specular Map
1 x 2048 Specular Color Map
1 x 2048 Bump Map

1 x 2048 Reflection Map
1 x 2048 Opacity Map
1 x 2048 Glow map
1 x 2048 Glossiness map

Isn’t it a bit nuts that “real-time” nowadays can mean 10,000 polys with two (and the rest!) 2048 pixel textures applied?!?!? Whatever happened to polygon limits that you could count in your head and teeny tiny little hand-pixelled textures? Bah!

Full contest info and guidelines here!

Eastwest are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year! Many of their titles are hugely popular all over the world, and their products have earned many awards over the years!

Recently they’ve launched their own player/sampler (PLAY) which is 64-bit and they have released 6 different products based on that platform.

One of these products is Stormdrum 2 - The next generation (worth $495), which we’re pleased to announce as the prize for the winner of the 15th CGEmpire Music Competition!

The theme this time is ‘The long Journey Home‘. The contest ends on Sunday 11th of May 23:59 London time. For more information on how to enter, please visit the competition thread in our forums.

For more information, demos, videos and tutorials about SD2 please visit this page.

Round #14 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

The challenge this time, quite obviously is…

…to not draw a cat! So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

A hearty congratulations to MashPotato for winning the last ColourThis round with her excellent “Dinosaur eating Ham” entry:

Check out previous winners here!

Well it looks like Cinemaware have done it again, in their stylish 1950’s b-movie homage ‘It Came from the Desert’. Unfortunately, as was the case with most floppy disk based games, the limited storage space doesn’t really allow for much in the way of variation. The upshot being that each character was pretty much represented by one portrait (albeit with overlayed lip wobbles and blinking eyes for those super-realistic talking animations). So basically, this picture of the nurse (whom you meet right at the start) is basically it for the entire game.

Which is a bit of a shame really.

There was one other woman in the game which I suppose you could say was “slightly tasty”, although to be perfectly honest…

…she looks a bit slutty if you ask me. Look - she’s even got a bit of bra showing. This is the 50’s! What would the neighbours think?

Maybe it’s just that all blokes are genetically programmed to slightly fancy nurses. Maybe it’s the uniform of authority. Maybe it’s just that dithering doesn’t look very nice on pixel characters. Who knows?