Friday 12 September 2008

Machinima Comics?

The comic, right, is a concept I've been thinking about for some time now as a way for games companies to promote their games as a ROK Comic.

The art of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, a nifty looking First Person Shooter inspired by the 2007 Shadow of Chernobyl release from Koch Media caught my eye so I decided not just to run a press release on one of the web sites I write for, SciFiPulse in my spare time, but make something more of the stunning PR imagery available.

You can view the comic on the ROK Comics site itself and, since the comic is Fee to View online, grab the embed code and put it on other web sites, just like a YouTube video.

This is my first "Machinima Comic" -- a tip of the hat to the fabulous "computer game videos" fans of many games have created, which you can see on sites such as machinima.com. Admittedly, creating a comic from computer game renders is not as clever as some of the best Machinima, such as the Halo-inspired Red versus Blue, PEDS, based on Grand Theft Auto, or stunning projects such as The Dumb Man (created within Second Life), but the beauty of a ROK Comic based on game scenes is that it is of course much easier to create than machinima!

"Machinima Comics" could easily be used by games companies to promote their wares as well as providing an avenue for comic writers to create comics without (hem ham!) the need of an artist, offering a way for them to hone their scripting skills.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a survival FPS game for PC based on a 'what-if' scenario of the second Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident. The game is created as a warning to mankind against mindless play with technologies.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
is the official prequel to the renowned S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game created by the Ukraine-based GSC Game World studio, released in 2007. The game is set in 2011 and brings forth the events to have preceded the third campaign of Strelok to the Zone centre.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
introduces an alternative look onto the events of the original game and offers the player to try himself out as a mercenary s.t.a.l.k.e.r. in search of his own path in the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

• Official game site: www.stalker-game.com

• More information about the game is available on the official S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/stalkerofficial

3 comments:

Evonne @ Amoration said...

I created a machinima comic two years ago (Camp Darfur Comix) and will be putting out a new one called ManorMeta Mysteries in early 2009 to go with our new virtual world game releases. Thanks for writing and sharing your work!

John Freeman said...

Hi Evonne - thanks for the note about Camp Darfur Comics — it looks great! (People reading this can find out more about the Camp Darfur project at www.stopgenocidenow.org/campdarfur and read the comic at amoration.fotki.com/campdarfurcomix)

Off topic (but not), we did some ROK Comics adaptations of a charity project in support of the Red Cross earlier this year you might like to read at: www.rokcomics.com/floods.php

John Freeman said...

Okay, it looks like I'm behind the times: The guys who wrote Machinima for Dummies tell me "Gamics" have been doing the rounds for some time now and now I have a search terms it seems the genre dates right back to some early grabs from games such as Sim Life etc. Most interesting.

There's an interview with one of the genre's leading lights, Nathan Ciprick here on the Video Game Network. This one set in Half Life 2 is great fun: Concerned: The Half Life and Daeth of Gordon Frohman and there are loads more, such as Alien Loves Predator etc.

I've missed out!