#title3

I never played Karateka in the 80s, but as a big fan of Prince of Persia and Jordan Mechner's journals, I was stoked to hear that an interactive documentary about Jordan's prototypical cinematic platformer was in the works by Digital Eclipse.

Released this week, The Making of Karateka on the surface looks like any other game you buy through Steam ($20, Windows-only), GOG, or whichever favorite store or console you prefer (available also for Xbox, PS4/5, Switch). Once the thing loads though, you really get 3 things: a documentary, the original Karateka, and a new remaster.

The documentary part is an audio-visual slideshow retelling Jordan's development story starting with his teenage years pitching his earlier title Deathbounce to the publishing house Brøderbund. It's an interesting look into the iterative process, seen through correspondence letters, journal entries, and many playable builds at various stages of completion. After we reach the eventual rejection of that title, Jordan comes back with a prototype of a visual-narrative experience unseen on home computers. We get to follow Karateka's full life cycle from pre- to post-production, ending with the conception of its sequel (which eventually turned into Prince of Persia). It's a real treasure trove! Fellow pixel artists will appreciate the many graph-paper sketches and interactive overlays of final game sprites compared to rotoscoped outlines and filmed footage. There are also video segments, from a comprehensive breakdown of the music to interviews with other developers reflecting on the impact Jordan's games had on their careers. You'll even encounter a fan letter signed by the one and only "John Romero, Disciple of the Great Jordan and worshipper of the Magnificent Mechner!" (I kid you not, you can't make this stuff up).

Perhaps just as crucial for an interactive documentary like this, you can launch any of the floppy disks in the emulator, trying out various iterations and ports of Karateka.

The emulation is fantastic and lets you fiddle with display settings (monochrome or color display, scanlines, pixel perfect or zoomed) as well as enhance the frame rate. You can even rewind the many deaths you will face if you've never played the game before (like me). If you spend some more time obsessing over the weird artifacts of the Apple II hi-res graphics, you might even go down the rabbit hole of realizing that on the Apple II you didn't really paint colors as much as you used different monochrome dithering patterns that the graphics display would then turn into 4 different hues. A fascinating learning experience if you include some of your own research online!

Add to this the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit versions to compare how the graphics got adapted across the earlier ports and you have a nice way to relieve the mid-80s with a bit of help from modern emulation (I did beat the C64 version without rewinding though!). I'd love to see more art from the other remakes, especially the 16-bit Atari ST port, but I understand their decision to omit playable versions of those due to the lower quality on the gameplay side of the translations.

This brings us to the final part of the package, the modern remaster. Unlike the 2012 complete reimagining of the game (with 3D graphics and all), Digital Eclipse approached the remake as the ultimate port of the original to an imaginary system along the lines of a 90s VGA PC.

It's well done. Some of the fully-redrawn scenes are a bit overpainted for my taste (I'd prefer a pixel art rendition of the castle than a blurry photographic collage, although there were many games in the 90s that did take this approach), but the in-game graphics are really in style, including the smooth animations that are like one would imagine granted a beefier CPU. It's also a sort of director's cut with previously unseen scenes added, in particular, the battle with the leopard as a clever action-puzzle in the middle. The AI is unfortunately even less challenging than Jordan's implementation. As great as the 6-move fighting system could have been, you yet again resort to simply kicking away opponents as they tirelessly crawl into your range. There isn't even the nuance from the original where you were the one who had to approach some enemies with skilled timing. On the other hand, you now have optional goals and achievements that make the repetitive/easy combat work in your favor (stringing various combos, beating opponents or the level under a time limit …). As the Digital Eclipse president Mike Mika admits at the end of the welcome commentary mode, they didn't manage to achieve their perfect port, but they did come close.

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed playing both the original as well as the remake and while the combat system lacks any sort of depth beneath its stunning animations, Karateka is instead a monumental experience for its presentation. Big characters with personality and realistic motion are displayed through cinematic camera cuts and story vignettes (3 years before Ron Gilbert came up with the word "cutscene"). There are details like animating the unfortunate falling off the cliff at the start of the game, or respectfully bowing to the first guard as they bow in return. Jordan's creative work is precious and worth the attention this release gifts it.

I highly recommend The Making of Karateka to all retro gamers and/or game developers for its immersive documentation which provides an experience that goes beyond the usual video documentaries. It's interactive—just like the subject it's talking about—something I want to see more in the future. And if the $20 by any chance seems high to you, consider that the original retailed at $35 (and that was in 1984 dollars).

I was a big fan of Antoine ‘Sir Carma’ Lendrevie’s voxel art ever since I wrote my big article on pixels and voxels in 2016. Not long after, Antoine moved to Vancouver—the home of Brace Yourself Games—and started working as lead artist (and now art director, among other artists) on the simulation/strategy game Industries of Titan.

What followed were 4 years of patiently looking at cubes being carefully arranged into delicious dioramas on his Twitter, merging slowly into vast sci-fi cityscapes you can marvel at in the screenshots above (make sure to see them up big to take in all the voxel detail).

Since Lospec launched in 2017 with its limited-color palettes list, the site quickly grew into the best resource for digitally restrictive art as it elegantly calls art forms such as pixel art, voxel art, ASCII/ANSI, low-poly 3D, chiptune and anything else digital that purposefully uses restrictions, often inspired by technologies of the past.

After adding an extensive database of pixel art tutorials and many other features such as an online pixel art editor, a merch shop, and user accounts, the site’s creator Sam ‘@skeddles​​’ Keddy would like to go into full-time development on the next big feature, the Lospec Gallery.

The idea is to have all the pixel-art-specific features of galleries such as Pixel Joint (sharp pixels with integer magnification scales), but open to everybody without purist requirements, as well as extended to other digitally restrictive artworks that also lack a dedicated place on the web.

One of my favorite things of 2019 was—surprisingly enough—a mobile app! Less surprisingly, it included mesmerizing pixel landscapes painted in the 90s by Mark Ferrari (Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, Thimbleweed Park) for a calendar/organizing software called Seize the Day. What set Seize the Day apart was its ‘living worlds’ art—specially made illustrations for each of the 12 months of the year.

Now, before you say you’ve seen these images a hundred times already (as they often circulate the web), unless you’ve been around in the 90s, you haven’t seen all the special effects incorporated into the software. You might have seen the GIFs of the scenes with animated snow, rain, and waterfalls, and at best you went to the HTML recreation of the images where you could change the time of the day with a slider. While that’s immensely impressive as it is, there was even more to the art. Sizzling chimney smoke, beautifully shaded clouds, changing weather, lights turning on and off, fireflies flying around, luminescent fish, people with torches walking across a bridge in the evening, even auroras borealis!

Over the course of 2019, Ian Gilman, one of the authors of Seize the Day, painstakingly recreated all the extra effects within a mobile app called Living Worlds - Art by Mark Ferrari. At the start of each month we’d get a new masterpiece, which I’d leave idling on my iPad, quietly brightening my workspace. The amounts of joy this would bring me was quite unexpected (although, now that I think about it, not many things make me happier than beautiful pixel art).

I promised one more thing from Ultimate Pixel Crew yesterday. As much as permanent teams are not common in pixel art (I can only think of eBoy off the top of my head), the advantage is clear if you want to tackle bigger projects. Game companies sometimes have a lasting core of pixel artists, but it’s more common to outsource the work to a band of freelancers that stick together for just one project (or even less). We’ve had music videos created in this way as well, for example Goldfish’s We Come Together had a team of 15 working on it. Today we'll look at a smaller production though, coming from an established team.

Ultimate Pixel Crew, specifically @motocross-arts and @setamo-arts, early last year created a video for SKY-HI’s song Role Playing Soldier. The lyrics, neatly supported by gaming-themed visuals, tackle the often absurd nature of RPGs where the player essentially grinds their way to the end by killing and looting a never-ending wave of enemies. The meaningless task is questioned in the music video by both the player character and a melancholically-woke monster that is tired of the mindless violence. Where Elvis and Dimmi gave a satirical take on the same topic, Motocross Saito and Setamo paint a more positive resolution. I’ll let you find it out yourself in the video that clearly gives a nod to Hyper Light Drifter as well:

This week I was reviewing the list of undergraduate retention initiatives that have been implemented by Buffalo State since 2016. The list is long and touches many aspects that are generally related to the success of our students. Here success means the retention and persistence of our students from the first day they join campus until they graduate and go on to their first postgraduate jobs or graduate school.

Retention and persistence are something I speak of often on campus. I have challenged us all to think about what we do and what we can add to enhance the success of our students. The long list of initiatives demonstrates how seriously we have been in defining best practices and bringing them to campus.

Rendering of the east lobby in E.H. Butler Library where the new Academic Commons space will be located.

From mandatory advisement, to creating a plan to centralize student support, to increasing high-impact practices, and much more, we have taken up the mandate to increase the retention and persistence of all students. This fall we are adding yet another weapon to our arsenal: we have been approved for a five-year federally funded Title 3 grant, “Insight to Impact.” This grant provides the resources to hire a data analyst to assist the campus in understanding the conditions of success for our students and thus replicate those success-enhancing elements as needed. This, along with the additional resources to add coaching, peer mentorship, and more, will assist us in making the important impact on students that will result in success.