H4H: The New Standard, P2 | The Black Discs (2014)
Grudging acceptance
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The transition from 2d, pixel-based gaming to 3d, polygonal-based graphics was a rough one. It opened up a lot of new horizons, and the world of videogames is richer for it. That it so aggressively tried to end 2d gaming, was unfortunate, as if we couldn’t just add to the good things we had with more good things.
What was unfortunate was that, in my opinion, first generation 3d graphics were ugly. Even at the time, it felt like we’d gone back to the 2d equivalent of 1982 or so. So while there was a lot of artistry in the late era SNES/Genesis generation, things felt primitive again for this generation. And so I blamed Sony for a lot of that, and didn’t really engage this system much at the time, when it released in 1995. It took me until Ocarina of Time more than three years later for me to warm up to this generation of games.
But the original Playstation was a beast, and newcomer Sony quickly became dominant in the hardware field. And over the years, as I sampled back through games, I could see why. Watching my younger brother get into Resident Evil 2 back then helped, also.
The black disc media Sony used for these games was visually compelling, and while only the Nintendo Gamecube opted for any other visually distinct disc media, these to me definitely had a feel of their own and set the system apart. Therefore, I chose to paint the four-disc Final Fantasy VIII discs as part of this series—the multi-disc setup of some of the larger games also being a hallmark of the system. I generally have not included paintings of cartridges and such as part of this series, and less so for limited edition prints, owing to the murkier area of copyright as the artwork on the labels creates a problem. I have on a couple of occasions created paintings of game media, but they haven’t been part of my limited edition offerings.
When creating these images of often floating objects, I usually take a bunch of photos and essentially green-screen myself or props out of the images.
Resident evil 1&2 and Metal gear solid for the PS1 were definitely the more memorable games during the time i had the system. getting the PS2 after was my last ditch effort to try to stay in the console gaming world before completely transitioning to PC games.