I’m currently playing Viking: Battle for Asgard, and basically it’s great. If you ever saw any of Simon Bisley’s groundbreaking colour work for Sláine the Horned God in the British comic 2000ad, this is basically the video game interpretation of that, but with Vikings instead of Celts. I really can’t fault the art. It’s less polished than Assassin’s Creed but the painterly aesthetic allows it a lot more flair with the colour palette.

Gameplay-wise it is, as the post title suggests, an open world quest-em-up, but substitutes deeply satisfiing gratuitous gore for humor, which in this case works rather well. It’s getting some crappy review scores online but you know what? Fuck those guys.

After a lot of messing about with my friend Satine in the States I’ve (hopefully) managed to snag one of these great Obama posters by Shepard Fairey, the proto- Banksy guy behind the whole Obey/ Andre the Giant thing (you can’t ship them directly to Europe for some reason).

Another reason to love Barack Obama- during this speech he points out a previous piece of Shepard’s (at that point free and unofficial) work for the campaign and says “Very nice graphic, by the way”, later also writing him a thank you note. He cares about graphics! What’s not to love?

I hear Hilary thinks graphics are frivolous and unimportant and loves PowerPoint.

I’d been hankering after some old school platforming action- the last decent platformer I’d played was the excellent Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the Game Cube some years ago- and also something I could play with my partner who likes that kind of thing (specifically Zelda).

Last year’s Tomb Raider- Anniversary is currently delivering in spades, managing to be challenging without being frustrating. What I really can’t stand are games that are too easy- I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed- where you end up mashing the same buttons and walking forwards for ten hours. Anniversary has you sat pondering your options while hanging from vines fifty meters above the ground, which is as it should be with a decent platformer.

My girlfriend still hasn’t picked it up but at least I’m trying, right?

My girlfriend’s first attempt at pimping a Qee (DIY Japanese toy.) We’ve had it sat around since Christmas, looking accusing and unadorned from it’s shelf in the corner. This is not a good look, so eventually Myriam had at it with some felt shapes that were lying around.

We had a lot of good design-ey fun doing it, I have a feeling this might end up being rather expensive.

Someone backed out of an exhibition at the Foundry, so the RuiNation show is on for an extra week or two. Next time we’ll actually do some work for it and not use ten year old backdrops, we promise.

RuiNation exhibition Flickr set.

Gotham, a font we can believe in.

It makes a pleasant change for a mainstream American-type thing to be using a sans. A nice sans too.