Well, gave it a shot. I think it actually starts out really well, but unfortunately it doesn't keep it up. Oh well, I may salvage the ideas I like out to make a better piece 

http://files.armoredcore.org/miscellaneous/kobel/music/Incomplete/Blind1.mp3

Haha, that's a good idea for a Tick/Venture Bros villain too.

Alan Wake, Left 4 Dead, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Dead Rising, I believe COD4 had an expansion or something for it, zombies were in World of Warcraft, Stubbs the Zombie, House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, even Halo has zombies, there are so many fucking zombie games.

Silent Hill is a zombie game now? 

Anime is basically too stylized to be realism.

Yeah that's true of all cartoon styles though; Japan is no different in this regard.

Of course, they all share feats such as the enormous eyes and unrealistic clothes and hairstyles

Um, what?

'anime' style is no more a cohesive style than american comic book style. An exception can be found for every broad rule you try to define.

Rubber v. Glue, trial of the century

[stereotype]

There is a "general style" thought.

Is there? I don't think there is; I think there's an anime style stereotype. Really, what ties together the art styles of, say, Berserk and One Piece? Unless you meant 'generic' style, in which case there's a vagillion generic anime styles which no one who's ever produced anything relevant has used. Generic gets you basically nowhere. I wouldn't even try for stylization, either, I'd just try to get a figure you can draw rapidly and which is expressive; trying to achieve stylization is fetishizing the method over the result.

No one should even try to do anime. It's silly. Play around with cartooning styles until you find one you like. I'm not putting down anime art style at all, but I don't like it when I see people whose dearest ambition is shallow emulation (though I don't see anyone like that here, I'm just saying, you know, there's a lot of them around).
Besides, it's not like anime is a single cohesive style anyway. Astroboy style != Ghost in the Shell style != One Piece style.

But the heart isn't centered in the intersection.

The intersection is off, but his heart's in the right place.

It ain't much but I've never done this before and I didn't spend a lot of time on it...
http://megaswf.com/view/800729035c16ff7e2848c3cf6d29b773.html

although I wouldn't dismiss playing dress-up with your character as being unimportant either

Oh I don't dismiss the importance of that, but people talk about that stuff all the time, and a lot of people seem to believe that that's the only form self expression can take in a game. The other thing is a big deal to me primarily because I don't think people have talked about it and it's just as important a concept as expression through player design in a game.

Arrested Development was going downhill and I'm glad it ended when it did.

It was only going downhill because they were under pressure to change or get canceled.

This touches slightly on a topic I'm interested in, which is self-expression through gameplay. I really don't think a lot of people are talking about this, but I think it's a big part of what draws people to games. I'm not talking about, like, choosing what your character looks like, or their past, or choosing an emblem. Building a skill set/talent tree is something closer to what I'm talking about, but is a rather clumsy implementation of it.

What I mean is, for instance... in a lot of fighting games, I tend to favor single well-timed strikes to interrupt my opponent's flow, or a highly aggressive flanking style that is hard to track. I favor these patterns in basically every competitive game I play, and these become an expression of my character.

I get frustrated with any game which doesn't allow me to be competitive and express myself in this manner. That's what I'm talking about, the way a summation of moment-to-moment tactical decisions can tell you about someone's character, or allow you to express your own.

Also, the topic quote reminds me of a line from a stand-up comic whom I can't remember the name of right now: "I don't want to see your baby photos! Your children are like your poetry, I'm sure they're beautiful to YOU, but no one else gives a shit!"

Okay well flip books are cool (should I make them by cutting up printer paper or is there a better way?), but the main thing I'm concerned about is the process of getting a bunch of drawings lined up and in the same format and somehow converting that into an animation. What I mean by the basics is the stuff that has little to do with an animator's actual skill, but the mechanical shit they have to do to get the job of animating done.

Oh man I wonder if I should get in on this...
Does anyone know of a good tutorial for getting started animating? This book is great for the theory, but I need something that covers the basics.

Yeah, I can respect that there are a lot of technical challenges, but it seems like most studios aren't even trying.

Summer camps and psychological trauma

Those don't seem very disparate 

But games require just SO MUCH animation that to keep it all feature film quality is pretty much impossible. Try animating even a simple walk, and you quickly realize how hard a whole game would be.

I don't know if I buy that excuse! Yeah, games take a lot of animation, but so do feature length films, and at least a FEW of them still have excellent animation. It's a little pathetic that there are almost NO games that we can point to as having outstanding animation... particularly in light of how much work we put into realistic rendering.

Your 666th post had better be at least as equally interesting.

Unfortunately there's actually a lot of pretty good reasons for balls to be the way they are. Maybe we can make cyborgs with internal gonads and air conditioning units.

I just got this book last night and I'm 100 pages in now (partially due to over-spicy chinese food but still). Absolutely fascinating read, and it's making me realize how crude most game animation is, which is one of those simultaneously disappointing and invigorating things (like a Jon Blow lecture). I wonder if I can animate something myself...