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[jiggle]

First heard about it at GA, and glanced thru it in a bookstore. Finally bought it and was reading thru it just now. It doesn't have many words, but lots of pictures. Profiles alot of games from Japan. Most interesting part, for me, are images from behind the scenes, like wireframe models, unshaded models, textures, lighting etc etc. (Not the same contents for every game.) Stuff people learning 3D would enjoy I'd imagine.

For a couple of games like PolocroisIII and Darkcloud 2, there were images of non cel-shaded version of the character models. I must say they look nicer than what made it into the games.

Also somewhat surprising to learn is that the characters in Venus & Brave were actually in 3D.

I am a little disappointed that the game featured on the cover(FFX2) only have old materials that can be found all over the web.


Games featured:
Unlimited Saga
Final Fantasy X-2
Robot Alchemic Drive
Steel Battalion
REsident Evil Zero
JoJo's Biarre Adventure
Onimusha 2
Panzer Dragoon Orta
Sakura Taisen 4
Virtual-On Marz
Soul Calibur II
Venus & Brave
Contra: Shattered Soldier
Zone of Enders 2nd Runner
Dark Cloud 2
Popolocrois: Hajimari no Bouken
Energy Airforce
Space Raiders
Armored Core 3: Silent Line
Disaster Report
Kamaitachi no Yoru 2
Lupin the 3rd
Sd Gundam: G Generation Neo
Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball(even worse than the section on FFX2)
Rygar
One Piece


Hopefully there's a part 2 for this book.

 

[RuGalz]

Not bad for their first attempt but I find the translator lacks the knowledge to translate technical information into Eglish that actually makes sense...

 

[Ironclad]

This book is good as well.

 

[jiggle]

Not bad for their first attempt but I find the translator lacks the knowledge to translate technical information into Eglish that actually makes sense...

Is this translated from a Japanese book?

 

[RuGalz]

Well I kind of assume it was translated from interviews or whatever with developers...

 

[TheGreenGiant]

its actually VERY shallow. Save ur money

 

[FortNinety]

its actually VERY shallow. Save ur money

Yeah, it's widely regarded as being pretty bad.

 

[The Take Out Bandit]

Yeah, I'll second the notion of this book blowing large amounts of ass.

It's only useful if you want to read about the most painstakingly lame aspects of game creation, read: the lame duck CG intros. The few sections I was interested in (Sandlot / From Software) all focused on their CG intro production and IIRC, little to no attention was paid to the in game graphics.

I really look forward to casualties of game budgets starting to surface, and I anticipate extraneous CG bullshit to be the first to go. Praise be the gods!

 

[jiggle]

Man, I must be very shallow(which I am) and easily impressed(yep). Although I do agree there's not much contents, I guess I just really like all those production pictures.

 

[Doc Holliday]

Hmm weird, i really liked this book. Learned a few tricks here and there.

 

[Spike]

I borrowed this from the library just recently. I agree that the translations are lacking, but it is cool to look at the various stages of development.

 

[Warm Machine]

The book is good and it does talk quite a bit about the real time graphics and the systems used to display them. More focus is on the movie sequences but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It isn't technical enough to learn a lot of new things that you had absolutely no clue about but it is head and shoulders above most other art books in terms of digging into production. Only so much they could do with 2 to 4 pages dedicated to each game.

 

[Date of Lies]

I remember it was like 40-50$ when I saw it and it didn't look like there was anything you couldn't just find on the net.




I bought that "Game Creators and Careers" book, but I have really read it yet, not sure if it was worth 80$ CDN though.