Here’s the second and final part of my video game-related Inktober sketches! Be sure to go to my website (or art Tumblr if you’re nasty) and check out the rest!
A good friend of mine requested a sketch based on the infamous Friday the 13th NES game. Admittedly, I’ve never played it before (aside from maybe a ROM way back in middle school), but I’m a professional and I’m not letting a little thing like that get in the way of drawing Jason Vorhees! Although I’m mostly a Michael Myers fan. Or well, really, a fan of the original Halloween. I’m just digging myself deeper and deeper into this hole, aren’t I? That game seems ridiculous, though. I don’t quite understand how it’s played, but 8-bit Jason is a treasure in that purple jumpsuit with his silly running animation, isn’t he?
Another request! Jennifer asked me to draw a krogan from Mass Effect for Bethany because she has a deep love for them. (ed: I LOVE GRUNT.) I, uh, have also never played a Mass Effect game. Please don’t hurt me. The Knights of the Old Republic games on the Xbox left a sour taste in my mouth for reasons I can’t really pin down, and Jade Empire didn’t look too great either, so BioWare games just aren’t my thing. Plus, I held a grudge against Mass Effect 2 for a long time simply because it had the audacity to come out on the same day as No More Heroes 2. I’m probably digging myself into another hole here? ANYWAYS. Krogans! They look like frog people with stone foreheads and they bash skulls with one another all the time. I can get behind that. Can you get a whole party of krogans to fight on your side in Mass Effect? (ed: kind of-ish) Is that how that works? That’d be cool. After drawing this, a few other friends popped up requesting other characters and species from the games, but, well, I don’t write for them. Sorry, other friends.
YOGA FLAME!! I suck at the Street Fighter games. Always have. But that didn’t stop me from renting Street Fighter II like, ALL THE TIME when I was 6. My favorite character was always Blanka because of his electricity powers and vague resemblance to the Incredible Hulk, but I was always best with Dhalsim. Using his yoga powers to stretch his limbs and breathe fire were the only way I could stand a chance at making it to (but never beating) M. Bison. The few times I’ve played Street Fighter IV I was pretty decent with him too, so there‘s that. Man, they missed out not putting him and Mr. Fantastic in Marvel Vs Capcom 3.
My favorite Zelda games are Link’s Awakening and Wind Waker, but my favorite character has always been the mysterious badass Sheik. I remember, in 5th grade, I got a subscription to GamePro magazine and the cover to the January issue of that year was for Ocarina of Time, an awesome image of Link and Sheik back to back, surrounded by monsters. I loved that cover, and I didn’t even have an N64 at the time. My best friend and I would go outside and play pretend, as children do, and being more knowledgeable of the games at that time, he’d always pretend to be Link. Me? I’d play as Sheik (or that guy Roman, from the Nintendo Power comic adaptation of A Link to the Past.) Remember, back in those days, no one knew who Sheik was, just assuming it was a dude, only to find out once the game was released that it was Zelda in disguise all along, a nice step towards subverting her status as the usual damsel in distress. Even then, I still played as Sheik when we went outside. I just figured Zelda had gender swapping abilities, no big deal. Now I’m an adult and so I no longer play pretend outside, but I still think Sheik is awesome, and I liked picking her in Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl from time to time. Also, have you seen how cool she looks in Hyrule Warriors? Pretty awesome, right?
…Yeah, I know, only doing 8 videogame characters out of 31 sketches for the month of October seems kind of shabby, doesn’t it? Sorry. Though, in fairness, a lot of characters I did draw HAVE appeared in videogames! Practically every single comic character I drew has appeared in a game! Heck, I haven’t seen Gundam 0080, but Hy-Gogg is my favorite mobile suit thanks to Gundam Battle Assault on the Playstation! I should have included it! Ah well, there’s always next year.
Brett Marcus Cook is an artist, designer, and giant Godzilla fan. Check out his comics Other Sleep and Cannonball Fist!
