A JUICY INTERVIEW

I recently had the pleasure and great fun to be interviewed by Gemma from the retro and current video games review site, Juicy Game Reviews.

A chance post that I made on Twitter got us chatting about the Nintendo 64, or the SNES game Uniracers, also known as Unirally in PAL territories. Although I never worked on this title myself, I was at DMA Design when all the drama surrounding the game with Pixar was going on. It was a shame that the lawsuit resulted in it getting pulled from the shelves as it's a great game.

Unirally - Uniracers SNES Boxart for the N64

Anyway, we chatted briefly about my early days in video games when I worked on DMA Design titles such as Body Harvest for the N64, a little bit on GTA, and Zenith. The first game that I worked on at DMA was Zenith for the N64 and it's one of the titles that got pulled from production. 

Body Harvest Boxart for the N64

It was a damn shame as it was shaping up to be a really exciting game, and I have no doubt that Zenith would have been a great N64 game. But I won't spoil what we chatted about here. It's more fun to read about it on the interview. Gemma is really cool and I had great fun with her questions.

Zenith Player Characters

I also got the chance to chat about some of my work outside of games in the acting and film-making industry. 

It was fun remembering back to those early days in video games.

GTA

SEE THE INTERVIEW CLICK HERE

Star Wars & Ghostbusters

This was a bit of pop art I created for fun, and hopefully maybe sell some prints of. I built the stormtroopers in 3D which was great fun, and posed them the same way as the actors are in the poster for Ghostbusters. I initially put this up on Redbubble but within 20 minutes it was removed. Apparently ILM took the hump, and Redbubble removed it. Not the kind of attention I was hoping for, but still amusing. Considering the vast amount of pop art out there on the subject of Star Wars, and the amount of Star Wars related artwork still up on Redbubble, I'm baffled as to why I was picked on. Anyway, those wonderful people at Fine Art America have happily given it a home.

You can buy prints of it here.

Fine Art America

Je Suis Paul

My blog has been long overdue for an update. I will carry on using my blog to post updates about Gameboyz, but I’ll also be blogging about other projects I’m working on and various subjects.

Like everybody, I was stunned and horrified by the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. I wanted to create a piece of humorous art in show of support of the importance of freedom of speech, and how we can’t let barbaric acts like these silence us. But what is freedom of speech really? Is it more than simply voicing our opinions, or does it have to go as far as to say that I’m ok with someone being verbally abusive to me or what I believe in? I have seen many people hiding behind their right to freedom of speech as a reason to be appalling abusive to people, and usually from the safety of being behind a keyboard. Of course it is not ok for someone to be abusive to you, and certainly it is not acceptable to encourage abuse towards you and commit hate crime.  

But can we justify any level of this freedom with comedy? Several times have I witnessed an almost immediate change in emotion when an article which at first was believed to be serious, was in fact revealed to be satire. It’s easy to say there should be no barriers when things seem to be in your favour and not being directed at you, but I believe there is an element of the hypocrite in us all. Even with humour we all have a point when we say enough is enough when things do not seem fair to us. There is a saying that if you don’t wish to offend anyone, then you should spend your life doing and saying nothing, but even doing and saying nothing is bound to rub somebody up the wrong way.

Freedom of speech should not be a coward’s excuse to be abusive to another person, and I certainly believe we should be able to laugh at anything, but we have a long way to go to truly accept and understand our fellow human beings. And if one day we finally do, maybe we can truly be at peace.