Berzerk

Ok, now I really am just messing around.

I've noticed that there's a female version of wolverine now, the X-23 (a clone of wolverine, or a new line of mazda sports cars - you decide.) And I thought, they're all mutants, wouldn't it be funny if they cloned a female nightcrawler? Or even better..... Heh. Heh. Heh.

So I quickly sketched out a female cyclops but had no background. I hate when I do this because it's a lot harder to draw a background on a previously existing image rather than drawing them altogether. The idea was to have her testing her powers in the X-men's laboratory. What came out looked limp and chunky like the old video game Berzerk, so - wtf?

I drew in Evil Otto (looks familiar ) and got out the pen tool to do some vector graphics for the title.

For those of you too young to remember, Berzerk is the most dangerous video game of all time. Space Invaders may have inspired teenage crime waves (seriously, there were at least four different incidents where your parents held up everything from minimarts to laundromats to get quarters to play Space Invaders), but Berzerk was the only game to actually kill people. One from a heart attack and another from an epileptic siezure.

I think that what it was is that the Berzerk is nerve-wrackingly slow. A lot happened on screen but your little guy never seemed to move fast enough, especially when evil otto started chasing him across the screen. So you would hammer on the joystick as if it were an accelerator and just scream, "Move It!!!! RUN!!!" as the machine screamed back, "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!" Then plunk - the gamer has a stroke and falls over dead.

Hopefully my art won't have the same effect.

But consider yourself warned.



Note that I'm talking about the arcade version of Berzerk and not the Atari 2600 version ( [link] ) which is about as exciting as watching oatmeal cool.

Time: 5 hours.