The Cartridge Thief Blog

 The PlayStation 5 has been occupying store shelves and scalpers' basements for 3 full years at this point. Launched in the midst of a global pandemic and boasting noticeably improved graphics hardware, its developments over the ageing PS4 were enough to attract plenty of people on release. In those early days, the only thing putting many off getting one was the prospect of having to deal with one of the aforementioned low-lives that hoarded them for the lucrative resale market. (Image property of Sony) I, however, was not one of those people. Even before the scalpers got their grubby little mitts on the whole stock and Sony were failing to keep up, I was already turned off the console. The idea that shiny graphics should sell me on a console that, fundamentally, wasn't doing anything new compared to the PS4 didn't appeal to me.  Yet, about two weeks ago, I finally caved and decided to splash out on a PS5 which raises the question of "why now?". Today, I want to d...

  Re-skinning is often considered to be a dirty word in the video game industry. In addition to conjuring gross images if you think about it for too long, re-skinning is synonymous with laziness in the industry because of how it involves  reusing existing enemy assets rather than creating new ones. It's a fairly natural assumption to make.  After all, tracing someone else's art homework and changing the colours didn't do any of us favours back in high school.  (Images property of Konami and Sony and Santa Monica Studio) However, I've played quite a few games recently that have shown that the second-hand enemy market is a lot more complex than this initial assumption. Thus, from this experience, I wanted to take some time to examine where the distinctions lie between the good and bad use of re-skinning and put forward my 3 Core Commandments for how to re-skin enemies in a way that doesn't make players think that the developers clocked off for lunch early. Old Dog, Ne...