Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Check it out: Wrought (Legs and Cranius)

From the same people who helped me bring Ulduar to life comes another collaboration. Set to the song "Wrought" by the Seattle rock band Peratus, this is yet another shining example of Legs' talent and artistry in machinima. With Cranius in the roles of director and actor, they tell a vivid, moving story. Legs writes: "Our interpretation of their song is a tragedy which unfolds as you see flashbacks from the perspective of an undead warrior who recalls how he fell in love with a beautiful blood elf before his undead existence, a forbidden love which was unacceptable to her people."



My fav scenes are definitely the ones involving the brute squad. :D Enjoy!

Friday, June 12, 2009

Ni Hao goes to academia!

Looks like Ni Hao was featured in the keynote of a Texas A&M symposium exploring race and ethnicity in new media:

Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft [Conference Notes]

Ni Hao caught us a lot of flack for being racist against Chinese. We also got a lot of support from Chinese and Chinese-American players who found it amusing. Ni Hao does have many parts that could be viewed as racist if seen out of context, but the entire project is meant as a satirical look at the gold farming stereotype, not the race as a whole. Mad Cow Studios has nothing whatsoever against players of Chinese heritage. We hate gold farmers of any nationality. We also do not balk at a topic that we think would be funny, even if it is a bit risqué (case in point, Hard like Heroic). We were aware it was a risk. When Nyhm first wrote Ni Hao, he did debate whether it was too much. He did not wish to be seen as racist and recognized the questionable nature of some of the lyrics. We finally decided it was too funny to not produce, and we'd just take the risk of offending a few people in the name of amusing many others. At last count, Ni Hao was over 4 million views on YouTube, so I for one am glad we took that risk.