VGA Releases Prints from Two New Games

LEFT: Boxer by Ben Crooks and RIGHT: Vignettes by Pol Clarissou

VGA is proud to announce the release of posters and editioned giclees from two visually distinctive games: Boxer and Vignettes. Posters start at $35 each. From now until the new year, enjoy 20% off with gift code HOLIDAY. TO SHOP, CLICK HERE.

Boxer
Cukia Kimani and Ben Crooks' Boxer is firmly rooted in the fighting game genre, yet it extends two-player brawling into novel and surprising directions in terms of imagist, hand-drawn figuration, and real-time character control. The struggles, victories, and defeats of the game's anonymous pugilists are depicted in a highly illustrative style that draws on a diversity of animation and drawing traditions. Crooks' animations and drawings function as a fighting game distillation of Bill Plympton, William Kentridge, and Leon Golub. The surreal gestures of extended limbs are as graceful as they are grotesque in a way that matches the organic flow and feel of thumbstick-only control and top-down perspective. Here in Wiggle Joysticks, the two figures express the relief and agony shared by both the victor and the loser in a fleeting a post-fight moment.

Ben Crooks is an artist, animator, and game maker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Boxer, which won the inaugural A MAZE/Johannesburg award, is Crooks' first collaboration with Cukia Kimani. Kimani makes games in Johannesburg where he founded the Nyamakop game studio.

Vignettes
Vignettes is a subtle video game that takes on the bold task of transposing the long tradition of the still life into interactive media. As a video game Vignettes performs a task that two-dimensional still life can never do: reveal the interconnectedness of apparently different objects through real-time animation and playful manipulation. Unlike conventional still life, Vignettes creates radical relationships between objects that may not have been there before, instead of meditating on the form of a single object alone. In print form however, these relationships are again refocused on the essence of objects in the manner of still life painting, drawing, and photography, revealing that 3D modeling is an extension of these media and that the video game artist can have it both ways. 

Pol Clarissou is a graphist and game developer based in Valenciennes, France. His other credits include noteworthy existential wandering games such as Even the Stars, and Orchids to Dusk: a 2016 Independent Games Festival Nuovo award nominee. He is also a former resident of KO-OP. Vignettes is a collaboration between Clarrisou, Armel Gibson, Pat Ashe, and David Kanaga.