I never had my own console or many games when I was younger so never played things like Crash or Spyro until recently. I am obsessed with Retro game remakes that I have absolutely no nostalgia for. What I got instead was lots of lovely drawings with excuses/ attempts to justify these decisions as if the artists had made them FOR THE ART! It was just a bit sad. I also know that game development is not all sunshine and daisies, and I would have appreciated a discussion in the book about why they had to work quicker with the final game. It'll make you feel fired up, Bob!ĭisclaimer: I know none of the above was the artist's fault, that decisions relating to time constraints etc. If this is the case for you too, get this book. I played the Spyro series throughout my childhood and it is very special to me. There were just a lot of sad vibes going round and it hindered my enjoyment of what was otherwise an excellent book.Īfter that rant, I feel like I should clarify that the tears mentioned initially were nostalgic tears of joy. Well, yeah, but where is your enthusiasm? That was one example, but the contrast between their intentions with the Gnorc enemies from game 1 compared to the Rhynocs in game 3 was even more striking. Where the text about the first game talks about them wanting to add additional details to their bespoke dragon designs to make it as good as it could be, the text about the baby dragons in the final game is all 'there was no point making each dragon unique as all babies look the same' (paraphrased). The reason this has affected my rating of the book is that it also shows here, and it left me on a bit of a downer while flipping through the Spyro 3 sections, compared to the rest. It's still a great nostalgia piece and tons of fun, but due to the immense size of Spyro 3 and the timescale in which Toys For Bob had to turn this remake around, they had to cut corners and it unfortunately shows. Anyone who followed its development and played the result knows that. The third game (and to a lesser extent, the second) in the trilogy was rushed. The second thing that brought my rating down is perhaps more to do with what happened with the development of the game (the Reignited Trilogy I mean), but it was reflected so similarly in the book that I had to mention it here. It showed a lack of care which contrasted with the immense attention to detail present in this remake and hammered home in the rest of the art book. However, the print-o that was introducing the Sunrise Spring homeworld with a painting of Sunny Villa, subsequently missing out any sort of painting of Sunrise Spring AND not giving Sunny Villa its space alongside all of the other levels from all 3 games - it really made me groan. So why then have I given it 4 stars instead of the perfect 5?įirstly, there are a few mistakes in it: typos like "Breezebuilder Harbor" instead of Breeze Harbor, and "Crystal Island" instead of Crystal Islands made me wince, but I could have overlooked them. The art is stunning, the written sections about how they approached remaking the 3 greatest video games about a plucky purple dragon ever made by human beings are very interesting. Spyro the dragon (the video game and the character) means so much to me that several parts of this artbook actually brought tears to my eyes. Micky lives in beautiful Washington State with his wife and daughter where he enjoys life's essentials: movies, comic books, chocolate and sushi. Most recently Micky wrote the bestselling book The Art Of Spyro: Reignited Trilogy and completed his sci-fi trilogy Skiptracer. In 2018 Micky completed his first original sci-fi novel, Ridgerunners, and co-wrote the graphic novel The Invisible Empire: Madge Oberholtzer And The Unmasking Of The KKK, as well as the illustrated novel Strange Highways. In 2017 Micky was tapped to write The Howling: Revenge Of The Werewolf Queen, a comic book continuation of the beloved 1981 Joe Dante horror film The Howling. He has self-published three horror novels in his original series The Turning, on Amazon. As one of the first writers at Blizzard Entertainment, he has more than two decades of experience in the cutting edge of the gaming industry. Micky Neilson is a two-time New York Times best-selling author whose graphic novels, Ashbringer (#2 on the list) and Pearl of Pandaria (#3) have both been published in six languages.
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