Cirignani summer15:sp

MAGAZINE

A look at

WORLD OF WARCRAFT

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I S T S

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A N D A R I A

Review Splatoon: Nintendo’s new wii U title

ALSO INSIDE: New game Releases • richard avedon • food • travel • culture Summer 2015

I N S TO R E S SEPTEMBER 1 5 , 2 01 5

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Table of Contents PAGE 4: Editor

Letter

PAGE 6-9: Travel

Food

from

PAGE 10: Loot Releases)

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the

Culture

(New

PAGE 16-23: Visual Mists of Pandaria PAGE

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PAGE 30-35: Review PAGE

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Appeal:

Richard

Avedon

Splatoon

Diversity

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the

From Editor

G

rowing up, I always found myself drawn to different kinds of magazines than the ones that were featured in most stores. I didn’t reach for the gossip magazines - I reached for the magazines that caught my eye visually. I enjoyed picking up magazines about art, rock bands, gaming, tattoos... especially the ones that had a lot of posters and visual elements! Today, those are the kind of magazines I still find most appealing.

I created OP Magaizne with a vision of bringing more aesthetic into something I love - gaming!

I’ve been gaming since my mom gave me my first Gameboy with Pokemon Yellow in it at 5 years old... to shut me up. It’s been working for 19 years.

I’m currently a graphic design student at FIDM. While I’m very busy with my work now, I still try to find time to play video games and keep up with my online friends. I’m excited to grow up with the video game industry and see where technology takes it. The day I can ride a dragon in virtual reality is the day I will be truly satisfied. I’m sure I’ll be gaming

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IN STORES SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

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Experience

food • culture • travel

RETHINKING SNACKS When you think of food to eat while gaming, you’re probably thinking things like chips, soda, candy, pizza, etc. Mixing a sedentary lifestyle with junk food habits can make you feel pretty crummy over time. Next time you’re about to sit down for a 5-hour World of Warcraft binge, think about grabbing some healthy finger food! A bowl of strawberries can be much more satisfying than a bag of chips.

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Experience food • culture • travel

WINDOW DRESSING Themed windows make brilliant vignettes on FIDM’s 5th floor.

By Dagmar Winston Photographs by Kyle Swinehart Each semester at fashion school, FIDM, located in downtown Los Angeles, the 5th floor is host to a variety of window displays created by the Visual Communication students. Each semester they are given a theme and told to run with it. The results, quite often, are spectacular. This semester’s theme is nature and instructor Katherine LoPresti instructed students to build their window displays with “as much organic materials as possible.”

The students work as teams to build everything from the dresses to creating the typography for the windows. The group effort pays off as the nine windows are often the center of attention for visiting parents and prospective students.

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Experience food • culture • travel

BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT TOUR Located in Irvine, California, Blizzard’s headquarters is as impressive as the games the studio has developed. This is where the folks responsible for creating and running genre defining titles, like World of Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft get their work done – and we’re very excited to offer you a look at where the magic happens.

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NEW EXPANSION REVEALED

us.battle.net/legion OP Magazine -11

loot

Game Releases To Look Forward To In The Next Year

Release Date: 10/27/2015

2

1

Release Date: 10/20/2015

3 Release Date: 10/23/2015

4 Release Date: 9/1/2015

5 Release Date: 11/6/2015

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6 Release Date: 9/15/2015

7 Release Date: 10/20/2015

8 Release Date: 12/31/2015

9 Release Date: 10/6/2015

10 Release Date: 9/20/2015

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COMING SOON FOR

A A IN VA N M ILA D CO C OD BL LO LA ERN E RS SS ! IC

MARIO'S 30TH ANNIVERSARY

ON SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2015 GET THE CLASSIC MARIO AMIIBO ONLINE AND IN STORES 14 - OP Magazine

Can Be

VIDEO games TOO Art Scenery from Skyrim OP Magazine -15

The Art and concept behind blizzard’s fourth world of warcraft expansion 16 - OP Magazine

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Concept Art

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It starts with the world itself, and the art of Pandaria is predictably drawn from Eastern architectural influences - pagodas and paddy fields, decorated with deep reds and delicate ornaments. While the rugged and Nordic Northrend was a high point for Blizzard’s artistic vision, it’s arguably been trumped by the efforts in this new expansion - a Great Wall of

Pandaria strides across a zone, factional hubs are occupied by cutlass-wielding stone giants, and hanging bells and blossom trees adorn the pagodas and outcrops of the land. Bejewelled and beguiling, it’s a pristine and intricate look, with a far greater focus on the finer details than the broad texture swathes that have typically dominated WOW’s art style in the past.

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E N V I RO N M E N T NANCY TSENG and EMANUEL MERINO

The new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, was a thrill to play at Blizzcon 2011. I was able to get a great feel for the new atmosphere, the new Monk class, and the new Pandaren race since I played for about two hours and almost finished the demo.

The demo was filled with Chinese themes, from the scenery to the language. It started off in a Monk training temple where I met with Master Shang Xi who gave me my first set of hand wraps and assigned me quests to destroy a few training targets and to spar with a few fellow Pandaren Monks.

As I explored the territory, there were lots of bamboo trees, cranes, and even some AI Pandarens practicing their balance and stance on bamboo poles in a lake. The last city I visited was called Morning Breeze Village, which had a foggy, mountainous landscape with ancient sayings on huge rocks. The new Monk abilities also fit with this theme as well. For example, everyone used the roll ability to travel faster, and you could see a wood block style cloud from from behind as people rolled across the landscape to complete their quests.

next elemental spirit called Shu is a water spirit, which is also very similar to the Chinese character shui (water). In another city, I also had to help them clear the town of annoying Hozu, or monkeys in Chinese.

As the Pandaren Monk, I attacked with a varied combination of physical attacks, such as a jab and the flying serpent kick.

One ability, called the quaking palm, was pretty useful when dealing with a difficult enemy or a crowd of enemies because it would temporarily put them to sleep. The flying serpent kick is the Monk’s longrange, preemptive strike ability where you soar through the air to kick your enemy. You need to have some distance between you and your enemy or else you cannot pull off this move. These abilities were very fun and easy to use because of the combos that you could pull off. For instance, I would spot an enemy far away and close the gap with a flying serpent kick and them finish them off with a quaking palm, tiger palm, and jab.

After playing Mists of Pandaria at Blizzcon 2011, I wanted to immediately go home and reactivate my account to play more WoW as I wait for this As for the language, many enemies, expansion to come out. I loved playing animals, and spirits are named after the new Monk class and using martial common Chinese words. After defeating arts to attack enemies, collect elemental a few fellow Monks, I had to help collect spirits, and save cities from Hozu. This elemental spirits. The first elemental new expansion is very fun to play, and I spirit I collected was a fire spirit named recommend everyone give it a try when it Huo, which means fire in Chinese. The comes out.

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A ETH

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Mists of Pandaria does provide some consistently strong raiding experiences, even if many of the tricks-of-the-trade of Blizzard’s encounter design are no longer surprising.

Judging by the statistics on the armory, LFR has succeeded in getting many more players to actually see and partake in the raids. Mists of Pandaria shipped with a strong starting raid line-up with a lot of content, and Blizzard followed it up with two strong raid tiers, Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar.

The fights are varied, thematically appropriate, and complicated enough to maintain interest.

Encounters like Siegecrafter Blackfuse or Galakras having multiple roles for players such as being on the conveyor belt or in the tower team, respectively, helps keep the game fun on the fifth run Mists of Pandaria is the most successful of the expansions in providing new and interesting

battlegrounds. Payload and murderball are hardly new game concepts (as evidenced by us having names for them), but Blizzard took them out of their usual FPS format and made them work well in an MMORPG. Only one other expansion—Cataclysm—has given three new battlegrounds, and two of those were basically rehashes of existing game types placed on different maps (Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks) and the other is one of the most commonly blacklisted battlegrounds in the queue (Isle of Conquest), which manages to combine the worst parts of Strand of the Ancients and the current Alterac Valley. Mists of Pandaria has hopefully set a new precedent for battleground releases, both in quality and quantity. The next step would be to introduce brand new gametypes that could only be done in an MMORPG format OP Magazine -23

“All photographs are accurate.

None of them is the truth.”

–Richard Avedon

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Richard Avedon: A Portrait of an Artist Fahey Klein presents a major retrospective of the photographers work.

By Kely Smith

What do Jean Genet, Jimmy Durante, Brigitte Bardot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacques Cousteau, Andy Warhol, and Lena Horne have in common? They were a few of the many personalities caught on film by photographer Richard Avedon. For more than fifty years, Richard Avedon’s portraits have filled the pages of the country’s finest magazines. His stark imagery and brilliant insight into his subjects’ characters has made him one of the premier American portrait photographers.

Born in New York in 1923, Richard Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section. Upon his return in 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store. Within two years he had been “found” by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was producing work for them as well as Vogue, Look, and a number of other magazines. During the early years, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. His real passion, however, was the portrait

and its ability to express the essence of its subject.

As Avedon’s notoriety grew, so did the opportunities to meet and photograph celebrities from a broad range of disciplines. Avedon’s ability to present personal views of public figures, who were otherwise distant and inaccessible, was immediately recognized by the public and the celebrities themselves.

Many sought out Avedon for their most public images. His artistic style brought a sense of sophistication and authority to the portraits. More than anything, it is Avedon’s ability to set his subjects at ease that helps him create true, intimate, and lasting photographs.

Throughout his career Avedon has maintained a unique style all his own.

Famous for their minimalism, Avedon portraits are often well lit and in front of white backdrops. When printed, the images regularly contain the dark outline of the film in which the image was framed. Within the minimalism of his empty studio, Avedon’s subjects OP Magazine -25

move freely, and it is this movement which brings a sense of spontaneity to the images. Often containing only a portion of the person being photographed, the images seem intimate in their imperfection. While many photographers are interested in either catching a moment in time or preparing a formal image, Avedon has found a way to do both.

Beyond his work in the magazine industry, Avedon has collaborated on a number of books of portraits. In 1959 he worked with Truman Capote on a book that documented some of the most

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famous and important people of the century. Observations included images of Buster Keaton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Pablo Picasso, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mae West. Around this same time he began a series of images of patients in mental hospitals. Replacing the controlled environment of the studio with that of the hospital he was able to recreate the genius of his other portraits with noncelebrities. The brutal reality of the lives of the insane was a bold contrast to his other work. Years later he would again drift from his celebrity portraits with a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, and working class Americans.

Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal. Having met in New York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than thirty years. For all of the 1970s and 1980s Avedon continued working for Vogue magazine, where he would take some of the most famous portraits of the decades. In 1992 he became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, and two years later the Whitney Museum brought together fifty years of his work in the retrospective, “Richard Avedon: Evidence”. He was voted one of the ten greatest photographers in the world by Popular Photography magazine, and in 1989 received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London.

Today, his pictures continue to bring us a closer, more intimate view of the great and the famous.

Avedon died on October 1st, 2004.

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All About Splatoon, Nintendo’s Hot New Game for Wii U OP Magazine -31

Splatoon Review:

By Martin Robinson

Did nintendo make the right move?

Is Splatoon a shooter or isn’t it? There’s been a lot of discussion about where exactly Nintendo’s new Wii U exclusive - the first all-new characterled IP to emerge from within the company for 14 long years - fits, but in truth it defies easy categorisation. Yes there are guns, though they’re employed in a different kind of wet-work: one that sees splashes of vivid, bright colour sloshed all over the stages. There’s competitive online play at its heart as well, though success isn’t measured in how many headshots you pop off but in how much colour you bring to the world, and how successful you are in spreading that thick, sloppy ink. This is new territory for the company, for sure, but the one thing that’s evident throughout Splatoon is that, despite the lack of familiar faces, it’s every inch a Nintendo game.

It’s a machine for happiness, in other words, where each element has been engineered to elicit a smile. Nintendo’s games have always held fun at a premium, of course, but given a blank piece of paper it’s fascinating to see how far its developers go in energetically providing colour of their own. Splatoon is a giddy, at times

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delirious game.

It’s chaotic, too. The Turf War battles that are the default online mode see two teams of four face off against each other from opposite sides of the map, working to paint as much of the floor as possible in their own ink. At the end of each match, the amount of territory is totted up, and a winner is declared. It’s scrappy and it’s simple, and it speaks to a pleasure as primal as that found in other online shooters, even if it’s more overtly juvenile: this isn’t about bloodlust, and it’s only nominally about a sense of conquest.

Predominantly, Splatoon is all about creating a big, gaudy mess.

The chaos is orchestrated by exquisite design, as you might well expect from Nintendo EAD. Form meets function in the characters you control: slightly gangly teenagers whose purposeful posture speaks of their energy, and who can transform into squid at the press of a button, gliding through the ink they deposit with impressive speed. It’s a strange concept that’s been approached with a sense of impeccable, meticulous logic, each system tying into one

another in a delicious weave.

Take the ink you spray, which drips gloriously from each surface (glimmering like gloss, it almost burns the nostrils with its freshly laid, acrid paint shine). Dipping into it in squid form allows you to hide from enemies, to move faster, to scale painted walls and to top up your ink reserves and so victory comes about not just by spraying everywhere, but by spraying wisely, opening up new channels for yourself and your team-mates.

Take the weapons, variants on shooter staples that are bent towards Splatoon’s own particular style. There are the rollers that steam their way through levels, creating a pathway so others can follow in their wake, or the squat 52. Gal that spits out thick angry globules of paint. There are the special abilities that unleash huge towering geysers that can tear through enemies, or give you an Inkzooka that thuds out whole pools of spray. Nintendo’s quite the gunsmith, it turns out, even if its armoury is pointedly non-lethal.

Take that adolescent veneer too, which works its way outwards from your genetically spliced teen protagonists. The Shibuya-esque hub world in which you’re deposited every time you start up Splatoon is a fulcrum of fashion, where shops that refresh their stock every day sell you hats,

shoes and shirts that each come with their own perks and abilities (a game of dress-up that’s reminiscent, in its own way, of Square Enix’s excellent The World Ends With You). There’s a sense of bubblegum rebellion in the day-glo punk aesthetic too, backed up by spiky, catchy tunes that cascade with all the sweetness of late-90s Sega.

One of the few genuine missteps made

by Splatoon is in its use of Amiibo - although it’s hardly the game’s fault. Scanning in one of the three tie-in models unlocks a challenge mode, whereby existing single-player missions are remixed with new goals in mind. It’s a fun diversion, albeit hardly an essential one, but it’s a shame that it’s locked off, not only for those with no interest in Amiibo but also for those who want them but aren’t lucky enough to get their hands on them. As is too often the case, stock seems to have run dry, with models already going for a painful premium online.

It’s enough to make you think you’re playing the best Dreamcast game that never was, though this is one of those rare titles that works hard to fill out the Wii U’s eccentric brief. The GamePad’s put to good use - even if the optional motion controls are somewhat divisive - with the touchscreen

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an integral part of your own loadout. Reading as a comparatively light package - reflected in the map that’s hosted on the second screen, its slightly slimmer asking price - with just one identifying where your ink is needed and what mode and five maps available on day one. It’s areas need winning back, is essential to victory, a curious model that makes for a game that as too is using the touchscreen to mark out and can initially feel lightweight, even if it’s already leap to your team-mates’ side. expanding at a fairly rapid rate. A new map has In that leap, told with a brief squat of your been introduced within days of release (dubbed squid before they fling themselves across the map, Port Mackerel, it’s currently one of Splatoon’s you’ll find all that’s great about Splatoon: a solution trickiest locales, a maze of containers patrolled to a common multiplayer problem, solved with a by moving trucks that can be mounted for an unique sense of style. It’s the kind of craft you find aerial advantage), as well as Ranked Battles cropping up throughout Splatoon, from the drama and Splat Zones, a variant on King of the Hill. of the results screen Updates from this provided by a point on are set to Nintendo covers new plump flag-bearing be weekly, climaxing ground with messy cat to the Miiverse in August with the messages that find colour in Splatoon - and introduction of themselves daubed custom battles and over the walls creates one of its finest squads. Voice chat of stages like so remains off the cards games in a generation in much cute graffiti.

- an omission that’s They’re the kind understandable given the process. of details that can Nintendo’s desire bubble up and surprise you even after a week’s to provide a safe space to play, but still one intense play - like how the frustration at the lack that feels like it’s holding back a deeper, more of an ammo counter on the HUD gives way to tactical brand of play. It all speaks to Splatoon’s delight when you eventually find it in the canister own unique rhythm: the daily refresh of stock in on your character’s back, slowly depleting with the plaza’s shops and the drawn-out trickle of each schlepping shot. generous updates suggests There’s a more traditional Nintendo game to be found in Splatoon in the four-hour diversion provided by its single-player mode. More than a mere tutorial for multiplayer, it’s a fully featured campaign with its own progression system, its own hub world and its own novel ideas that, as is so often the case in EAD’s work, are ushered in for single levels before disappearing, never to be seen again. It plays out like a short, sweet semi-sequel to Super Mario Sunshine, its platforming powered by colourful gushes of ink, and all those ideas come together in a climactic boss fight that’s the equal of anything created by Mario’s Tokyo EAD team.

Beyond that, there are still signs of Nintendo finding its feet in a multiplayercentric game - or, charitably, staking out its own eccentric territory. Splatoon launched

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the longer tail of other online games, while the rate of progression and the three-minute fights suggest something pithier, punchier and more poppy.

It’s those three minutes that really count, though, and it’s there you’ll find the genius and the joy of Splatoon. It’s where you’ll find a genre distilled, broken down and reassembled, with each piece snapping perfectly in place. It’s where you’ll find Nintendo charting new territory, and sharing with you the thrills of their own discovery. And it’s where you’ll find what happens when Mario’s maker steps away from the comfort of the Mushroom Kingdom and tries something new: a true modern classic, and one of Nintendo’s finest games in a generation.

7 tips to

improve your

battle skills!

1. Get used to the controls 2. It's not about body count 3. Know how to escape 4. Paint!

5. Super Jumps 6. Learn the Weapons 7. Special moves

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in stores 9.1.15

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diversity

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