Finished Portal 2 tonight, yay!

It was every bit as good as I'd hoped. Fantastic visuals (Valve's Source engine is newly updated for the game) and Wheatley and GlaDOS were brilliant.

It's worth a second playthrough just for the commentary, the missed dialogue and the achievements.

If anyone's unfamiliar with Portal, it's a first-person puzzle game that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and simple objects using the "portal gun", a device that can create portals between two areas.

In "Portal " you play the human Chell who's just awakened from stasis after several hundred years. Chell must navigate the dilapidated Aperture Science Enrichment Center and its test chambers with the portal gun while the facility is rebuilt by the reactivated GLaDOS, a rampant AI computer. [Paraphrased from Wikipedia].

If you've never played it, get a friend to show you it or try the first Portal for yourself. It's available for cheap for consoles and through the PC 'Steam' service.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com

I was sorting out the images on my Macbook and I came across this...

This is the original cover design I was sent for the slipcover of the Greek "Dragon Tamers" hardcover. Looks good, right?

If you're not a gamer, reader or designer then yes - it's shiny. Attention grabbing. Looks good.

...But there's something not quite right. Apart from the strange character in the bottom who might be the publisher's mascot, the book's protagonist is a black-haired girl. So immediately, some mental alarm bells are ringing about this cover designer's attention to detail.

Wait, haven't I seen that guy before...?

Final Fantasy E.Maree?

That's the cover art for Final Fantasy X, voted by Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu to be the greatest video game of all time and fifth in IGN's "Top 25 PS2 Games of All Time". Selling 6.6 million units worldwide, it's a pretty big deal - the Final Fantasy series is one of the best selling video game franchises.

I pointed out the mistake to the publishers and it was redone, though I never did get an explanation as to how that happened.

The final Greek cover.

This amusing event shows that book cover designers are far too often really bad. There are plenty of great ones who can sum up a book in a simple image, and there are a lot of famous, stunning covers - but there are also thousands of 'designers' who think it's acceptable to Google Image Search the keywords that are vaguely related to the work and badly edit it all together with a Photoshopped font on top.

It isn't okay. Google Image Search images are almost all still under copyright, and sticking them all together and selling it is just profiting easily of other people's work. There are people who work hard to create these works - and it's not usually well-known video games that get ripped off, it's independent artists who don't have a chance at taking legal action when their work is stolen for commercial use.

Because of how difficult it is to be sure photo-based covers, especially foreign ones, come from open sources the illustrated covers for my work tend to be my favorites. The amount of work that goes into the airbrush-painted cover for UK Dragon Tamers 2, digitally painted Dutch DT1 and traditionally painted somewhere-Nordic-maybe-Swedish DT1 all stand above the rest for the sheer effort taken. Done well they can create a unique impression of a story's cast.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of great covers made using photographs - most good covers are these days. Two of my recent favourite designs "Fallen" and "Hush, Hush" both use photographs to stunning effects.

In the end, though, there's always people trying to take shortcuts and making things unfair for everything.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com