Vol. 3 January
2012 TTThhheee EEEllldddeeerrr
SSScccrrrooollllllsss VVV:::
SSSkkkyyyrrriiimmm
NNNeeewww AAAnnniiimmmeee
CCCooommmiiinnnggg
SSSoooooonnn!!!
FFFrrrooommm AAArrreeennnaaa
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CLAW]
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Contents
Literature Section
Book review: I Am
Legend by Richard
Matheson
Book Art
Game Section
The Elder Scrolls V:
Skyrim
Game Art
Film and Animation
Section
Anime News
The DC Team
Contact Us
Credits
New Anime From the Director
of Cowboy Bebop
Page 14
Dragonistic Artwork and Crafts
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We here at the DC are proud to bring you the January issue of
our web magazine. Everything you see has been put together by
a team of only a few people. The links you see are fully functional,
and we encourage you to visit the pages of the artists and sites
featured. We return after taking a month off in December, and
we hope to continue bringing you interesting articles and artwork
features. We are currently looking to expand our team,
particularly in the Film and Animation section. We are also always
looking for artwork to feature and sales to advertise. If you are
interested in contributing to the magazine or promoting your
work, see our Contact Us page.
-The Dragon’s Claw Team
The Legend of Zelda:
Skyward Sword
Page 14
From Arena to Skyrim
Page 10
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Book Review
I Am Legend by Richard
Matheson Reviewed by AJ
With a film adaptation starring Will Smith, I
Am Legend gained quite a bit of
recognition a few years ago. I read the
book simply because I liked the movie.
While the story was heavily edited for the
movie, the basis remains the same – there’s
one man alive in a sea of things that want him dead.
The story follows Robert Neville, a man who is quite average. His
home is attacked by vampires every night, forcing him to constantly
repair the damage and forage for supplies by day. He is plagued by
the death of his family and the lack of human contact.
Eventually, Neville takes it upon himself to learn more about the
vampires and separate the ancient myths from the reality. Through
many painful struggles and against the odds, he stabilizes himself
and dedicates his time to research.
The story, though often describing grueling tasks in Neville’s
day-to-day life, is never boring. There is a steady flow that keeps the
plot moving forward at all times. Matheson’s writing style, particularly
because of some of his adjective choices, is great at conveying
everything from the peaks of insanity to the emptiness and loneliness
of death. At one point he describes the air as “molten” – definitely a
unique description of air, yet one that perfectly explains the heat,
humidity, and stagnation.
The story is quite sad in many places, and, at times, a bit
gruesome. It’s an interesting take on vampirism and a post-
apocalyptic society, and also a unique look at basic human
emotions, instincts, and needs. The plot is hardly comparable to the
movie, and if you like one, you won’t necessarily like the other. The
book, fortunately, is quite short, and I would recommend it to
anyone looking for a good story.
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Book Art Feature
↑A G A P E by Velvet-Moonlight
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Featured Game
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim By AJ
The fifth installment of The Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, certainly has a
lot of people talking about Nords and Khajiit. The game was at the
top of the UK’s Christmas charts, which have been dominated by
Activision and EA for the past eight years, and several of its voice
actors have been nominated for 2012 Academy Awards for their
work in the game. People who have never played any of its
predecessors are picking up a copy and starting their adventures on
Tamriel, hopefully without any arrow-to-the-knee incidents.
Graphically, Skyrim looks fantastic. The rugged mountains are
dotted with crumbling ruins, glowing caverns, spired towers, and
busy towns. Cities sprawl over the mountains in the distance, giving
you quite the view from high above. The complex scenery certainly
has its share of glitches, too, though. There are known freezing issues
on PS3, and there are many instances of clipping and stuck images.
Skyrim is quite a bit different in mechanics than the previous
games. The entire skill system was overhauled, cutting and adding
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skills, changing the way player’s level up, and adding perk trees. The
crime system has been updated from Oblivion, giving you different
bounties depending on the area you’re in. You may also have
assassins or hired thugs sent after you for stealing, making it much
more interesting, but the system’s not without drawbacks. Horses can
report you for crime, and that was probably taking it a bit too far.
The combat of Skyrim is quite customizable. Skyrim introduces
dual-wielding, allowing much more versatility. Different combinations
of equipment (or equipped magic) will create different attacks, and
the same spell on both hands can be combined for a massive
casting. Certain attacks take place in a tiny cutscene, which is nice-
looking, but seems to break the flow of combat a little.
Alchemy, enchanting, and spell-making are also available in
Skyrim. Alchemy suffered a downgrade, allowing three items
(instead of the four items Morrowind and Oblivion allowed) and
using a standard table instead of four pieces of leveled alchemy
equipment. As someone who hoards reagents and potions, I was a
little disappointed.
Smithing takes weapon and armor repair to a new level,
introducing ore mining, smelting, leather tanning, workbenches,
forges, and grinding wheels. It makes for a much more interesting
experience than simply repairing weapons and armor. In fact,
durability has been completely removed from Skyrim, allowing the
player to focus more on improving their equipment rather than
simply keeping up with its damage.
Marriage is another new feature, and it doesn’t discriminate
against race or gender…as long as you don’t want to marry a khajiit
or bosmer. Still waiting on a mod for that, Bethesda. Having a spouse
has several benefits, like extra money, food, and a bonus for
sleeping with your spouse.
Of course, the most important new features of Skyrim are the
dragons and the Shouting. Shouts use the dragon language to
create powerful effects, unlocked by finding the words on Word
Walls and collecting dragon souls from killing dragons. They’re like
super spells. Shouts play a significant part in the overall game, and a
pretty huge part in the main story. Dragons are found in several
places, perched on Word Walls or terrorizing guard towers. Weaker
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ones can even attack randomly, raining fire or ice down on you from
the sky.
Overall, Skyrim is great to play. There are loads of NPCs and
objectives, lots of massive dungeons, and plenty of ways to
customize your character. In general, it seems that the game was
made with a bigger audience in mind. The menu is minimalistic and
clearly labeled, the skills seem a little more simplified, and the attack
cutscenes are all closer to other popular video games than they are
to previous Elder Scrolls games. It can be buggy in places, but it’s still
very much worth playing.
[FANTASY HEADQUARTERS] 9
Celestial Chainmail on Etsy
10% off with the code
2MYVALENTINES until
February 15th!
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Featured Game
From Arena to Skyrim By AJ
In 1994, Bethesda released The Elder
Scrolls: Arena for MS-DOS. The open-
world game had cities, generated
wilderness with inns and other points
of interest, and dungeons. Designers
took inspiration from the Ultima series and built their world for a first-
person RPG game. Arena was difficult to get started with, a little
buggy, and hard on the computers of the time, but it was
considered a success, paving the way for other games of its type.
The second game in the
series, Daggerfall, was released
in 1996. The world of Daggerfall
is massive, with over 750,000
NPCs and over 15,000 places of
interest. Instead of a linear
storyline like Arena had,
Daggerfall has six different
endings with more complex
quests.
Then came The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002, setting a new
standard. The game had very
customizable characters, detailed
stats, and a wide variety of
factions, items, and side quests.
The game characters and
landscape was created by hand,
making it far more detailed than its
predecessors. Very few things in
the game are leveled, meaning
the player can encounter (and try
to defeat) very powerful enemies very early on, and find very good
loot if they know where to look. The main quest is generally
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considered to be a little lacking, but that didn’t keep it from getting
a Game of the Year edition. Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls
Construction Kit, which allows users to modify the game. Thousands
of mods later, including many graphics mods to help it keep up with
the latest graphics, Morrowind still holds up today in playability.
Morrowind had two sequels, Tribunal
and Bloodmoon. Tribunal introduced
mercenaries that would follow the player
around, and Bloodmoon introduced
werewolves and several monsters that
later appeared in Skyrim.
In 2007, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
came, complete with horses and NPCs
that interacted with each other. The story
was better told than Morrowind’s,
combat was more complex, and the skills,
while mostly similar, had the added benefit of perks as they were
leveled up. NPCs sleep, eat, and read, generally following
schedules, but not to the point of being fully scripted. Alchemy
introduced poisons as well as potions with good effects. Monsters
level with the character, keeping the game around the same level
of difficulty and continuing to challenge the player.
Oblivion had a single sequel, The Shivering Isles, that added
plenty of new items, monsters, and new areas to explore within the
realms of Oblivion.
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2011 brought us the latest game in the series, The Elder Scrolls V:
Skyrim. The skill system was reworked, the crime system became
more advanced, more activities opened up for the player, and
dragons will attack you at random. The graphics are generally
described as being somewhere in between “really good” and “the
best thing ever.” The landscape is incredibly detailed, and the map
is dotted with tons of diverse points of interest. The development
team focused on making each region, race, and even different
sectors of the same city seem unique.
The Elder Scrolls has also produced
several side games, including Battlespire,
Redguard, and even four mobile games.
The series has contributed heavily to the
RPG world, and it will continue to do so
for years to come.
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Game Art Feature
Halo by Vybeosa
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Anime News
Sakamichi no Apollo By Tim
You know what animes
most of us would agree are
awesome? Cowboy Bebop
and Samurai Champloo. You
know what else is awesome?
Shinichiro Watanabe, director
of both Cowboy Bebop and
Samurai Champloo, is going
to be directing a new anime
called Sakamichi no Apollo.
It’s about three high school
students who come together
because of jazz music.
Now, I’m not normally a
fan of jazz, but the opening
theme to Cowboy Bebop,
“Tank,” and the rest of the
soundtrack is the only jazz
music I truly enjoy. Who composed that along with the rest of the
soundtrack, you’re wondering? Yoko Kanno. And guess what? Yoko
Kanno is the composer for Sakamichi no Apollo’s soundtrack. Yoko
Kanno has done many well known animes, such as Cowboy Bebop,
The Vision of Escaflowne, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex,
Wolf’s Rain, and many related movies. The soundtracks of all of those
I greatly enjoyed.
I think this is something to get excited about. We don’t know
when Sakamichi no Apollo will be coming out, but I know I’ll be
keeping an eye out for it.
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The Great & Powerful Trixie has finally arrived in your podunk town!
Prepare yourselves for the greatest show of your lives during Trixie’s
unprecedented Tour of Indefinite Length! (Trixie needs to lie low for
awhile after the debacle back in Ponyville.)
Let the show begin!
Trixie Tales on Tumblr
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The DC Team
AJ
Audrey J. Ross spends much of
her time on various art projects.
She sells jewelry, crafts, and art
prints, and she has a book
published on Kindle. She plans on
going to college for visual arts to
further her artistic studies. When
not being artistic, she is often
cooking, listening to metal,
and/or browsing the Internet for
hours on end.
J
Jet (pronounce as: yet) is a Dutch
sixteen-year-old girl. She’s still in
school, but wants to study Biology
or Archeology after that, even
though languages are her
strongest subjects. She loves
reading, writing and drawing, but
can also often be found doing
some sport or another. She often
listens to music from Disney
movies.
Tim
Tim Geary is an avid gamer and
eater of spicy things. He’s often
spotted leaving his natural
habitat with a bag full of snacks
and a bottle of hot sauce. He
hopes to attend college to
pursue interests on wildlife biology
and psychology. He is currently
researching metaphysical and
paranormal phenomena and
beliefs from all over the world.
Jakku
Jakku Diran Ebansu is a
pseudonym. He's a 17 year old
amateur artist and professionally-
serious gamer. He represents
Britain on the DC team by
complaining about the weather a
lot. He loves high-tech scifi and
exaggerated science, like in
Eureka, for example. He believes
he reads far too much scifi and
fantasy. The scifi diet starts
tomorrow. Supposedly.
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The DC on the Web
Facebook Twitter Blogger DeviantART
THE DRAGON’S CLAW WEBSITE
Submit Artwork
Get in touch through any of the above sites or email AJ directly if
you’re interested in having your art featured in our magazine!
What We’re Looking For
We accept fan art and original works that incorporate fantasy,
science fiction, or gaming. No nudity or extreme violence, please.
More info can be found in our DeviantART group.
Advertising
Contact AJ if you would like to place an advertisement in our
magazine. You can message her on any of the above places or
email her directly.
Join the Team
Think you can do what we do here? We’re looking for team mates!
Fill out our application if interested.
Email AJ at [email protected]
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Credits
Cover image and all Skyrim screenshots by AJ from Skyrim; Arena,
Daggerfall, Morrowind, Bloodmoon, Oblivion, and Battlespire images
from The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages and © Bethesda
http://www.bethsoft.com/
http://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
I Am Legend cover © Orb Books
http://us.macmillan.com/orb.aspx
Book Art Artist
http://velvet-moonlight.deviantart.com/
Game Art Artist
http://vybeosa.deviantart.com/
Cowboy Bebop image ©Tokyopop
http://tokyopop.de/
Advertisements
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dragonistic
http://www.etsy.com/shop/celestialchainmail
http://trixie-tales.tumblr.com/
This entire webzine was made in Microsoft Word 2007
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Word-2007-Old-
Version/dp/B000HCZ8GW
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