Of all the games I’ve played, the most well-written one (800,000 words anyone?) has got to be Planescape: Torment. Released in 1999, this RPG used the Infinity engine (of Baldur’s Gate fame) and takes place in the Planescape (AD&D) setting. I love everything about it really, it’s hard to describe just how awesome this game is if you haven’t played it, so I’m not even going to try :) Eurogamer recently had a nice retrospective on it though. This website has a lot of cool goodies for the fans :)
The Nameless One, the main character that has his mortality stripped away from him, bears the mark of torment. The Rune of Torment is described by Eric Campanella:
The bladed shape that appears on tattoos, the Axe of Torment, the Weapon of Torment, and is part of the ultimate Symbol of Torment, is actually two perfectly matching shapes flipped and combined. One of them is meant to be pure steel, the other rusted metal. These represent the Nameless One and the Transcendent One and their very unique relationship. You can see this symbol close up if you go to the bestiary section of the journal and make sure you have no portraits selected.
Inspired by the Rune of Torment symbol, I’ve baked a mocha cake topped with a marzipan torment symbol and cocoa powder:
Fell: It is *torment.* It is that which draws all tormented souls to you. Fell nods at your left arm, at your shoulder. The flesh knows it suffers even when the mind has forgotten. And so you wear the rune always.
Pain, Agony, Suffering, Torment. When the Rune is invoked, even the earth shall resonate its anguish. Torment of the mind. Torment of the body. Torment of the soul. All will be made clear when the Circle is drawn.
What can change the nature of a cake?
One of my favorite gaming series in recent RPG history is The Witcher. The dark atmosphere, morally gray area decisions with indirect consequences, steamy sex scenes, these games have it all! They also features the sexiest male video-game character I have ever seen ^^. I would love to have his babies, were it not for the Trial of the Grasses leaving poor Geralt of Rivia sterile ;) After surviving this trial, all witchers receive this beautiful medallion shaped like a wolf’s head.
It was exactly this medallion that inspired me to bake a The Witcher cupcake. The cupcake is cappuccino-flavored, which is a reference to Geralt’s glorious long white hair. It is topped with blood-red marzipan and a 3D wolf’s head that I modeled out of black marzipan by hand.
The Witcher Medallion cappuccino cupcake
The Witcher Medallion cappuccino cupcake
If you haven’t played it yet, I can really recommend the entire series. Start with The Witcher on PC and follow it up with the sequal, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings – Enhanced Edition, coming to a PC and even Xbox 360 near you soon!
One of my favorite games when I was growing up has got to be Day of the Tentacle, that was developed and published by LucasArts. This amazing point-and-click adventure was released in 1993 and had a dream dev team with legends such as Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame. 10-year-old-girl-me was totally in love with the Day of the Tentacle visual style, gameplay, voice acting, humor and overall awesomeness.
So without further ado, I present you, Purple Tentacle, made entirely out of marzipan. He’s planning to dominate the world from the comfort of a lemon-flavored toxic sludge iced cupcake:
It makes me feel great! Smarter! More aggressive! I feel like I could... like I could... like I could... TAKE ON THE WORLD!!!
Yes, thank you, naive human! Now I can finish taking over the world! Ha ha ha!
But wait, there’s more! As a special bonus treat, my dear boyfriend also tried his hand at molding some marzipan into Purple Tentacle’s friendly brother: Green Tentacle. He is cowering in fear after hearing about the evil plans of his brother:
Uh... I will try to talk him out of it.
Hi there GameCake-aficionados!
Just wanted to give you an update on why I haven’t updated (lol, there’s a joke in there somewhere, but coming up with this joke is left as an exercise to the reader!) this site since forever. I’ve been extremely busy working on my MSc graduation project and studying for my final exam (Random Signal Processing 2: Stochastic Processes). Usually in weekends, when given the choice between gaming and baking gamecakes, gaming wins, because it’s easier and less time consuming. Well, that’s what I keep telling myself anyway ^^. So I recently finished my second playthrough of The Witcher 2 (the Roche path this time) and Gothic. Last weekend I started playing Gothic II.
But enough about that, onwards to the interesting topic of GameCakes! Two recent events really inspired me. The first is that my Angry Birds Marzipan Tutorial is being repinned like crazy over at Pinterest (a really cool visual online pinboard where people share and organize things they love). The second event is getting a truly amazing e-mail from a fan who really appreciates the work I have done for this website and is just as excited about GameCakes as I am ^^. So, awesome sender of e-mails, if you’re reading this, thanks a lot! Mails like this are really inspiring me to keep baking and updating the site :)
And now for the Future Work section (getting all scientific here)… I have several projects planned and here’s the scoop on some of them:
- The Witcher wolf pendant
- Some character from The Binding of Isaac
- Some more Final Fantasy cupcakes (like the Cactuar Cupcake, but Tonberry?)
Baking my own donuts from scratch has been a dream of mine for quite some time. But I thought it would be very time consuming, so I never really got around to it. As it turns out, I was right :D I started baking around 8 pm, and was done 4 hours later ^^ I used this recipe and added chocolate to the glaze. Needs moar chocolate!
Of course, I can’t just go around and post delicious chocolate glazed plain donuts here, where’s the game theme in that? So I added some marzipan, and suddenly: Portal: Aperture Science donut!
Aperture Donuts: we taste what we must, because we can!
I’m eating donuts and I’m still alive!
Tiago, of Tiago’s Tech Blog fame, commented on my marzipandroid post with his extremely awesome birthday cake:
\o/
Don’t they look smart? Thanks for sharing, Tiago! So if you’re wondering what those letters and numbers mean, it’s his age in hexadecimal (I’ll leave the math to convert this to the decimal system as an exercise to the reader ;) )
I would love to feature more cakes on this blog, so let me know in the comments section if you baked something game-related that you would like me to feature.
So I got these measuring spoons in the mail this week: cup, tbsp, tsp, stuff like that. This means I can finally try baking some American recipes! Try? Yes, try! Apparently, it is not a really good idea to bake lemon bars (recipe here) in a leaky pan over an oven grid…. I was very surprised to see that at the end of this hot sticky messy adventure, I was left with some extremely tasty Pacman Lemon Bars:
Wagga wagga wagga
And this in my oven:
Messy oven is messy
If I could pick one enemy as my favorite from the entire Final Fantasy series it would be Cactuar (known in some regions as Sabotendā). The character design, the way they move, the sounds they make… Perfection!
It is therefore with great joy that today I can present you a Cactuar Cupcake!
Cactuar Cupcake
Made from marzipan and standing on a vanilla cupcake covered in sandy cinnamon sugar… Mmm…
So what’s your favorite Final Fantasy enemy? Let me know in the comments section ^^
Finally! Time for a gamecake! I baked this one as a prize for the Game of the Year-award of the MKT 4 game development project I assisted. Also, since it’s Link’s 25th birthday, a Zelda-themed cake seemed appropriate. It’s filled with two layers of strawberry bavarois with fresh strawberries and covered in buttercream and a mixture of marzipan and fondant. So here it is, in all its sparkly glory! Congrats to the winning team Hexacon!
Shiny Triforce cake
Sparkles!
I think I could have done a better job on this cake. I had the flu all week and under the pressure of having only 5 hours free to make this cake, I had to compromise a lot. I wanted to make a 3D Link holding the Master Sword, or with an opened chest and a victory cup in his hands, but after two people told me that the marzipan head I had finished looked nothing like Link, I decided to skip the whole 3D Link bit. Better luck next time. Sparkly Triforce it is!
Yes, I am still alive, and yes I have been baking stuff. In the past weeks I baked a strawberry-whipped cream cake for my mom, cupcakes with chocolate buttercream and 64 (such a geeky number) chocolate chip cookies ^^ I did however not have the time to make anything game related. But here’s the good news, today I did have 2 hours available. Since I am so happy with my new mobile phone (HTC Desire Z) and Android, I decided to make the cute green Google Android robot out of marzipan:
Marzipan Google Android
Marzipandroid says hi
Recent Comments