Provided of course that your summer days involve hardened killers, big guns and chicks on poles. Ahh, how I recall my youth, wasting away many a lazy afternoon carrying out ruthless vendettas against those who had done me wrong, squeezing the life out of them by any and every means necessary. This really takes me back.

I think I may have mentioned that I have a certain level of… anticipation at work for Shank. The game played so smoothly at E3 that I’m honestly a little breathless thinking about it. Two more weeks. One day at a time.

In the meantime, enjoy these concept sketches because they are gorgeous. My favorite is the movie poster design.

A NeoGAF user has painstakingly pieced together details of the canceled Legacy of Kain game, The Dark Prophecy. The game was being developed in 2004 by Eidos and Ritual Entertainment, but fell victim to the axe before it could be completed. Now a huge amount of information has been recovered.

It would seem that The Dark Prophecy‘s story was due to center around two different time periods, one featuring a tyrannical Kain from the past, one featuring the modern day Kain. The vampire would also regain his transformation power, as first seen in the original Legacy of Kain. The Dire Wolf form would return, along with a Dire White Wolf and a monstrous “beast” form.

A ludicrous amount of art and screens have also been posted, which you can check out below. It looks like it could have been a pretty cool game, and speaking as a fan of the Kain character, I’m sad this wasn’t finished. Ah well, maybe Kain will rear his ugly head again someday.

[Via NeoGAF]

We’re hard-pressed to call a book full of concept art for Alien Breed: Impact created by clearly talented artists “kinda nasty,” but, well, part of it features images of gross bugs and stuff. More to the point: gross alien bug things.

If you’re into this kinda thing, we’ve dropped the whole set of images into the gallery below.

You’ve already seen an extensive breakdown of the concept art behind Double Fine‘s nü-cult-classic Brutal Legend right here on Boing Boing, but above, interface designer Joe ‘codeloss‘ Kowalski goes awesomely in-depth on work he put into the menu and title screen systems — a system brilliantly aping the wonderful yesteryear of gatefold sleeves and ballpoint-pen scrawled notebooks.

If you’re still a stranger to its foreboding metal world, see our Games To Get page for links to newly discounted copies of the game, or visit Double Fine’s own shop for autographed copies & ephemera.

And yet, he has a style and flair all his own. It’s probably all of the voodoo. LucasArts Games released a group of images showing the development of LeChuck’s look in the upcoming Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Special Edition.

I really like the page with all of the faces. It’s a hard line to walk between cartoonish and sinister with this particular character and I’m pleased with what they’ve come up with. What do you guys think?

It looks as if Blizzard is slowly rolling out the opposite sex choices for Diablo III, beginning with last week’s reveal of the female Monk. Now we get our first look at the female Barbarian, an imposing figure of a female if I’ve ever seen one. It’s refreshing to see a well-muscled barbarian female, as opposed to the Playboy model in a loincloth version we’re used to getting in our fantasy fiction.

Here is her in-game model, seen in motion on the Barbarian class page:

And here’s a full-body picture of the concept art:

Now that we’ve seen the Monk and the Barbarian, we anxiously await the reveal of the female Witch Doctor and the male Wizard. So far the male Witch Doctor is the most scantily clad character in the roster. I bet the male Wizard is only wearing a star-speckled Speedo.

Game developer Blizzard has already shown the male version of the Diablo III monk. It hasn’t shown the female version. Until now.

Diablo III has four character classes announced so: Witch Doctor, Wizard, Barbarian, and Monk. This concept art is for the female version of the existing monk.

In previous games, players were locked to a class/sex combo.

The character’s official page has the female in-game character model as well.

Check it out. And that pixie hair!

It got at least as far as the concept art stage, according to old artwork from concept designer Ross Dearsley unearthed by the man who prefers to be called superannuation. Dearsley’s concepts cover all manner of Electronic Arts project, from the unreleased Syndicate and Gunhead to something called Hurikan to other unnamed projects.

Let’s take a peek at the unannounced, potentially aborted Road Rash.

Dearsley’s notes says that he was focusing on “ease of differentiation” in his character concepts for a new Road Rash, with bikers of all shapes, sizes and visual personalities. There’s not much here beyond clothing studies and loose sketches of big, bulky and portly characters, but they certainly do nail “ease of differentiation.

And, to add to the list of literary works turned video games, Dearsley’s concepts out a game concept based on Oliver Twist.

Looks a bit like a kid’s version of Assassin’s Creed, but with one potentially interesting concept mentioned in the notes, Oliver’s hunger levels affecting his pose and animation and, I assume, his vitality. Dearsley’s concepts show off Fagin, multiple versions of Oliver and the Bowstreet Runners.

The artist has concept art from another project, something “Arthurian” from 2007, also for Electronic Arts, on his personal blog. He notes that one of the project’s “key visual elements was to be the scale difference between ‘normal’ people and the gigantic armoured knights.”

Seems EA is quite taken with building IP upon already existing work without those costly licensing fees. Shame that some of this stuff never saw the light of day. Another opportunity to work in “Dickensian” into a post lost.

Ross Dearsley [Blogspot via superannuation

Some of this was featured in the latest issue of Game Informer, but since most of you wouldn’t have seen that, enjoy.

The latest in Nintendo’s series of “Iwata Asks” is up on the company’s British portal, and contains four rare, most likely never-before-seen (by you) pieces of concept art drawn up during the original Zelda’s formative stages.

A world map, some pixel sketches, even a design outline, it’s all below. Below, and hand-drawn.

zelda Handheld History [Nintendo]