by Joseph Leray

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To ease the interminable workday keeping us from a long weekend of cheap beer, cheaper hotdogs, and too much exposure to the sun, Reddit user RudeBootie has kindly uploaded a collection of animated fighting game backgrounds, sans fighters.

My eye is admittedly untrained, but I'm spotting a lot of SNK-published titles from the "King of Fighters," "Art of Fighting," "Mark of the Wolves," and "Samurai Showdown" franchises, with a perfunctory nod to Capcom with E. Honda's bathhouse from "Street Fighter II" at the bottom.

If nothing else, the collection is a shrine to pixel art craftsmanship and a reminder that these iconic arenas defined an entire genre during the formative and prolific mid-90's. The backgrounds on display run the gamut from melodramatic, to surreal, to pedestrian, featuring everything from ruined castles to beached oil tankers, monkeys bathing in an onsen to a cheering mermaid in a clamshell, idyllic landscapes to crowded street markets.

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the-daily-robot-seattle

Pixel artist The Daily Robot (AKA W. Miles Donovan) welcomes you to his 8-bit skylines for Boston, Seattle, and Chicago, in a project he says was inspired by NES/Famicom games.

Oh, and look at that: they switch back and forth between day and dusk.

After the jump, check out the rest of Donovan's images and wonder what he could do with the Tokyo or Dubai skylines.

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Artist and designer Sébastien Barkici reduces franchises like "Final Fantasy," "Assassin's Creed," and "Metal Gear Solid" down to their barest visual components in this series of video game posters. While I think the "MGS" poster is the most striking, I have to say, I love how he pared down three corporate mascots--Mario, Sonic, and Pac-Man--down to their base colors. Clear, iconic, and recognizable (although I would have gone for a darker shade of blue for Sonic). The trick here is to evoke without cluttering the image with excessive detail (I'm a little lost on the "Final Fantasy" one--is it a crystal motif?).

After the jump, check out more of Barkici's deceptively simple work.

[Source: Sébastien Barkici via dotcore]

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inside-donkey-kong

The images are the work of Dutch illustrator and designer Metin Seven, whose site Seven's Heaven features a ton more of his art work.

The images add a skewed perspective to classic video games "Space Invaders," "Dig Dug," and "Donkey Kong" and are up for sale at Imagekind.

Check out a couple more of Seven's prints after the jump.

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I'm not gonna lie: I covet this oversized hardcover from publisher IDW, but I wouldn't even know when I'd have time to pore through it. Still, that doesn't make me wish that I could get my hands on one of the 250 copies of "Transformers: The Art of the Fall of Cybertron," based on last summer's game from High Moon Studios and publisher Activision.

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Titan Books is releasing "The Art of Dead Space" this week, and they've provided us with some pages from this look at the art and history of Visceral Games' trilogy.

After the jump, check out concepts for series hero Isaac Clark's suit, a look at the frozen wastes of the Tau Volantis outpost (along with the things that dwell there).

You can pick up the "Art of Dead Space" today.

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The U.K. print maker commemorates Square Enix's PSOne classic with a series of five posters.

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Visceral games releases images for original visions of some of the spiny, crawling, murderous heavies they had planned for "Dead Space 3."

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If you've ever wanted to hang a piece of art from "Mirror's Edge" on your wall, Danish gallery Cook & Becker have partnered up with EA to offer fine art prints from 2008's first person free running game as well as the "Mass Effect" franchise.

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Fans of thatgamecompany's downloadable hit can check out concept and environment art from Journey in the upcoming art book.

Details after the jump.
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