Hallucigenia 9810 - score: 5.5 out of 10

God Among Lice:
If you're looking for the pack with the best Halloween theme, this is the one to get. Most of the other Halloween-themed packs I've seen are pretty half-hearted compared to this one. The pics of pumpkin carvings are a nice touch. (my pick for best pumpkin goes to Ice :)

The fact that Hallucigenia isn't afraid to venture into media other than digitally created pics lends a strong variety to the pack. Spirit Wolf's traditionally-created (not sure of the medium) duotone Knights and the orange Winter both impressed me. Uneide's colored pics appealed to me more than the pencil sketches. They look to be colored before they were scanned, though I'm not totally sure, and don't really care anyway. The Mermaid especially struck me.. reminds me of that famous photo of a guy returning from WWII who's kissing a random girl in the street. Uneide's toon/photo collage was also interesting, though I'd say the bottom pic works much better than the top.

As for the digitally-created pics, Optik Nurv sure is trying hard to be like Catbones, and could very well succeed in his quest someday soon. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm sure you already have your own opinion of. The rendered pics from Tim Bowling seemed rather crude, though the color was nice in a couple of them.

As for the rest, there were a good number of throw-away pics that didn't need to be in the pack, some of which might have been in here just for their halloweenness. There were probably more pencil sketches than I really want to see in an art pack, too, and few of them were developed at all.. just little sketches. A pretty solid release from the Hallucigenia people, I'd give it a..

score: 6

Root88:
Optik Nerve had the best images in this pack by far. ON-DECAY.JPG really stands out. Most of the other pics were just ok. This pack was filled with art that were merely pencil sketches. Some of the sketches weren’t too bad, but they didn’t do much for me. The pack would have been twice as good if the artist tried to color them on the computer, or at least with some colored pencils or paints. If the artists aren’t comfortable doing this, I suggest doing a joint pic with someone else. The fact that half the images were photos of jack-o-lanterns didn’t impress me at all. I would have appreciated if they were released in a separate zip, or just left on the web, so I wouldn’t have wasted my time with them. The packs rating also suffered a bit by artists using Metacreations Poser to create their 3d models. I would much rather see a smaller pack with more quality artwork.

Their NFO file was informative and they gave a URL to a newly revamped website, although I couldn’t connect to it after numerous tries.

score: 4.5