Calendar stuffs

Note that this isn't my Bday, it's my persona's. Marks the day i decided to become a spriter, it's sort of a big deal to me.

Also, August 30th, is my sister's Bday, She's 19 today. I'll b sure to throw cake on her face later.

Get Behind Me, Doktor!

Faust and Potemkin are my two favorite Guilty Gear characters. Faust in general, and Potemkin for his character. They're both on the extremes of character size; Faust is around 11 feet tall and weighs less than a lot of the normal sized characters due to being twig thin, and Potemkin is hust a huge mass of flesh that weighs a few tons, if I remember correctly. They still manage to stand out from all the other characters in the series in less obvious ways, though.

Faust is a bag-headed demon doctor that swings a huge scalpel around and crouches in a manner that makes his abnormal height disappear completely. Gameplay wise, he's actually one of the shorter characters. Other than that, Faust is...weird. He swims through the ground, teleports, pulls his head off of his body and using it like a bomb, and pulls meteors out of his coat. The game explains Faust is able to do all this weird stuff by basically saying "he's a doctor". He's also bald, has seven very familiar scars on his chest, flies around like Mary poppins using an umbrella, and shouts naughty things while cutting people up.

Potemkin, aside from his monstrous, well, everything, is actually one of the more human characters in the game. He's a former slave soldier that helped to overthrow his country's oppressive government, and now works directly for the president. But the thing that really makes me like the big guy is his hobby: Potemkin reportedly likes to draw, and hates pencils that can't survive being grasped by his battleship fingers. It's one of those things that makes you go back and look at the character and getting these really goofy images in your head. If you wanna see the type of goofiness I mean, try finding the Story Mode ending pic where he holds Bridget's yo-yo.

Funny things are funny

I do not read many online webcomics (K-ToF is the one more likely to be that person), but I do read Kevin Bolk's stuff. And and in this filler comic for The Last Mystical Legend of Fantastic Fantasy Trigger Star (triggerstar.com) Fresca happens to whip out his extra weapon. While that is pretty funny, I must point out to you the ad that happens to display to the right of the comic.

It just makes that strip that just more perfect!

L4D survival opinion: Helms deep

This is gonna be short as fuck, after the first time we played:

I counted at least 7 miniguns in the level, but i know there's more. There's ridiculous amounts of ammo, explosives and health. And you can hold in the room you start in by shooting nonstop while watching TV (watched American Chopper for the last 10 mins).

Also, forgot to post this in the "Heaven can wait" review:

Booya.

If u need to kill massive numbers of infected for the achivement, get it, otherwise, boring as fuck.

Personally. Do not want.

Beware of Demoman

Besides the obvious attack method of hurling spiked balls at foes, the Demoman and Lakitu actually have a few surprising similarities. Both of them can sail through the air and attack from far out of the reach of their target. Mario(except in SMB3) and the other classes will die from at most 2 attacks from them if not given the chance to heal. Also...they're both really really annoying and can induce rage very easily.

Intresting Wii stuffs

Animal crossing is the fucking devil! WEll not really...it's just what I've been doing for the past 4 days. This is one heck of an awkwardly addicting game, Zach and me got a lil competitive about bug catching and fishing to see who could complete the museum first.

Mmm... what's new... Well while doin some research for my Wii *cough usb loader cough* i came upon this video about homebrew stuff:



First few homebrew games are like, "meh" but then starts showin some media player for the wii that can play Youtube, but then! FUCKING TYRIAN APPEARS!

Tyrian is an old space shooter game with a pretty long story, many ships u can buy in the orse of the game with many weapons u can equip and upgrade and even secret levels that could lead u to even more ships and weapons. the game could b played alone in sort of story mode, or in an arcade mode, or 2p where each player is a different kind of ship, but that both can connect to each other to form 1 and get extra power. I was and still am a huge fan of it.

Normally you require DOSbox to run it, which sucks to configure and all that crap, but as that video points out, there's a openTyrian project, that that is so worth my attention. I'll b looking into that quite soon.

The video features other misc stuff, but what caught my interest was ScummVM, i remember that from the PSP homebrews, it's an emulator for old school point and click adventures, the ones that i believe Jimmy likes.

Then u can see emulators (SNES, GBA, N64), random homebrew games and apps.

Neat stuff all around really. The Wii homebrew scene is rather interesting really.

Taco Bell is full of win.

How do you make a McDonald's meal better? You can't, but at least you can make it look pretty!


All the bad in a good looking form. Yay heart attack!

http://www.fancyfastfood.com/

Comparison of cartoon.

I remember a time when cartoons were pretty damn cool. Cartoons today are now all pretty wishy washy, anime, or attempts to be anime. Once in a while a good series comes out, but in the 80s and 90s they cranked out the good stuff like there was no tomorrow.

In any case, one of the most anticipated part of the cartoon was always the intro. Without the intro how can you know how badass a cartoon is? The anatomy of a cartoon opening was pretty simple and can be found across a large spectrum of the most popular shows.

1) Bad ass or catchy song. Let's face it, if it doesn't stick in your head you probably won't remember it. In addition to some awesome instrumentals, the vocals are the heart of the song. The singers poured their love into singing that intro. They HAD to sing it to earn their bread and water.

2) Animation is top notch. Sure the actual cartoon may have looked poor, but gosh darn it the intro made it look epic.

3) Timing. The intro could range from short to full pledge mini-episode. Which ever the case, it was used up to the last drop.



Iron Man 90s Season 2 Intro. Yes, season 1 opening sucked, but what they did was fixed that up. Watching this makes me feel like a man. Hell if you are a girl this probably made you manly as well. Watching this makes me want to pound some freaking iron and pour hot molten metal into a cast naked. There is not much lyrical words going on but you pretty much knew two things. 1) He's fucking Iron Man. 2) He's gonna fuck you up with his bare hands if he has too.



Iron Man : Armored Adventures Opening. What the hell was that?! First off he's not a man at all, so I don't know what the song is talking about! He's a boy! And I can't even understand what the heck is going on? Ring? What the fuck? Iron man has a super suit and you're talking about obtaining some damn ring?A bunch of people pops up? Who the hell are they and why should I even care about them. Watching this makes me realize something about this Iron Man. 1) He's a douche and let's the public know it. 2) He's a boy trying to be a man but fails. 3) Oh they were singing? I thought it was a bad narration.

Post your thoughts!

WTF why is there a fridge there?

Louis 2012

I'd vote for him...

L4D campaign opinion: Dead City

I thought bill was being tentacle raped at first.

Admittedly, that's one of the coolest posters for a campaign I've seen so far, but that's where all that is positive about this campaign ends.

This:

Déjà vu... again...

This is how like 80 % of the map looks like. A lot of the campaign looks like a cardboard box city, and by that i mean huge fucking cities with no alleys and the buildings seems to all fit right next to each other making a huge box. That is fucking terrible and cheap design.

The campaign has a huge fucking excess of "copy paste" everywhere, Zach and myself had to ask each other like 10 times "Have we been here yet?" because the same building/alleys are re-used a lot and often the entrance to a building looks like the exit. All crescendo events seemed to b there for the sake of it and honestly, were lame.

See the gate in the pic bellow? i honestly think we've had to open like 8 or 9 of those, and for such a simple gate, it take a fucking long ass time to open.

I'm seein double..

In that pic though, me and Zach, and Bill, and Bill and Francis, and Francis, and Zoey (yea it was a fucking weird ass server, i dunno) had to wait for the drawbridge first, well, fine, we waited. then we proceeded to half a mile of bridge, and then..

This part honestly took like 10 mins to go through, and we barely had anything to do

Wait what? how does that work? are there really bridges like that? i googled for a bit and i could only find drawbridges like this, a drawbridge with a fixed center and 2 parts that lift up on each end, that seems quite retarded, what would b the practical use of such a bridge? well, obvious to force people to wait twice when running from a horde of zombies.

One of the Francis decided to become a Zoey at that point. Also, fun fact, apparently tanks can't swim and instantly die from it.

So yea, this campaign has a lot of design issues, some of the design seems retarded, stuff looks way too much like it's there on purpose to piss off players, there's subpaths all over the place that leads to just ammo or health, etc. I guess this campaign is hard to follow because it doesn't follow the basic rule: use light to guide players. u often end up in huge fucking areas where everything looks the same and have zero idea where to go.

Besides level design, this campaign has other issues though, such as floating items as seen bellow, there's a scripted subway train that runs in front of u just because the end of the first map, and it gets stuck. the first time me and zach got to it, it stopped, we assumed it was meant to do that, and when we approached it, instant death. It did that the 2nd time too, but i jumped in front of it and got through, then all the bots went against it and died, and the train got unstuck and Zach could pass too.

I'm doing that with my mind, serious.

At one point, because of the bad level design, we ended up in a top floor with a hole in the wall. there was a fire escape ladder nearby, it was impossible to walk or jump on it, but we were quite fucking lost and i was feeling suicidal, so i made a jump for it and didn't make it, but hanged on the edge of it, Zach was close enough to help me up it and i got on the top of the level, which obviously isn't meat to happen.

I couldn't get down again, so i explored and saw some of the level (which only confirmed the copy paste feel) and eventually jumped down to my death. It was then that we discovered the level had almost no respawn rooms for like 10 entire minutes of Zach's non stop walking. Seriously, he walked more than the first 2 maps of no mercy without finding a damn rescue/spawn room.

Oh god the finale...

We were there for far too fucking long...

This is a bad finale on all accounts. for starters, it took us 20+ mins to figure out how to start it, we even ended up backtracking the entire level just in case this was a fucked up alternate path for medkits. After a lot of duscussion, we concluded that the subway HAD to b where the finale was, and did a 8th search for anything that might trigger it.

i was tired, sick of the campaign, it was close to 2 hours gameplay, i was ranting and bitching for a good 5 mins and at one point said: "I mean what the fuck! What o we do? do i have to buy a ticket or s........ WHAT???"

Yes... at the entrance of the subway station, there's like 4-5 of those things where u buy tickets from, 1 of them can b activated.

Say "Pills!"...

After i killed Zach in frustration, , the finale was very plain and simple, a train arrived, and we finished the campaign.

In conclusion?

This is so not worth the hour long download! seriously, on top of everything else, this is the biggest campaign we've downloaded so far in filesize!

This is a definite DO NOT WANT!

My old host finally went poof

I checked the blog earlier and seems that all the images from the layout were gone, i uploaded them to the backup host i had setup for such an occasion and i think everything is working again.

In case one of the old posts has missing images, please let me know so i can re-upload them.

Rom review: Seiken Densetsu 3

Once i finshed my internship, i had in mind to play this rom online with Zach for the fun of it, but let's just say that although it's perfectly possible to play a fast paced FPS with a friend that lives an ocean away, it's still impossible to play a fucking simple SNES rom properly with that same friend.

Zach played with me up until the 2nd or 3rd mana spirit i think, and then we got desynced so god damned often and quickly that i had to carry on on my own.

aka "Secret of Mana 2"

Intro

"Seiken Densetsu 3" is the sequel to "Seiken Densetsu 2" (obviously) which is also known as "Secret of Mana", so logically this game would b "Secret of Mana 2" and is generally accepted as such. However, the events in this game happen a millennium or so before SoM.

I own the original SoM, and i loved that RPG a lot, it flows well battle wise and traveling isn't that much a a pain in the ass. they give u a lot of crap to do but it's a fairly fun game that I've beat several times on my SNES. for what feels like 15 years (let's see, this came out in 1995... we're in 2009... close enough.) I've known about the sequel, and a couple of years ago even tried it out but never actually beat it. As a spriter i always admired it, but now i wonder if i was right in doing so.

I was gonna go with the "God Hand" for myself, but it seems that it's a terrible class to play as.

SoM has cool features that the first game didn't have, such as, u can select 3 from 6 characters as ur party, and there's 3 possible paths your adventure can take depending on who the main character is. So this is the party Zach and me made.

As u can tell, i cheated on the exp and maxed the characters, that's cause this game is a huge dick and i kept getting 1 shot killed. but more on that later.

Story

It's a squaresoft game, do i really need to tell u the story? fine, as i mentioned there's multiple possible story paths depending on the main hero, however, those are just plot devices to set that character into the main story.

The gist of it is that Mana is dying, The Mana fairies venture off the Mana holyland and into the normal world (?) to look for a poor idiot that will b forced to save the world.

Holy fucking shading and contrast issues batman!

I'm just dying to get on this right away. This game has issues, lots of them, but something i surprisingly didn't like was the spriting style.

The style is almost entirely without any sort of outlines, and the background style is very similar if not the same as the character style, EVERYTHING is fucking hard to see!

example:

Don't get me wrong that's a fucking amazingly well done work there, but u barely notice the vine thing at the bottom right, it fuses perfectly with the pumpkin in the back quite fucking well. and it's hard to tell the background from the enemies in many occasions. the thing is, this game is TOO detailed, there's way too much stuff on the screen to look at and nothing actually gets your focus. I'm not saying it's unplayable, far from that, but everything looks grainy and contrast is so damn low. on this aspect i actually think the original game is FAR better and cleaner, the sprites and backgrounds are more enjoyable for that reason.

Also, be aware that this game has day night cycles, and at night it's far far worse.

But yea, on many many occasions, i ended up preferring the simpler sprites of the first game over these. I think a good reference would b the Mana spirits:

Back when i was a spriter and helped people with sprites, a big NO was to go fucking crazy on the palette and use like 32+ colors on a sprite that weren't even noticeable for the viewer and actually killed the contrast. Another was to add way more details on the sprite that it should be possible to.

SoM1 --------------------------- SoM2

For the most part, i prefer the sprites from SoM, they're cleaner and easy to see, i especially like the Undine, Gnome, Lumina and Dryad from SoM1, the only spirit i like from SoM2 is shade, that rendition is clean and nice surprisingly, but that's probably cause shade in the original was fucked up for some reason. Luna seems equally nice on either game.

This game is a dick!

Ok so like, in SoM1, u had to get the 8 Mana spirits, activate the seal of 8 mana seeds (which u usually did about the same time u got the spirit if no very soon after), then in a plot device that to this day i still fail to understand, the seals beak, you go through 2 fairly big dungeons, fight the Mana beast, and your done.

However, this game, is an asshole.

• Adventure begins, u get fairy in your head, she makes u go get the 8 mana spirits not because they're useful, but for the sake of getting them. This take for fucking ever cause transportation in this game is god damned awful. on the way to do these, u have to do bullshit quests which just made me rage, those are usually related to the character from your party and even the characters that u didn't pick. You fucking have to advance stories that aren't even related to yours!
  
  
• So 10 hours later, when u got the 8 spirits and open the gate to the Mana holyland, EVERYONE AND THEIR GRAMMA flies into it! i am not fucking kidding, even beastmen grabbin unto fucking birds go in! everyone goes inside it, EXCEPT YOU! Why was everyone prepared for that except your party i'll never know, and you have a fucking fairy in your head for the damn holyland that could had let u know about that beforehand! So now, we're dragon hunting!
  
  
• Finally 1 hour later, u're into the holyland, we get there only to find out that... u know what? i dunno what was the point of that, u go get the sword of mana (which u never ever use in the entire game), and leave. Meanwhile in the normal world, the mana stones all broke, and released 8 God beasts. So guess what? u know the bullshit u endured getting the 8 spirits earlier in the game? that was nothing! The game makes a big deal about the Darkness Mana stone being missing, and then it's instantly hinted where it is and u find it right away.

Darkness god beast(s)

• So 5 hours later, after what felt like replaying the game all over but in hard mode, u find a secret palace in the jungle/forest, to proceed deeper into the palace, u have to light up 8 fucking orbs, and to light them up u have to complete random ass tasks that go from killing a boss, to opening a chest.
  
  
• 2 hours later, you'll get to proceed into a fucking puzzle castle, that if u're smart, u'll go check GameFAQs right away, fight tons of bosses and then ur done with that shit.
  
  
• If like me you weren't smart enough to check GameFAQs and wasted 2 more hours on something that didn't make sense, i think you're just about ready to go into the Mana holyland again to have your final fight, which should last like 30 mins or something, and then grats, u beat this damn game.

I got so pissed at this game for making me walk all the way back to so many places twice, the fire spirit/god beast jumps to mind. it's in a volcano at the end of the desert, the first time u have to go there, u have to walk trough the entire desert and then down into the volcano, fair enough, didn't have proper transportation at that time. But when i have to go back to fight the God Beast, i have Flammie, and it won't let me land anywhere near the volcano, i pretty much have to walk all the way all over again!

Having a flying dragon proves to be surprisingly useless in this game because you'll still be forced to walk everywhere! I'm sorry but i don't get the logic in that!

Bee gals are kinda cute

A fight system that'll make u quit!

By far, the worse thing about this game is the fights, specifically when there's any magic involved.

in the first game, u had to access your wheel menu, select a magic, and the game flow resumed except for the caster and the target of the magic. in this game, everything stops at all times. It's fucking rediculous, whenever anyone cast anything on anything, all the characters and enemies have to wait until that magic animation is done to start moving again, but it gets worse, if enemies chain magics, u will have to wait until all of them are done before u can even move again giving you no chance in hell to even heal, and that includes using healing items and B attacks.

Zach is my witness that i often yelled and screamed for like 2 mins at a time begging the game to let me have control of anything. it's unbelievable... After a short while, u quickly start dreading magic, it makes everything take for fucking ever, they way magic is handled in this game is completely failed.

mandatory giant enemy crab

Other aspects?

• Cons

Like magic, the storage system and the other menus are incredibly bad and slow, i just don't get why they didn't keep the system used in the original game, i don't get it at all. I mean, i was kinda playing both games at the same time. because initially as i said i played SoM2 with Zach, so i played it only when he was online, and i played SoM when he wasn't playing with me, and that only made it that much more painful to play SoM2.

All menus in this game are slow and suck balls. equipped items always took at least 3 mins cause the menus are so damn slow and needlessly complicated. For some bizarre reason, your characters equipment isn't shared, they all have their individual bags, and there's situations where my character got a weapon that only the cleric could use, but it was in his bag so the game made me take the item and put it on her bag so that she could access it! why??? my character couldn't use that item even if he wanted! was it so hard to put that item in the bag of the character it's meant to?

Equally retarded, all armor and weapons are character specific, and i do mean specific, 1 weapon or armor will work only with 1 character and that's it! good lord, the first game was so much better in that aspect.

Also didn't like how character where stuck using only 1 type of weapon.

• Pros

I did like some stuff about the game though, the fact that the character could evolve classes and gain more abilities, that was interesting and is similar to what u can do in ragnarok online, except in this game u notice much less of a difference.

The sprites, even though i bitched about them, are fucking amazing none the less. but the reason i bitched about them is because the style simply didn't feel appropriate for the game. But they're still amazingly details masterpieces.

If u exclude the magic, fight system was actually pretty fluid and nice, sure u could die really fast without noticing it sometimes, but u just need to pay more than in SoM. Also, i like how characters don't "die", their health drops to 0, and if u clear all enemies, they get up again with 1 health.

Verdict

I gotta say, after all the pain this game gave me, and how little the payoff feels, i'm awfully tempted to rate it as "Do not want!", but... i don't want to.

Maybe out of compassion for the original game, and because i looked forward to play this game for so long, i feel it's not an horrible game. it does things that u don't see often around (multiple path character evolution, multiple storyline, multiple character/party choices). it had potential to b awesome, but didn't.

It's not a horrible game, but it's not a good one either. Just gonna go with a "Sort of want" on this one.

Damn nature you is scary

Zombie Ants caused by a fungi. WTF.


http://www.livescience.com/animals/090812-ant-fungus.html

TF2 update: the best part

So ok, this update wasn't really about the hats only, although they did get a lot of people back to play the game, and farming...

In alot of people's opinion, myself included, the best part of this update is the new losing animations!




Zach found this video, but bloggin is a chore for him.

TF2 update: hats?

Actually the hats just seem to b a pretext to fix a LOT of bugs, the list is pretty huge, and somewhat interesting. You can check that here.

As for the new hats, here's all of them:


Haven't been covering this update as closely as the Sniper vs Spy one cause it's really not that important to me and i don't care too much.

See u all ingame!

I Want To Be A Part Of It

A somewhat younger Idel Von Teffar singing...something.

Like all my really good ideas, it's something I stole from somewhere else.

It's so bad, it's great.

So I recently picked up Dragonball Evolution for rent, because I knew better.

It seems that lately Hollywood has decided that making crappy movie and releasing them in theater is a wonderful idea (looking at you Street Fighter: Origin of Chun Li, King of Fighter, Sub-Mariner, Thor, and Avatar).

I really can't say much about this movie other than it's great for laughs.

In fact Chris from King of Fighter 98 said it best in broken Engrish:

L4D campaign opinion: Heaven can wait

So lately I've been emo, and so Zach brutally forced me to play a L4D custom campaign he heard good things about, "Heaven can wait". Now that site has a review of the campaign, so I'll just give my opinion on playing the campaign.


Zach and me just beat it like not 2 mins ago, and i gotta say, it was huge, so incredibly huge. the official ones by valve feel extremely small by comparison and maybe even halfassed.

We played for what feels like 2 hours, and was probably at least 1 hour and a half, But we never died or turtled, we were always on the move. The guy who made the map (or team, i dunno) sure saw the commentary that valve did about the way the level design is made for L4D, cause he really stuck with it and i quickly became the "path finder" for our lil group.


The paths themselves were great, varied a lot, was very original and sometimes hard to find. at one point we went back on our tracks because we took the alternate way to a street and ended up back in the start of the level. That only happened once though and it's cool to b able to pick which way to go on a level.

This map didn't follow valve's standard of "all weapons and equipment from the start". when u start, there's a dead guy on the ground with a handgun, and that's it, u start with dual pistols and u will like it! You find guns and other items usually in places where it would make sense finding them, and u don't find all tier1 or tier 2 weapons together every time. as example, there's a sort of city hall u go through, and there's army trucks and barricades in front of it and some dead soldiers around, u find a few assault rifles around them cause that's what the military uses, not auto shotguns or hunting rifles. u find a single shotgun at a police barricade near the beginning as well.


Ammo and health was very limited , i ran out of ammo way too often, and we all had to conserve health, which was fun because the default campaigns seem to try to take you out all at once, but then heals u up and refills ur ammo, in this campaign however, u get the feeling it's less dangerous on crescendos, but it's" strategy" is to wear u down over time. it's a different kind of difficulty.

Also, although it's a huge campaign and we did find a few glitches, by no means this campaign feels halfassed or lower quality than the official ones, the details the campaign is up to par with the official stuff, maybe even better.

Oh, and when u get to the river, don't jump into it like Zach did, that's stupid and u'll die.

If u own L4D, i HIGHLY recommend this campaign, it's a total "do want!".

A Unicorn Hunt

Cutie Pie Sorceress focuses a lot on a fantasy setting, where magic, mythical creatures, and supernatural phenomena are simply ordinary occurances to the people of Crust Town.

However, despite this, the world still has it's own myths and legends, and as far as most people are concerned things like Unicorns are still mythical creatures. Mr. Dark, the world's greatest sorcerer, is not one of them. One of his ambitions was to proove that the Unicorn does in fact exist, and now, thanks to what seemed like a sorcery-induced tragedy, he's effectively got the remainder of time to do so. Occasionally, he'll refrain from attempting to take over the world in favor of going on a Unicorn hunt, provided he feels he has a good enough lead to follow.

His loyal servant Fava is good for grunt work and companionship, but supposedly Unicorns only approach pure maidens(and vegetables don't con't, unfortunately). Although she continually stands in the way of his conquests of the world, Raspberry Jam is bound to him by the Sorcerer's Code, and therefore is obligated to assist him in furthering the knowledge of magic...Much to her chagrin.

Mr. Dark is solely responsible for the metaphorical term "Going on a Unicorn Hunt": A fool searching for something that isn't there.