| March 24, 2002... I
Like the Sprite in You |
A couple of weeks ago, another web site editor expressed
his disgust with sprite comics, the strips published on the
Internet that use altered artwork from video games rather than
original drawings and characters. He's got a right to
his opinion, but if you regularly visit this site it's pretty
clear that I don't share it.
What really bothered me about his editorial was his comment
that sprite comics demonstrate a lack of creativity on the
part of their creators. That's not always true... some
of the Flash films and comics I've seen were clever satires
and tributes to the games that supplied the artwork. In
fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that taking the characters
directly from the games helped the authors deliver their
messages more effectively than hand-drawn characters
would.
There's also the issue of time. I don't know about
the rest of you, but it takes me hours to pencil, ink, shade,
letter, scan, and apply finishing touches to a comic.
I'm willing to take that time if the comic stars my own
characters or if I'm drawing a strip as a favor for somebody
else, but if I just want to point out Sakura's silly attire in
the Street Fighter series, hell yeah I'm going to take the
characters and backgrounds directly from those games!
It's just not worth spending an obscene amount of time drawing
my own loose interpretations of the characters that my readers
may not even recognize.
That's why I personally have no problem with sprite
comics. Sure, most of them are pretty lame, but the best
ones can take situations and characters from popular video
games and not only parody them extremely well, but perfectly
illustrate how the games would have looked if Mario got sick
of rescuing the princess or someone offered Sindel from Mortal
Kombat 3 a Tic-Tac after enduring her scream fatality.
I just wanted to get that off my chest. Anyway, since
we're talking about comics, I just thought I'd mention that
Byron, the official Gameroom Blitz mascot, is going to be one
of the contestants in a celebrity edition of a comic called
Eleven Must Die. Don't get too excited, though... he
won't actually be killed. Instead, each of the comic's
guest stars will be given a crystal ball that keeps them
anchored in another world... if the ball breaks, they're
thrown back to their own realities. What's great about
this is that nobody knows for sure who will be the last
character standing. Although Eleven's creator and the
guest artists can influence the story, only a handful of
volunteers will be able to write characters out of the
storyline. Each of the volunteers will be selected
randomly, and the person chosen will in turn be able to remove
one of the guest stars.
Yeah, we've seen this premise in a lot of television shows,
but it's an innovative idea for a comic, especially a furry
comic that reads like a tounge-in-cheek Dungeons and
Dragons. It's going to be tough for Eleven Must Die
creator Chris Farrington to make characters from twelve
entirely different artists interact convincingly, but judging
from the quality of the last two chapters of Eleven, he's got
a pretty good shot at it.
| March 1, 2002... Sing a
Song of Shenmue |
Yikes... it's been a month since I last updated this
site! Looks like I'll have to make up for a lot of lost
time. Let's see, I'll add a Virtua Fighter 4 review
here, some guest reviews over there, a new addition to
Fighter's Misery here, and... there, that ought to do the
trick!
If I'm gone for another month or more after this, I've got
a pretty good reason for it. I'm working on upgrading my
computer from a wimpy Pentium 166 to something at or near the
gigahertz range. Soon, even the most inefficent emulator
won't be able to stop (or more accurately, slow to a crawl) my
newly empowered PC. I'll even be able to- dare I say
it?- step into the 90's with MAME!
I don't know if I'll be upgrading to Windows XP,
though. As tempting as it is to help phase out that
obnoxious paperclip (even Microsoft's turned on that thing!),
I'm not really fond of the operating system's new, overly
glossy look. Bill Gates has taken a lot of ideas from
Apple in the past, but I don't think he's ever been as
transparent about it as he has with XP. Plus, it's even
more resource hungry than previous versions of Windows, and I
can't justify wasting all that power if there aren't any
appreciable benefits from doing it. Of course, I said
pretty much the same thing about Windows 95 five years ago,
and I eventually fell in line just like everyone else. I
suppose it's only a matter of time before I upgrade to the new
operating system... but you can be sure that it'll be a long,
long time. :)
Speaking of eventualities, I just bought the original
Shenmue for about ten bucks, since every Dreamcast player
seems to be required by law to pick up a copy. I'm not
as excited about the game as everyone else was... it's got a
lot of problems that you weren't hearing about in the reviews,
like awful control and inconsistent graphics. Ryo's got
all the precision and grace of a rusty farm tractor thanks to
your typical Resident Evil/Tomb Raider style control scheme,
and to make matters worse, the analog stick positions the
camera rather than the character. Shenmue's the kind of
game that doesn't require perfect control, but it would have
made selecting between two adjacent objects (the toy capsules
in many of the towns come to mind) a lot easier. Getting
to my next complaint, the graphics are incredible. Wait,
I mean mediocre. Hold on a sec, I meant excellent.
No, no, they stink. It's really hard to decide because
some characters, and even some parts OF the characters, look a
lot nicer than others. One of the biggest problems is
that Yu Suzuki tried to drape photorealistic textures over low
polygon builds, rather than balancing out the two as was the
case in, say, Soul Calibur or Crazy Taxi. There's a lot
of detail on the faces of each character- they look more
genuinely Japanese than the saucer-eyed stars of most video
games- but their arms have rather obvious edges and some of
the textures on their clothes are hideously pixellated when
you get near them. There's just no balance
artistically. Maybe AM2 should have considered
sacrificing some of the wrinkles on the old ladies' foreheads
and just improved their overall appearance.
Shenmue does have some merit, though, and I'm not just
talking about being able to play Space Harrier and Hang-On in
the local arcade. First of all, it's set in the 80's,
and who could complain about that? Secondly, it's a nice
peek at the rural side of Japan, which often gets neglected by
the media. Shenmue demonstrates that there's more to the
land of the rising sun than towering skyscrapers.
Finally, it's hard to find a game with this much attention to
detail... outside of Metal Gear Solid 2, of course. It's
fun to just buy stuff even if it has little to no bearing on
your quest for revenge.
Ah, yes... revenge. I could use some on that
Evil_Shito guy, whoever he is. In case you don't know
who I'm talking about, check out my message board.
Judging from his attacks on Pat Reynolds and myself, it's safe
to assume that he's an old acquaintance of ours from our days
in fandom (personally, I think he's just cranky because our
newsletters kicked the living, uh, Shito out of his). I
wonder if this person will have the grapes to reveal his true
identity. Even if he doesn't, it shouldn't be too hard
to find out who he is now that the forum displays IP
addresses. Now, choosing a suitably cruel and unusual
punishment for Evil_Shito after he's caught, now THAT'S the
tough part.
| February 2002... Dude,
Where's My Updates? |
Not sure what happened to this month. Evidently I was
in a coma, or visited Tibet, or just didn't feel like
updating.
| January 25, 2002... No
Whammies, No Whammies,
STOP! |
Here's some exciting news for classic gaming fans...
there's a BASIC compiler available that will allow you to
design your own games for the Atari 5200. So far, it's
kind of limited... I can't imagine being able to write more
than simple text adventures and Snake games with it.
However, when the creator improves it and adds more graphics
and sound commands, I'll start work on a simplified 5200
version of the game show Press Your Luck. It seemed like
a perfect match to me... everyone who's familiar with the
system hates the 5200 joysticks, but the beauty of a video
game adaptation of Press Your Luck is that you won't need to
use them. You simply press a button to stop the marker
as it flits around the screen, preferably on a space without a
Whammy in it. I'm planning two modes for the game, with
one and two player options for both. The first, Classic,
is most closely based on the game show... the two contestants
each get five turns, and can choose to pass play to their
opponent if they think their luck has run out. The
second, Showdown, allows players to compete simultaneously by
giving them both control of the marker. This mode is
timed for two minutes, forcing both players to take risks if
they want to take the lead.
You'll find updates about Project "Jess Your Luck" here on
The Gameroom Blitz, so keep comin' back!
| January 19, 2002... The
Orgy of Destruction! |
OK, so the last banner was a little embarrassing.
Here's one that oughta pump some testosterone back into this
site's veins. Those pictures, by the way, were from Game
Hits' second annual Orgy of Destruction, where a bunch of
frustrated gamers smash broken systems, games, and controllers
into bite-sized chunks with the aid of hammers, baseball bats
(aluminum, please!), cars, and even our bare hands if
necessary. The games get in their licks, too...
occasionally, tiny shards of crappy CDs and monochrome Game
Boys will lodge themselves into the hands of their
assailants. I was nicked by a piece of plastic the first
year and Game Hits owner Shawn Sodman took some shrapnel the
next. Neither of us were seriously or even noticably
injured, though, so it's more than likely that we'll be back
for another Orgy of Destruction sometime in 2002.
Hopefully, I'll give the next one full coverage in The
Gameroom Blitz.
| January 17,
2002... Random Thoughts (Arcades,
Kabul!, and outside
projects) |
One of these days I'm gonna post an update on the same day
I write it. Oh well...
First, a correction. Remember the story I printed
about that local arcade being closed down by pressure from the
town's council? Well, everything about it was true,
except for the part where I said the arcade owners were going
to sue Lakeview for loss of revenue. Brian Deuel
recently told me that he decided to drop the lawsuit because
he didn't want to deal with the paperwork and the lawyers and
the court fees and all that fun stuff associated with taking
legal action. Personally, I wish he would have went
through with it, just to make the lives of the former town
council members even more miserable, but I can understand why
he's not pushing the issue.
So hey, I guess my work was mentioned in an issue of
Entertainment Weekly. Unfortunately, the reference to
Kabul! in their review of Atari Age was very brief, but maybe,
just maybe, I'll be able to pull in a few dozen more readers
from it. By the way, the writer of the column gave Atari
Age a well deserved A, so I suppose the editors of
Entertainment Weekly do know a good thing when they see it...
that is, when they bother to open their eyes.
Well, before I go, I should let you know that due to
college and outside projects, I'm not going to update The
Gameroom Blitz very much. What outside projects?
Well, I'm planning on writing character descriptions for the
English translation of Card Fighters' Clash 2. The game
won't officially be released in the United States, but thanks
to the hard work of dedicated Neo-Geo Pocket fans, you can
find the English version of the game on the Internet and even
play it on an actual system with a backup device. I've
always wanted to be part of a project like this, and thanks to
the CFC2 translation team (consisting of Judge, Comic-Kaze,
Flavor, and others), I'm gonna get that chance.
I'd also like to spend more time drawing and contributing
to Zoo Logic. I've ignored the comic long enough, and
considering some of the great articles he's contributed to my
fanzines and this web site, I owe it to Josh to update it more
than once every few months. Plus, to be perfectly
honest, I need the practice. The less time I spend with
a pencil and paper, the more my artwork's going to
suffer. I was thinking of adding an art section to this
site a couple of years ago, and it could still happen if I
become confident enough about my artistic talent.
| January 7, 2002... GRB
at the Movies (also, Suikoden and Card Fighter's
Clash) |
Me thinks it's time for another update. I really
don't have any excuse not to write one... the holidays are
over, my birthday's over, and I've got a few days left before
classes begin again. It's the perfect time to start
writing again... and I have a lot to write about!
Let's get some of the off-topic stuff out of the way
first. I went with a friend to see Lord of the Rings...
I'm not really a big fan of movies but I thought my friend
would enjoy it, having done little else but play Final Fantasy
X for the past week. Maybe it's because both films were
by the same company or because they were set in a fantasy
version of the United Kingdom, but Rings reminded me a lot of
Harry Potter. They both went overboard with the special
effects, and each film was a little on the long side... but
they had great casts playing some very likable characters
straight out of the books that inspired them. I always
thought Liv Tyler was just a hack actress riding on her
father's coattails (as well as her own shapely figure), but
her performance in Lord of the Rings was great. It was
also nice to see Elijah Wood get a starring role in a film
like this... he deserves it after proving to the world just
how lousy an actor Macauley Calkin really was in The Bad
Seed.
We also caught a couple of trailers in the theatre.
Spiderman looks good enough, I suppose... if the film is
anything like the sneak peek I saw, it's going to leave
roughly half the audience stumbling out of the theatres with
sensory overload. I don't know about the casting,
though... wasn't Toby McGuire the same guy who played the
beagle in Warner Bros.' Cats and Dogs? Oh well, I guess
he needs the work, and so does Sam Raimi now that Hercules and
Xena have both been cancelled. As for Austin Powers 3,
the preview didn't really tell you much about the film, but
I'm sure it'll be even more over the top than the second
one. Plus, it'll give midgets everywhere one last chance
to cash in on their height before the technology in Lord of
the Rings renders them obsolete and legitimate actors get all
the small fry roles. I've got three words for Verne
Troyer... Swiss bank account.
All right, it's time for a little video game action.
I spent most of the holiday season playing Suikoden, a smartly
designed role-playing game that lets you establish a
headquarters, then fill it with recruits. The ones you
take with you act as full-fledged party members, and the rest
stay behind as non-player characters, adding options and
features to the game. It's one of the most rewarding
RPGs I've ever played, since there are over a hundred
characters to find, and each one contributes to the game in
their own way. The best part is that I've been assured
by friends that the sequel is much better... and I've read on
GameFAQs that yet another sequel to Suikoden is being
developed for the Playstation 2. I'll take 'em
all. Heck, I'd even try Suikoden Card Stories for the
Game Boy Advance if there was a version available in
English!
Hey, speaking of card games, I thought you guys might want
to know about this... there's a translation of Cardfighter's
Clash 2 (the Neo-Geo Pocket game starring hundreds of Capcom
and SNK characters) available on the Internet now. It's
not finished, but what's there makes it playable, and I'm
surprised at how faithful the translation is to the English
text in the first game... even the font is the same. As
for the game itself, Cardfighter's Clash 2 doesn't seem quite
as good as the first one because you can't actually walk
around in each of the locations. Also, the artwork on
most of the cards has changed, and while it's still well done,
the angrier characters aren't as endearing as the ones in the
first Clash. You do get a lot more cards, though...
nearly everyone who wasn't represented in the original game is
in Clash 2. You'll find Rock Howard, Bao, Tizoc, the
stars of Project: Justice, and even characters from Dino
Crisis and Onimusha! Hmm... now that I have these new
graphics, it might just be time to retire the Bomberman
picture I've been using to represent all of my
contributors.
While I'm here, I might as well add another pair of reviews
from John Roche and more links to my favorite sites. As
long as I'm changing the links page, I should remove the plug
for IGN.com, because I don't really recommend the site
anymore. It's a little strange that the advertisements
have only gotten worse since they started that moronic
subscription service... the only thing that really impresses
about the site these days is that they've found places for ads
I would never have considered. They're about three steps
away from beaming commercials directly into the minds of
readers. The only thing stopping them is that the
technology is, at least according to Futurama, a thousand
years away, and there's no way Imagine Games will be around
long enough to take advantage of it. Judging from the
desperate pleas for subscriptions on IGN.com, they'll be lucky
to make it to the next episode of Dick Clark's New Year's
Rockin'
Eve.