Before I go, I'd like to direct your attention to the latest Awesome NES update.  Kirby's Adventure is the main entree, followed by a light Kiwi Kraze salad, a finely aged King's Quest V wine, and the excessively bitter King's Knight as an aperitif.  Be sure to stick around for the second course, which will be served later in the day.

Nevertheless, I'm going through some serious withdrawl right now.  I'm using the TVUPlayer in an attempt to calm those raging cravings, but despite a wide assortment of channels, it just isn't getting the job done.  I've got the Viacom networks, and I've got access to dozens of stations spanning the globe, but I've still got a Chowder-shaped hole in my heart that none of these channels can fill.  Damn this cursed unemployment!  If I only had a steady job, I would claim all that was mine and more!

Anyway.  There's some pretty exciting news for Playstation 3 owners.  Word on the street is that unsung game developer Level 5 is working on the third Dark Cloud game.  Good thing they waited five years... that's how long it took for most gamers to finish the last one!

This time, it's Alpha Gold, based on the typeset used in some CPS2 fighting games.  This one looks really good in Windows Movie Maker, and I imagine that it'd be right at home in MUGEN, too.  I'm going to keep cranking these out until the evaluation period for FontCreator expires, so if you've got any suggestions for video game fonts that haven't already been done by someone else, leave me a note in the forum.

There's also a new Awesome NES page packed with sports celebrities (Jimmy and Jordan and John, oh my!) and a YouTube video that's markedly different from anything I've done in the past.  Get it while you can, folks... knowing the megalomaniacal jerk who owns Viacom, it probably won't be there for long!

All right, onto video game news.  There's a report on Joystiq that Microsoft is planning to retire its old-fashioned Xbox Live gamer pics and replace them with avatars, which all bear an uncanny resemblence to the super-deformed duffers in Hot Shots Golf (well, they're always duffers whenever I play that game...). 

It's pretty obvious that Nintendo's own personalized characters motivated this change, but with the Xbox 360 fast approaching its third birthday and expectations for the Xbox Live service already cemented in the minds of gamers, will it even matter?  Some critics even feel that there will be a backlash from the more mature Xbox 360 user base, who will resent being represented with childish personas. 

It's all starting to feel like the New Coke debacle from 1984, when the Coca-Cola Company messed with success by changing the formula of its flagship product.  Although focus testing suggested that New Coke would be a smash hit, consumers were furious that the Coca-Cola Company turned its back on tradition, and rebelled by boycotting the new product while hording cases of the old one.  It's even worse in this case because there's no way to hold onto the gamer pics you've purchased once Microsoft purges them from Xbox Live. 

Just a word of advice, Microsoft... reconsider.  The Xbox 360 is in a precarious position already, sandwiched between the Wii and Playstation 3 in sales.  A sudden and extreme change to the universally loved Xbox Live service could upset that delicate balance and put the Xbox 360 dead last in the console wars.  You've already been given a lot of undeserved breaks from your fans, who have stuck by the Xbox 360 even when their systems have broken multiple times.  Don't press your luck.

Also, I've updated the YouTube page with a brief VIC-20 retrospective.  This was my first computer, so you can imagine how forgiving I am of its many shortcomings.  It's got a sixteen color display, an appallingly low resolution, less than 4K of memory (today's computers have 500,000 times that much!), and even the case is a throwback to the dark days of disco.  However, none of that matters to me, because it had some incredibly fun games, and it's where I learned the fundamentals of computer programming (kind of like this guy, except without the love and admiration of millions of nerds).

And while I'm on a VIC kick, I might as well share this with you:

Thanks to a pretty darned awesome shareware program called FontCreator, I was able to whip up this custom font, based on the VIC-20's typeset.  Sharp-eyed gamers will also recognize it from classics like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and River City Ransom.  The design is still pretty early- some letters aren't properly spaced- but I'm really impressed with how it looks so far.  You're free to download it, but if you like it, I'd really appreciate a PayPal donation sent to mneko13 (at) yahoo (dot) com.

[EDIT: I've reposted the font, fixing most of the errors that were present in the first build.  It should be the next best thing to typing on an actual VIC-20 now!]

Yep, I'm totally broke.  So what else is new?