Dear Livejournal,

Today I stepped on a nail. It felt good so I stepped on it again. God, my life sucks.

I've said it before and I will say it again: Titles are not my strong point. Especially when I know I'm just going to ramble about random stuff.

Today marks the three week mark until move out day. Excited? Yes. Packed? Partially. I started packing last week and have pretty much gotten to the point where's there's nothing left to pack save what I'm currently using (Xbox, computer, TV, that stuff). I suppose I could pack up my pots and pans and malarky, but eh...

I did wind up trading Pokemon (and a myriad of other games) in and picked up a copy of Puzzle League. It's good, but it definitely is NOT Tetris Attack. Ranked matches... well there really aren't ranked matches. The closest thing is the "Birthday Mode" which ranks you against people with the same birthday. I'm number one... and the only person on the list. Not many people play PPL online. Another thing that cheeses me off is the difficulty level; it's too easy. There's really slow, slow and about what would equate to normal in TA. Nothing in between. The music sucks too. It's just standard ambient/techno type music like you'd find in Lumines or any recent (non-DS) Tetris game. The music from Tetris Attack was awesome. Every single piece. I've got the Blargg music on my iPod for heaven's sake! That's how awesome it is. But otherwise, it is Tetris Attack and I can play online but they've screwed up the best puzzle game of all time.

I took a little Lord of the Rings quiz thingy on Facebook (which is definitely better than MySpace) and I'm a true LOTR fan. The questions were rediculously easy like "What race is Legolas?" Some information I suppose probably can't be gleaned from the movies. But at that even a casual reader of the books could get all the questions right. Either that or I'm a bigger nerd that I thought. Meh.

Well, like a said, general ramblings of random stuff.

Five steps for instant fun!

1. Go to your local Wal-Mart

2. Find one of the store phones

3. Dial #96

4. Wait a few moments

5. Have fun!

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The start of a new arc. Pretty pleased with most of the artwork here, except Bowser in that last panel. Missed yesterday's update, but oh well. It'll be coming Monday. Technically all I need to do is arrange it as I've got the artwork all drawn up. Now on to some artworks.

This was going to be the first panel Monday's comic, but when it came down laying everything out it just didn't fit. Probably the most risque thing I've ever drawn, but don't blame me. Blame Nintendo. They love their Peach pr0n, I 'spose.

I wanted to try drawing some chibis and something Guitar Hero. This is what came out. I like the bassist and the singer best.

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If you've played Strikers you'll no where I'm coming from.

I've been booting over to OS X lately seeing as I'll have to get used to it when I go to school. Safari, however, is pissing me off. The colors on here don't render properly. It's the same problem that plagued IE4-5. So the gradient at the top doesn't properly blend into the background. Instead it's a disgusting blocky chunk. At that the gradient isn't smooth like it's doing some sort of weird compression thing a la AOL. Apple, if you're software "just works" why does it have problems that were fixed over ten years ago? Bastards.

Anyways... I now have less than one month in my current place of residence. On September 18th I set sail (heh) for Florida and my future. It's about the only thing I think about and it's making time go incredibly slow. To say I'm looking forward to the move would be like saying Jesus is a good man. But, I do not wish to dwell on the topic and more.

Yesterday I rented Mario Strikers Charged (Wii). It's okay. Online play is always a plus, but they really dropped the ball on the music. Every piece of music is a two to five second loop. It really, really, really blows chunks. But the game itself is pretty fun and it controls well. So if you just mute the TV and turn on some tunes its not so bad. Too bad the Wii doesn't support this instrisnicly like a certain other console...

Alright, here's the links to all the latest comics:

Side Effects May Include...

Did You Really Think That'd Work?

New from Scholastic Books

I found a slight error in my previous statement about the Britons. Patrick Stewart. He's more awesome than most Americans.

The title has absolutely no bearing on the subject matter of this post, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Everytime they say "biscuit" instead of cookie I think to myself "Stupid, buscuiting Brits!". But I digress.

Actually, one thing I hate more than Brits is fruit flies. And, apparently, they hate me too. They've been trying to kill me lately. Over the last two weeks they've sent suicide bombers down my windpipe and up my esophagus. It's really pissing me off. I'll be happily watching Next Gen or something, there'll be a faint "bzzztt" followed by the nast coughing fits. Burn in Hell, fruit flies, burn in hell.

Finished with my Pokemon game I decided to have some fun. That's right, I hacked my save file. Actually, I'm thinking of selling the game off and picking up Puzzle League. As much as I still think it's a bastardization of Tetris Attack (which I've been playing like crazy as of late) the thought of ranked online matches is a sweet morsel I may not be able to pass up. Maybe I'll just stick with Tetris DS for now. Maybe I should stop buying games.

At least until Eternal Sonata comes out ;-)

I hated Pokemon when it was cool to own five million pounds of various Pokemon related merch. I always thought it was dumb, Japanesey, and over-hyped. Things that over merchandise always piss me off. But that is not the point of this article. I'm just giving my prior stance.

I picked up Diamond a few weeks ago because I needed something to play. Jeff has a copy of Pearl so I figured I could also play him when I move out to Florida. I will say that m experience was better than I expected it would be, but if you are a die hard RPG fan it will not satisfy your apetite.

Though it is classified as such, Pearl/Diamond is not much of an RPG. It shares many aspects that are common to the genre such as battles, leveling up, world exploration and such, but it lacks the one thing that makes Final Fantasy games the best RPGs ever: story. The game opens with you and your buddy suddenly waking up and deciding to become Pokemon trainers. A certai Dr. Rowan gives you your Pokedex and you are given your primary mission of filling it with all sorts of info on exoctic Pokemans. As you traverse the globe of Sinnoh you stop by local gyms to obtain badges which allow you to progress through the game.

Being a grinding game you'll be seeing a lot of the battle screen. Entering battle combines the two most common elements of RPGs: random encounters and visible ones (a la Mario RPG). The random encounters only happen in caves, water, and the "tall grass". Dotted along the rest of the map are various peoples who, without asking your permission before hand, decide to do battle when you enter their line of sight. These are all rather easy and trite and more of a nuasance than anything.

Almost all battles are one on one making leveling up more than one or two of your Pokemon difficult and lengthy at best. One thing that really pissed me off were the stupid messages. Every time anything happens there's a message announcing it. "It's still raining", "Biscuit used Metal Claw", "Fire Anus's health was drained", "It's not effective". This drags out an already slow paced game. One thing that I found amusing/annoying in particular were the "effectiveness" messages. It's tell you your attack wasn't effective and then your enemy would proceed to die.

One thing this game is definitely not selling itself on are visuals or audio. The map is a combination of 3D environment with 2D sprites. The battle effects are probably the best looking parts of this game but still don't compare the Final Fantasy VI (keep in mind that game is 13 years old and was made for the Super Nintendo). Music is meh. Hummable but not memorable. The sound effects suck ass. You can always tell when a Pokemon was from the original game because it's little battle cry would be a series of Gameboyesque beeps. It's really sad when the dev team is too lazy to rerecord the sounds for better hardware. It sounds really stupid and out of place.

So I've been pretty harsh up to now. I wasn't throughly impressed but I was mildly entertained. I don't know if I'll continue to play now that I've finished that game (there are more quests and, of course, grinding). About the only replay value this game offers is through net play. But you'll have to know some people with the game and do the appropriate friend code swapping. Overall I give the game a 5/10.

As you may recall a few months back I released unto the world my envisioning of an NES Guitar Hero commercial. If I recall correctly I complained about directing my younger brothers in the video. Well, I guess I can quit complaining... because now they're international movie stars!

This is taken from the pages of Ngamer Magazine (Brazil Edition) and was kindly sent in by YouTuber, muzinfa (thanks, bro). It's quite awesome that somebody was tickled enough to put it in their publication but the fact that it also crossed the language barrier is doubley sweet.

I'm not dead, I swear. Okay, it's only been a few days. I did make a comic for Monday, though I hate it. Art's not bad, but... ugh.

However, this is not the reason I am posting. Nay! I've completed what is probably my best work since my Maya picture. Interestingly enough it started out as a practice sketch, working on form and stuff. A few embellishments later it's a pretty cool sketch. Many hours, a few hair and grass tutorials later and it's this:

One thing I'll say about it is I love the colors. It's bright and cheerful. I'm really happy with it over all.

I may post a comic later today, but maybe I won't. Last night I got everything drawn, scanned, colored, etc. and when it came to writing down the dialog I realized the joke was not funny. So, I will give you guys the artwork I drew instead because I still like that. Well, I like how I drew Wedge, anyways.

I didn't take out the text bubbles so you, my readers, can use your wild imaginations and pretend there is writing in them and that it is funny.

Something that was supposed to make the original cut of the design but somewhere along the way I forgot. So, here it is. The new headers I think give the site a more full-bodied experience and the word "Blog" there tells you exactly what you're looking at... you know, in case you're dumb or something.

Comic

I continue my little comic rampage with this installment. I'm not thrilled with the artwork but I love the writing so it balances out in the end. A little bit of TMI here, but I got this idea whilst showering. Goes to show you, ideas will come at just about anytime.

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Stay tuned next week when Tom Nook is hanged for his unforgivable crimes.