Redness

So very scary.

If You Stab a Piece of Wood, It Turns Into This....

Quite a while ago I got a whittling tool, just a handle with a couple replaceable blades on it, and a bunch of small blocks of basswood. I carved up a few of them, one wound up looking like a piece of wood that had some corners hacked off (not shown), one became the little black and red twisted tower thing, and the other became a noble beaver.

Why do bad video games happen to good people?

A conversation about old NES games got me nostalgic enough to fire up my trusty emulator, NESticle. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying old classics like Kirby's Adventure or Double Dragon II, I thought "now that I'm older and wiser, I wonder if Dragon's Lair is any easier?"

It's still impossible. I tried downloading windows media encoder so I could capture video of me playing the ROM, I thought it would be funny to show how many things can kill you on the very first screen, but my review would be pretty damn short since I can only make it about 4 SCREEN LENGTHS into this platform game...plus I couldn't get it to work.

The main problem was that Dragon's Lair in the arcade was popular because it had amazing animation by guru Don Bluth (Secret of NIMH, American Tail, Land Before Time). That fails miserably on an 8-bit system. On games like Mario, you can make him duck in one frame, almost as soon as you hit the button. In Dragon's Lair, the hero Dirk takes 5 or 6 frames to slowly get on his knees once you hit down. The same problem occurs for attacking, jumping, and even turning around, meaning that even though the enemies are slow as shit, you just CANNOT respond in time to do anything unless you memorize it.

Luckily for me, there is already a pretty funny youtube video of some guy bitching about this game.

Illustration Friday - Rescue

Here's a rescue maneuver that anyone living with toddlers should know how to perform. Even if you know it was flushed before the keys went in, there's still psychological damage from having to reach wrist deep into that toilet. Personally, I've fished for toothbrushes more often than keys though.
And now thanks to my genius, if you were scanning Illustration Friday you got to enjoy two thumbnails of this pic since I posted just the link to the picture the first time, and there's no undoing it - my shame will be forever recorded in the I.F. archives.

Rock On, Arctic Monkeys!

I knew I couldn't miss Monday Artday's word of the week "Monkey", so I whipped up this fellow inspired by the band "Arctic Monkeys", who I've been listening to a lot lately. Looking at it now it seems I've forgotten his guitar strap, so if you were hoping for an accurate depiction of a monkey playing bass I hope you're not too disappointed. But I'm happy with the furry little rocker, I guess I'm in a good mood since I didn't have to inhale any acidic gasses at work today. And finally, a list of some of my favorite monkeys of all time:

#5 - Grape Ape

#4 - Gleek or Glook or something, the one from Superfriends

#3  - Curious George

#2 - The one I saw at a Russian circus riding a horse and throwing a ball, while wearing a cute and practical monkey diaper

#1 - Mr. Teeny

Illustration Friday - Expired

Haven't done the old draw n' scan in a while, but here's a new one for Illustration Friday, drawn in pen with a tiny bit of color from Photoshop. What I learned while doing this one is:
1) Should practice drawing noses
2) Should practice drawing hair
3) While cross-hatching adds volume to milk jug shapes, it may make a person look like Two-Face.

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - Star Wars CCG

 Finally we know what a Womp Rat looks like!

 Decipher's Star Wars CCG expanded to the point where every character, ship, creature, location, object, or spoken word in the original trilogy was on a card somewhere. The Phantom Menace expansion came out and had everyone enjoying Darth Maul and Qui-Gon, but then apparantly Decipher could or would not continue their liscencing agreement and this great game abruptly died.

THE GAME: One person plays a light side deck, the other plays a dark side deck and you switch after each game. Decks are exactly 60 cards, because the goal is to totally deplete the other guys deck (drain all their Force in Star Wars talk). The most enjoyable way to do this is of course to slaughter the other guy in a battle, but you can also slowly drain a deck just by having characters on sites where your opponent doesn't. Also adding to the challenge is whenever you draw cards or use disposable interrupts, you are actually also depleting your deck and getting closer to losing if you're not careful.

CONS: It's the most complex CCG I've reviewed by far. Cards tend to contain paragraphs worth of effects instead of simple stuff like "add +1 to some skill". It takes a while to figure out the fighting system, where you are firing weapons, comparing power, "drawing destiny" if you're allowed to, and then deciding which characters have to die and if any additional Force needs to be lost. The game is loaded with complicated rare interrupts and effects which are only useful under very specific conditions, such as "if Han and Chewie are in a battle together". There's even the game-within-the-game of Sabbacc; I don't even recall when or if it's mentioned in the movies, but if someone plays a Sabbacc card you'd better break out the rulebook and figure out what the hell is going on.

Interrupts with 2 or 3 very different uses, characters with lots of conditional powers, and most of all Sabbacc make it a little complicated to play 

EPIC EVENTS: Depending on your point of view, Epic Events could fall under either "why it's fun" or "cons". It's cool that you can blow up the Death Star, blow up a planet with the Death Star, blow up the Endor shield generator, or train Luke on Dagobah like in the movies. However it takes a lot of cards and a hell of a lot of planning and luck to actually accomplish them. Doing so normally gives you some good bonuses, but it's much easier to just play huge characters and ships and beat the crap out of the other guy.

WHY IT'S FUN: Star Wars + CCG = nerd heaven. It's fun when you finally figure out how to string together combos of all the crazy effects rather than just deploying all the main characters you can get your hands on. It's challenging to make a balanced deck that can attack and defend both the land and outer space locations. It's fun to pull out some alien that was on-screen in the movie for 1/8 of a second who winds up being as good as a Jedi in the CCG. It's even fun to try Epic Events and fail horribly.

MEMORABLE GAMEPLAY: Luke's Aunt and Uncle successfully kill Vader for invading their moisture farm. Vader misses a generic Rebel Soldier with his lightsaber twice. Sending Leia to the Rancor. All this and more, in the (sadly defunct) Star Wars CCG!!!

WHAT THE HELL? While it's intended to have Yoda train the Dagobah expansion Luke, you could technically have Luke's uncle train a Jawa in the Jedi arts.

Monday Artday - Invisible

The word challenge was "invisible" - glass is sometimes invisible to some unfortunate birds. One time one slammed the huge window door in our basement and stood out there totally stunned while my dogs went nuts trying to claw their way outside to get it. So far I've experienced 3 bird on window collisions in my day.

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - DOOMTOWN

THE GAME: Doomtown is the CCG based on the “Deadlands” world, which is full of cowboys and grotesque abominations in about equal numbers. You have a bunch of cowboys/freaks. The other guy has a bunch of cowboys/freaks. While you can win in the obvious way of wiping out the other guy’s entire crew, you can actually win without ever starting a fight as long as you earn more control points than the other guy has influence. All the characters are moving around Doomtown which you create with location cards, so you have to outmaneuver your opponent.

THE CARDS: They contain some of the most unique game lingo of any CCG, for example: Pay 2 Ghost Rock and boot a dude at a strike to call out a posse.

MEMORABLE GAMEPLAY: The Grim Reaper gets suited up with a New Hat and Blue Jeans, and rides off to a shootout on his Penny Farthing.

WHY IT’S FUN: The card art is great! Most items, characters, and events have funny effects and flavor text. Battles between characters are resolved by drawing poker hands, with other cards letting you draw more than 5 or discard more to make monster hands like 5 aces or the ultimate “Dead Man’s Hand”. But if it’s not a legal poker hand, your opponent might get the last laugh by playing a Cheatin’ card and turning the tables on you!