some animatings

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So Flipnote Studio was just released on the DSi for download, and I like animating so I played around with it a bit:

Of course I go and find a bunch more options that would have helped out more after finishing the thing (a guide layer, particularly), but hey, it’s a fun little program, good for practice. I have to go upload all the pictures from Comic Con somewhere and I’ll make another post soon. Got some new test animation for World 3 that I’ll post after that, heh.

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Okami . . .

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So this isn’t technically a review, yet. I just finished Okami for the Wii.

Guys, I have never had a game make me feel this absolutely emotionally involved before.

I cried. The friggin game made me cry, it was that beautiful.

I don’t even know how I am going to go about writing this review, it will come soon. Tune in for it guys because I want this review to reflect exactly how I feel about this game.

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My Comic Con

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Hey guys, Brad will be doing a full wrap up of comic con later (complete with picturez ZOMG!!!) but here is something to hold you over. I actually wrote this on the plane ride home. This is me thinking y’all care what I think again 😉

As most of you know, I had the pleasure of attending Comic Con 2009 with Brad this year. My apologies for breaking off from my regular gaming reviews, but I hope that some of you would be interested in hearing a little about the experience of Comic Con.

It’s crowded, horribly crowded, and I’m sure the excessive amount of Twilight fans that decided to attend this year didn’t help. You go through over 5000 booths and sometimes you end up lodged inbetween a booth you don’t want to see and another booth you really don’t want to be caught dead even glancing at.

However, the whole experience gave me a strange sort of glimmer of hope. I saw appreciation everywhere, even in those crazy cosplayers, there was just utter appreciation. I’ve never seen any kind of celebrity act as graciously as the ones from the “interwebz”, and there are quite a few big ones. I’m sure there are a few bad seeds every now and then, but I didn’t meet one in my whole experience.

As a 24 year old sometimes it can be a bit disturbing to see what can pass off as art or as animation nowadays. When you are raised on the good ol’ 80s cartoons of yesteryear you tend to cringe at the popularity of things like SpongeBob Squarepants and  . . . well . . . every single CGIed version of a cartoon that hangs around on TV nowadays. You don’t see the same talent and love for smoothness and lines or even for general beauty. It’s slap it on a lunchbox and sell it as soon as possible.

I was sorely disappointed to go to a panel and hear about how they’d released their game on everything except for maybe a box of wheaties and they reveled in it. REVELED in being total sellouts (I’m looking at YOU EpicGames). Even more disturbing were the hordes that worshipped that kind of behavior but I won’t get into that . . .

On the OTHER side of Comic Con I managed to see a completely different side to all of it.

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Travelling…

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Delayed flight = missing all subsequent flights = travelling all day = teh suck

🙁

They need to update the SkyMall magazine, some of the crazy scams in there are already outdated by crazier, more futuristic sounding scams!

I just realized that there’s an ad on the back of the magazine… Isn’t the whole thing a magazine full of ads…?

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Getting married and all that

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Hey everyone, I know I haven’t been updating lately, even after promising that I was going to kick start updates (which did last for a little while there, especially with E3 providing some nice topics of conversation for anyone with their eyes on the gaming industry), but, well, Fairly and I have been crazy busy lately, as we’re getting married on July 11th (and you can check out the engagement post from some time back here). Yep, that’s this Saturday! Craziness! Just wanted to give one last blog post as a single dude, since there will probably be yet another period of broadcast silence after this post.

First off, there was a bit of progress made on World 3 that I announced earlier. I haven’t really had a chance to work on World 3 much since then, but development on World 3 will begin officially after Fairly and I get back from ComicCon at the end of this month. Hopefully there will be a whole bunch more updates once that starts, as I really want to keep everyone updated on World 3’s progress along the way, get feedback on the progression, and hopefully try to involve everyone out there in the development in some sort of way. Should be fun.

Click below to check out the rest of the post. Got a pic of the Newgrounds Tank Trophy in there!

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A call to arms!

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Addicting games is having a contest, and Fancy Pants Man is up for the most Courageous Stick Figure Stunt award! And if you don’t believe that traveling to the depths of a cave to wake up the sleeping Angry Penguin isn’t the most courageous stunt that you can think of (besides maybe getting his tasty ice cream cone back from the Angry Rabbit), what you doing on my internets??

picture-2

Being Courageous, Serious Business!

Woot an official badge thing!

Click the badge, click VOTE 😀

Vote and then check out the action on Nickalodeon on June 27th, 5pm (PST)!

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Nintendo R&D

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This hit me during Shigeru Miyamoto (you know, Mario’s dad)’s roundtable that just ended, and I figured this needed a separate post, so be sure to still check out the next post for the rest of my super important opinions, heh.

Here’s the quote from IGN:

Q: Microsoft and Sony showed their motion controls. I would like to hear Mr. Miyamoto’s feedback.

A: Miyamoto says for Nintendo the strategy is to do development and get the hardware ready and have software ready and then make the announcements. Until this new technology reaches that level, it’s really impossible to make any judgement on it. “Of course, we’re working at R&D at Nintendo. The things that we’ve seen here are things we’ve seen before,” he says. He is in favor of motion controls and anything that gets players moving.

Think about that one for a moment. What would happen if Nintendo came out and showed off all of the new hardware that they have in R&D right now that’s just as unfinished as Microsoft’s and Sony’s motion controllers? They would be showing off TONS of stuff that might never make it to the market.

Thing is, Microsoft and Sony KNOW that they need to have motion controls hit the market, even though they’re still working with very early prototypes right now. Because of Nintendo and the Wii. Hmmm…

Btw, new Wii Zelda just confirmed as continuing the Twilight Princess art style (and maybe being WM+ exclusive) 😀 Sadly, that’s about all the new info that’s out there right now…

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Nintendo’s Conference

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Welp, another press conference and you know what that means: everyone start predicting what Nintendo will be showing next E3!

Okay, not really. But yeah, the conference was pretty boring. No Pikmin (yet?), no Zelda (except for Spirit Tracks, which does look hella fun), Wii Fit 2, Nintendo Heart Rate Monitor or something like that, and yay expanded audiences.

Here’s the thing, though, as my cousin pointed out, Nintendo doesn’t really show much in the way of 3rd party software at E3, so a ton of 3rd party stuff was announced, bragged about, and otherwise showed off yesterday or pretty recently. I was feeling pretty bummed after the conference, until I looked at the Wii videos section on IGN. WOW.

I’m going to have to break this post up cause this might get long…
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The Future of Gaming!

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Behold:

Even better:

In all seriousness, though, to actually compare this ‘Natal’ this to Wii Motion Plus, well, when I play games like Gears of War and Halo, I’m always thinking how much better they would be with Wii pointer controls, or how much better GTA4 minigames would be with Wii controls.

Could this thing even control an FPS or a precise minigame?

So I guess that right now I’m playing 360 pre-natal? Yeck.

And if anyone actually cares to see how it really looks (but what’s the fun in that?):

Moar GIFs! Full body waggle!
spazzle

Okay okay, I promise that I’ll rag on Nintendo tomorrow if they unveil stupid things also. That would make me unbiased, right?

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Some Cutie Pants

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Releasing info before E3 seems like the cool thing to do, so here’s an early version of Cutie Pants’s run cycle so I can get some feedback on it and all that.

Hopeful there will be more test videos like this so you guys can see the progression of the animations.

Of course, watch it on YouTube.com itself for a much higher quality version…

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E3 predictions ’09

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Would be amazing if I could say that I’ll be at E3 this year showing off World 3 or something cool like that, but alas, I’m just on the consumer side of the news barrage once again.

Anyways, looks like most of the 3rd party info has been spilling out over the last few days, especially for 3rd party Wii games, since no news is going to stand a chance amidst whatever Nintendo finally decides to unveil.

Any guesses on what we’ll be seeing? Sounds like a new Zelda and / or Mario title is almost a given, same with more info on Wii Sports Resort, and something called Wii Fit Plus (maybe it’ll come with sunlight and fresh air this time around? lawlz I kid I kid).

As for the less whispered about stuff, I’m still calling (begging for?) a new Star Fox game this year. Would be nice if we saw whatever Retro Studios was working on, maybe even see a New(er) Super Mario Bros. on DS? Pikmin 3? Though that one’s probably most likely…

Either way, looks like we’ll be getting a much better ‘real gamer’ focused E3 from Nintendo this year. At least we better, after how badly Nintendo messed up last year. Heck, they even issued an official apology for their show!

Showing off FPA at E3… *daydreams*

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Long Awaited Twilight Princess Review

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or maybe I flatter myself thinking that everyone has been squirming in their seats for this review . . . 

yeah flatter, definitely flatter. 

So I promised a level by level review, but after spending a while writing that I realized it would be impossible to do that without ruining the game. I hate to break promises but I hate spoilers even more. So this will be a rather long review because there is so much in the game  and it’s Zelda, so my heart has always belonged to this game. 

😉

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Game Mechanics

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[quick edit, looks like the subscribe to posts page is working now, the plugin got updated, I think all new peoples are going to be automatically subscribed, if anyone has a problem with that, let me know, everyone else, click the new page tab at the top right there, you can select which categories you want notifications for]

Yo yo yo, just thought I’d do a quick post (okay, well, not as quick as that Sonic one, but also far less depressing!).

Getting back into the swing of working on FPA again, I’ve begun thinking about game mechanics, and analyzing games that I’m playing even more so than usual.

So I’d like to know, what’s your favorite game mechanics? This post got quite a bit longer than I thought it would, so click below for my answer, and some musings on saving in games and game difficulty…

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