The fourth

Happy Fourth of July everybody!  Have a hot dog and blow off some fireworks, or something.

Updates, right?!

Man I hate updating the CMS.  Not that it's difficult -- actually, it's rather simple -- but it rattles my nerves everytime.  I just expect the update to fail midway and then needing to go to a backup copy and restore everything.

This update is rad though as it resolved that bug that was bothering me.  Yea for bug fixes!  Kudos to the development team at Bolt!

The cutting room floor

When I wrote that Beastie Boys feature a few weeks back, I originally wanted to use an animated gif for the music video "An Open Letter to NYC."  Instead, I opted to create a still image that shows multiple scenes of said music video.  What you see above is the animated gif I was gonna use.  I never really created an animated gif before, but it was a fun learning process.  So fun in fact that once I started, I couldn’t stop.  This blog post will be used to showcase them all.

Also, there seems to be a void of animated gifs of the Beastie Boys (or poor quality ones with watermarks), so I’m doing my part to fill in that gap.  You’re welcome, internet.  See the rest after the jump.

The deets

I was catching up on postings from one of my favorite video game sites -- The Dreamcast Junkyard.  I also read the comments of each blog post because there are just enough of them to read ‘em all.  I like reading them because of their interesting facts and info.  Well, a recent post had some really, really good comments regarding details on games.  And when I mean “details,” boy howdy do I mean them!  What started as a discussion about very meniscal details regarding a racing game (that part was kind of boring) it turned to conversation about fighting games.  And in some parts a debate between two commenters would break out.  It was amazing to read the details each one brought to the conversation; so much that it’s worth mentioning here.  There were a few commenters there, so the two to look for are CD ageS and Wry Guy.

Here is the link to the blog post.

I also archived it here, you know, in case the site or post were to ever disappear.

Dreams of Krybor

What the heck is this image a reference to?  Listen to the latest episode of Retronauts to find out.

16-bit Seinfeld - The Tenth Strip

This will be the final strip for this Seinfeld comic/video game series thing.  Hope y’all enjoyed it.

Studio A - Chelsea Wolfe

Last night I accidentally came across an interesting show. It’s called Studio A and it’s on KCET (a TV studio that was a PBS member station for the Los Angeles region for many years but is now an independent educational station).  Studio A is music series which covers a wide spectrum of music and cultural backgrounds that showcases bands and performers.  An episode will have artist play a set of songs with short interviews mixed in.

Last night’s episode had Chelsea Wolfe performing.  Her music crosses some genres of music including but not limited to electronic, experimental, and folk.  Chelsea and her band played a number of tracks, most of which come from her latest album Pain Is Beauty.  Every song they played was great but the two I liked the most were "We Hit a Wall" and "Tracks (Tall Bodies)".  I heard some elements of Portishead and Akira Yamaoka in her music, and that’s cool because I enjoy those artists and that type of music a lot.  Never heard of her before, but I’m glad I came across her and this show.

If you’re interested and want to see this episode with Chelsea Wolfe, you can watch the full episode on KCET’s website.

GATMOG

I didn’t know this, but during the time when Machina/The Machines of God album was released, The Smashing Pumpkins had an animated series in the works.  It was canned and was never released but a production demo for it was leaked out online.

The demo contains three episodes and it deals with, I guess, stuff Billy was frustrated with during the time.  You know: record labels, music, THE MAN.

It was kind of interesting.  Would have been nice to see it fully fleshed out so I could fully understand what Billy was trying to say with the series, but it wasn’t really my taste of storytelling; especially when it’s coming from SP.  I found the videos on YouTube.  Just search for “glass and the machines of god.”

16-bit Seinfeld - The Ninth Strip

Again, this one it too long to show here.  See the strip after the jump.

E3 2014: Nintendo Digital Event

It was only a matter of time before Nintendo got into the Skylanders and Disney Infinity market.  With the new Super Smash Bros. game is the ability to use toy figurines and place them into the game.  For example, a Mario figurine was used to place Mario into the game to help take the opponent down.  They are calling this Amiibo and will include a number of characters from Nintendo’s catalog of franchises.

Hyrule Warriors is a game being made by Tecmo Koei, and as you’d guess, it’s a Dynasty Warriors game set in the universe of Zelda.  Kirby and the Rainbow Curse was cool to look at because they are using stop motion/clay animation for the visual appearance of the game.  It was really impressive.  In relation to this, for this digital event, it looks like they hired Seth Green’s studio, Stoopid Monkey (the guys who make Robot Chicken), to make a few animated shorts that stared Reggie and a few Nintendo characters.  These shorts were pretty funny.

The most outstanding game for me was Mario Maker.  With it, you can build your own Mario levels.  The video showed how you can resize things like pipes, move them around, and place enemies and items in certain spots.  The other game I was interested in was Splatoon.  This one has two teams, each with their own colored ink.  Your job is to cover the arena with your ink with your ink gun.  You spray the ink as a person, but you can change into a squid and use other abilities like swimming fast through your own colored ink.  Looks like a competitive game with some good strategy ideas.

Below is a list of all the games they showed during the digital event:
- Super Smash Bros. for 3DS
- Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
- Captain Toad
- Yoshi's Wooly World
- Bayonetta 2
- Hyrule Warriors
- Kirby and the Rainbow Curse
- Xenoblade Chronicles
- Mario Maker
- Splatoon