Sunday, May 29, 2011

The only Jump Ultimate Stars spoof anyone wants to make

Updated artwork with most recent reversion.
AozoraWarsJUSStyleLarger.png
The image speaks for itself doesn't it?
And plus I discovered the comma key on my keyboard doesn't work anymore. Gotta get a new one soon.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Old Superjustinbros vs. Poppy Bro Fan.

Nothing in trying to direct all my friends to attack a hater, but honestly.

Look at what this person, known as Poppy Bro Fan, said about (but not directly to) me last December. Apparently this guy doesn't know the difference between the "New Justin" and the "Old Justin"

"There used to be a major lolcow back in the days. His name is Superjustinbros, and i'm pretty sure you might remember him from the Fandom Rape entry. He used to be such a troll, there were multiple blog entries about his ill temper and superior attitude. He also advertised this "Franchise" he was making, called "Super Justin" where he was the main character (Lawl, self insert Stu) who got to bang Trauare Wrede, of all people, and fuck up Rosenkreuzstilette in general. He claimed the Rosenkreuzstilette girls were his own creations, which was a blatant lie, and stole several people's RKS fancharacters, shoehorning them into his "Franchise". Since it's easy for me to get homesick, i read up on things happening in Japan a lot. This is how i first found out about Rosenkreuzstilette and their creators, [erka;es] and WOMI. And how i also found out about his screwing over the series with his "Franchise". He's now long since killed his behavior, but to honor the sooncoming Freudenstachel, hey, i thought he needed a memory."

But he wasn't done yet.

"Another thing he's famous for? Drawing "Sexypics" of the RKS girls that make me want to tear my eyes out."
*Insert his anatomy rage-filled shit*

Yeah. ANATOMY. The one thing that everyone hates about my art. And to make things even more gay-tarted, everyone on there is seriously gender-confused. I got a dick, not a Vagina. I don't have big boobs, and I'm not a baby makin' machine.

Reposting my FAQS from last year regarding what he's saying about my out-of-date personality...

"What is Super Justin and why did you cancel it?"
The Super Justin series (which for some time, I referred to as a "franchise") was intended to be a series of Super Mario/Sonic the Hedgehog hybrids staring myself, as a japanese fourteen year-old boy dressed mostly in blue defending the world against various different enemies. The two main reasons why it was cancelled was because 1. to avoid copyright issues with the characters I had stolen, such as Grolla Seyfarth from Rosenkreuzstilette and Roark from Pokemon, and 2. because I couldn't take anymore negative criticism, as it was driving me to insanity.

"Were you once an art thief?"
During my first few weeks of activity on deviantART, yes. As I spent gradually more time, I started doing it less until the content of my artwork became entirely original work hand-drawn by me. (even if it's fanart of someone else's character.) Although I was still pretty much stealing when it comes to the Super Justin Wiki, which had all of its content entirely removed by me not long ago. At first, I thought I could easily get away with it, as I have seen multiple people on deviantART upload stuff with copyrighted material, (I guess since nobody reported them) but after thinking it out for a bit, I soon took action and removed the stolen content immediately, making it something I no longer have to worry about. Bottom line, I stopped stealing artwork/characters, and never will again.


"I heard you used to act like a troll. Is that true?"
Yes, I will admit I was once a terrible troll. But now I have been maturing, and I know better not to troll. But the reason I was is because I wanted to get popular by telling people to "check out my gallery" as well as "I drew him/her too". If you were to look at some of the really bad troll-comments on dA I had made, you would see a reply from me saying something like "Why did I say that?".

"Why did you go around telling everyone that Rosenkreuzstilette was worse than your "franchise" and insulated [erka:es]?"
This is somewhat difficult to explain in full detail, but if you want to know, I can spare some details on what was going on.

Personally, while I do like playing the Mega Man games a lot, I prefer the Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog series overMega Man, which is possibly why I said my "franchise" would surpass Rosenkreuzstilette, but that turned out to be a big mistake, since for one thing, I didn't even make a game for that "franchise", so there was absolutely nothing to compare RKS to. Plus, to add to all this ruckus, I even said it was "too scary," saying the game's colors weren't that colorful. Looking back, I can see this game was intended for a older audience than I had expected, so I withdrew that useless complaint, seeing how a good game doesn't have to be colorful, and have practically every stage take place in a dungeon/castle/fortress/tower. (and let's not forget the religious symbols.)

For the insulating [erka:es] part, the prime thing I said was they were "uncreative", due to many of the elements, characters, and enemies from the original RKS being based on or inspired by various things from other popular video game series. After some time, I soon released what I had said was wrong, as [erka:es] does in fact have a good amount of creativity that they're able to create something that's worth playing for the fun, and of course, the nostalgic factor. I have tried apologizing to them, but they have yet to respond.

(Yes, I'm willing to admit I made many mistakes back then, and I'm sure I will never again.)

Someone please tell him to stop this serious s%it. I know it';s outdated, but he needs to know.


Thursday, May 19, 2011

Skee-Ball got portable, and more addicting.

EDIT: So apparently the collections menu aren't limited. When you get a lot of things, another shelf is added to store even more things. So discard everything I said about increasing storage compactly, but I still think that the different ball and lane variants should be sorted onto different shelves located below the default shelf.
Skee-Ball HD
Freeverse and Graveck, two of those obscure indie mobile game companies, had not long ago introduced a version of one of America's most-addicting arcade games, Skee-Ball. If you got an iOS device, you can get Skee-Ball for a cheap price, and you'll be entertained for hours.

Well, it can be exciting at times, and even after you find out you can purchase items from an in-game market to customize your game, it only becomes your love-mate for the next six hours, until you eat away at the iPod's batteries. And how does this work?

Well, tickets, of course! Yes! This virtual adaptation of Skee-Ball even re-creates the classic quest of "collecting tickets to collect prizes that have no value whatsoever." Only here, they give you a purpose to waste tickets.

But before I discuss the use of tickets, let me describe the gameplay. It's Skee-Ball as you remember it- throw nine wooden balls up into a scoring area, and depending on which area the ball lands in, you are awarded 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and if you got badass aiming skills, you can even nail 100 points with one ball. If you do well enough, you can win bonus multipliers that multiply your score by up to 9x, with the multiplier value increasing or decreasing depending on your performance in the last game, and if you keep your streak going long enough, you're bound to score over two thousand on a game or two.

And as I described above, there are tickets involved. For every 50 points you score each game, you win 1 ticket at the end of each round. If you have multipliers in effect, your chances of getting a good amount of tickets per game increase (although it does not multiply the # of tickets you get, only your overall score). To roll the ball, you just swipe your finger across the palyfield, and Walhalla, out of nowhere a ball come storming down the alley and jumps the ramp, landing in the scoring zone. You can apply spin to the ball and roll it at different speeds. Once you've gone a good number of times, it's time to redeem those tickets at the prize corner.

When you visit the prize corner, up for sale are eight (12 in some versions of the "HD" edition). Most, if not all of these are cheap, useless "junk" that serves no purpose other than showing off to your friends (Note: the only of these worth getting are extra tickets, which actually give you tickets rather than taking away). At to my knowledge, you can only store a limited number of these (Correction: Storage is unlimited). Now why I bring up the (possible) limited storage number is because in the ticket market, you may also stumble on a number of different ball and alley styles that change the color scheme/patterns of the ball/field. These two kinds of items are the only reason to collect tickets, because they can be used to customize your in-game experience with different themes that suit your fantasies. And if that wasn't enough, they even change the items in the shop each time you do a round of Skee-Ball (some appearing more often than others). So just keep playing, and soon something will show up in the market that catches your eyes.

So what do I think about this? And what problems/frustrations have I encountered regarding this title? And what suggestions am I making to this game to make it hopefully even better than it is now? Well first off, the graphics are good, the controls are accurate (except it's difficult to roll the ball at maximum speed on the HD version and when playing the standard low-res version in full-screen on an iPad), but I have ran into some instances where the ball did get stuck on the play-field. 1: the left and right sides of the large 20-point holes, where two (or more) balls can get jammed, 2: right next to the 10-point socket where the ball stops moving and doesn't go into the appropriate scoring hole, and 3: the ball ends up balancing on top of the ramp that launches the balls into the air, and it never comes down. This caused me to have to reset the app or turn off the unit entirely (Update: These "ball getting stuck" situations are more common when you lob a ton of balls into the scoring zone at once).

Second, give the different balls and field styles separate folders (leading to different shelves) with no limit as to how many types can be placed and used, and do not allow us to sell them back for tickets. If we do, then we'd have to go unlock them again, which is something I'd prefer not to do. Also, allow us to set the ball/field style to "random," which gives us each time we start a game from the menu one random field and/or ball type purchased from the market. The amount of "useless" prizes should still be limited (Update: Discard this sentence).

Speaking of the market, the issue regarding some users not being able to access the menu where you can get in-app purchases to add items to the market and get more tickets (unless you have a plus+ account(?)) needs to be fixed, plus I'd like if the holiday-themed items from the free edition were also released as an expansion set to the paid version (if they aren't already).

Updates should not only focus on adding more features, but also fixing issues in the game regarding criticism in the iTunes store and other things, such as allowing moderately strong swipes on the larger-screen versions to throw balls at their fastest speed, updating the visuals of the standard version to retina (hi-res) graphics, adding support to Apple's Game Center, and allowing us to back up user data between devices via our Game Center/plus+ accounts. I play Skee-Ball on both my sister's iPod (second gen.) and iPad (1), and I have items purchased on one device but not the other.

So that ends my critique. Freeverse, if you can, please take these concepts into consideration for future verisons. Your app is extremely fun, and gives us an excuse not to go to modern-day arcades and blow money on tokens.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Leaping with Jumpman, into obscurity.

You know me, I love myself some obscure platformer games.
Back in the late 1990's, I stumbled upon the shareware version of a platforming game entitled Jumpman Lives. It had twelve levels, with each level having some new feature possibly not seen before. After some time, I got a plug-n-play C64 unit that had Jumpman Jr; the sequel to an title I had never known about, then when I began researching stuff (thanks Wikipedia), I found out more about the Jumpman games.

Basically, the original, released in 1983 mainly for the Commondare 64, was a platformer where you controlled a pale white figure with a red shirt and magenta pants, collecting bombs (but I called them cereal pieces due to their "O" shape.) on Jupiter. Yea. Jupiter. Apparently there's a fraction of Jupiter that's habitable with green girders and blue ladders, and it also has flying white squares that latch out at you, and even missiles that come out of nowhere. Sure it didn't make sense, but of course it worked, and it was pretty addicting.

They had a shorter but much more difficult sequel entitled Jumpman Jr, which had twelve completely new levels but still had the same basic principles and objectives as the original.

Then came the one I was most familiar with; Jumpman Lives!. This one was unofficial and released only on PC (DOS to be exact), and had levels that previously existed in the two only-existing predecessors, as well as some new exclusive levels to this version. The shareware version only goes through the first 12 levels while the full version does what you'd expect: giving you the full-length game and probably one of the most confusing and difficult-to-use level editors ever. Trust me. I've never figured it out in the entirety of my life.

Though one fatal thing I have to address was that the last time I played Jumpman Lives!, the controls were unresponsive and sloppy as f$%k. If you want to try this one out, you can grab a download of the title here, but don't come crying to me if your controls are screwed.

During the remainder of the nineties and from 2000-2005, several other Jumpman-related games and remakes also surfaced, with one of them being Jumpman Zero, which gave Jumpman a new rolling ability to help survive those long vertical drops, and thus prevent his legs from being broken. Jumpman 2 and Jumpman 2049 were two other Jumpman games that were being worked on at the time, but they never saw the light of day and both were canceled. The only one that was actually easy to instal and play was Jumpman: Under Construction, an effort to re-create the original game(s) and also provide an engine for one to make their own Jumpman games from scratch. Unfortently, development stopped only after the third public beta was released in Christmas of 2003, and afterwards, the forums where you could download level packs by other users also went down. But thankfully the site itself is still intact, so you can download it and (try to) create up some levels (And if you can figure out the "appearing/dissapearing platforms upon collecting a bomb" gimmick out, then you're golden).

It's sad to see one of my longtime favorite series bite the bullet at the last second. More or less, I'd wish Chris Leathley, developer of Under Construction, or someone else whom has privileges to the game would just step in and complete the editor, make some things easier to put in (like pre-loaded dragon textures), add more features, and just overall finish up the project with fully-working Jumpman/Jr./Lives! levels recreated down to the finest detail. Please Chris, seven years is more than enough.