Saturday, September 22, 2012

Bayonetta's Back, and the fans couldn't be any happy.

Really couldn't be happy.

For a little over a week, people everywhere started hyping up the sequel to the immense 360 and PS3 hack & slash game, featuring the return of everyone's favorite black-haired witch that can turn any scenario into a day down at the strip club. However, given that the original Bayonetta wan't on the Wii, fans in my eyes presumably only wanted the sequel on those consoles that people only say are superior to Nintendo's thanks to the graphics and lack of any tacked-on motion based gameplay, and let's not forget the "childish" themes.

I'm going to bring up here that the Wii U is rumored to be many times more powerful than either the 360 or PS3, which means room for more scenery and unnecessary animal transformations that'd cause you to launch yourself off when you're performing endless cartwheels to avoid enemies. Plus, if this is the treatment something like Bayonetta is being given by fans, why they're not picking on Rayman Legends is beyond me.

As you can tell, I'm more of a Nintendo guy than a Sony or Microsoft one. Granted I do like all three companies as the developers that work for them produce one solid A title after another, But even if I could still get the sequel had it been released on any of the big three, I'm kind of in favor of Nintendo publishing the game onto their upcoming console since after all, they've been getting a backlash (at least in my perspective) ever since the original Wii first came out, since it wasn't as powerful as either of it's competitors; and many of the third party titles released early in its life were below average at best, and their quality wouldn't be increasing until well after Microsoft and Sony already established a healthy fan-following. Take your pick on whenever this ended up in your favor or not.

I'm not sure if I'd really get into playing Bayonetta 2 since I kinda lost faith in the original only after the fifth chapter and finding out the game's crazy length; It runs 22 chapters from what I've read online, and the strict Medals system didn't help. You die maybe twice or more in a single chapter, you're doomed to getting a Stone trophy. And to be entirely fair, you could get higher through constant re-playing of the chapters to understand all those "Press a Button to Avoid This" moments and increase your health and library of moves. Regardless, I may very likely still buy the game since, well, it's Bayonetta. Even if I don't play/watch/read something, I'll still have it for when it goes out of print.

Hopefully this new installment isn't going to star an entirely new-looking Bayonetta like with what happened with the Devil May Cry series, even though Capcom would still end up using the original design of Dante for Project X Zone. Whoops?

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Get your OtakuBall Resources here!

I know I had said this would be a standard post, but I believe a series of image files and word documents should be able to do more justice than a post that stretches out for infinity.

Download it here.

Oh, and for all of you that are making clones, don't just play Breakout and Arkanoid; try the other clones and see what features work for you and which ones don't. However, I will say this: Don't put in some kind of block or enemy (like a Skull block or such) that will lead to death because of the ball's misbehavior (only bosses and bombs that rain down from certain destroyed blocks can kill the paddle directly, enemies can only stun/freeze the paddle and misguide the ball in another direction). Also, don't tinker with the ball's speed by speeding it up too quickly into a level, and don't have unrealistic bouncing physics, like the ball suddenly reversing as it tries to go up a channel of Gold Bricks, and get creative with level design; don't just stick to levels of only one particular theme (such as animals). And to conclude, never leave out proper ball aiming with the paddle.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

M-07 WARWOMAN Preview

By now everyone should know about my recent WARMAN series, which I launched earlier last July. Since then I got a brief overview of the series and the series' protagonist M-10 WARMAN posted onto my deviantART. Not long after I began work on M-07 WARWOMAN, the only of the WARMEN to be female, and the only one aside from M-08 WARMAN that remains loyal to the good guys of her team (i.e. wasn't put under control by the Parous).

I made quite a bit of progress on her design; and I'd say by now it's completion ratio is in the late 20's. Her profile art will take advantage of burning in the multiple layers of cell-shading, which I've done previously on M-10 WARMAN.

Since I'm getting "this" close to finally revealing more stuff about Otaku-Ball (I know I've already made a blogpost on it, but this one will describe all the features that will be utilized), I created this little c*appy teaser image within a pathetic timespan of 30 to 40 minutes.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Explaining "Da World Hens with U"

In the post directly preceding this one, I posted two The World Ends with You images meant to be spoofs of the series, using the character mugshots ripped from Solo Remix (which are obviously better quality) and the backgrounds from the original DS version. Since then, I made two more of these images.

Yea, The World Ends with You is just a series I can't get out of my mind. I beat it within the span of two Augusts, August 2008 and August 2009, playing through Normal up to Week 2 Day 5 and then Easy for the remainder of the game (this was long before I started forcing myself to select the normal difficulty for everything so that people don't think I'm noobish) with only 3 deaths. I defeated every Noise and Boss (except two Noise fights and one of the Kariya & Uzuki battles) in one attempt each. I simply adore it for that unlike other RPG's, you could easily survive any fight and dodge every attack, possibly coming out of a string of fights without a scratch. Nowadays I probably wouldn't have touched it due to extreme laziness, but I still beat it before such kicked in in later years. The double-character system was easy; just mash away on the Control Pad and watch the animals (that's what Noise are in most terms, but not in others) suffer.

My "report" is not 100% complete, and I have no plans of obtaining the game's Star Ranking in all categories. Especially considering how sharp the difficulty curve is if you went from Normal to Hard. But that's another story for another day.

While I doubt this'll become a recurring occurrence, Da World Hens with U are just gimmicky mugshot comics (an alternate to sprite comics) featuring obviously, The World Ends with You's cast of Japanese death-metal punk/goth-loving teenagers and adults, portraying the characters as actors with Hanekoma under the director's seat. Just like the game's Another Day, Da World Hens with U is non canon, and is also entirely fandom. The relationships between characters have changed, some have gone from enemies to playful rivals and frememies, while others... stay exactly where they are. No I'm not going to bring in any of the boy-on-boy relationships, so here are the actual pics themselves.

For this one I tried to go with the "Imagination Route" and depict all the character's dialogue as images. This is where the "changed relationships" this can really do justice, as it portrays Neku and Kariya as buddies, rather than enemies. However, Beat is still spamming death thoughts for what was done to Rhyme during the first week. The scene being depicted is Week 3 Day 5, the qurater-final chapter in the game, where Neku and Beat duel against Berserk Kariya and Berserk Uzuki, but Uzuki wasn't present at the time thanks to being stuck with "Taboo" Minamimoto right outside the Reaper's base; where here it's just Minamimoto's umpteenth attempt to woo Uzuki out of Kariya's grasp with a new look and more tattoos, but failing as he would many other time since he was introduced into the script in Week 2. Of course Uzuki isn't exactly the dumbest brick around and continuously explains she already has a boyfriend whenever Minamimoto's attempts don't go according to plan. I was originally going to put something else in Minamimoto's speech bubble, but I din't want this to become R-18. With Minamimoto's love for equations, you may get an idea on what it was initially.
One thing that I wanted to establish in Da World Hens with U was Minamimoto's obsession with pulling all the focus onto himself rather than any of the others, unintentionally making him one of the more disliked actors on the set. Here we have Minamimoto "borrowing" Mitsuki's hundred-dollar camera for doing what he does best, while the others enjoy(?) their break-time in the Reaper's hideout in-between shootings. This would probably take place sometime after the beginning of Week 2, where Minamimoto would be written into the plot, then continue to fool around with everyone else offset after  Neku and Joshua kill a mutated black lion meant to be Minamimoto's Noise Form. Can't really explain it any further than that.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

When overpriced iDevice apps aren't big enough...

Now that apparently everyone is back into The World Ends with You thanks to Solo Remix, and most of the mugshots are now on The Spriters Resource, I decided to throw my hat into the ring again. with "marvelous Photoshoping skills".
FUN FACT: Yes Megumi is smiling while facepalming. Guess he just finds the concept of Mitsuki talking about her jugs impossible not to smile at.

This one is bound to be major spoilers, but everyone should know this by now.
Miyamimoto audio transcription: My, looking for this "Composer" fella? Well, he's RIGHT here!