Everyone loves a good Transformation fetish.

Go read it. It may answer many things.

Otaku-Ball post (hopefully) coming soon

Hey everyone. Just wanted to mention that I may upload in a few days a post regarding my idea to create the world's greatest Breakout/Arkanoid clone: Otaku-Ball. In the meantime, I'll give you the planned block graphics to be included in the game. There's more, but this is what I have for now.

You can find more on my Photobucket "Sprite Sheets" folder.

Anime Techno X Aozora's Adventure? Stupid, but possible.

Well might as well spill yet more beans from my gigantic jar of imagination.

Remember back in my days of character-stealing for my original letdown of a "franchise"? Well, something like that is prone to happen again with my new indie series, Aozora's Adventure, but will be taking a much , much smoother and less critical approach than Super Justin did.

But before you bring out your banhammers, allow me to spare the details.

Currently, all of the major characters in Aozora's Adventure are all original/semi-original designs by myself and a variety of people that I've met via my carrier as an amateur indie artist since early '09 (I'm not aiming to be perfect. Just great by most standards), and not once have I taken/used a character from another series or franchise (the later being a word I refus to say under most instances) without permission, and I do not wish to do this if it'll cause such a rucus similar to what happened two years ago (causing an entire fanbase to strike against me). Like I said, this will not cause many, if not any problems compared to Super Justin. And I'm not going to be "stealing" them. I'm going to earn permission to use non-original characters the only way I can: Making the Aozora's Adventure series good, release it to Japan online as Aozora no Tabi, get it popular (but not that popular) in that country agmonst the web, re-release several freeware Aozora's Adventure games that were originally printed in English, wait a long time, and attract the attention of major anime, manga, and video game retailer Animate. Oh yeah, you know where this is going.

Embrace for unexpected impact in

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Well durrhurr yes. If you haven't heard of him already, let me give you a pointless history lesson. Anizawa Meito, the character shown in the image above, is the current main mascot of Animate, and is the protagonist of his own series; Anime Techno. Piror to this, the character and his sidekicks made major cameo appearences in the well-known and popular anime/manga series Lucky Star, which in all honesty, does not require an introduction, and features many other cameos. Seriously, that's how popular it is. And Anizawa is always trying to sell his shit to good ol' Konata Izumi, but tries too hard, flipping shit upside down and over-reacting with army and warfare sequences, and fails after so much effort, even in scenarios where he becomes so close to succeeding. I don't know how many times this has been done in the series, nor if it's a common theme, as I've never seen Lucky Star. So don't complain if my info is incorrect.

Now back to Aozora's Adventure. Yea I would like Anizawa Meito to be a character in my own series. It happened to Touhou Project, why not mine as well? Well, Touhou Project is currently the most well-known doujin series in history, so I can see why Animate would notice and like their own characters to appear alongside the Touhou girls in a crossover title starring Anizawa as one of the main characters. And so around Animate's 10th anniversary, that's exactly what the fans got: Anime Techno X Touhou Project. If that wasn't enough, Anizawa made another cameo in Disgaea 4 as some kind of attack character. Yea clearly Anizawa Meito has the power to appear in everything ever, and take over the otaku culture world just like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but even with a good number of cameos, mainly in Lucky Star, he still remains a strange and almost unknown figure outside of Japan (IMP, it's my perspective).

And because a few series could do it, I wanted to see if maybe once Aozora's Adventure becomes well-known, I could get permission from Animate (as well as give them some ka-ching), to use Anizawa and his gang in the series. It will not be like me butchering characters from Rosenkreuzstilette and Pokemon in Super Justin by changing their personalities, backstories, and in a few cases their appearances, giving little to no credit to the original designer(s). Anizawa and the other Animate characters would keep their initial personality and appearences from the Anime Techno and Lucky Star OVAs- for prime instance Anizawa still likes to make dramatic expressions, flip all over his Animate shop when a specific person drops by (in this case, the main characters in Aozora's Adventure, mainly Aozora) and blow shit up for no reason other than to give the message "buy my f&cking products!" And he still brings up Comiket, fights with his lesser-employes over disagreements over dead out-of-print products, plus his enemies, spins like the Tasmanian Devil, and set fire to himself when explaining the reason successful animes are successful in the first place. Here however, along with the basic stuff, his attempts would be plotted much more insane, even re-arranging the entire store to parody a movie in the shoot-em-up/war genre, and planting stronger cameras on the outside of his store to spot Aozora from far away down the street so he can quickly re-arrange Animate just before Aozora enters so he can exploit his plans flawlessly. As with Lucky Star, all these plots fail, sometimes with close successions, and other times with Aozora sabotaging one or more of the Animate employes by knocking them out or engaging in a short fight scene. As the series progresses and more failures from Anizawa, Aozora purposely enters the store not to browse, but for him to have fun with Anizawa and watch he and his allies fail at convincing him to buy something from the store, even at booths during events. Much later in the anime's lifespan, Anizawa evolves from an enemy of Aozora to a minor anti-hero, kicking some mecha and witch ass for himself (mostly without the main protagonists) and slowly forgiving Aozora for many tradegies, while still having a small hatred for not buying Animate's products earlier in the anime). Call it a stupid idea, but like before, I'm all up for criticism. And besides, this may not exactly happen.

I'll bring this up: The currently non-existing Aozora's Adventure anime isn't really considered to be made for a profit, just for fun. And even if it does get made, it will be mostly a type of cross-genre anime, spoofing and parodying many other series, both obscure and well known. If I am able to secure rights for the Animate crew, then Anizawa would appear about halfway via the first season, and subsequent appearances in later episodes, both major and minor.

Peace out.

Dot.S, Trains, Puzzle games, Pac-Man, and Break Out oh my!

Yep, get ready folks, because we're going to dig in into obscure gaming and nostalgia overload. Before I begin, though, I want to share some good news with you guys.

I am happy to announce that I have secured a working copy of the Dot.s Design Builder, and have uploaded it to Mediafire. So now people can enjoy this great application that emulates Tomytec's great toy product from Japan. Sure it's in Japanese, but if you're into MS Paint or other common painting applications, you may be able to figure it out without understanding the language.

~Download~

And now we begin with the real thing.

Since about a year ago, Matt Rix's Trainyard has made a big impact on the mobile gaiming industry, by introducing puzzles that can be solved in hundreds- or even thousands of unique solutions. Since the launch of the level editor September 1st, I have made a number of levels for Trainyard, each with varying difficulty.

If you own Trainyard (not Express), here are the levels.

And BTW, respect the brown trains!

Heheh, sorry. Got a little bit carried away there. ^_^; Anyway moving on.

Next up on our lineup is Xye, a open-source enhanced remake of Kye, the later being a puzzle game made by Colin Garbutt way back in 1992. It was released in two versions, a shareware version that had 15 levels in all (and they get hard very fast), and the ability to add and distribute single levels via the internet. The guy behind the remake is Victor Soliz, and he did a great job on reviving a little under-rated gem by adding many, many new concepts and unique puzzles. It is also compatible with levels created for the original Kye.

You can get Xye as well as multiple versions and editions of Kye here at this site. As for additional puzzles, they two can also be found at Xye's homepage, buy you you can look around the Net. I recommended this site to get old Kye levels and the official Xye forums for both old and new. For more information as well as a few more level packs, Robert Phipps' Kye fansite is the place.

Allow me to introduce two games of the "Noid" family of breakout games. Both by completely different companies and on Microsoft's now-defunct MS-DOS (which means for newer computers, you need DOSBox to run them), Aquanoid (1991-1992) and Electranoid (1994-1995) were clones of Taito's Arkanoid games, that tried to cash in on the popularity. Sadly though, both games sort of failed, as they both had difficult paddle physics, in that the ball wouldn't ricochet correctly as it should in any modern Breakout clone, but they both tried to introduce new elements to the genre of Arkanoid clones. Aquanoid had a massive overabundance of powerups and powerdowns to boot, as well as solid unbreakable blocks that would fire lasers at destroyable blocks. Electranoid (besides sounding like a god-darn Sega Genesis game), had enemies, which Arkanoid also had, but Electranoid take is up another step. These enemies lob balls at you, meant to hinder your progress by turning blocks into metallic ones that require multiple hits to destroy, turning your paddle invisible, or killing you. Yea, pretty crazy, especially with the Green Menacers and their Metallic Green blocks that need the Red Ball from a Red Menacer to destroy, which does become troublesome at times besides not being able to control the ball well. Overall, both games are okay, but I don't recommend them a whole lot (especially Electranoid) unless you are addicted to Breakout and Arkanoid and their many, many clones.

I am supplying a download for Aquanoid because this "limited shareware" version seems to be more up to date compared to the one you can find on the internet. It even has a separate Setup application that you can boot up to change the color of the ingame font. Pretty cool. Get it here. If anyone knows about or has the full 150 level version of Aquanoid for download, please, of all things, let me know.

Electranoid, on the other hand, can easily be found by google-searching the net. Grab it here.

I'm also throwing in a .ZIP of Yabog, another breakout clone with some crazy block types, plus an editor. There's also Bat 'n Ball, but it's remotely nothing special. No power-ups, just a paddle, a ball, and no special block types besides destructible and indestructible blocks.

Dodger is a pretty strange puzzle game (yea that genre is really fancy today) that deserves the title Pac-Man vs. the Space Muntants. You're Pac-Man, you run around, eat food, dodge alien lazers, and avoid swallowing poison.

I only (and sadly) have the shareware version, which lacks the level editor of the full version. Anyways, here you go.

This next one, called Mini Pac-Man is pretty funny though. Once again, you are Pac-man (who looks rather odd), but for whatever reason, he has a bad flatulence and belching problem. Mazes are constructed by blocks and contain dead-ends, turning around sharp corners is hard, no recovery time from getting hit, but still good fun.

So yup, this is why I've haven't been drawing much recently. I've also been getting ready for my final year at school, so I've been doing a lot lately. Yea, I got one hell of an agenda. @__@