Sunday, January 27, 2013

Atari 2600 Wiz-Man

Yep, that one game from Game Center CX 2 if it was on the good old Atari 2600.

Maybe this could become a reality as a homebrew cart? (though I'd have the copyright on the bottom replaced with modern info, since here it's done as if we had Wiz-Man instead of Pac-Man, and 1980 (the year of Pac-Man's debut) was Wizman's debut, with the port to the NES/FC (Game Computer in the GCCX world) coming four years later in Japan in 1994 and as a 1995 launch title in other countries).

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Cars & Clocks in Asia


What's directly above you is Next-A-Class doing a promotional video the way we geeks like to see it best.

(EDIT: I know this animation has a big history behind it, as all shown on the site Kotaku, but I'm in it more for the action.)

What's below is MESAI, a Korean indie animation team transforming an everyday alarm clock into the biggest nuisance that wants to see you exhausted to the point of passing out.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Not Pac-Man x8 and x8+8

From the creator of A0zora and the Mari0 SJB Mod comes an expansion of StabYourself's newest game Not Pac-Man that will have you on your ankles till the day you succeed.

I'm proud to present, Not Pac-Man x8! Now featuring the four forgotten ghosts, Sue, Funky, Kinky, and Spunky, joining the original ghostly quartet!

Can't defeat the game with so many ghouls running rampant? Thanks to fellow forum member Qcode, you can now play Not Pac-Man x8+8, a special version that adds an additional four Power Pellets to the maze.
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Get it here, and happy chomping!
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101251006/Not% ... n%20x8.zip 

You need LOVE (0.8.0) to run this mod.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

The unofficial Mega Man Weapon Color Template

Hey 'ya all! I hope you had an epic holiday season. Sorry I couldn't get something planned for the holidays, but here's a something else I had on my Photobucket for some time to (hopefully) make up for it.



Ever wanted to mess with the colors of Mega Man? With this template, you can easily alter two colors and see how other poses, items, and even the life bar would be affected. Use it for whatever ideas you may have. until then, here's a few examples of this template in use.

If you can't tell, yes I like colors and messing with color palettes. That's what part of being an artist does to you.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Either I'm on a roll, or I'm potentially on the verge of setting my own trap.

-image removed, it is now considered outdated-
A little fact: After I added Isamu of Koya no Shonen Isamu, I was hoping that my brain wouldn't allow me to add any more characters to my self-titled "Crossover" series, a way for me to produce non-profit fan works/recreations of Jump: Ultimate Stars and Mario Kart 64 (titled Aozora's Wars and Otaku Kart: Kyukyoku no Akushonreshingu respectively) without falling under the mighty bandwagon. Welp, my research on tvtropes has led me to Air Gear, a shonen series that appeared in the same magazine as Fairy Tail, and in the Crossover series, is the seventy-second series selected to be represented. Its primary protagonist, Itsuki Minami, brings to mind (at least in my terms) Kohtaro Kuga and Kazuki Muto, 'cept with rollerblades and a crow by his side. His inclusion is based on Sunday VS Magazine: Shuuketsu! Choujou Daikessen, which coincidently enough includes both The Law of Ueki and Fairy Tail. However, the crossover series I've done shows Kosuke in his The Law of Ueki Plus appearance, as I've also upgraded numerous other characters represented into their most recent forms, so why not leave Kosuke off the ride? And with Fairy Tail, I've added Lucy Heartfilia as she is a selectable character in Sunday VS Magazine. So where does Gray Fullbuster go? Easy. He stays unlockable.

So from here on out, I hope to plead that the only thing I'll be doing here is improvements to existing content. If I really did continue, hell would probably freeze over.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Champ Ms. Pac-Em Maze Expansion


For anyone that plays the unofficial Ms. Pac-Man DOS port Champ Ms. Pac-Em, I got a special treat: A user-created expansion set that contains 78 additional different maze designs. Please note you must have Champ Ms. Pac-Em downloaded on your computer (or at least, in a folder where the game can be booted up by dragging the .EXE onto DOSBox if its OS is post-XP) before downloading this package, then extract the contents of the package (minus the README) into the same folder as all of Champ Ms. Pac-Em's data. Don't forget to check your computer's Program Files!

You can find the download for Champ Ms. Pac-Em here (look for v1.5, full version). If you're running in 64-bit Windows or some other OS that renders you unable to run the installer, contact me via any social media of your choice and I'll send you the contents of the game in one convent zip file.

Download the extra mazes package.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Tired of Mega-Fever yet? Have a stupid sprite-comic!

Once again, big kudos to the Rosenkreuzstilette gang for making me seek out other and more original MegaMan-esque games. 

Anyways, what the title says.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Mega-Fever continues. Let's have some Crazy Color Combos!







I can't really say this is anything but an experimental project to see every possible color Mega Man/Rockman could achieve across any NES via both original games and fan mods/hacks, using all it's primary colors from the system's pallette (as they appear in NEStopia).

Since the image's size is far too large to upload onto any image-sharing site (and it'd make this blog very cluttered), you can find the image over at this link. I warn you it's a very big image.

Feel free to link the palettes to weapons from Mega Man clones that don't play in classic 8bit style and/or don't feature Mega Man as the main player's character. Or use it for whatever purpose you desire.

UPDATE: Here's one I made for Weapon Energy Pellets and Weapon Energy Capsules.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

How do I see Freudenstachel?

Yea, two Rosenkreuzstilette posts in a row.

Not sure if I've really played enough of Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel to give a full heads-on review, so I'll just list my own personal pros and cons.

=Pros=

*State-of-the-art visuals, scenery and sprites.
*Great character design.
*A very in-depth storyline.
*Decent level structure.
*Music selection is much improved over the original game I found myself shedding tears of joy over Trauare's level theme.

=Cons=

*Japanese vocals got repetitive; I found myself muting them.
*Once again, enemy sprites (and some items, tiles, etc) are flat-out taken from other games, re-colored, and just scaled to a larger size. Some of these edited sprites do not fit with the gothic structure of the game as a whole, coming off as cartoonish, and it seems like it wants to cram in "I'm Mega Man 11", with stuff like Strudel's Not-Rush ice sculptures as if we didn't know this was a Mega Man clone from the start. There is a clear difference between tributes/refrencing and theft. Just see Trucks and Skulls. I see no Birds with extensive shading and higher quality in that game.

EDIT: Okay, I see where I may have gone there. Remember when I showcased Fegaman in a previous post? Well, that game uses the original unaltered sprites from both Super Mario and Mega Man, but unlike Rosenkreuzstilette, Fegaman has the balls to admit it's a non-profit fan game and credit where all its material originated, while WOMI never put in "Original Concept © Capcom and all respective owners" on the [erka:es] startup screen.

*Controls seem a bit slippery at times, especially in underwater segments. Freudia seems very heavy and hard to control in water while Cheep Cheeps (yes, the Mario enemy, with the same design) attempt to drown you. I dunno; swimming just worked out so much better in Mega Man 8.
*Schwer-Muta's level is flat out filled with trial-and-error segments, filling it with severe fake difficulty. Thankfully it's not a bad as the first game, but having to fall down a pit that looks bottomless and a quiz room that asks "What classic Mega Man weapon does Freudenstachel allude to?" somehow brings it up a notch. Real difficulty, like those featured in MegaMari, are more welcome.
*Freudia is presented with no new abilities that the protagonist of the previous game, Spiritia Rosenberg, didn't have. No crouching (ala Magical Doropie and Darkwing Duck, the later being a Capcom game), and no 8-way firing abilities (like any Contra game, or Bass in Mega Man 10).
*Taking a cue from the Mega Man X games, upgrades aside from the item that gives you Beat Strudel that enhance Freudia's power, speed, and other factors.
*Freudenstachel uses the same Mega Man 4 passwords (yes, still no proper save feature, despite Mega Man 8, 9, and 10 having such) as the original, yet follows the "Doc Robot" patterns with the Schwarzkreuz. While not what I'd like, Mega Man 3's passwords would allow support for remembering which of the four Schwarzkreuz were defeated.
*Many, if not all, of Freudia's learnable powers seem next to useless, in ways similar to Mega Man 5. This is where I mention Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, where the abilities you learn from the Robot Masters in this game are true upgrades over the Mega Buster, with at least one advantage over the weapon you start with, thus making you want to use those when necessary rather than sticking to your default weapon. Try for yourself and see what I mean.
 *In contrast, any weapon should have a good effect on any boss, with each having resistances to specific (between zero to two) weapons and a weakness to one weapon, which this one weapon should deal double damage.
*A pop-up help screen should be present detailing all the nooks and crannies of every power up accumulated thus far, including upgrades if present. See Rockman 4 Minus Infinity.
*No W-Tank (recovers all the energy for one weapon) or S-Tank (recovers all life and weapon energy for all weapons) support, just your basic E-Tank.
*Lack of shops, present in every Mega Man game since 7.
*Lack of any additional game modes, the biggest being "Challenge" and "Endless". Has WOMI ever played the ninth or tenth Mega Man games?

Just a quick reminder, these are my personal opinions, and I'm sorry if you don't like them. But as I say with people making Breakout clones, it would really, and I mean really help if you played more than just the official Mega Man games and maybe one or two fan clones. Rosenkreuzstilette was the first of the series, so it was fair to expect so little. But there was a massive four-year gap between this and Freudenstachel, so I was hoping for some true balls-to-the-wall gameplay that at least gave out new enemy types with appearances not used by Nintendo or Capcom. While I did enjoy getting it, and it does have it's moments of fame, the first few minutes afterwards of playing and having to think "Knockoff graphics" and "Unimproved concepts" killed the joy for me. Honestly, a big disappointment for me after all the hype, but that's not to say others, like yourself won't enjoy it. If you liked the original you'll certainly love the second, but as for someone that had to mod the first game to get some enjoyment, I can't really say a vanilla Freudenstachel is for me. -___-

Friday, October 26, 2012

Here's your Freudenstachel fan-made fan kit.

Every graphic from the game in one convent download. All else I mention; I do not want to get a good old C&D for pirating copies of the original game. If you want it badly but are unable to reach DLsite for the stupidest of reasons, there's not much I can do but recommend other Mega Man clones or at least ones with a similar but not identical gameplay style.

http://www.mediafire.com/?899gf5w90n92i5q

Oh yeah, a one-panel fanfiction. Should be tolerable, especially considering how the girls speak in their native language.



What?, you thought they were going to be talking in Japanese?

Saturday, October 20, 2012

How NOT to "update" an iOS Game.

Seems as if some don't know how to give out changes to games without destroying the feel of prior versions. The subject for today is Atomic Ball from Meritum Soft, which recently turned from an addicting and appealing Breakout clone to a cash cow money-sucking creature with a similar gold/currency system alike hits such as Temple Run, Draw Something, and the Circus Atari reboot, requiring you to pay much more than you would have before just to unlock all its features.

See for yourself, an epic(?) comparison of 1.0 and 2.0.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Freudenstachel: DISCO NIGHT START


Yep, THE Rosenkreuzstilette sequel Freudenstachel is finally live. And I personally found it more enjoyable than the previous game.

I'm not giving out full opinions until I play enough of the game, but a quick summary: Music is much more fitting into the levels than before (of the ones I played thus far), and WOMI even inserted a few Super Mario Bros. references alongside the plethora of Mega Man ones. Now if only there was a proper crouch mechanism as well as a standard save feature so I don't have to take screenshots of the password screens.

But that's not harming the fundamentals in any way. Give it a whack, I say, we waited four years for this!

Collect your copy here. Just please don't go messing about the site and stumble upon a NSFW section.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Freudenstachel; LETS PARTY

Corrected a few things based on advice from TDOMMX.
And corrected some more.


After me and many others having to wait four years through development hell, the well-hyped sequel to Rosenkreuzstilette will be released this Saturday. And even if I'm not demonstrating my levels of excitement as much as most of the fan base, I am eager to dive into Freudenstachel and give it a closer look.

Keep in mind I'm not going to play just one level and then write up a negative review with no valid criticisms present, as I did for the first game, I'll give an in-depth look though the prologue stage and the initial eight levels (planning to conquer at least half of them, either up to the boss or boss included) before I cite my opinions. And before you ask, I do have early thoughts on the game based on pre-release screens and information (many of which I got from following the blog Schwer and Schwer Alike) which I'll go over quickly in my own perspectives.

The game, as you probably all know, is a Mega Man clone playing under the viewpoint of Freudia Neuwahl, whom was a boss in the first Rosenkreuzstilette (and the only of the eight to share unique traits and have a significant place in the plot), going on to battle a crew of black-magic users (Word along the Grapeline calls them "Dark Magi") known as the Schwarzkreuz, or Black Cross, led by Pamela Arwig, in addition to dealing with the same girls from the first game Spiritia Rosenberg had to defeat herself, alongside newcomer Dolis taking the place of Freudia in an all-new environment raging with plant-life and Guts Man lifts. All the levels of the returning characters look similar with almost identical tile sets, but with new layouts, making Freudenstachel seem in ways a "1.5" entry and in others a true sequel.

Excluding Liebea and Schwer-Muta, the other Magi users have undergone a "timeskip" in their clothing, now being presented with more advanced outfits (i.e. Trauare Wrede looks more like a warrior, Sichte Meister shreds her clothing for no reason, and Grolla Seyfarth, another fan-favorite, gets upgraded armor and now carries the sword of her deceased grandfather, Raimund Seyfarth, which Raimund's spirit possesses. And of course not to mention the implants. *slaps myself*. Rather than taking their weapons ala Spiritia, Freudia upgrades her main weapon, the Freudenstachel, by combining it with one of her friends' after they fall, thus transforming it into a new weapon (aside from changing the color of Freudia's hair ribbion and cross-shaped blood-stain). Fans speculate that Iris Sepperin, the final boss of the original will return, and much like Grolla from the first game, Black Cross leader Pamela Arwig will become the protagonist in her own side-quest.

This is where my words may become slightly more severe, but please keep in mind I'm not trying to do any harm to the series in any way, just voice my thoughts. For one thing, while perhaps doing the following crucial to the story and the Dark Magi's plans and having new attack methods, why reuse seven of the eight initial bosses when you could have said bosses being new recruits to the RKS, with ID numbers RKS10-12, and 14-17 respectively? With how well WOMI designed the original cast and how many talented Japanese artists volunteered to create Strudel, Dolis, and the entirety of the Black Cross back in '08, the addition of new characters would enable the series to expand further, but in defense, this does spark some "quantity over quality" issues where it's better to have a few characters done well than a bunch with little to no proper backstory given, thus preventing us, the players, from connecting socially to these new characters. If anything, the Black Cross could be larger with five additional members, the runner-up eight (of course including Eifer, Schirach, and the Refrakita Twins) serving as the main bosses with Pamela Arwig afterwards in her own fortress. Again to speak out against myself, this'd render Dolis useless, making her a throwaway character at the last second, and with all this drama about Freudenstachel's tough development process, I'd say not waste a good character. Bottom line, I say keep things the way they are. so we don't have to go through another two seasons of guessing and crazy rumors. Just hope it's done right so the fanbases don't go raging on like Legends 3. Seems Capcom is really diving into some deep chit, so now we need to have the fans fill in after the great Inafune departed from Capcom.

I'm not going to bring up the whole "it's unoriginal bla bla bla" scenario, as I've said what I need to more than enough, whenever it be deviantART, Twitter, or this very blog. Though to add fuel to the fire, one other source for how a proper Mega Man clone could be done right, are all these ROM hacks of the original sextet of NES Mega-Man games, regardless of if it's a Japanese or English person doing all the modding, though for this instance, the one I'm going to bring up is Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, which features a good number of unique twists to the original formula, such as the sloped surfaces that normally didn't come until Mega Man 8, Quick-man lasers that don't kill immediately but appear a little quicker (whenever this is good or bad is up to you) and shorter wait times between death and restarting a level. And not to mention the custom soundtrack for Minus Infinity, while not original compositions, fits very well with their assigned stages. Other hacks would induce alternate game modes, like the "Endless" series that puts you through random rooms where the goal is to survive, and not to mention time attack in Mega Man 9 and 10.

With non-hacked games, there's Fegaman. Just Youtube game footage and just see how heart-pumping it is. Or just look below.



On a similar topic, I want to bring up that a while back, I figured out how to create mods for the original game with the assistance of TDOMMX's RKS Data Archive Decoder and some guides from Ravy Comics (Link to his RKS pages), mainly music and sound modifications, to ones that were a little more intense and went with the stages a single tune was assigned to. A few examples as to what this mod did are below.

*The sound effects are changed to ones that sounded more realistic, and when a Magi user fired off her weapon, the sound it makes is like a basic real-life gun being shot. Later versions eventually had me using equliveant sounds from both Mega Man and Darkwing Duck, though long after I decided against it, as the realistic sound effects made me chuckling every time I fired off a weapon.
*Zorne and Sichte's stages use music from both Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2.
*Schwer-Muta uses the factory music from Kirby 64.
*the Iris Palace bosses use the "armored boss" theme from Super Mario RPG.
*Others I don't really recall from memory, but all the songs were defiantly modded.

Soon after I posted the modded OST on Grolla's Dungeon, so anyone who owned a non-pirated copy only had to replace the needed files to execute the mod successfully. The download itself wasn't the full game, and I never intended on posting the game as a whole. The most I'd see myself doing is just posting everything in the game's "data" folder that could be modded easily pre-decompressed, no .exe file or anything like that.

With that said, Freudenstachel contains files compressed in a different format, which makes the RKS decoder useless in attempting to extract everything. Via e-mail, I got in touch with TDOMMX, and based on what he stated, the Decoder will not be updated due to the extensive amount of piracy the tool had inadvertently caused (Why work on something that'll make it worse?) Even if I could somehow rip all that the game has without some complex tool and still mod it for my own enjoyment, I'd keep the mods to myself if it's for the goods of the bigtime followers of the series' development, and I respect TDOMMX's final thoughts on the scenario, not wanting to force him into a very detailed project. Unmodded or not, I'm sure Freudenstachel will still remain enjoyable even without me gutting everything out.

I'm leaving one final song to end the post.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Not tired yet? Here we GO~~~

Well suprise suprise. This blog's going to get another update. But first, some info regarding the "Aozora Nudity Omake". Once again, this blog is meant to be for all audiences, so for anyone interested, refer to a prior post for proper information. Why I'm bringing this up is ever since I first posted on this series, I added three more characters to the roster, but unfortunately for many, this is an all-men update, as you can probably see below.

Since I want to avoid making Super Justin: the Blog dedicated to this one subject (and quite frankly a pesudo-weak one at that), this will be the only other time you will see me posting in regards to the Aozora Nudity Omake. If you're in dire need of receiving any character updates past Neku Sakuraba, Kohtaro Kuga, and Dante, representing The World Ends with You, Shikigami no Shiro/Castle of Shikigami, and Devil May Cry respectively, I'll gladly keep anyone that contacts me via e-mail informed on either male updates, female updates, or both. And since I tend to do these types of art at a faster pace (since well, they're done for mostly my enjoyment, but I still show them off for anyone that is into these as well), I may be able to accept character recommendations. Keyword: May.

So that finishes up that story arc. But I'm not done. As I reported on Twitter, I seem to be going through a severe artist's block thanks to the Nudity Omake series. This is causing me to have a bit of trouble on which character of the Aozora's Adventure series I could attempt next that just about anyone could enjoy. Of course it very likely will not be one of my female characters since all of the major females of the series are already done. I am leaning towards Keanu, since his simple appearance may make it a bit easier to accomplish drawing him in comparison to a few others (I won't state any examples). And it'll be your basic profile art. No sexy action scene, though I'll try to do a decent background that's not some abstract design. If you want anything sooner, you can follow my other projects on external sites. I'm sure you're bound to get something if you search my name.