Mario Pierces the Heavens!

I'm not buying it.

SJB now on Skype

Title is self-explanitory.
Username is Superjustinbros.

Second Wave

Yes I know this blog hasn't been updated in a month, but that's because I've been caught up in quite a lot of disputes. Though in reality, it's only of my concern. You all are in the clear, though considering how easily I seem to be building up anger, I need a bit of downtime from productive stuff.

However I did create this small bust shot of Aozora. Why you ask? Well, let's just say I got aware of a particular game'e existence after three years of it's original release. I'm of course talking about Sunday VS Magazine, which is very much in a nutshell a rival of sorts to Jump Ultimate Stars, which of course I can't resist giving it a massive upgrade (Aozora's Wars, mentioned previously.) to improve on it with movesets, a wider span on supers, and an in-depth campaign with tournaments and endurances. All with probably the most playable fighters ever in a fan-based video game idea second only to MUGEN. So obviously finding out about SVM means Aozora's Wars gets an expansion pack with all those characters and their respective fighters and supporters? (especially not making sense with a game idea that doesn't exist in playable format of all things)

Take a wild guess.

AOZORA'S WARS: SECOND WAVE

So after your brains are done processing the absolute confusion and/or whatever, let me fill you in that again, this is only a game idea. And it'll stay like that until I learn how to code and crap. Of course considering how people have crammed the message "start with small projects" and I can't sprite big sheets of stuff like what's depicted in Jump Ultimate Stars, don't expect it to be the very first project I set my focus onto. Especially when you're cramming 180 total playable characters into one frankengame that's intended to be a holy grail for anime/manga geeks and fans of fighting games.

No ship.

For the record, not all these guys are from Weekly Shonen Sunday or Weekly Shonen Magazine.

Did I mention before I wanted to do a recreation of Mario Kart 64 with the same guys listed above?

Meet Orborun

If anyone out there is a die-hard Super Monkey Ball fantic (or any other game involving rolling balls), I'm sure you'll get an immense kick out of Tiny Lab Productions' latest upcoming concept Orborun. It's a game where you do nothing more but steer a ball down a slope as it moves automatically. It does pose a great challenge and I find myself rocking back and forth just racing down the tracks.

You can try out Orborun's ten-level flash demo on Newgrounds, or download betas on other platforms at the Orborun IndieGoGo page. I'm sure you'll have a blast.

I make c%@p

Robotnik says "DELICIOUS"

Oh wait, wasn't the other day Groundhog day?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Come and find me on COLOURlovers!

You can hunt me down on COLOURlovers here.

Oh, I forgot some samples.


Color by COLOURlovers

Color by COLOURlovers

Color by COLOURlovers

Color by COLOURlovers

Color by COLOURlovers

Color by COLOURlovers

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.

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.

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. -___-