Games Done Quick Withdrawal

It's that time of the year again, huh? Well all last week was the 2021 alliteration of a little charity marathon known as Summer Games Done Quick, and I (mostly) took off the week to watch it in full while storms ravaged the area around my home. My game rooms saw no activity and I effectively wrecked my sleep schedule sleeping late and waking up earlier than usual on certain nights, especially Monday Morning's Nintendo Entertainment System block.

Overall, SGDQ2021 was a good marathon and something that I got a lot of enjoyment and hype out of especially in these times even when some minor nitpicks forming over some of the choices made for the event and the game selection. At the end of a day it was a great set with both some popular titles, some not-so-popular titles in my head I've been wondering when the Games Done Quick marathons would return to being in-person as they have from the very first marathon all the way to Awesome Games Done Quick 2020. With the past three marathons having to adapt the "Online" moniker and make runners run the game from their homes, it effectively killed the live crowds that crowded up behind the runner(s) and their couch and reacted to every single little thing the runner accomplished. Do some crazy stunt? Lots of applause. Pull off a successful clip? Thunderous cheers. Some lame joke is told through a donation? A chorus of booing. All that is lost when you make the event a strictly-online event but unlike your typical convention that could do only online panels as a result of the pandemic, the main part of the event (the speedrunning) is still fully intact, even though SGDQ2020 did have its fair share of technical issues as a result of the online shift.

If there's one notable element in the transition to online that benefited the event as a whole, it allows for a far greater and broader selection of runners from across the world that could participate in the event without having to deal with the time and cost to travel to the event physically, especially if the runner was based outside of the U.S. In short, it's a degree of accessibility that wasn't there in the marathons before SGDQ 2020 Online and it made me wonder if this aspect could be preserved for when the live marathons return, involving a combination of both live runs and online runs. The former would still be the main focus, including the single camera showing the runner playing the current game, the couch behind them, and the audience watching and reacting to the action unfolding on the projector screens not shown on the camera. Online runs, on the other hand, would continue the format used by the three online marathons but would swap out the runner's webcam for a shot of the crowd like what's used in live runs, only in this case the runner's webcam would be positioned in the corner of the view. Alternate views would be needed for runs involving multiple runners but at its core it would be a format friendly for both live runs and online runs.

For real though, the marathon was nuts. Day 1 was strong right out of the gate and I think it was the best Day 1 of the online era of marathons, Days 2 and 3 had some solid runs, Day 4 was swallowed up mostly by a run of Golden Sun: the Lost Age that remained a fun watch all the way through and has its fair share of great runs before and after it, and it only got better in the final three days. Day 5 brought the chaos that was the Silly Games Done Quick block, the Sonic block, two runs focused on the DLC for Doom Eternal, and a Generation V Pokémon race. Day 6 was the sole TAS run of the marathon followed by two very, very hype rhythm game showcases (separated by a run of Breath of the Wild), and Day 7 was the unofficial, day-wide "Nintendo block" co-starring Super Meat Boy Forever (the game that got advertised again and again during the GDQ marathons for years) and two Souls games, concluding at the very end with Kingdom Hearts II. Of course not every run was a hit for me, considering some of the games I did see felt very samey (all the first-person games I noticed in the late hours throughout the marathon and the four hours of five Castlevania games in a row on Day 3). The Mega Man runs all being on separate days in lieu of a full block and two of them taking place in the early mornings instead of the usual late morning/early-to-mid afternoons used by major franchises was also a move that I didn't agree with either, though at least it was an improvement over SGDQ 2020's single Mega Man run.

At the end of the day it was nice being able to take the week off and enjoy some games and now I'll be trying to get back to my regular schedule and find the motivation I desperately need in these times.

The Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart Custom Skincolor Extravaganza

Going into this article, you’re probably wondering where did I get an idea like this from? Well, back in 2019 I spent quite a bit of time making custom mock-up colors for Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart and I teamed up with a user in the game’s community named Xkower to produce Collabcolors, a community-made color pack for Vanilla that operated as its own .exe. However, you could not bring these skincolors online into net games unless others also had the .exe and players without it would be displayed with the wrong skincolors. Vanilla Sonic Robo Blast 2 would give server hosts the ability to add on extra skincolors in Version 2.2.5 through scripts, whenever they be traditional skincolors, wild and wacky skincolors meant to be jokes, and a whole slew of animated skincolors.

Before jumping into the project, it's important to note that the game is capable of displaying up to 256 colors and cannot (outside of OpenGL mode) display any color outside that palette. Since Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart was built from version 2.1, various changes that would occur in the palette to expand the versatility of the colors featured in the jump from version 2.1 to version 2.2 don't exist. However, you can use a program called SLADE to convert graphics in the 2.2 palette into the one featured in 2.1 and vice versa, and the alterations will be immediately noticeable. For instance, this is what happens if you take the 2.2 palette and convert it to 2.1:

*Pale yellows, depending on the shade, are converted into light yellow, light orange, or light beige.

*Rose pinks become pale pinks, matching the ones already in the game.

*Seafoam greens become light cyans on the lighter end and teals on the darker end.

*Royal purples are converted into light blues or dark magentas depending on the hue.

*The four brightest shades of magenta are lost- the brightest of them becoming might blue and the rest turning into the lightest shade of magenta available in a palette.

It gets a little better if you take the 2.1 palette and convert it into 2.2, with the only change worth noting is the different type of teal used between the two palettes. But anyways with the above notes in mind I began to backport the more unique colors from vanilla Sonic Robo Blast 2 version 2.2 into Kart. The list of converted skin colors, in addition to the customs mentioned further down the article can be found in this gallery. As everything in this portion was a “Vanilla” color by technicality, I opted to merge them with Kart’s vanilla list:

1. White
2. Bone (A shade of grey not in Kart, in Vanilla it serves as a counterpart to Silver)
3. Silver
4. Grey
5. Carbon (A shade of grey not in Kart, in Vanilla it serves as a counterpart to Nickel)
6. Nickel
7. Black
8. Jet (A darker version of Skunk in Vanilla instead of being a dark steel blue)
9. Skunk
10. Fairy
11. Popcorn
12. Artichoke
13. Pigeon
14. Azure (A light grey/steel blue mix instead of a teal/purple mix)
15. Slate (Fills the upper half of the color ramp with greys instead of lighter steel blues)
16. Bluebell (Resembles a lighter version of Kart’s “Jet” color)
17. Sepia
18. Beige
19. Walnut
20. Brown
21. Leather
22. Bronze (Vanilla’s version of the color Leather, with dark browns that fade into a dark grey)
23. Tan (Uses the pale yellows which do not convert successfully to Kart, so light orange is used)
24. Salmon
25. Pink
26. Rose
27. Brick
28. Cinnamon
29. Ruby
30. Raspberry
31. Cherry
32. Red
33. Crimson
34. Maroon
35. Lemonade
36. Flame
37. Scarlet
38. Ketchup
39. Dawn
40. Peachy (Has a more dominant use of peach and pinks compared to Kart’s Peach color)
41. Quail (A light brown that fades into lavender)
42. Sunset
43. Copper (Has a more “rustic” look compared to Kart’s version)
44. Creamsicle
45. Apricot (A shade of orange with peach for the highlights)
46. Orange
47. Pumpkin
48. Rosewood
49. Burgundy
50. Tangerine
51. Peach
52. Caramel
53. Cream
54. Gold
55. Royal
56. Sandy (Resembles Royal but has a greater amount of brown in the color)
57. Bronze
58. Copper
59. Quarry
60. Yellow (Uses dark yellows in the back half of the ramp instead of golds)
61. Yellow
62. Mustard
63. Crocodile
64. Olive
65. Vomit
66. Garden
67. Lime
68. Lime (Resembles a lighter version of Handheld than is more yellow than green)
69. Peridot (A color that combines army greens with dark yellow to emulate lime green)
70. Apple (A shade of yellow-green in-between Vanilla’s Lime and Kart’s Handheld)
71. Handheld
72. Tea
73. Pistachio
74. Moss
75. Camouflage
76. Robo-Hood
77. Mint
78. Seafoam (A pale green that fades into teal, adjusted to give the former more exposure)
79. Green
80. Pinetree
81. Forest (A darker green in comparison to Pinetree)
82. Emerald
83. Swamp
84. Dream
85. Plague
86. Algae
87. Caribbean
88. Azure
89. Cyan (Retrofitted into a successor to Vanilla 2.1’s teal color, uses color 247 to sell the effect)
90. Aqua
91. Teal
92. Cyan
93. Wave (A light blue that fades into a dark purple, converted to Magenta)
94. Icy (A lighter Jawz)
95. Jawz
96. Cerulean
97. Navy
98. Cerulean (A dark navy blue darker than the above two)
99. Platinum
100. Slate
101. Steel
102. Thunder
103. Rust
104. Wristwatch
105. Jet
106. Sapphire
107. Periwinkle
108. Blue
109. Blueberry
110. Nova
111. Pastel
112. Vapor (Similar to Wave, but uses light blues to make the color appear more purple)
113. Purple (Doesn’t use magentas in Vanilla, unlike the “Purple” in Kart)
114. Moonslam
115. Ultraviolet
116. Dusk
117. Bubblegum
118. Purple
119. Neon (A darker version of Kart’s Purple color, known as Indigo in Kart Z)
120. Plum (Darker version of the below color)
121. Violet (Resembles Fuchsia but uses dull pinks to transition into the magentas)
122. Raspberry (Fades into magenta at the end instead of being a shade of red)
123. Fuchsia
124. Toxic
125. Mauve
126. Lavender
127. Byzantium
128. Pomegranate
129. Lilac (A lighter version of Pomegranate)
130. Lilac

Most colors in Vanilla, excluding the very dark colors, end with a dark color of the color’s shade. In Kart, all but the lightest colors fade into pure black (color 31). You may also notice that several of the ported Vanilla 2.2 skincolors share their names with several of the Kart colors. No color between the two are 100% alike but to go over exactly how all the skincolors with the same name compare would take too much time out of this read, and the skin olors that were chosen to be ported over were the ones that I felt offered something new to the table or showed just how a skincolor like Peridot would work in Kart without the necessary colors they used in 2.2's palette in the ramp.

Of further note is Color 247, the bright neon cyan or teal. This color is never used in SRB2 and SRB2Kart’s internal graphics at any point, only seeing use to render transparency in textures in vanilla SRB2 and on skincolors in SRB2 2.1 and 2.2 (though in only one instance each). Meanwhile, Kart does not use color 247 for any skincolors by default, only using the darker teals that occupy Colors 220 through 223. It is still possible to see the color in-game if entering a colored sector that turns the sprites to a bright teal such as the underwater section of Paradise Hill Zone and through modding, players can add skins and sprites that use color 247. If the EXE is modded directly, skincolors that use color 247 can be added and will apply onto character skins without issue.

Still, there came the name conflicts and having to rename them all. The names chosen were influenced by some of the colors from the original Collabcolors, as well as the Mega Paint Drive (my spiritual successor for collabcolors) created for Vanilla and in one case, Super Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart Z. Furthermore to ensure compatibility with the hundreds of characters in Kart already, none of the preexisting Kart colors had their names altered or ramps changed, and no character from the default cast or Bonuschars would have their prefcolors changed for consistency.

• Jet -> Ink
• Azure -> Ghost
• Slate -> Marble
• Copper -> Rust
• Yellow -> Banana
• Lime -> Sunflower
• Cyan -> Frost
• Cerulean -> Peacock
• Purple -> Gemstone
• Raspberry -> Magenta
• Lilac -> Thistle

Following reconfiguring the Vanilla colors to better work alongside Kart’s, it was time to adapt the skincolors from Collabcolors. In the end, the ones I ultimately went with were colors I considered unique enough from both the Vanilla and Kart skincolor selections or had some other niche to warrant their inclusions. Understandably, this would mean a lot of colors from Collabcolors would be scrapped or receive major changes, and the colors that I did pick were the ones I considered “useful”, and which ones would work the best with custom characters in mind. In order to avoid dragging the number of colors through the roof, owing to the smaller number of available spots for extra colors in the .exe compared to Vanilla and the presence of the Vanilla recreations. The final list of add-on colors became:

1. Diamond
2. Raven
3. Chocolate
4. Earthworm
5. Yogurt
6. Pearl
7. Strawberry
8. Soda
9. Bloodcell
10. Mahogany
11. Fiery
12. Spice
13. King
14. Hot Dog
15. Carnation
16. Candy
17. Nebula
18. Steampunk
19. Amber
20. Carrot
21. Cheese
22. Dune
23. Brass
24. Lemon
25. Casket
26. Khaki
27. Light
28. Peppermint
29. Laser
30. Asparagus
31. Army
32. Crow
33. Chartreuse
34. Slime
35. Leaf
36. Evergreen
37. Tropic
38. Iguana
39. Spearmint
40. Patina
41. Lakeside
42. Electric
43. Turquoise
44. Pegasus
45. Comet
46. Lightning
47. Vacation
48. Ultramarine
49. Depths
50. Dianne
51. Exotic
52. Snow
53. Moon
54. Lunar
55. Onix
56. Lapis
57. Orca
58. Storm
59. Midnight
60. Cotton Candy
61. Cyber
62. Amethyst
63. Iris
64. Gothic
65. Grape
66. Indigo
67. Magenta
68. Disco
69. Mulberry
70. Boysenberry
71. Plum
72. Elderberry

The original plan called for 70 new skincolors but an extra two snuck in. The final result at least meets my specifications and 102 extra colors along with the original 100 is plenty enough. So then comes the tricky part: Getting everything into the game proper. Vanilla 2.2 has support for custom colors through addons- Kart, as you likely know, doesn’t. Thus, the only way to add the skincolors at this time would be to modify the .exe while steering away from changing/resorting the values of the skincolors. The only solution I could decide on would be appending the new skincolors to the end of the list after Lilac, starting with Bone from the Vanilla recreations and ending with Elderberry in the customs, keeping them as is from there or using the M_MoveColorBefore and M_MoveColorAfter functions in Vanilla to re-order the new skincolors alongside the 100 Kart colors while preserving their values.

The last bit I’ll mention (since this article is getting rather long) is the invcolor, short for Invert Color. This is the skincolor’s opposite on the RBY spectrum. Red uses Green, Blue uses Orange, Yellow uses Cyan, Black uses White, etc. This doesn’t apply to every skincolor, for instance Ketchup (a red skincolor) uses Mustard (a yellow skincolor) since they’re part of the same “condiments“ theme. This aspect of the invcolors would carry over to these new skincolors as well, either using the color’s direct opposite or another color based on the same theme. Vanilla 2.2 lets you pick which shade of the invcolor is used (out of 16), while Kart only has one shade (using the sixth color from the top of the ramp).

Any-who, that’s all I really got on this without dragging on the length of the post. I wanted to make this post and all the accompanying mock-ups more for the “What-If” novelty than anything else. Even if nothing comes out of these ideas I wanted to get them out into the wild anyways and I’ll admit it was fun re-creating all these in the time that it took.

The Birthday Followup Post

It is now a few days after my 27th birthday and it feels like very little, if anything, changed. The pandemic is finally starting to evaporate in my area and things are starting to return to normal, but I still don't have any plans to make appearances at major conventions hours away from my residence as I have from 2016 to 2019. That said as the summer starts to close in late July or even August or early September I would like to get back to meeting with friends IRL and find other ways to get some of the motivation I lost in the middle of the pandemic back.

I'm saying this since after having stalled getting it for Christmas, I finally own an authentic copy of Game Maker Studio 2 on both my Macintosh and my PC. However, I don't feel like I'm ready for the program just yet, in part due to the aforementioned lack of motivation brought on by the pandemic, me not really being sure where to start learning the ins and outs of the program, some extra bits of setup, and me trying to improve my conditions and physical health IRL. You could also say that since this is unfamiliar territory for me I'm hesitant to just jump straight in, especially since I've been more accustomed to being in the director role than coding the project itself, considering the relative age of most of my concepts. Then again the tutorials exist so I might as well do a bunch of those.

I also have a couple of minor projects left that I'd like to get to beforehand before I decide to jump into Game Maker full force, namely my first piece of full art since September 2019 as well as the last big update to my Sonic Robo Blast 2 skin color pack. And that's not getting into the many character bios and game concepts I'd like to document and share parts of before I start considering developing them proper.

Other plans of mine include planning out a full website to better house my works and conceptual ideas as well as launch a new, more smartly-run Discord server. Even if the former ever were to come into existence, this blog will still remain intact and I'll continue to use it into the foreseeable future for things not related to content that would be on the site and Aozora as a whole. But for now, this blog will remain my central hub. For anyone interested in my original characters, I will eventually get started with building up my Toyhouse with smaller/abridged bios for everyone as an alternate to the Aozora Wiki.

That's all for now, See you in July!

Maze-Kun (PC-88) Game Rip

With the end of May upon us, I thought I'd go and post a soundtrack I ripped earlier in the month just so there's some activity in times where it's really, really hard to be productive with the state the world is in (even if my home state is making progress).

This is Maze-Kun, a puzzle game from 1989 that has a heavy Sokoban feel. It was released on both the PC-88 and MSX2, but as the MSX2 version is really hard to find, this rip focuses on the more easily-accessible PC-88 version, containing all seven tracks. In all honesty it's not exactly something I'd call "my favorite" when it comes to game music and the less I can say about... whatever you'd call the Pro Level theme, the better. Needless to say if I was ripping these for personal use like what I've been doing on my original Mac for a decade, it would just be the Beginner level theme and the title screen, however for the sake of providing a complete product and especially now that I'm posting these online, I'm pretty much required to do a full rip no matter my personal opinion on one or more of the tracks.

As usual you can grab the entire thing at this link.

Game Devving: Where to Start?

So this June I'll be grabbing a copy of Game Maker for my birthday in the hopes that I can learn how to code games in it and come closer to producing the full-fledged and massive Aozora's Adventure games. Despite this it'll take quite a fair bit to get the Aozora stuff going and before then I'd prefer to focus on projects that are more easily solo-able or don't require as much of a large team of people assisting in the games to have a chance of finishing. That said I likely won't be jumping in immediately and just spend some time messing with it occasionally due to things like pandemic fatigue and a few other factors still looming over since last year in addition to some other projects.

I've assembled a small list of possible projects that could be good starts for my programing adventures, some with sample mockup screens or sprites.

• Super Mario Bros. Extra Special: A full-on remake of the NEC-PC8801 and Sharp X1 title Super Mario Bros. Extra Special with a whole helping hand of additional features including the ability to play the game as if it were converted to the NES (similar to how Super Mario Bros. Crossover did it and not at all like the NES port that outright butchers it due to engine limitations). Alongside remade physics to make it play closer to Super Mario Bros, you can play the game as Luigi with his SMB2J moveset intact, with PC-88 (with actual blue pixels for sprites, plus dithered or not), Sharp X1, and NES graphic options, more imaginative uses of Special's exclusives and items, and a bonus world to discover.

• Mega Man Puyo Puyo: It's pretty much in the title: A Puyo Puyo game set in the classic Mega Man universe. Based on Puyo Puyo on the NES, Puyo Puyo Tsu and Super Nazo Puyo, you ascend the Wily Tower as Mega Man, take on a lineup of Robot Masters one after the other as Proto Man, or solve a variety of Nazo challenges as Bass. Of course it's in the series' iconic 8-bit artstyle and the Puyo would be redrawn to match the Mega Man sprites (the ones pictured here are a mockup). To emulate the color limitations of the NES/Famicom, the Puyo colors can be set to be based on the characters currently dueling and the stage background instead of the default colors, and running different character/stage pairs results in different combos.

• Diamonds and Even More Diamonds: Perhaps the one "fangame" project concept I have on the mind that requires a bit more explanation; it may be more familiar to those of you that grew up with a Macintosh in the 90's as the PC versions were vastly overshadowed by many other games. You play as a ball and ascend/descend automatically while you control the horizontal movement of the ball, changing colors to destroy bricks and eventually breaking apart diamond blocks. This would be a large expansion to that core concept, bringing in both new levels and objects in addition to ports of the original levels from both Diamonds (and More Diamonds) and Diamonds for Kids. It would also come with an editor much like the original game for players to create and share their own levels.
• Paku-Chan: A Pac-Man clone and likely the first product to feature Aozora's Adventure characters, in this case Paku-Chan and Ball-Kun. It would replicate the original Pac-Man's game structure and design but feature loads of extra content in the form of new mazes each with their own high score tables, characters with fluid movement, and an expansive and detailed maze/mazeset editor. The enemy AI would also get an update from the original to be more modern such as a little more randomization but not as much as Ms. Pac's ghosts to deter players from going after patterns and no more ability to phase through the player on rare occasions. The ghosts also undergo different appearances as the player progresses.

These would come somewhat later due to their complexity and for being, well, mostly Aozora-focused:

• Otaku-Ball: A project with quite the history behind it (being a celebration/mashup of different Breakout games) and mostly already existing in LÖVE, but with the project sitting in limbo for a few years and coming out differently than some of my original plans for it, I'm considering a reboot the project with some new character art, new music and sound effects, a new and more colorful UI, some new block types and enemies based on other breakout titles than just the first Arkanoid and Electranoid, including a gallery of boss fights.
• Aozora's Adventure: The actual first Aozora title and a much different beast than what it was originally envisioned as 10+ years ago. It was stripped down heavily, becoming a NES-style game and a homage to many different titles released for it and the Famicom. It features gameplay reminiscent of Super Mario Bros. 3, a large variety of level themes, enemy encounters styled after Kirby and Mega Man, and a lineup of unique bosses to face. Perhaps the biggest change to the gameplay system beyond the more competent enemies is the B button changing from activating your character's run command to throwing a punch-punch-kick combo by default, or performing one of several actions depending on the transformation you obtain. There are also simple fighting game-style commands you can input (similar to later Kirby games) to perform different attacks per transformation.

• Rock-Aozora: The "other" first Aozora title. While Aozora's Adventure is a Mario clone, Rock-Aozora is a Mega Man clone but with a few unorthodox movement options added on- namely the ability to freely aim your shots in eight directions as well as crouch to dodge certain attacks without having to commit to a slide. It also contains some very powerful special weapons, some of which were changed quite a bit since the original "pitch" I wrote ten or so years ago. It might be preceded by a simple three-level Mega Man fangame to test the waters of making Mega Man projects considering there's at least... several other Rock-Aozora games I'm planing to make afterwards.

I don't really have much of anything else to add, in part since I'd rather not overwhelm myself with ideas considering how much time I plan to spend on Aozora alone once I get the game-making process going. Plus the task of writing down everything to prep each project and being able to eventually lead one with multiple contributors (whenever they be coders, sprite artists, level designers, testers, etc.) with myself still serving as the main driving force and main programer/level designer of the project. Especially so with highly ambitious game ideas like Aozora's Adventure III and the 3D-based ones.

Anyways I'm gonna leave it at that just so I'm not dedicating days to just one blog post.

The Long Stance on Conventions

Normally I would have a larger post planned out but it's not quite there yet. So in the meantime I'm making a different post to fill the void while I work on art and possibly prep another blogpost on some plans for when "gamedev season" begins.

In what feels like a repeat of last year, conventions are currently in an interesting place. Due to the ongoing pandemic last year continuing into this year and the vaccines just starting to make the rounds, conventions are still being postponed and canceled. As of this writing, two of the four major cons I usually attend announced they would either be converting to an online format or canceling entirely. And to be honest even if they were held in person I would still not want to go with all the new cases flying out left and right.

For me, a convention isn't really a convention if I can't attend it IRL since it's impossible to translate an entire convention into an online format. Conventions are about the social experience, the dealer's room and artist alley, the cosplay, and the panels. Most online conventions, as I've seen them do across 2020 and the first several months of 2021, can only replicate the panels aspect of a con (with one attempt at a virtual artist's alley I've seen) and if you're someone like me who's more into the interactive elements, these online cons sadly just can't capture the same magic.

Looking back, I always attended cons first and foremost to meet and support artists, meet up with friends that I otherwise wouldn't be able to see, and explore the settings of each convention. You cannot come up with an even greater/cooler landmark to host a convention than the Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken (I will miss you so much), the Atlantic City Convention Center, the Cradle of Aviation, and the Javits Center. Most of the panels I would see had a greater purpose than just the content on show- in those cases it was to support friends or an internet personality I really liked or otherwise supported. They were an extension to the convention trip, not the trip itself, is what I'm saying.

Either way I don't expect to get back to a convention for a good while, and if I do it'll be something local or smaller scale that won't really be worth bringing up until it becomes safe enough in my terms to return to a big-name convention. Plus there's a few things I need to attend to first in regards to my physical form which has been suffering since the pandemic and lockdowns were initiated. If anything comes up regarding major conventions, I'll let you know otherwise.

Too Much Karting

I think it's pretty obvious by now that I latched onto Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart for all the time since it came out. Though I've stopped playing online due to various circumstances I'd rather not get into, I'm still working in the background on custom racers to fill some stat blocks that aren't occupied by the base roster and what stat combinations aren't occupied by it.

Last month I released Wayne, the main protagonist of Hylics 2, after having started on it last August and afterwards getting sidetracked by both re-making my OC's (with more to come) and well, you know the other thing that happened around the time. What drove me to finish him earlier than I had thought was the occasional response/message on Discord of people looking forward to seeing him done (and to those that did, thanks for the motivation). Even then I still have five, maybe six other racers on the agenda, and maybe a few others on the backlot that I started on or am waiting until I complete a few more main racers before I tackle them proper. Recently I decided to get back into the swing of doing art since I've been sitting off doing it since late 2019, and since I've been feeling burnout and the desire to do something else (including character bios) I decided to take another break from making kart racers. Whenever it's a full break or a semi-hiatus, I don't know.

Now you're wondering, what the heck else do I have for this game? Well I had to significantly scale back my plans following the hard drive failure and the realization that eventually I need to do something else, including maybe gamedev stuff at long last, so I trimmed down the list of characters on the agenda so there's a chance I'll be able to call myself done with SRB2Kart when it comes to new racers.

• Berecca and Van, from Ninjala, are still the next in the queue, and with the decision to redo their hair so I can pump more detail into them, they'll understandably take a little more time than I initially thought including their signpost arts (I seem to struggle with them especially but I'll think of something). Stats-wise I'm sort of torn on making both of them focused on raw speed, so there's a chance one of them could be focused on acceleration and take the 2 speed, 4 weight slot meant for another racer that I plan to make sometime after as a "special send-off" to Version 1 barring character remakes and touchups.
• Solid Snake and Raiden, from the Metal Gear Solid series, are the other main duo for the pack that I've wanted to get to since at least early 2019 and you all likely know by now from previous update posts about Kart. These two are by far my biggest reasons for wanting to cut a lot of my further ideas for Kart and since they're both reasonably detailed and would almost reach up to Dr. Dude in height, I'd like to get every other major racer done before moving onto these two so I can pool what's left of my time with V1 into them (and if they bleed into V2, no big deal).
• Gil from Tower of Druaga is the only other significant racer that I want to get out for v1 and are comfortable with mentioning here. He's about 45% done with the base head fully drawn out, but lack of feedback on him especially compared to Wayne led to him being saved for later, and then when Wayne was done I didn't exactly have it on me to resume him at that moment.
• Roger, Zax, and Tan-Tan are still planned for V1 and they'll be worked on alongside other racers- Roger's wings will finally be implemented into his sprites and Zax will get a more robotic-looking (and rather large) arm on his left arm among a few other minor details to put in some more detail.

Of course the rest is TBD but at this rate consider these plus a few remakes down the line and some other surprise additions. V2 prep is also being considered (as in, the new palette and lookback frames- the new kart body isn't available until it does release) but not a priority.

Emulation and the Spriters' Resource Aftermath

I think most people by now know that there was a time in the 2010's when I was uploading new sprite sheets to The Spriters Resource for what can be described as "forever". It got to a point where it overtook my personal art and character renders and it would continue that dominance until SRB2Kart happened.

During the time I was chugging out sprite sheets, there was one platform that I ripped the most from than any other. Of course I’m taking about the Nintendo Entertainment System, launched in 1983 in Japan as the Famicom and two years later in the rest of the world. The reasoning behind it will become apparent as I go into detail. You see, my first modern computer since having been stuck on otherwise outdated Windows machines was an iMac for Christmas 2008. While good for productivity and content creation, playing games on a Mac, including emulators of old consoles, is not as reliable as one would think. Emulators on Macs don’t have the level of support and options they do on Windows and the pool of emulators available aren’t as… functional as their Windows equivalents.

Except for one emulator, that is. The Macintosh version of Nestopia, produced by Richard Bannister, was the first emulator for an old system that I had used that wasn’t on my sister’s PC. Even though I was very familiar with my cousin’s emulators for the longest time since he got an emulation-focused Windows XP computer in the second half of 2008 thanks to my uncle, this iteration of Nestopia built for Mac OS X changed everything for me and it still stuck with me even after I got a new PC for my own in Christmas 2010, if only because it had a available and robust for the time rewind feature allowing me to play through harder games without awkwardly stopping to make save states during hard levels or bosses. I played the snot out that emulator, discovering all sorts of relatively under-looked games, Japanese-exclusives, and ROM hacks. And most importantly, it (alongside Mari0) helped kickstart me into a craze of bombarding The Spriters’ Resource with sheet after sheet, my preferred consoles being the NES, Game Boy/GBC, Arcade, and PC/MSDOS due to how easy it is to rip from those respective machines most of the time. In hindsight though, some of the sheets I would contribute, especially early on, were not really organized that well or didn’t make the “bounding boxes” obvious enough. Some sheets did get updated, but many I only left in their initial states.

So what drove me to stop? Well, even with all the games out there that haven’t been ripped that I've taken interest in, the act of game ripping got to the point where I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for sheets I could quick whip up without having to finish a game all the way through as I had done for Lagrange Point on the Famicom as an example. Eventually I climbed to 1,000 sheets and next to everything that I wanted to rip from has been ripped, whenever it be one sheet or several from the same title. Not every sheet survived, especially the ones that were ripped from prototypes (the Spaceworld 1997 Pokémon Gold and Silver demo sheets, for example) when a new rule was passed to blacklist and remove any sheets relating to them following the Nintendo Giga-leaks in 2020.

By far my number 1 reason for stopping sprite outputs was, you guessed it, SRB2Kart. While I was able to form a balance between the two projects in 2019 in addition to finishing a character render that had been in production for a good while, by 2020 the racers I was producing (including de-motivation and burnout from the pandemic) demanded so much effort on my part that I had to pool everything into working on them just so I had a chance of some day being able to finish everyone on the personal todo list and move onto other projects. I still played the occasional emulated game but it was more to kill time and not to find content to rip. And once the “great hard drive failure of 2020” happened on my Mac, not only did I lose a good few WIP rips, I didn’t bother with playing NES games at all on my PC during the time I was stuck without a Mac and setting up the new one I got late October because I had long-overlooked the rewind features on the PC emulators I had at the time (Nestopia on PC requires it to be enabled, unlike the Mac version where it’s enabled by default, and FCEUX requires you to load a .lua script every time you want to use it and plasters an awkward “REWIND POWER” message on the top of the screen at all times). In short, having rewind in an emulator made it more accessible to play and undo mistakes and dumb errors compared to savestates (especially in the bad games) and a lot of these PC and Windows-based emulators hide it away.

Currently I have no idea if or when I’ll ever go back to sprite-ripping. Considering I have 1.4k sheets total ripped, give or take a few, I should be better off finding new hobbies to keep me occupied or going back to old ones, at least until I feel like returning to doing full character artwork again which should be hopefully later in the year if all goes well and things start escaping the pressure of the pandemic. In the mean time I’ll get to writing some character bios for my Aozora troops that I’ve been long neglecting.

Tang Tang (GBA) Original Sound Vision

After spending most of the past few days burned out on stuff to do that isn't just mindless grinding, I turned to collecting and binging video game soundtracks to fill the void. And with that came to mind another game I had ripped long ago in (almost) its entirety only to lose the rip to the "great hard drive failure of September 2020".

The subject is Tang Tang, the Game Boy Advance adaptation of DSL's arcade game of the same name. It stars four characters clad in different-colored armors in a Solomon's Key clone, traveling to five different themed planets to gather rings and kill five copy-pasted bosses. The Game Boy Advance version was outsourced the GameVision Corporation and keeps the general aesthetic and gameplay of the arcade version but features all new levels, simplifies some of the graphics, removes the option for two-player co-op, and remixes the entire soundtrack into a more bombastic and lively series of compositions.

Of course I got the Game Boy Advance version of the game when it was new, bringing it and my stash of Game Boy games with me everywhere I went. Karate lessons, relatives' homes, and even to Florida. Of course being a conversion of a coin-operated game with nothing extra in the package does lend itself to a rather mixed package (the bosses in particular are a pain to fight and just amount to finding a spot to camp and blindly shoot until the boss drops if it doesn't decide to run you into a wall first) but if you like straight-to-the-point arcade/arcade-style games it's worth a look, if not the GBA version then at least the arcade version (even if I prefer the music of the GBA version tenfold).

As for the rip itself, it has the five main world themes plus two jingles and two other themes (the title screen and ending). The only real causality is the ending theme- as the beginning is obstructed by the sound of popping fireworks, only the looped version can be fully recorded, and I know no one wants a sudden abrupt skip to occur in the music (or dead silence). Not that the ending theme missing the non-looping section is a big deal anyways and considering the odd sound hardware Tang Tang uses compared to other, more popular titles on the platform I doubt it'll ever receive a full, complete recording.

Anyways, you can download the complete soundtrack here.

Ms Pac-Man Twin, six years later

So it has come to my understanding that a little game called Ms. Pac-Man Twin finally got a dump after I had discovered the game and made mockups back in 2015 of what the game would have looked like had it been applied to more authentic hardware. I say that because the actual version takes quite a couple liberties with the source game.

To no one's surprise, it's a bootleg running off of knockoff hardware with a daughterboard slapped on, and many elements of the original game were straight up butchered or otherwise lost to SUSILU's attempts at getting a second Ms. Pac into the game.

Perhaps the most notable difference is how... different it feels to play. While you can play it solo, the experience practically begs to be played with a friend- each with a set of Pac-dots to themselves. And the round doesn't end until all of them are gone. Heck, a player can even steal the dots of the other player if they finish early to speed up the process (even earning double the points for eating the dots not of their color!). Its definitely got a more competitive edge and it does it far more confidently than Tengen's versions of Ms. Pac-Man through the early 90's, if only because players don't have collision with each other and dying doesn't force both players to respawn in a process that takes ten seconds. Fruit and intermissions are also MIA, in part due to the bootleggers deciding to stick in a fancy new title screen that overwrites all the necessary graphics and a longer death animation.

The other big noticeable difference is the sprite of the player characters themselves. For whatever reason, Ms. Pac received a whole new sprite-set edited from Pac-Man's sprites and they're... freaky to say the least. Smaller, single-pixel eyes, a larger bow, and going completely over on the lipstick department.

Of course being the sprite-artist I am (at lest, in a way) I tried to fix up the sprites to be a bit closer to the originals. Aside from the title screen, the revised HUD, and the new "double dot" tiles, there's no other custom spritework in the game.

With the game's most prominent elements covered, there was another thing I discovered upon looking at images of the game's title screen across the web and it may give some clues as to why the board was so rare. Take a look at the title screen one more time, particularly the bottom right. Notice the green "18" printed in the corner. That number never seems to change no matter what. Compare that to the oldest-recorded video of the game taken on Robbie's homepage:

The ones digit is cut off by the monitor's edges but here you can make out a 0 in the lower right corner in the tens digit. Likely, the full number is 01-09.

And here we have a 16, cleanly visible from photos of a board that was sold on eBay last December. If my understanding of this is correct, then these numbers would indicate the build number associated with each board- meaning the board the current MAME dump is associated with is Board #18, the one from the eBay auction is Board #16, and the one from Robbie's coverage is any board from #01 to #09.

With this, we may now know why Ms. Pac Twin was so rare to find and took almost three decades to get a dump: not only was it made in Argentina, South America in 1992/93, a time when Pac-Man bootlegs feel out of relevancy especially if you compare it to bootlegs like Hangly Man or Ms. Pac-Attack, the board had a very limited print run to boot, possibly having only twenty or so boards in circulation compared to the hundreds of thousands amassed by the more widely produced originals. It also never got its own dedicated machine and was stuck in generic cabinet after generic cabinet intended to be filled with other games, making it harder to spot and possibly leading to some confusing it for the original game.

So that's Ms. Pac-Man Twin, a charming little bootleg that I'm glad to finally play in an official capacity but I can't help but admit that I'm a bit underwhelmed, especially with the six years it took between me discovering the game and seeing it finally dumped and released. Then again it's a hack of a 40-year old arcade game so you can't expect too much.