A dream of extraordinary magnitude

There are message board topics and subjects that come up all the time and one that I keep running into is the coloring method of old comics. I used to have this really good link that went deep into the subject and mentioned how the Hulk and Iron Man dropped their gray colors due to printing issues. I lost that link long ago but I’ve found a few more. I think I’d have a better chance if I just stored ’em in this topic. In fact, I’ll make it a new category and do this for other topics I like to keep track of.

A Brief History of Color Separations by the Answer Man himself, Bob Rozakis.

Coloring Comic Books Before Computers – Parts One, Two and Three by Gary Scott Beatty

Categories: Comics, links to remember by PrimeOp
Tags: coloring

From the 1-UP Interview with Capcom’s Keiji Inafune

1UP: But is there any chance of an actual Shadow sequel?

KI: Maybe if we made something like the 300 movie. I’m just joking around, but that’s what we were thinking, some over-the-top violence.

1UP: So, basically Shadow of Rome minus the stealth elements.

KI: Yeah, hypothetically-speaking — we’re not planning this — but if we were going to make Shadow of Rome 2, we’d get rid of all the stealth elements and give all the violence you hurried through the stealth parts to get to. [Laughs]

At least there’s one designer that knows what we’re thinking. We need to print that up and send it to the rest of the game-making community. I’m not saying that no one likes stealth games, but most people that I talk to seem to hate it when developers shove a stealth scene into a non-stealth game. Boo that crap.

OH SNAP! CAMOUFLAGED OUTPOST!

Classic-Castle.com review of Camouflaged Outpost Lego set

When I was a kid, this was one of my most favorite sets. In one small set you got a mini-headquarters and an instant crew of Forestmen Lego figures. These days, you’d NEVER get such a small playset with so many minifigures. No, little green booger martians that can only bend at the waist don’t count as figures. If my old Lego collection hadn’t been wiped out, I’d look for the instructions online and rebuild it. As it is now, it’d be probably be a pain in the wallet trying to get all that stuff again on BrickLink and recreate it. The small black feather on the one minifig alone costs more than some sets now. Ouch. I’ll probably try to make my own version of that some day. Yeah, I know how sad that sounds.

Categories: Lego, Video Games by PrimeOp

So the big 7th Anniversary ScrollBoss bash is over. That chunky, green-and-black action-adventure game site was 7 years old last Thursday and I celebrated with daily updates from then ’til today. Damn, I’m tired. While nothing anniversary-specific was done, I pretty much just did what I usually do, but more of it. Added a ton more sprites, some sprite edits, fixed a few nagging layouts, threw in a small MUGEN stage and even fixed up a Beats of Rage conversion of Rolento that I started long ago. But of all the things I did during the celebration, my favorite has to be an update of the ‘Brawlstreet U.S.A. pagetop banner:

Click to see full size

Starring in that are a bunch of Capcom sprites altered to recreate a bunch of Beat-em-up video game stars who vary in levels of obscurity. Cody (Final Fight) puts his white T and blue jeans back on to rep for Capcom. Striker from “Bad Dudes” shows up to punch a ninja in his face and put in work for Data East. Jimmy Lee jumpkicks in the name of the Double Dragons and Techos of Japan/Atlas. Adam Hunter from the first Streets of Rage game checks in as Sega’s contribution to the cause. Blood, the big surprise of the banner, is the boxing member of the Cobras in Konami’s overlooked classic “Vendetta” arcade game. For fans of the game, he’s hitting the skinny guy that carries the knife and the basic thug with red pants lurks at the end of the picture. The guy in white and light blue is Thomas from what’s considered the original Beat-em-up: Kung-Fu Master. Purists may complain that I should have put him in his outfit from Vigilante, but I thought it’d blend in with the background too much. Barely visible is Rick Norton from my favorite underrated BEU series, Rushing Beat (Rival Turf, Brawl Brothers, and Peace Keepers in the U.S.) in rapid energy punch mode. This new version is a lot less Capcom-centric with the waiting enemies especially with Double Dragon’s Linda and Lopar/Rowper (complete with a oil drum in his hands!) waiting for their turn to jump in. For added spice, the graphitti is made from game logos and ScrollBoss site section logos. Of course, the scanlines are there to discourage sprite edit thievery. I’m a jerk like that.

As fun as all the anniversary stuff was to do, I’m glad it’s over so I can kinda rest. But all that banner did was inspire ideas for more banners like that, but with different genres. It’s no accident that the wrestling and ninja characters are missing from this banner…

Categories: ScrollBoss, Sprite Edits by PrimeOp

(What I was thinking while working on ScrollBoss stuff Sunday night)

I’m getting more stuff done for this 7th Anniversary thing than I thought. Maybe I can do something good after all. Hopefully I won’t have to put up with…

… an entire week of potentially computer-frying weather. Dammit.

Categories: ScrollBoss by PrimeOp

from Kotaku.com:

Honestly, up to this point, Smash Bros. Brawl hasn’t done much for me. Especially the pedestrian daily updates. As of today, though? OK, Nintendo, you got me. There’s an Animal Crossing stage in the game, and if you play a match at 8pm on a Saturday…yeah, you know how it goes down.
Smashville [Smash Bros Dojo]

That’s above and beyond the call of beauty. For those who’ve never played Animal Crossing, there’s this dog that… you know what? Trying to explain that game is like telling someone about a Monty Python sketch. Screw that. Just watch this video of the magic that happens in Animal Crossing on Saturday night. Check out what he says at the end and understand why K.K. Slider is the true king of the indy music scene.

Categories: Video Games by PrimeOp

The 7th anniversary of my video game fan site, ScrollBoss, is next week. I’ve been trying to get quick things to put together for a big update. I’d noticed that Google-searching ScrollBoss now only gets about 9 entries. I checked the “similar results” thing and felt better that a lot of the old things that’d pop up before show up in that. I think it’s related to my Google settings or something. But that’s when I noticed it.

See, ever since I first started it, putting ScrollBoss in a search engine would always ask if the user meant “scrollbars” instead. Makes sense, since no one was really using the term as a compound word. But now… it doesn’t ask that. You ask for ScrollBoss with Google, you get ScrollBoss. I’m sure it’s more of a sign that the place refuses to die than any sort of excellence. BUT STILL.

Categories: ScrollBoss by PrimeOp

I keep forgettin’ we’re not in love anymore to post about this crazy deal on Lego.com. Right now, you can get that big Arkham Asylum set at 50% off for $40 bones!

Arkham Asylum on Lego.com

I just ordered mine, so I can’t tell you how cool it is yet. What I do know is that the set comes with Batman in the movie outfit and some Bat-glider, Nightwing with a black motorcycle and trans-blue escrima sticks, the Riddler, the Scarcrow (there’s 2/13ths of your Legion of Doom right there), Poison Ivy (thankfully in her classic look and not her all-green look) and two prison guards that will probably be killed at the start of all your adventures. I used the El Cheapo shipping option (when don’t I?) so it’ll be a while before I get it. When I do, I’ll post pics. But even if you’re just thinking kinda/sorta/maybe on getting into the Lego Batman groove, just go get that now while it’s still there or you’ll be kicking yourself in the butt when it’s gone. Even though Riddler and Scarecrow will appear in new separate sets in a month or two, this is the only place I’ve seen Nightwing and Poison Ivy.

Categories: Comics, Lego by PrimeOp

In the early days of this blog was a Funky Friday, a day where I’d post links to music videos that’d either have a theme or not have a theme. Then I called it ‘Make the Music with your Blog” because I found someone else was using Funky Friday. But back in the first post ever was one of my favorite videos from one of my favorite groups: Whodini. Unfortunately, the video was deleted almost right after I linked to it. Hell, just about all of them were. That’s what killed the feature in the first place. After checking out the usual place, I found that someone uploaded it again. So I present it with what I said in the old post:

‘Funky Beat’ by Whodini
– When I was a kid, Whodini was my favorite group, period. I’ll eventually do an entire post on Whodini. For now, just dig the only music video on Earth to feature the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dinosaurs, multiple chef hats (a true primal element of comedy), the ‘Funky Beat puppet’ and Theodore Huxtable.

Much respect to the uploader for allowing future generations to see the glory of the Funky Beat Puppet. “FUNKY BEAT! FUNKY BEAT!!!”

Categories: Hip-Hop, Music Posts by PrimeOp

… because you can beat someone over the head with them until they foam at the mouth. Or you can cook with them. I think all four can be sold for scrap, but don’t quote me on that. I apologize to all those who expected something deep to follow that post title, but you should really know better by now.

I have too many overlapping ideas and I need to get things neatly arranged before I upgrade my current level of crazy. As an act of posting something mostly to sort things out in my head, here’s the plans

ScrollBoss: 7th Anniversary – Damn, I’ve been working on this piece of crap for seven years? The hell? Luckily, this one didn’t sneak up on me as late as it usually does so I may be able to cook up something special for it. At the very least I’ll probably debut a lot of sprite edits that I’ve been holding out on. I’d like to do something MUGEN related to make a full-body barrage with MugenBoss, but I don’t know if I have time to do what I want to do. I’ll talk about stuff that I want to do in a future post here.ETA: July 19th, the 7th anniversary date.

Nutroll: the Illness – No, it’s not dead. As I was rewriting what would’ve happened on page 2 and after, I kept getting more insane ideas including many more to map out my comic book universe. The locations where the news reports will come from are fictional and one will end up being the so-called Metropolis (the main city) of the whole universe. In fact, the first location will become a recurring place including a place where M-Wave shops. Plus, various other things put a cramp in my draw-drive and I don’t want to draw and half-assed page for Nutroll.
ETA: After July 19th, the 7th anniversary date.

Graphic Generators – No idea on these either. Other PHP things that I’ve done with ScrollBoss and Illmosis caused me to learn new things that I’ll use on the beta generators (Beat-em-up screenshot and Vs. Screen). One big snag with the Vs. Screen generator was that every character needs a good portrait that fits the style. Thanks to that, the Vs. one may be on hold. I have a ton of ideas for other generators, so it’s no big whoop. Since these future ones will use things that both the Vs. and Beat-em-up fakers will use and need, I’ll just wait until I’ve turned every good function in the first ones into separate modules that each faker can borrow from. That way, I’ll just have to update each function once. I may spin this off into a separate site since some of these generators won’t be sprite based. For now, they might fully debut on the ScrollBoss site. BTW: the little custom logos I made including Guy’s over there are FUN to make. I can’t wait until it’s time to do those for my own characters.

Lego Section – I promised this for Illmosis long ago, but I still don’t think that I have enough to start an actual section like I did for G.I.JOE. I only have a few custom minifigs, 2 mini-vehicles (like Aquaman’s ride over there) and a boring building front, so I’m cool with just posting my work on my blog for now. My stuff isn’t good enough to show on any user-based Lego sites, so don’t expect that any time soon, either. ETA: I have no idea.

Categories: Illmosis, Lego, My characters, Nutroll by PrimeOp

My BrickLink order from Sk8rs Bricks came in today much earlier than I thought. That envelope was filled with pieces I needed to get that Lego building backdrop up to a presentable state. The whole point of building it was to be a backdrop for minifigures but schemes of how to improve it became more important than the custom minifigs.
I don’t have the high pockets or spare room of those cats you see making even the medium-sized set-ups, that backdrop is only three bricks thick. Yeah, those buildings on floor two are only for show right now. On the plus side, these modified plates that I used allow figures to easily stand on the building ledges. Thanks to Lego’s decision not to use that kind of window much, I’m still undecided on adding a 3rd level to it.

I don’t know what it was, but something about working with Lego seems to help the creative gears in my head turn. I think it’s one of the things that helped get me through that artist’s block crap I couldn’t shake for so long. I may have lost the ability to act stuff out with toys, but building with them still blows cobwebs off of brain cells that I use to draw. On a side note… I really need a better camera. Dang, those photos look kinda chunky.

Categories: Lego by PrimeOp