Painted Pixels

Let's Go Retro! Rescue Rangers (NES)

2013-05-18T22:44:27Z

Let's Go Retro! continues with Chip N' Dale Rescue Rangers for NES, which I divided up into two parts, both are below for your viewing pleasure. I got a little silly on the opening to the second part, forgive me!

Miiverse makes drawing fun!

2013-04-27T23:11:21Z

One of the big features of the Wii U is the Miiverse, a sort of social community built into the system that allows people to draw and write messages about different games and topics. I find it really fun to use, and unfortunately I think Nintendo has been really lax in getting the cool features of the Miiverse into the general gaming population heads.

But I'm not here to complain about Nintendo's marketing strategies! I'm here to show some of crappy Miiverse sketches! While I used to draw a lot, as I've gotten older it seems to get harder and harder for me to put pencil to paper. But with the simple drawing system of the Miiverse, I've found it really enjoyable to do quick sketches here and there. It's also so fun when people reply with another drawing, or when I reply to someone else's! And now that the Miiverse is accessible through browsers, getting screen captures of the Miivese just became easier! So with that, I present some of my Miiverse creations, in no particular order.

When I got to King Hippo while playing Punch-Out on the Virtual Console, I just had to post about the absurd rendition they made of King Hippo in the Captain N The Game Master cartoon, which found him colored blue for no reason!

When Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan) was released for Japanese Virtual Console, a lot of people took to the Japanese Miiverse to post in the Mother 2 forum asking for a US release. That is not at all surprising given how vocal Earthbound fans can be. What's surprising is that Nintendo listened and announced we'll be getting it in the US this year.

The great thing about communities for things like YouTube and Amazon Video is that you can pretty much draw anything and it can fit into the community. In this case, Fraggle Rock! 'cause I love Fraggle Rock, and that's reason enough to draw Wembly!

I drew this probably less than an hour after the "Zelda series" community opened. At some point a few days later it got popular with the Japanese crowd, getting quite a few "Yeah's", and a comment that I can't read. Cartoon Zelda Link for the win!

Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing (or whatever the heck that game is called) is surprisingly good, and fills the void nicely until we get Mario Kart U. My two favorite characters to use are Wreck-It Ralph and Vyse. What was really great about this post though, was one of the replies I got from Miiverse friend Waddles:

Nicely done!

Of course, people are making Miiverse creations that blow my stuff away, stuff that I truly do not know how they even make with the simple tools you're given. But I find it really fun to browse through people's posts, or spend a few minutes making a sketch of my own to put up. My Miiverse handle is Toad64, so if you've got a Wii U, make sure to add me as a friend! I love talking games on the Miiverse!

Let's Play Ducktales!

2013-04-27T00:00:03Z

So PAX East has come and gone, and while there was a ton of awesome stuff I saw and played and sat it on, one of the biggest surprises was Capcom announcing their HD remake of Ducktales. People, I can not stress enough how huge of a Ducktales fan I am, even to this day. I have the cartoons on DVD. I have Scrooge figures, reprints of Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge comics, the hardcover collections of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. I was quite excited by this news, and stood in line for quite a while for the chance to try it out.

So of course, when I got home, I just had to fire up the NES and play through the game again! Then I thought that maybe it would make for an interesting Let's Play video. I decided to try a live broadcast on Twitch.tv. The results were mixed, but basically, I don't think my computer is up to the task; I ran the game on an emulator, and the frame rate was horrible as my computer both tried to play this game, as well as stream it live. Maybe I can figure out a better setup in the future, but for now, I think I'll stick to recording first, then uploading later. But the result of my Let's Play is below. What do you think of this live format?

Arcadecraft: Impressions

2013-02-06T02:59:16Z

This week an indie game launched on Xbox's Xbox Live Indie Games channel that I'd been waiting for since the reveal trailer was posted some time ago. A sim game where you get to run an arcade during the 1980s? Sounds awesome! I've put a couple hours into the game at this point and can say that while it can be fun, it also has some issues that keep it from being great.

First let's talk about the good. From checking out the trailer you can tell that this is one good looking indie game, with great lighting and lovingly crafted arcade machines to buy for your arcade. The machines don't have animated screens, which is kind of a bummer, but they have a single screen on their monitors, different control panels and unique art for the cabinet and marquee. The sound effects for the machines are all unique, and as time goes on your arcade will get machines that have much more sophisticated sounds than their predecessors. You can purchase decorative touches for your arcade to personalize it, coloring the walls, floor tiles, buying neon to run the perimeter of the arcade, etc. These touches not only add some personal touches to your arcade, but help with the popularity as well, which your customers will decide by a number of factors, such as layout, cost, new machines, variety of genres, etc. It does a good job of feeling like a real arcade.

Probably my biggest complaint is that, from my limited time playing so far, it seems like if you play poorly, you're pretty much doomed, but if you play well, you'll be doing so well that it becomes a bit boring. My first time playing, I made some bad decisions, and ended my first year (1980) with only two machines left, and I wasn't making enough money to purchase a new machine and afford my rent. I restarted and decided to blow through my loan money early, buying lots of machines to earn money. It worked like gangbusters, and now I'm in the early part of 1984 and have more money than I know what to do with.

Apart from that, there's some things that could use some tweaking. One of the things your arcades popularity is decided on is your diversity of genres. The only place I can see the genre listing for a title is in the menu where you purchase the machine. That becomes a problem when you've got 30 machines in your arcade and want to see what genres you may need. It's especially annoying because there is an info window you can bring up for each machine, but it simply doesn't list that. There's occasionally events that happen to throw some variety into the game, but they're few, far-between and will repeat often. Things like power-outages that require you go double tap each machine to reactivate them before they'll start making money for you again, champion players asking to use your machine to set a record score (you won't make any money on the machine but you may get a huge surge in popularity), things like that.

Is it worth playing? If your love arcades then I'd say look into it. The developers were obviously passionate about the topic and it shows as you do things like kick out players that are roughing up your machines (before they outright break them!), or showing how home console games can effect the popularity of your machines. I've just started 1984, and the 'game crash' hit during the holiday, drastically hurting the popularity of my arcade. I'm interested in seeing if they go anywhere with that, but at the same time I'm already feeling a bit burned out on the game. It's only $3, however, so I definitely feel like I've gotten my money's worth, but can't help but feel that this game is SO CLOSE to something I want, but doesn't quite hit it.

I know it sounds like I'm being hard on it, but admittedly two evenings in a row I sat down with it to play for "just a bit", and that turned into a couple hours. So there's really something addicting about it here, and I did enjoy my time with it so far. I'm just afraid I may have seen all there is to see already.

Space issues - manga in the library

2013-01-03T20:25:39Z

I was really excited to recently be able to buy some new additions to the library's manga collection. To date, most of our manga has been collected from donations, and as such there are very few complete series. However, space is extremely limited in my teen section, and as such I can't actually put all the new manga I've aquired on the shelf! (I've got a temporary fix by placing the new stuff in a different location by the entrance)

So now I'm left wondering, when space is such an issue, yet graphic novels and manga are so desired, what is the better option, to have complete series, but less overall titles, or have bits and pieces from different series but have a larger selection? I feel like right now I'm in a weird middle ground, with chunks of manga here and there, and then like almost 50 volumes of Bleach!

There have been videos...

2013-01-03T20:24:01Z

So I realize in my last post I said I wanted to get back to making videos with some sort of regularity. I HAVE recorded some videos, but unfortunately I didn't think anything was very good, so I never finished them. Hopefully inspiration will strike soon.

Let's Go Retro! SMB Challenge

2012-12-01T02:24:58Z

So I decided now that things have settled down a bit, I wanted to get back to making videos with some kind of regularity. While I still have a scripted, longer form Let's Go Retro! episode half-done sitting on my computer, I wanted to try something a bit different and immediate. I tried this once before and the results weren't very good, and in fact I left the remains of the result to sit on my hard drive for all eternity. This time, however, I thought the results were much better. I think in part it's because it's Super Mario Brothers, the fun is immediate and there, especially with the added challenge of playing with an upside-down controller. My first attempt to do a non-scripted video like this was with an N64 import title, Neon Genesis Evangelion. I think there was a point where I didn't say anything for almost 8 minutes, at which point I knew this was not going to work...

But this one did! So enjoy!

Anime Clubs Used to Have it So Good!

2012-11-27T16:49:57Z

Since I stepped into the role of Teen Librarian at the Sellers Library, I've had to continue many clubs and activities that were already regular occurrence here. Of course, since it's stuff like book clubs, anime clubs and gaming clubs, I've no complaints. These are things I would try to do anyway after all! But of course "running an anime club" was not part of my library school training, so I've tried to search around to see what advice is out there. From everything I can gather the best advice seems to be 'go back to 2005'.

Seriously, it seems the anime industry used to bend over backwards to get their DVDs in clubs' hands! Stuff like ADV Films' "ADvocates" would send you upcoming anime to screen and you'd do a survey or review as feedback to them. These all seem to have disappeared, of course related to the fact that the anime boom has since subsided. And while I'm sure there are other teen librarians out there that are running anime clubs, they seem to be pretty silent, as searches on YALSA's listserve turn up almost nothing, and VOYA's article on running an anime club is from 2005 and now pretty outdated.

Don't get me wrong, access to anime is easier than ever now with streaming sites like Crunchyroll around, so I feel obtaining anime is probably easier and cheaper than it's ever been before. But if people have new and exciting ideas about what to do in their school or library anime club, they seem to be keeping to themselves, or putting it in a section of the Deep Web that is not readily accessible to me. I feel like I'm starting to lose focus on what my whole point was here, but I think it's simply that when I search online or on forums for suggestions on what to add to my Asian Culture Club, all I find are articles and posts from the anime boom days. My first thought when going through the various articles of the past was "Anime clubs used to have it so good", but I wish there was a sure way to see if they still do!

Halloween Gaming in 2012!

2012-10-28T02:30:44Z

Man, Halloween really snuck up on me this year. It's my favorite time of the year, but it always seems to go by so fast! Well, at least with this year having the (still fairly newish) new job, and trying to get packed up to move, I have an excuse for missing out on most of the Halloween movie watching and gaming I would like to be doing. I did get to see a double feature of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein at a local theater last week, so I feel like I got a *little* bit of seasonal celebration in anyway.

As I'd mentioned in my previous post, I'm getting ready to move the day after Halloween, so I all my stuff, including all my games, are packed away! So while I'd love to get some spooky Halloween gaming in, it's a bit tougher at the moment. I do however, have my portable systems on hand, and there's still some Halloween-y gaming that can be had through them! Ghosts N' Goblins was just released on the 3DS Virtual Console service this past week, so I figured since my NES cartridge is packed away, why not grab it on the go? I'm at the halfway point through level two, which I'm sad to say is a personal best. They also released the Game Boy game, Castlevania The Adventure on the 3DS virtual service this past week, and while it's not the greatest Castlevania game, it's still got some classic music!

I also got in a little spooky PC gaming, thanks to the free to play Slender, which while being a really simple-in-concept game, comes off as pretty scary. You're trapped in a fenced-in wooded area and the Slender Man is coming for you. If you look at him too long, you go crazy and it's game over. You need to find eight pages scattered around the woods. I've gotten four so far. The atmospheric touches really sell this game, like the fog, which increases as you get more pages, and the incredible darkness around you, which slowly closes in as your flashlight's batteries slowly die. It's available for free here and they just released a version on the App Store for 99 cents.

New teen librarian, new base of operations

2012-10-26T19:57:03Z

So I mentioned in one of my newer videos that school was kicking my butt. But school has since ended. And I've got a job! Whoo-hoo! I'm the new teen librarian at Upper Darby Sellers Library in PA! And so far it's been a real blast. I certainly feel it's a bit of a trial by fire, as I've had to jump into the clubs that were already established by the previous teen librarian, which include four book discussion groups! There's also a gaming club and an Asian Culture Club (read: Anime Club). So....I like reading. I like video games. And I like anime. How cool is this?!

Of course it's not all fun and games, there's a lot of preparation, and trying to come up with ideas for programs that will be fun and successful. But as challenging as it is, and as much as I'm taken out of my comfort zone at times, it's all been really rewarding and I'm loving it so far.

So onto the site here! I really hope to start blogging again soon, and really REALLY hope to step up making video entries. My "new video every week or so" didn't last very long at all! I'm going to try and get that going again. But right now I'm preparing to move (the drive to work is killing me), so even though I really want to make some stuff, it will have to wait until everything is moved and unpacked! I have a lot of silly ideas that always go through my head, and I'd really like to actually make them into something instead of just thinking about them until they go away! So even though I've said repeatedly that I want to write here more, and make more video entries, I'm saying it again! Hopefully my next entry will be very very soon!

Oh, and speaking of blogging, I'm also in charge of the Sellers Library Teens blog, so expect me to blog on library activities there, and maybe occasionally cross-post here if it's cool. I just put up an entry about the latest Asian Culture Club meeting, which I thought had a really fun theme! Read it here!