Figured I’d post something I drew since I barely seem to do that here anymore. It’s Linda, a very, very bad woman from the old arcade game, Double Dragon. I drew a picture of her in practically in the same pose a few years back but that didn’t turn out so well. Too cartoony. This is more like it. It’s weird because I was thinking of drawing it over again recently because I need art of her for a few ScrollBoss projects. Out of the blue, a friend of mine e-mails me because he needed the old pic for a fan game project. I was glad that he wanted to use my art, but I felt bad because it was a bad picture. So that was sign that I need to draw her again. Plus, it’ll be good to have a pic of her that matches the quality of that Abobo pic I did last year.

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I bought that Lego set with Harley Quinn just for the minifig. Seriously. The Batman Begins-style Batman that comes with it was immediately put aside for trading fodder and the other parts are still in their bags to be sorted later on. It comes with some of those little diamonds and gems that you can put into a treasure chest and has lots of good vehicle parts. But, really, it’s all about Lego Harley Quinn.

Once again I take advantage of the fact that our K-Mart seems to have only old stock of some things when I luck up and score the 3-pack with Lex Luthor, Copperhead and Mirror Master. I already had the single pack versions of Lex (the lime-green flavor) and Copperhead but this pack gives me the more accurate version of Lex and a Copperhead with a better paint job. I mostly got it for Mirror Master because this toy line is too scalperlicious to even hope that I’d see a single pack Mirror Master.

Hitting Toys R Us pays off with with two Cobras (a.k.a. Cobra Troopers) and my 2nd Red Ninja. I feel lucky here because I’ve heard nothing but horror stories about people trying to collect the new G.I.JOE 25th Anniversary line. Most involve people not being able to find them or finding out that some chumpcakes buy them all up to sell on eBay. It feels good to be rewarded for not running to the online stores where these things are selling with an insane price mark-up.

I would like to give thanks for the following:

• For my family and my friends for still betting on the most worthless horse on the track!
• For the relief from the artistic constipation I caught back in 2002. With any luck, I’ll catch some creative diarrhea in time for 2008.
• For those who fought for what was right especially when no one was looking.
• For the people that check out my sites Illmosis and ScrollBoss. No one looks at this blog, though. Seeing as how this place is filled with stupid posts like this, I’m thankful for that no one else is actually reading this.
• For these beautiful things: 25th Anniversary G.I.JOE figures and the box sets that play the theme song, Taito Legends 2 for being full of old-school gaming goodnes, Dr. Thirteen, Gumby, the new Booster Gold series, the Sinestro Corps. Crossover, the All-New Atom by Gail Simone, the Rey Mysterio: the Biggest Little Man 3 disc set, whoever was behind Steven Richards and Little Guido Nunzio getting more screen time in ECW, whoever lets Santino Marella get on the mic on RAW, female wrestlers (like Victoria, Beth Phoenix, Mickie James, Gail Kim, Jackie Moore, Ms. Brooks and ODB), everybody that worked on the Shaw Studios/Dragon Dynasty DVDs and whatever mad genius at Lego came up with the skeleton horse.

And a special thanks to:
YOU

Thank you for playing!

The Batman/Superman/Justice League DC Animated Universe is one of my favorite storylines ever, period, at all, fo’rilla. I love many of the designs and depictions there (the Question, Mr. Freeze, Toyman, the Question, The Joker, and more including the Question) even better than the real DC Comics. What I still haven’t found room enough in my heart to love are the figures. I’ve been planning to dedicate a post to this, so I’ll pocket that rant for now. But I finally went ahead and bought this Darkseid that I’d seen in a Big Lots many times. I kept passing it up because I thought some parts of the armor were permenantly stuck on. I buckled and bought it since I knew I’d regret it if I ever did start digging the JLU figures. He’ll stay trapped in the package until I make a final decision on whether I can get into this toy line or not.

When it was announced that Toy Biz would be making 3 3/4 inch figures of Marvel Characters (in other words, G.I.JOE/Star Wars sized), my lid was officially flipped. It’s too bad that various factors caused the line to sell so poorly that the final waves only saw a limited release. Of course, you can buy them online at gooftardedly high prices. OR you can be lucky and find some at Big Lots for $3.00 a pop. In your face, toy aftermarket, and kiss my shiny, metal ass on the way out. I’m just hoping I can do the same with the other figures that I want which is pretty much everybody except Elektra.

The 25th Anniversary G.I.JOE figures have started hitting this area and I’ve been buying what I can. At this point, I have the Cobra set and the single pack versions of Snake-Eyes (pictured to the side), Storm Shadow, Cobra Commander (with the rag mask) and 2 Cobra Officers. It’s kinda weird that they put the Cobra (Trooper) in the Cobra set instead of the Officer since most people that buy multiples of the troops prefer to have more troopers than officers. It’s like workplace with 20 supervisors and one regular guy. The good news is that there is going to be a single-pack Cobra Trooper on the way later this year, but it’ll have a silver logo like the Viper glider pilot instead of the red trooper logo. Hey, as long that’s the only difference and they match the rest of the 5-pack trooper, I’m not going to gripe. These figures are far too cool for that. I plan to do a big mega post after I get the Joe 5-pack and Flint (hopefully after this next paycheck) with pictures and all that good stuff.

One thing that I want to say is that I’ve seen sellers charging over $50 for the 5-packs but I bought mine from Toys ‘R Us (actual, not website) for $30. In fact, I’ve heard that some people have found them for cheaper than that. Do some price hunting if you really need to net-buy ‘em. I’ve heard that the distribution on these are going to be good, so don’t get price-gouged out there.

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.

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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.

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.

… 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.

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.