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.

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!

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.

She’s not done yet, but here’s a pic of Samus in her Metroid (NES) armor:

I know, I know… I need a better camera. You can’t even see that the torso decal has the segment lines in orange. I’ll have to make them darker when I finish the rest of the sticker/decal set for the figure.

This week’s haul is A LOT bigger than normal because a lot of it was bought a week earlier but arrived this week. It also made up for last week since I spent the weekend in the house trying to recover from a week of dramatic jackassery. Since I was too lazy to take any pictures, I’m going to post this picture of Bat-Hulk laughing like a goon looney. Because he is. Yeah, I scanned that from the Metamorpho Showcase TPB and colored it according to a scan posted on the Comic Treadmill.

T-Shirts: My mother surprised me with two birthday gifts: A Transformers shirt with Optimus Prime and another with Speed Racer. Beautiful stuff.

Comics: the All New Atom #12 (great issue as usual filled with Gail Simone funhappytimes) and Essential Two-in-One starring the Thing vol. 2 (which I guess is filled with Thing-ness). Got two short comic book storage boxes to replace the long box that had Capt. America and Avengers comics in ‘em. After having eight heavy long boxes, I’ve finally got it down to one last long box.

DVDs: Batman and Batman Returns were bought for 50% on Amazon during their big Warner Bros. sale. I’ll add my old barebones Batman Returns DVD to the trade pile to make a lil’ bit of that money back. Today I picked up a DVD double features with 9 Deaths of the Ninja and some other Kosugi-less flick then a disc with Saturn video’s “best” Kung-Fu fights for less than $8 total thanks to Splitstone Entertainment.

Lego: First, the BrickLink order I made came in. For the most part, it was full of parts for that building front that I’m working on as a background for minifigs. I’ll post pics once I get the upgrade done. Then Raijin shows up and gives a gift of the Robo Raptor and this Castle set. that he found cheap at a garage sale. Damn! To top it all off, we stopped a K-Mart hoping that there was another Rogue Knight Battleship on clearance for $8. Nope. It was $2 dollars. Hell, this minifigure from the set probably runs more than that on Bricklink! Lots of nice parts in this set including some nice armor and weapons.

That’s it for this post. Time to watch some flicks and get to work on some random character headshots.

I’ll have to get an up-to-date computer by mid-2008. Because of my artwork? Well, yeah. But that’s not why I have a deadline. The reason is that there’s going to be one of those Massively Multiplayer Online games based on Lego. The more that I hear about it, the cooler it sounds. How cool? To the point where I actually give a crap about a MMO game, something that I’ve never cared about until this.
Kotaku post on upcoming Lego Universe game

A few comments:
1.) I may not play it unless I can be a ninja, Futuron, Blacktron or Classic Space guy. Maybe a Skeleton, but only if I can carry Harryhausen-approved weaponry.
2.) I won’t play it if other people can wreck up your Lego joint like I heard people can do in the Nintendo DS version of Animal Crossing.
3.) If Cena wins, we riot.

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While I’m at it, here’s something that I meant to post a long time ago. It’s a modified version of the old Blacktron Meteor Monitor. I’ll have more pictures of this at a later date. Before anyone blows a gasket about it, I covered every brick and plate stud that I could and I added propulsion to it. Thanks to a lot of great Bricklink sellers, I have a small Blacktron army. I know I keep promising to post more Lego pics, but I’ll get around to it. Eventually. Maybe.