Another reason why August 2008 sucks can be found in the link below:

The Herald, Sharon, Pa. - Fire destroys Splitstone Entertainment

Splitstone was one of those places that would make you exhaust your monthly allowance of saying “Hot damn, I can’t believe they have that!” Why? The last time my friends and I took the long drive there, we walked in the door and found The Official Nintendo Game Players Guide and I ran into a copy of Jaleco’s Shatterhand, one of the best games little-known games for the NES. That’d be a mind-blowing day at most places, but not Splitstone. This is the same place where I bought the Versus Books SFA2 guide and Double Dragon live-action movie on DVD on the same day. Remember a few years ago when even the big chain video game stores still had everything from the NES to the Playstation 1? Splitstone was like that to the 25th power. Splitstone went past the NES era all the way back to the Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision and even the Odyssey². I hadn’t seen an Odyssey² game since… cripes, 1980 something. My fingers hurt when I thought about trying to type out all of the epic goodness and recaptured childhood memories I’ve bought from there over last few years. We bought an official boatload of tapes when they were clearing out their VHS stock and many of the NES carts I’ve been able to get for my sister came from there. They had tons and tons of old and new video games, movies, music and even books. I never even got around to checking out all the comics they just started selling. The people that worked there are cool and they never played that “Oooh, I’ll sell it for the highest price I see on eBay!” crap. They also had a disc grinder (or whatever they’re officially called) and all CDs, DVDs and game discs were always in perfect condition.

We didn’t go there that much this year thanks to the rise in gas prices and the really bad weather during the winter. I’d just asked my sister what NES games she still needed and planned get them from Splitstone. Sadly, that’s not going to happen for a while. I’m glad that no one was hurt but I feel really bad for the owners because it’s a family run business. Even after they rebuild, I don’t know how they’ll replace all of the incredible stuff that they had. It really was one of those places where you’d find the game or movie that you never thought you’d find. I wish them all the best of luck in getting through this and rebuilding.

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.

Check out what was waiting for me in the mailbox today. That’s right, it’s the book Memoirs of a Virtual Caveman by Rob ‘Dire51′ Strangman! It’s also the the first book cover that I’ve ever had a chance to draw, color and even letter. The cover looks a bit scrunched even though I thought I had the recommended cover dimensions right. The worst part is how the crystal-clear printing process drops dime on how I went all lazyhouse on the giant game cart’s cover. The shame! I plan to start reading this one Sunday night and I’m sure that the video game lore within will put a smile on my face. The stories are from that rare breed of gamers who love play mechanics and techniques more than graphics and random techno soundtracks but don’t get annoyingly pretentious about it. There’s even a chapter about Rob’s OPCFG site, a place that talked about old-school gaming before it was cool and inspired me to try and make something more out of ScrollBoss. I’ll ramble some more about this book after I’m done reading it.

Remember that book cover that I drew and colored a lil’ while back? It’s out!

Memoirs of a Virtual Caveman is a book by Rob “Dire 51″ Strangman, the creator of some great video game-based sites including the mighty OPCFG, the West Mansion Splatterhouse shrine and the Ghoul Realm that pays tribute to Capcom’s G ‘n G games. It’s full of real-life video game stories that kick off from the Atari 2600 days up until the beginning of the Playstation 1 era. Many of the articles I’ve read about the early days of video games miss the mark by a mile because there’s a lot of stuff that no one remembers until they start telling stories from back then. I’ve only seen some of the stories in their early forms and even then they were fun to read. Some will make you nod or smile as you remember a similar experience and others will make you twitch with envy (especially if the duffel bag story is in there). Rob and those who contributed stories to the book worked their butts off to bring you some true wayback action in book form and I hope you give it a shot. Plus, I drew the cover, so I did a lil’ bit, too. You’ll have to read the book to fully understand what the cover means. No, I’m not telling you. Snitches get stitches!

The book is finally available for the buying and the reading Lulu.com. Buy it as soon as you can and let them know if you dig it!

IGN has a news story about Marvel and EA ending their relationship of making fighting games together. It didn’t matter if Marvel Nemesis was in 3-D or even if they managed to break space-time and make the game 4-D, most people weren’t interested in a so-called Marvel fighting game where Captain America and Dr. Doom were kicked to the curb in favor of new characters. Cap and Doom were in one of the handheld versions, but when does that ever count? I would’ve bought it if it had been a real Marvel vs. EA game where Spidey, the Hulk and Iron Man could fight John Madden, James Pond and Bionic Lester.

My main hope is that Marvel and Capcom resume their old partnership in creating epic and insane fighting games or, at least, re-issue Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for PS2 so I don’t have to pay scalperlicious prices for it. Part of the whole hook of the Capcom/Marvel games was that Marvel has some of the greatest characters in all of fiction and Capcom created some of the greatest and most significant fighting games ever. Arcade Renaissance remembered two interview quotes that may bring some hope to those of us who are still waiting for Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Say what you want about the direction of some of their comics, Marvel’s been making a lot of great licensing moves and I think even they may know just how much people want to see Spider-Man and Mega Man fighting side-by-side once again.

Someone asked if I could post a merged version of that Truetorial posts I made while working on the Wendy Milan pic. I decided to do it because it’s a good idea and it gives me a chance to improve it a bit. I call it a ‘truetorial’ because it’s a tutorial that includes all the parts where I screwed up. I think some people get discouraged by seeing flawless tutorials and think, “Yeah, well, whoever wrote this is a pro.” Showing the mistakes is a nice way of saying, “Look, if an idiot like me can do this, you can do this.” This one isn’t really in-depth but I hope it gives you a few tips for drawing fan art from sprites.

Step 1.) First, you need to gather some reference. Internet image searches can help a lot but it depends on the character’s level of fame. Searching for a popular character like Master Chief or Lara Croft will give you buttloads of pictures and loads of butt-pictures if you don’t turn on ‘Safe Search’. If you’re drawing someone from an obscure SNES side-scrolling beat-em-up, you’ll probably just find a few random graphics on a fan site ran by some crumb bum. If you can’t find the pose you’re looking for, you’ll have to get your own reference. Fire up the game or pause it (if you can) or take a screen capture of it like I had to here. I sketch the pose a few times while trying to get all the limbs in the right places and add my own spin to it. This is also a good chance to get some of the surplus fail out of my system. Unless you absolutely must keep the same exact dimensions and shape of the sprite for game-related or contest purposes, don’t be afraid to fix anything mistakes the sprite has like screwed-up anatomy and broken perspective. If the pose is just impossible to do or is only possible due to the weird proportions of the sprite style, you may have to mess around with the anatomy a bit to get the pose right. If you’re afraid that people will complain about the changes in message board or art site comments, just remember that they’ll complain if you leave them in, too.

Step 2.) After days of almost drawing the picture and then remembering that I had to do other things for about 3 other people, I decide to finish it on Saturday, a day where I’m usually stumbling around like a zombie from an accumulated lack of sleep. I take a first attempt at it that to solidify a few more things. Sometimes, it’s a mess of lines that I plan to go over later or just take note of any problem areas. With maybe 4 hours of sleep in my system, the first attempt here is horror beyond imagining. It is so ugly that I spend the rest of the night thinking of giving up drawing forever. At least once I think about awkwardly jumping out of the second story window head first with the futile hope that the impact would break my neck and kill me instantly. Just… just anything to not think about how I drew that. I crawl into bed, curl into the fetal position and fall asleep while listening to “Living Inside Myself” by Gino Vannelli hoping that tomorrow will be a better day*.

Step 3.) After six hours of sleep, I take a second shot at the picture while noting everything that didn’t work the first time. The torso width and big boots match the sprite better even if it’s weird to see her with a realistic face. More adjustments are made to those weird shoulder pads after I see how they look in other animation frames. That brings up another rule to remember: get multiple pictures and/or sprites of whoever you’re drawing. Even if you’re drawing a pose from a single sprite, you may not have a good view of all the outfit details or might be drawing the only sprite where something was drawn incorrectly.

4.) After I decide that I don’t hate how this one looks, I break out the .08, .05 and .01 Micron pens and begin to go over the pencils with ink. The .05 tip is for the main details, the .01 is for really small details like the fine linework in the hair and the .08 takes two trips around the outline so it’s not just a boring, flat outline. This one turned out okay but there were certain things that I was uncertain about. Her face gives off the exact ‘nice girl’ vibe that I wanted and I like how the hair turned out fine here. The boots… notsomuch. Since I’ll also be using for things where I’ll have to shrink it down to super-small size, I put a really thick outline around the whole thing.

5.) I scanned the pic in pure Black and White mode at 600 dpi. How big is that? 2492 by 6263 pixels. To look at that at full size, it’s probably twice as wide and six times as tall as your monitor. I don’t have a fancy-pants program that automatically cleans line work into vectors, so I have to clean them manually. My main trick is to use PSP7’s ‘Retouch - Smudge’ tool set just high enough to blur the out the stray pixels without bending the line then use ‘Adjust Brightness/Contrast’ to get crisp lines again. Sometimes I can use ‘Despeckle’ -> ‘Gaussian Blur’ (VERY lightly) -> ‘Adjust Brightness/Contrast’ on the side. But I usually have to use the line tool to redraw some lines that look too bad to clean. My computer isn’t powerful enough to color it at this size and would crap it’s soul if I even thought about it so I shrink it down to 836 by 2100 pixels. Still unsure about a few things so I posted a preview of it on the Prime Central Station board. Z_Sabre_User pointed out that the leading leg looked a bit oddly shaped. I think the way that the tall kneepad covers up where her knee is gave her leg that sausage look. So I went back to the original and added a slight curve to it and fixed a few other things I didn’t like. Glad I didn’t fully clean the lines at first because it’d have sucked to re-clean that mess twice.

6.) With crisp lines in effect I add a transparent Multiply Layer with base colors that are partially taken from the sprite’s lightest colors. All the shading is done on more Multiply layers. The shiny lighting was made with transparent Normal layers just to lighten it up a bit and Dodge layers which adds that funky, fully-saturated look that enhances the shininess. Once it was fully colored in, I posted it on the Prime Central Station board and sweated Bullet Bills until a few kind people told me that it wasn’t completely fugly.

That’s the end of this truetorial which shows just about everything I do when I do what I do, especially the mistakes. It’s not that I think I’m great or even good, but I hope there’s a few tips that’d help someone out. As for why I drew Wendy, you’ll have to wait a while on that.

* - Yes, that’s a joke. I just got to a point where I put the picture to the side and watched Kool Moe Dee on Soul Train. Besides, the window has a mesh screen that can’t be moved. So there’s that, too.

Random news things that I’ve run across:

The Black Church and the Hollowing Out of Black Politics by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

A good article, even if it’s disturbing and sad. It’s sad to see that some of Black pastors and politicians are using the same crooked, divisive moves that were used against those that came before them. Here’s a quote:

The fears of those who predicted that billions of dollars in faith-based subsidies distributed by the Bush Administration to churches across the country would build a Republican patronage machine in white constituencies, and severely blunt the prophetic edge of the Black Church, may be coming to pass. Where once Black pastors were among the few who could speak truth to power with little fear of economic retaliation, many may now have ministries with governmental funding streams to worry about, while the least principled among them have been emboldened to ape the talking points and political interventions of white right wing ministers. In the current context, given the flood of corporate money available to pliant African American politicians, and the lack of local news coverage that might facilitate their being held accountable, the interventions of the Black Church into politics only threaten to take those politics further and further away from the desires of African American constituencies.

And now a Newsarama article by Dirk Danning about the whole Spider-Man marriage thing that I kinda don’t care about. What scares me about this article is that he also makes a perfect wrestling analogy that makes sense if you follow wrestling. I’ve been thinking the same thing about how many of the things that I enjoy seem to use the same tactics. Imagine paying for a wrestling Pay-Per-View to see how a rivalry finishes up only for it to drag on to the weekly show. Sounds like a lot of comic book Big Event mini-series, hunh?

Well, I’m going to end this thing on an up note:
Bionic Commando: Rearmed
Well hot damn.

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!

It was a tough choice between the Rey Mysterio - the Biggest Little Man set and the entire Filmation series of Aquaman, but Rey won out in this case. The Cruiserweight division was one the main reasons I watched WCW Monday Nitro and Rey Mysterio Jr. always pulled off some insane move that blew my mind. Those matches were my introduction to the Lucha Libre style of wrestling and I’ve dug it ever since. I haven’t watched anything from the set yet because I’m saving it all for Sunday. I’m already hyped up for it because reading the match listing reveals matches vs. Dean Malenko, Juventud Guerrera, Juvi’s dad Fuerza, Ultimate Dragon/Ultimo Dragon, Psicosis, Jushin Thunder Liger, Super Calo and Blitzkreig. Some of my favorite matches in wrestling had Rey vs. Malenko and Rey vs. Ultimate Dragon, but I’m dying to see that match with Blitzkreig. I’m a bit disappointed that there’s only one 6-man tag match, but I’m just glad that this set has what it has. Of course, I’m saddened about the lack of La Parka but maybe he’ll do a run-in on one of these matches. Still, three discs of Rey doing his thing is well worth $20 and I hope sales on this can lead to some later releases with more Cruiserweight action.

When I got this DVD set at Wal-Mart, it was bundled with a DVD preview of the latest Smackdown vs. Raw game that’s about to drop soon. While I’m looking forward to getting SvR2008 one day, Fire Pro Wrestling Returns will be my next wrestling game purchase. I don’t have any of the fancy new gen machines, so I’ll hold off on SvR2008 until I get one. I’ve only played the GBA version of Fire Pro, but I immediately got into the depth of it and I’ve heard the PS2 version ups the ante much, much more. The two-dimensional graphics don’t put me off at all and video that I’ve seen of it shows that it’s just as or maybe even more fluid than the current 3-D wrestling games. Plus, the chance to customize everything from wrestlers (and you can make HUNDREDS), factions, tag teams, rings (even draw your own logos), and even referees is too insane to pass up. Even better: it’s less that $20. Aw yeah.