a suspicious drawing of sherry the talking mouse from several Ultima games abusing gargoyles with their own boomerang
I always liked the Gameboy game Ultima: Runes of Virtue. Attempts to directly port regular Ultima games to consoles felt unfinished and misguided, beyond even the degree to which the original non-sequel Ultima did, but Runes of Virtue was a specially crafted Gameboy action puzzle adventure perfect for the short play sessions that Gameboy was specially suited to.
DESPITE the very stupid dance that Sherry does at all times.
In frap it was only this past month that I saw enough of Ultima 6 to realize Runes of Virtue directly follows it, as back when I played Ultima: The False Prophet, its super nintendo port, I found it less unfair than Ultima Exodus, also a Nintendo system port and the only other game in the series I had tried, but still too unclear in its goals to get very far in. Nintendo versions hiding the title numbers didn’t help. BUT recognizing a bunch of the character names and concepts from Runes of Virtue helped me appreciate what I could of it slightly more than I would have otherwise. Certainly more than if I had known of and played the bewildering nes port of Ultima 5 instead.
Though it turns out to be the most accurate and playable Nintendo system Ultima port, that still was not enough for me to crack, apparently. Perhaps its most egregious offense of is presenting Sherry as an isolated-use item whose only purpose is retrieving a single essential item and optionally running under locked gates to steal other treasures or move switches, provided you think to try that,
and who inherits the hero’s neon green poison aura when deployed if you happen to have one available
rather than a fully functioning combat party member whose 1 strength allows her to only wield the likes of a boomerang, but with 27 dexterity, out of a maximum of 30, for deadly accuracy.
I actually have a legal copy of this game and apparently generated a character in it years ago, probably around the time that I regretted playing ultima 1, without going any further, and imagined it should be pretty easy to get to the same place the youtube video was at and take my own screenshots, since youtube pictures are ugly and the person whose video I took those from is an irritating bonehead anyhow. As hokey and annoying as Ultima is, I appreciate the progress it made across a few years and the influence even the shoddy ones had on better games, and reserve the right to laugh at them on my own terms, without condemning them. Some dork reading all the dialog aloud, stuttering half the time, and constantly interjecting snarky comments and complaining about how it is different and better in Ultima 7 makes it take longer and also me to hate him more than the video game he is suffering/cheating through.
But I was today unprepared for how irritating it also was to control Ultima VI even on its intended platform and how infrequently attacks connect even with high dexterity (though more so than without), so I could not easily recreate the scene. But I had already made the dumb drawing so felt obligated to try for longer than was sensible. I thought eh it can’t be THAT hard. I just need to kill ONE big gargoyle out here to have an unblurry picture of its body on the ground and then I can edit the text to say that Sherry did it.
sensing my unvirtuous inclination, an invisible doppelganger of the king Lord British with no property except raw scorn suddenly got a turn and crashed the game when I tried to enter a command and then stared at me disapprovingly until I forced dosbox to quit
The news just gets worse. The highest court in the country is taking bribes from a collector of Hitler Memorabilia, the threat of war with china and russia or possibly ourselves rises again, despite unprecedented climate disasters still nobody with power cares about stopping them. And direst of all?
dopes with glasses! That’s it, life has no meaning. We can never recover from this. I might as well
dopes with glasses and hats!
Truly awful. I can tell these things “think” they are scholars among dopes, and they are probably the dumbest dopes of all time! Not like me. I do useful things with MY life.
for the first time in united states of america history a president, former or otherwise, has been criminally indicted. but I want to talk about something more important.
not the most imaginative vegetation but the movement makes a difference compared to the old versions.
I also tried to make their scales relative to each other more consistent, but I did not succeed! These are full size and the gifs are between 20% and 25% of full size.
I should see about adding stripes to something since the spots may get tiresome. I have the power to make the spots glow in darkness by making an overlay for each frame with only brightness values, which I already did for the eyes on one of the imps, though I am wary of doing too much of that after all the slowdown I have already had from sprite over-laying.
the colors seem at first a tad flat relative to the old versions that I made with whatever colors I felt like, but the solution to that is more directly within my grasp without additional images needing to be loaded than brightness is.
I still CAN use whatever colors I want, but I desire to keep animated objects within the 256 color game palette so that the file sizes would be lower than true color images, since these are quite larger than before, over 1000×1000 pixels per frame, on average, and there are quite a number of frames! But I am able to alter how the palette is accessed.
Unfortunately this program, called Slade, has a strange malfunction in its palette recoloring manager –apart from its frustratingly small window sections that ordinarily can’t be resized and the few that can will rapidly revert to their default size– that will copy the first gradient color on to the second one if a graphic that the palette change is applied to already exists within a set of definitions that I view within this editor. And it may not be apparent here but I have swapped seven sets of colors so far, two gradients for every set of 16 colors, because a single gradient across that many looks worse than the regular palette. And so I must immediately remove the data for that palette change from the file and put it into a different one that will never be opened in this editor ever again. and if I didn’t get the colors correct –which I can’t really be sure of until I see it within the game– I have to manually text-edit the color numbers to tweak them. HOWEVER up until maybe two weeks ago I also created them by text-entering the numbers so this tedious inconvenience is still an improvement. Even with the bug it lets me establish which palette indexes are being replaced rather fast.
so I only need to figure out HALF of this!
these things can now jump in places where normal monsters would stop and turn around. once in a while they even get somewhere.
for whatever reason in the south-west-facing angle I had the left arm lower, but every other angle had it up, but it was west and north-west that looked out of place, so I “corrected” them to match southwest even though that one is wrong. the jump looks too ostentatious with the arm in the air. it looked like the creature should be making that pihGAA grunt that Kyle Katarn in Dark Forces does when he jumps. It was making me laugh.
but maybe that is good and i should switch them back.
they also have marginally improved pain frames, since part of alleviating the repeatedly cited “lag” associated with this creature is exporting its sprites as single pieces rather than layered fragments that can be reused for different versions of itself (but that ultimately create a load problem since the game struggles more with volume than mass, essentially), so rather than have them wiggle around independently I have no choice but to animate them properly. however their “death” frames and all frames for the shorter pointy-noised “fyop” are still layered like before so those are not in here, though they tried to be. And then I spent too much of yesterday trying to make a better looking test area to show the sprites in, and I ended up filling it with so much useless doohickery that the video capture still gave me problems. Also the test area is still ugly.
in any event now I can do more important things
or I can start redrawing and adding needless animation to old pieces of scenery that nobody will notice because they hang from ceilings and aren’t interactive or important. ah, a life well-spent.
I had a dream of seeing famous French singer/cartoon character “Carlos” directing some sort of production with a local musician– initially I understood to be someone who resembled MC Hammer and came up to me in the street earlier but later Carlos’ possibly fictional daughter called me on the telephone and said it was actually her– in a restroom of a Paris metro station, and wondering later if i should go back to get video proof. I assumed the dream implausible since Carlos got dead in 2008, before I took video regularly or went to France,
but apparently I was misinformed. You might think it is referring to someone named Carlo but it is in fact a real band made up of real bearded people that [au] pays [de] homage to Carlos and just doesn’t understand how ownership apostrophes work because French doesn’t use those and I guess they want this title to catch the attention of non-french speakers who have heard of Carlos and are curious about developments in his life (after or otherwise), all me of them.
with my curiosity fulfilled I don’t actually need to hear any of their performances. I may even have had a performance of Jope and Some dopes at the same venue and charged as much money. Also don’t read the page at that link. It is from 2004 and I have probably not read it since posting it but it looks complicated. It it just to indicate that I was briefly involved with a local performing arts event of dubious merit and effectiveness.
The clouds are on heroin now. It certainly explains all the erratic and extreme weather. lately. I am surprised I haven’t heard anybody talking about this.
what i HAVE observed people talking about (or one person quote-tweeting a quote-tweet about):
I see why the Central Intelligence Agency cancelled this: “listen kids you THINK bin Laden is a bold patriot leading the fight for justice from his cave, but he’s actually on the front lines flying across the desert, controlling matter with his mind and fighting off multiple white infidels at once with a double laser sword”
Although the text in the apparent source, this 2014 article, indicates the toys were meant to be part of good will packages. Based on the minimal context year-old twitter post I thought the figures would have been given out separate from anything else, in order to make their intent less clear. It does not to me seem sensible for US allies, cronies or conscripts to be appearing sympathetic to bin Laden up front because that potentially undermines their message; the toy might never actually be played with or it could be lost or the larger package it was contained within could be stolen before it reveals its true nature, quite apart from if the MEANING of the transformation comes across in the intended fashion. Just giving out the toys at all risks sending the message: Osama bin-Laden is a well meaning merry fellow! Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. Don’t believe what we told you about him up to this point!
And then assuming the toy does go to a child who does witness the paint fall off, that kid then needs to deduce “OH i get it now, the people who gave us this DON’T actually like Osama bin-Laden. Well consider me convinced! I don’t like him either now. I will be sure to pass this along when a local warlord kidnaps my mother and tapes a bomb to my father’s chest.”
I suppose this story is funnier the less context you have.
I also saw another old twittor post last week that explained how to view articles on sites like washington post’s without creating an account, which would actually be practical information to have and I didn’t bother to take note of where that was nor of the specific instructions. Listen I can’t keep up with everything. I need to focus on what’s important like one year old posts on a broken social media platform about nine year old news stories about twenty-year old weird stuff that the CIA ultimately decided against doing.
and also teaching vaguely dog-rodent people how to jump
page 3-58 of this
I changed “gitchmerd” to “gidjmerg” because it was brought to my attention that “gitch” can refer to underwear. as “merd” will, with the simple addition of an E that goes unpronounced and thus may be imagined as present even when it is not, be a french word for excrement that is considered more obscene than the ordinary french word for excrement, I considered the combination of the two undesirable to have people think I might have intended unless I did, which I did not. It is enough that the drawings are crude without the names also being so!
I will ideally have amended the previous instances of the name before you see this but unfortunately was not able to before I saw this.
imp fact I think it was only said one other time, on page 3-52 and that was simple to correct, although I thought the letters there suddenly seemed too skinny to be legible, and that I would need to later redo the other word spaces also to make them match the one I just did, but NOW they do look more read-ready than the comparatively bloated and irregular alphabits I just added. I also noticed that the telephone/meep’s column did not match between the two pages. I suppose there is no great necessity to keep those consistent, which is good because I would also need to check every other page it appears on and see which was more prevalent and likewise fix the rest. Lack of fixing is not the majorest problem with this production!
ceptin about us bein intelligent dis is nuttin but typical lamestream media propyganda. what about dem supa toitles? I seen em everywhere I go. dem reptilians is runnin da government and deir vermin buddies is runnin da media which is how come you don’t see it on tv cept what they want ya to see em. Tink about it.
Dese glasses aint just cuz I can’t see real good. Dey mean I know a ting or two, which is how many eyes I got.
what about toitle on toitle crime? dat’s never on da news. it really carapaces me off if you’ll pardon my french but I don’t know why dey is eatin frogs and snails and mustid but not toitles.
and toitles don’t say no prayas, even when you ask em to nicely when you gonna shoot em. Dem toitles is godless dirty communists. real dirty. i seen em comin outta da sewers all da time. And you nose i can smell em.
huhuh I made a funny
dem toitles did pizzagate too. youse oughtta google it. deyse all homophiliacs. dats why you don’t see no goytles. huhuh. just dat reporter lady and I hoyd sheza lesbean and den dats beastyalities oddawises. I bet dem toitles would be gettin abawshuns if dey knew how. Dats why we gotta repeal roe vissis wade. Did you know roe is a some kinda egg? And who hatches from eggs? Toitles! And wade is when they gotta go on duh scale cuz of all dem pizzas.
in summaryation deyse nuttin but criminals. dey is been groomin kids wif deyre violents and nekkid consumerisms and voter fraudulents since ah HMMMM when was dat?
sound familiuh? Good night.
Somehow it is hilarious to me, in the video game Ogre Battle, that lacking space to spell out “red dragon,” owing to differences between Japanese and English writing systems, the localizers opted to just include “red” followed by that dopey dragon face icon. They could have written “R.DRAGON” and everyone would have known what it meant! But THIS I can’t take seriously! I am only thankful that the regular dragon at least spells the word.
curiously the game’s font has been extracted and uploaded to this page, which I know because for some/no reason I was LOOKING specifically for that specifically to see if that silly dragon head icon is included, and it is NOT, even though the actual game rom’s graphic data
puts it right after the letters, which I determined using Tile Layer Pro. YES i used rom hacking software i haven’t touched in nearly 20 years just to get a clean look at that stupid icon since I haven’t actually played this game. I don’t play video games anymore, generally; it takes too long. Now I watch other people play them –as it happens, Ogre Battle is one of the rare games where my participation is nearly as active as the actual player’s– to keep me from checking my messages every 7 minutes while i try to draw things, or to keep me from considering that my body is past its prime and I am tumbling toward death while I walk in circles in the basement here trying to burn off calories from all the garbage I eat since eating nonsense is the only thing I enjoy and I still delude myself that I can eat it at the same rate that I did back when I played video games and hacked roms and not suffer ill consequences. Then i realized other people for whatever reason have placed downloadable save data for Ogre Battle there so I can in fact take a proper game screenshot rather than blurry ones of youtube videos.
what REALLY makes me mad, is this dumb “wyrm” that has a lower level and lower just about everything else, and LITERALLY ALL it can do is exhibit its dumb tail at foes, and it DARES to try and charge MORE goth money than a REAL dragon.
just LOOK at how STUPID that is! they have sharp teeth, they have FOUR sets of claws, fairly pointy wing-ends, the chance at dignity of NOT having a dopey lizard head icon in their fighting class name, and THIS is what they choose to do! and they are QUITE proud of themselves.
that is like the kind of attack “lope” (the annoying lizard from my comic strip) would do
ARRRRYRHGHGHGHJ I am leaving before this gets ANY stupider.
I already left! This is someone else’s problem!
one of these is from 2004, the other is from a bit more recently. The usual story applies to it: I expected a certain difficulty level and it became exaggerated beyond what I could handle, foremost on the least important sections. the front view (1), the most important and most likely to be seen view, was easy. side-front (8, gets mirrored to be angle 2) was a bit harder, then side (7 (no not THAT side 7 (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is)))was horrible, and side-back (6) was a disaster. in part because I kept trying to match it to 7, even though 7 was horrible. i ought to have drawn over angle 8, but i didn’t because i was using the OLD old old 2004 version as a base, even though the old version’s angles matched even worse. i was even conscious of how poorly they matched at the time. although looking at that again did at last convince me to add stripes. Thankfully stripes have not been a disaster yet, though i have not tried to draw them on the copious amount of earlier redrawn sprites of this… thing. My best decision over the 2004 version is blocking the back muscles with that pathetic half-cape. I didn’t know how to draw back muscles then, and I STILL don’t. This new edition of the monster is old enough that I no longer recall if that was why I added a cape, but there do not appear to be other conceivable justifications.
angle 8 actually doesn’t have the far hand out far enough; trying to match angle 6 to it also held me up somewhat. Since it doesn’t look BAD on angle 8 like it does on 6 i don’t NEED to change it.
no I sure don’t.
please do not make me change it, me.
the fool (that I drew, not me) yet has no proper pain frames; in the past this motion was used both for a close-up attack and a non-violent reaction to experiencing violence. For the moment that shall continue as I am rather worn out from the length of time necessary to draw it. Going forward, assuming I am not cursed by a being beyond my comprehension to remake my own old unreleased material for the remainder of my lifespan, I want to include more expressive characters, but that will require fewer moving parts. even minimally detailed ones like this become a problem when there are so many pieces. If this gets any more frames I hope they will have the courtesy to be non-rotatable!
although mercifully and surprisingly these are still in stock so perhaps I should order one. Gosh I’ll SAVE so much MONEY!
A clear sign Big-Y is a Connecticut and Massachusetts-only supermarket; if Kroger or Food Lion had a Kids Fruit Club that would be cited as proof of child grooming and republican governors across the nation would race to issue condemnations of it and proactively try to pass laws against it
naturally just [yesterday] I saw this
which IS in Connecticut, but the ludicrous conservative backlash to the name led to a bigger back-backlash that gave the store so much business that it ran out of stuff to sell. In Florida or Texas it might have had angry protestors outside demanding that the employees release fictional juvenile hostages and then a week later everyone inside and out would have covid.
still I am concerned that Big Y is getting so comfortable with these mutants
and worse, the mutants are getting comfortable themselves.
why don’t we just throw a beach party for them!
this is beside the point but I am fascinated that this game’s title screen is a redraw of its weird box-art; generally Japanese video games with weird United States box art don’t have their title screens updated to match it, except to alter logos. Also despite the weird cropping to allow the text to appear the picture overall looks less weird. although the tree is duplicated, the texture on the sand is questionable and the banana looks amidst a prophylactic demonstration, the artist treated the sun as a light source rather than another piece of fruit, and the figures themselves look less like there is stuff wrong with them, which to me is of foremost importance.
especially THIS creep, that looks less like it is surfing than “he went that-a-way!”ing while squatting behind a stair with bacon on it. Someone even thought it was good enough to put on the side of the box as well! It was not. There (here) it appears to be concerned about trademarking but unable to leave its post plugging a dike leak.
It might help to contrast this with the original Japanese box-art that is strikingly dissimilar to both its own title screen and this, but I decline to on account of it including a depiction of the grapes-themed boss foe that I find aesthetically unpleasant for reasons that are beyond the scope of this web page. Additionally that Japan Super Famicom box-art is dissimilar to the Japan game boy version’s box art, which would need to be contrasted with the fact of US editions of both using the same box-art despite differing in-game character designs, thereby explaining why the monkey only has a conspicuous tail in one of them, and all of these factors combine to really not be much help at all. Is there any expert in the field who COULD help?
oh WHAT?! I had no idea. Years ago this appeared on the zany video game quotes website, and I never knew or asked where it came from. I ASSUMED the graphic was for something remotely archie-related; the Archie Comics company published works on a few topics that weren’t strictly archie themed, such as ninja turtles and sonic t hedgehog. I didn’t guess it was in a video game magazine advertisement for a property other than those two, certainly not the monkey vs evil fruit game. Factually the sonic comics did not appear until after this but I had to look that up. I should not have had to look that up! This should never have happened! Had Archie been pondering video game comics before Sonic or does it merely mean Archie recommends throwing basketballs at food that has limbs and faces? Do I and Archie actually have common ground? What horror! Looking up the phrase “recommended by archie” now seems to indicate this endorsement was not offered to other products. Consulting the site’s founder likewise indicated the same source and that he had even scanned it himself.
and that is what me asking about it looked like. I did not really ask at 1:51am, however. Why is the time zone incorrect? And why did I think I needed to prove that I asked about this?
all in all a very stressful day! I had other pictures of stupid limbed fruit to show but now I am just upset.
Now I am more upset!
I don’t have to take this. I’m going home.
an eccentric imp melts, in 2023 and 2004. I do like the stripes on the 2004 version of this animation, but I also repeatedly didn’t notice that I forgot stripes, which happened with the same sort of stripes on elpse back when I first started coloring in the comic strip pages. if I would have the patience to draw stripes on all the other sprites of this thing. is also uncertain.
The old version also simply has purple hands and feet rather than wearing purple gloves over them as, for now, the new one does. Surprisingly, it is easier to draw those melt since the form does not need to be consistent between frames. Since I didn’t draw this from eight angles, however, switching the gloves to hands shouldn’t be as big a deal as some previous not big a deals ended up being.
That trick I was so proud of on the linked page, to put all the angles in one image, made the game too slow, trying to load them all at the same time, so I had to re-insert them all separately anyway. I might have mentioned that before, but I immediately forget what I saw after saying them. That is part of the point of saying things, for me, to get them out so I stop thinking about them and can think about other things. But that does not prevent me from beginning to think about them again in the future! At best I can send them to the back of the queue.
page 3-57 of this
once, if ever, I sort out also what the gnomes in the apartment and kumquat outside are doing round-about this point, this may be a higher numbered page. for now i have a fairly loose mental grasp of what is going on since I jump between so many slow, uncompletable projects, so I need to follow this thread in a fairly linear manner to have any control. I know enough that it doesn’t risk tangling with the others for a while. the next two pages are likely to be mostly yelling over a telephone and elevator usage. Those were not in the plan, so I ought not try to manage several additional plans with additional unplanned nonsense simultaneously.
I also should finish uploading pages from the shoddier comic strips. I say that now because I do not expect to do that now.
I don’t know how much to attribute to the original script, the unofficial translation or the artwork, but Scenario 3 of Shining Force III is rife with incel energy
To clarify, this game and Shining the Holy Ark use the word “innovator” to refer to a person who has special powers granted by otherworldly “spirit”s, the portrait artist(s) seemed to favor half-closed eyes and the unofficial translation was done by nerds still playing a dorky old sega saturn game 20 years after it came out.
And I wish I could have been one of those nerds, to a degree, it but I just never had time to, and worried I would be overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of it relative to earlier games in the series, so I eventually gave up on the idea of me doing it any time soon and just watched videos of other people playing it (while I attempted art-work) to satisfy my curiosity about it as best I might.
But now I realize it fundamentally does not change a whole lot from its predecessors. But still by very nature of being a cd console game coming out in the wake of Final Fantasy 7 everything takes longer to load and longer to show. I regret missing out on the one time my ancient habit of leveling up EVERY hero regardless of apparent inferiority would actually matter, but really it doesn’t matter very hard; one battle in each of the first two “scenario”s requires that you send a backup group apart from your main force of 12 to a different location.
also the pictures with the pink-nosed weirdo are blurrier because the less-blurry shots are from play-throughs by people who changed the names of the primary heroes Synbios, Medion and Julian. If the pictures were from me playing the game I would also have changed the hero names but I wouldn’t change them to normal people names like internet dorks generally do. Synbios at least is a goofy enough name that it looks like something I would come up with.
And i NEEDED several different people’s videos. The game has an immense quantity of dialog, video people seem to skip most of it, but the blurry person put up videos exclusively of dialog. Another video person played it properly and efficiently but skipped a great amount of optional material and had an annoying habit of talking over the video about stuff that hadn’t happened yet, while a yet different player didn’t talk and accomplished all tasks but didn’t necessarily play fair either, so I wanted additional perspective on encounters that seemed too easy. And I still screwed that up because I didn’t want to see really important battles done easily first, but then the guy who played properly would still find some excuse to give away needless plot details. But I didn’t want to mute the audio either because sometimes he said interesting things, and I also didn’t THINK of that until late in the process. oh oh ohhhhhhh! what a cruel life.
2022 in pictures.
this really isn’t necessary since I already made a video and most pictures that would be rightly eligible for this entry tended to be bunched into a single entry in a single month. The video also was not necessary and so i am doing this anyway.
january
february
march
april
may
june
july
august
september
october
november
december
that just about dumbs it up.