Tumblr Doodles: Jul-Dec '15

For more doodley nonsense, check out jilik1.tumblr.com.

Tumblr Doodles 24/12/16

The first of two freshly-posted festive doodles from my Tumblr. Happy holidays, everyone!

For more doodley nonsense, check out jilik1.tumblr.com.

Tumblr Doodles: Jan-Jun '15

For more doodley nonsense, check out jilik1.tumblr.com.

Another Bloody Reblog: Pick-ups 12/02/16

Originally posted on JiliK's Tumblr.



Had a couple of hours to kill last week, so I ventured into a GameStop for the first time in ages. Expected to find a lot of last-gen stuff going for clearance prices. But nah, not so much. €11/€12 was about the norm. If you were after uDraw games for the Wii though, boy did they have you covered. Nevertheless, I turned the place over in search of bargains.

Pretty happy to have turned up Singularity and Syndicate for €3.99 each. Of the myriad of shooters last gen, these were two of the few that piqued my interest. Grabbed Resistance too for €1.99. Not expecting much from that, but eh, €1.99. And for ninety nine cents, I picked up a copy of the XLBA compilation disc, that I think shipped with units of the Xbox 360 Arcade unit. Not exactly a knock-out collection, Pac-Man CE aside, though I’ve always been a bit curious to try out Boom Boom Rocket. Plus, there’s a demo for Surf’s Up apparently, so that’ll be exciting.

From the small shelf of PSP stuff remaining (Pour one out for UMD Video, you guys. The only thing left: a sole copy of Family Guy: Blue Harvest. :D), I picked out Wipeout Pure for €1.99, and coming in at the same price, I rounded things off with Project Rub aka Feel the Magic: XY/XX. I actually had a DS on me for once, so I managed to play that for a bit afterwards while I continued to kill time. That game is gloriously weird. Where’s it been all my life?



Can you tell I’ve been on a bit of a Doctor Who kick lately? :D From a very rocky start with Series 1 of the new show a few years ago, I’ve come to really love Doctor Who. Now that I’ve finished Series 9 (A few dodgy episodes, but very strong overall, I though. Not too upset to see Clara go though. I just never liked her much. *runs*), I’m slowly making my way through the Third Doctor’s run, and it’s great. It’s not so easy to come by though. I’ve recorded every episode the Horror Channel have the rights to at the moment, but to watch the serials in order, I’ve had to resort to buying some of the DVDs, which do have some great extras, but cost-wise, they really start adding up after a while. To make things worse, a bunch of them seem to be out of print now. Come on BBC, you’ve been milking cash out of these discs for aeons. How about putting together some larger, more budget-friendly sets? And I mean a seasons’s worth of serials for a reasonable price, not two for a few pounds less.

Also decided that I’m going to finally take the plunge watch Torchwood, which now that it’s left Netflix, is only possible on disc it seems. Haven’t started it yet and I’m not quite sure what to expect, to be honest. I really like Captain Jack as a character, but generally, people seem kind of down on the show, aside from the two mini-series. No turning back now though.

Hey, I Made More Mario Maker Stages!

Mario Maker! It’s been a while, but I’ve been hard at work for the last couple of nights putting together a new level. Plus, a previously unseen one.



Bowser’s Bouncy Castle - C6A3-0000-021A-F85F

I don’t think that there’s any denying that this one’s a sizable step up in difficulty from most of the levels I’ve made so far. In first half you’ve got a challenging, but fairly traditional Super Mario World style castle - a few dry bones, a few magikoopas, lava, fireballs, a couple of spiky columns, and watch out for that saw blade!

At the checkpoint you’ll hop into the recently-added fire clown car and blast your way through a gauntlet of bumpers, bob-ombs, cannon balls, koopas and hammer bros.. I’m not going to lie, it can get pretty hairy in there, but take your time and you should be okay. If you’re feeling really adventurous, it is also possible to get through there on foot, but I wouldn’t recommend it. :D

On the other side of that is a showdown with Bowser himself. Again! :D Yeah, I’d like to see Nintendo give us a few more bosses to work with, but I think I did a okay job of making the battle here a bit more interesting than usual. Also doable without the clown car, by the way. It does involve a bit of strategy though.

Needless to say, there are a few secrets to be found in this level too…



Castle Dash - 17AB-0000-0106-9CF1

So this is a level I uploaded back December. It’s another SMW castle, but this one, I fancied doing something a little different with. Here you have only 60 seconds to dash through an obstacle course of saw blades, conveyor belts and thwomps. It’s pretty challenging, but I did my best to try and point you in the right direction throughout, so hopefully, it’s not too unwieldy. Although I see on Nintendo’s Mario Maker site that it’s already been classed as an expert course, so I guess it’s too late for that. :D



The current record record holder on this one is Zain, who seems pretty happy about that (I think :D). I’d say there’s still a bit of time that could be shaved off that though, if anyone wants to try and win some Mario Maker kudos.

Note: Mario Maker kudos not redeemable for cash value.

DeviantArt Updates 23/12/15

Departure

by JiliK - Dec 24, 2015

Festive Fire

by JiliK - Dec 24, 2015

A festive-type drawing I whipped up in Autodesk Sketchbook while half watching Breakfast at Tiffany's last year. That movie: eh; I'm not sure what Deep Blue Something see in it.

Winter's Evening

by JiliK - Dec 19, 2015

Hey, I Made Some Mario Maker Stages!

So I bought Mario Maker last month. Not just to feed my horrible amiibo addiction. I was quite excited about getting in there and playing other people's levels; something I've really enjoyed for the most part, though for every stage I like there are at least twenty that either play themselves, deliberately troll you or revolve around insanely obtuse puzzle-solving.

The part of the game I really didn't expect to mess with much though was the level creation. To be honest, I just didn't think I'd be cut out for it. I didn't think I'd know where to put anything. I didn't think I'd have any good ideas for levels whatsoever. Sitting down with the game for the first time though, I found that actually, I did know what to do. It was almost like I'd played an obscene amount of Mario in the last nineteen years, like I'd been in training for this exact moment since I picked up a SNES controller to play Super Mario World for the first time in 1996. It was like the "I know kung fu" scene in The Matrix. But cooler.

Now I'm eight levels deep into my Mario making adventure and while there aren't any revolutionary concepts to be found in any of them, I think I've generally made some good, solid, Mario-ass Mario levels, as the guys at Giant Bomb would put it. Let's take a look at them (and reuse a lot of content I've already posted on GAF, Tumblr and elsewhere. Yay, blogging! :D).



Take the High Road - 1CCE-0000-0048-6B18

So unlike quite a few people, I didn't just take the tutorial level the game has you build and upload it as is (No, I'm not kidding!). Instead, I cleared away that stuff and got to work on this short little stage.
The idea of this stage is that it can be cleared with a non-stop chain of jumps (off of enemies) from the first goomba, on to the flag pole. At least that's the idea. Trying it again six weeks after I made it, I'm having some real trouble nailing it. :D (Maybe all those horror movies and candy bars have rotted my brain.) Even without those impressive acrobatics, this should still be clearable, as long as long as you do take the "high road" and avoid the paragoomba nightmare in the lower part of the level (an area the name of the level tells you to avoid, but people still keep going in there :D).



Red Shell Well - E62D-0000-0069-53B5

Working with the second set of unlocked tools (If you don't know, most of the creation tools are locked in Mario Maker to begin with. I can see what they were going for, but it's kind of a bad set-up.), my second stage was a slightly longer, but more conventional underground one. There are few tricky jumps in here, but nothing super crazy.



Watch Out, Lakitu's About - BA1E-0000-006A-426D

This one though is a bit of a step up in difficulty from my first two. You've got a couple of lakitus to deal with (one might not be as bad as the other though), a bunch of moving platforms and a fair bit of SMB World 8-style gap traversal. This is also the first level I included any meaningful secret in. That I'll leave up to you to find though.



Submerged Kingdom - 9101-0000-0072-F27C

The idea behind this level is that it was a ground stage that's been flooded. Now there are shoals of cheep cheeps to contend with as well as the original goombas and koopas. It looks tougher than it is. Then again, it too forever for this to go beyond 0 clears, so maybe not. :D



Recently Drained - C666-0000-0073-45DE

It might be a bit rich putting this up as a distinct level when this is 99.999% Submerged Kingdom with the theme changed from underwater to ground. :D.  I just wanted to make sure that that stage could actually be cleared as a ground stage for authenticity’s sake, and it was kind of fun. Cheap, sloppy, but kind of fun, so I put it up as well. Now it’s both more popular and has a higher clear rate than the original version. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



Kuribo’s Hideaway - F73D-0000-007D-BABC

My first foray into SMB 3, this was also my first castle stage (No, wait! Oh, they’re gone.) I really tried to make this feel as much like an authentic Mario 3 fortress as I could, and what Mario 3 stage would be complete without a few fun secrets?

Justin knows what’s up.

As did the producers on GameCenter CX, apparently. :D It made it into a group of ten foreign courses on a recent live challenge. Sadly, Arino didn't go for it, but hey, it was awesome just to be selected.

Giants Rule - AA63-0000-0092-A8BD

Yeah, there’s no way I wasn’t going to make a giant-themed SMB3 level when given the means to do so. I’m slightly disappointed that I wasn’t able to put giant blocks in here, but other than that, I’m really pleased with how this stage turned out: big-ass enemies; of course a kuribo’s shoe; a challenging little icy sub area (if you can reach it). Rumours even speak of a mysterious prison in the sky…



Go, Mario! Find the Secret Base! - 4515-0000-00F0-DE96

And here's my latest level. Moving from Mario 3 to Mario World, the main area in this I’d compare to say, Donut Plains 4 in Mario World proper. It’s made up of a lot of smaller platforms, with some tricky enemies to deal with, and a bit of conveyor belt/track-type business towards the end.



However, if you do as the (very DBZ-inspired) name suggests and find the entrance to the (admittedly not very well-hidden) secret base, you’ll end up in a airship sub area that’s a whole other level in itself. While this area isn’t up there with the most difficult Mario Maker's Course World has to offer, it’s certainly the hardest bit of a level I’ve put together so far, culminating in a battle with a very well-guarded Bowser Jr. Magikoopas; hammer brothers; homing bullets; cannons: the works!

Having finished this after the recent patch, I put in a couple of checkpoints in here too and, continuing to escalate from those few coins in the sky at the beginning of Watch Out, Lakitu's About (Oops, spoilers!), I crammed both areas as full of secrets as I could. I heard that there might even be a way to skip a significant portion of the airship area. Well, less heard, more deliberately put in. :D

That's all for now. For my latest levels (presuming I don't sudden abandon this, like quite a few other things :D), you can check out my page on Mario Maker Hub or my profile on Nintendo's shiny new Super Mario Maker Bookmark site.

Another Bloody Reblog: October 2015 Pick-ups and More

Okay, I’ll admit it: it's been me all along! :D

No, not much in the way of rarities here, I’m afraid. This lot's mostly made up of a bundle of Mario-related games I bought a few weeks ago, mostly games I already had in some form, but never on the NES/Famicom. It’s been kind of neat to go back and play Mario 2 and 3 without the Mario All-Stars enhanced graphics for the first time though, and it’s proved to be a great refresher course for Super Mario Maker, even though I didn’t quite plan things out that way.

Also picked up a few Konami classics (the two Wai Wai World games and the Famicom version of Kid Dracula, which is super fun), plus Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo Zen'in Shūgō, a follow-up to River City Ransom set in old-timey Japan (JiliK: history expert). I was really temped to grab that one up on the Japanese Virtual Console, but there’s far too much text to try and play it in Japanese. Thankfully though there’s a translation patch out there though and with the cart, I can put it to use on my Retron 5.



Picked up a few Super Famicom and Gameboy games too. Puzzle platformers aren’t usually my thing, but I spotted a copy of Mario & Wario going for a few dollars and I couldn’t resist. Mystic Ark was much the same. All I know is that it’s an Enix RPG that involves collecting people that have been turned into dolls, or something. Eh, it was two bucks and there’s a (really well-done so far) translation patch. It’s got to be worth a shot at least.

The other two SFC games I’ve played a fair bit of already. Magical Taruruuto-kun (top left) looked like a pretty neat cartoony platformer in videos. From what I’ve played of it though, the platforming seems super basic, but the game’s also quite frustrating because if you take a single hit, you not only die, you go back to the freaking map screen. Heisei Inu Monogatari Bow: Pop'n Smash (centre left), I’m enjoying a lot though. It’s a wacky tennis meets soccer game, more or less, where both you and the computer have goals sealed off by blocks. The basic aim of the game is to smash the blocks by lobbing a ball off them with your tennis racket and getting it into your opponent’s goal. There’s definitely a bit of jankiness to it, but it’s been pretty fun, frantic action so far.

On the Gameboy side, I also got the portable version of Kid Dracula, as well as Metroid II and Donkey Kong Land, which I've actually been enjoying quite a bit. It’s impressive how much of the SNES game they managed to cram in there, especially in the animation department. Granted it looks kind of like garbage, and it can be tricky to play with the big character and limited view of your surroundings, but it features all-original levels and the Retron’s save states take a lot of the frustration out. I’d say it’s worth a look if you can get it for cheap and preferably Retron/Retrode it up.



Some new additions to the family. That brings me up to 13 amiibos now. I think. :D Definitely still a few out now that I’m thinking of getting. I’d be surprised if I make it to the end of the year without picking up Sonic and Fox, and maybe the Duck Hunt dog. Overall though, I find most of the amiibos they've released so far either fall into the categories of cool-looking figures for characters I have no attachment to (Palutena, Little Mac, Shulk, ROB) or characters I like with figures that I don’t (Gannondorf, Wario, Link). Chibo Robo will be mine though. Oh yes, he will be mine.



Club Nintendooo!!! Having blown most of my remaining points on the Link Between Worlds soundtrack a few months prior, I was just short of getting the MK8 soundtrack when it appeared, of course, at the eleventh hour before the service shut down, leading me to spend..... too much on eBay for a copy once they started going out to other members. But boy, that soundtrack’s awesome.
That’s not the only Club Nintendo soundtrack I picked up in the last while though. I managed to snag the Ocarina of Time, Animal Crossing and Kid Icarus: Uprising all for about €20 each thanks to a saved search I set up. Not bad. Actually bad though: Pokémon 2BA Master. Thanks, Laser Time.



If the Mario Kart 8 soundtrack hit at the eleventh hour of Club Nintendo, the Endings and Credits CD hit at the twelfth. This time though I wasn’t about to spend *cough* *cough* *cough* euros on the damn thing. Instead, I bought a few unused Club Nintendo codes on eBay, enabling me to clear out the last of my stars in style. (Though it really bums me out to think of how many more I'd still have to play around with if I hadn’t spent all my Gamecube era ones on all those terrible wallpapers. Damn it, Nintendo.)

Also grabbed the Mario 30th Anniversary double CD, and, let’s address the elephant in the room: I bought the Data Discs Shenmue soundtrack...



...which is pretty rad, but it’s the thing that finally got me to cave and get a turntable, and I held out for so long. Vinyl is just something I have no attachment to or nostalgia for. Now I have this bulky-ass player and (already) a stack of records that I don’t know where to put, and I'm just ripping everything to MP3 anyway. Couldn’t we have skipped the middle step and you could have just given me downloadable versions of hard to find/non-existent video game soundtracks, Data Discs/iam8bit?



But no, you had to get me out there buying vinyl-exclusive early Now compilations didn’t you, because hey, I might as well. I’m already swimming in a sea of the stuff!