deviantArt Update #2

Disperse

by JiliK - Oct 21, 2009

Another DA upload. This time it's a new wallpaper I inadvertently made while messing around with an image in Paint Shop Pro.

deviantART Update

Spray Guy

by JiliK - Oct 20, 2009

As well as adding the Arty Screensaver to my DA Gallery today, I put up this little guy, who I doodled in MS Paint with just the Airbrush tool around Christmas 2006. I've been trying to do something with him for a long time, but I finally gave up and decided to put up the original image. He kind of reminds me of a lecturer I had at the time actually. :D

Arty Screensaver

TL;DR Version: I've remade a screensaver from my old site, get it here.

Back in the Spring of 2000 I was in the middle of finishing up my Junior Cert. art project. The theme I'd picked for it was "Summer Memories", so in the run-up to doing the final painting, graphic design, 3D and craft pieces I was cranking out practice drawings and paintings of flowers, butterflies and the like as well as design ideas for my final project submissions.

In the Summer of that year I took some of those drawings (and some other stuff) and made them into a little screen saver. I called it the Artwork Screensaver and uploaded it to my old web site on the soon-to-be-closed-down GeoCities.

A couple of months ago, I set about remaking that screensaver with higher resolution images and lots of new screens. I put the finishing touches to it a few weeks ago and popped it up on my web site, where you can grab it, should you feel the need to do so.

After I'd finished, I thought it would a nice idea to go through the saver screen by screen and give a little background on the bits and pieces of feeble artwork it contained. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Hey, come back!



Screen 1: How abstract. This comes from a not-so-great design I entered in Telecom Eireann's Design a CallCard competition in 1997, in which I was one of many, many runners up. Seriously, there were about seven in our school alone. For the original screensaver I scanned in a photocopy of the design (TE kept the original), cropped it to this and messed about with the image a bit in a program called Repligator, I think.



Screen 2: Two flowers I drew one day at home while I was messing around with some pastels. I'm pretty sure I was finished with the whole art project at that stage, so I guess these were done on my own time.



Screen 3: A little drawing I did sometime early in 2000. After having seen this documentary on a modern artist one night, I decided that anyone could crank out the type of stuff he was doing. Within the next few days I set out to draw something as arty and pretentious as possible and this was what I came up with. I really liked the drawing so it got included as the third screen in my super-pretentious Artwork Screensaver™. I think they call that "hypocrisy"

Recent Game Pickups

It's been ages since I posted anything, so I thought I'd talk about a few of the games I picked up recently. Well, not about Pikmin 2 or The Munchables. They were pretty sweet deals at €23 and €18 respectively, but I just want to knuckle down and finish Super Mario RPG on the VC before I move on to anything else on the Wii. Just one more star to go!

Frequency:

I was in a local record shop to grab some headphones last week and I went to check out their small game section at the back. Sitting on the shelf was Frequency, Harmonix's first PS2 effort and a pretty damn expensive game to get hold of now, new for €9.99.

I really enjoyed Amplitude. It made you feel like you like you were mucking about on a mixing desk, building songs up from their basic components. I thought was always was interesting to hear what different combinations of those components sounded like. Some of the later songs required crazy amounts of dexterity, but hitting the right combination of buttons at the right time and activating the track you were on was always extremely satisfying.

Frequency seems to pretty much the same as it's sequel, from what I've played. The graphics aren't quite as flashy and the track listing seems a bit more obscure, but I'm sure that I'll enjoy it equally.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus

While Sonic Mega Collection on the Cube is great, there is one major drawback. The lack of save states makes it pretty tough for a lazy game such as myself to beat any the games on it. Screw practising, I prefer to cheat my way to success. Thankfully, you can save away in the PS2/Xbox versions, so after spotting it in GameStop, I decided to double dip.

Just like the Cube version, this includes with all the major Sonic games from the Mega Drive, but you also get a bunch of (fairly ropey) Game Gear efforts. From what I've seen so far, there doesn't seem to be any 60Hz option, which is a big disappointment if true. On the bright side though, you can save anywhere you like by bringing up a menu with the L2 button. The only problem with that is that it takes forever for the game to save or load. A temporary quick save like in the PS2 version of Half-Life would have been a welcome inclusion, but it's better than nothing guess. Maybe I'll finally be able to get past the fucking Labyrinth Zone now. :D

Castlevania & Contra

Another compilation and one I had forgotten about until pretty recently. I already had the original Castlevania on the VC, but I didn't have the rest of the games here and with the cheap price it was going for on eBay, I decided to grab a copy.

What you're getting here are the three NES Castlevanias plus the NES versions of Contra and Super C, complete with customisable controls and save states. I was kind of worried that the game mightn't agree with Windows XP, but it worked fine and the emulation seems pretty good from what I've played.

The only problem I have is that in order to save or load, just like Sonic Mega Collection, you have to go into a menu to do it, there's no way to quick save or load by pressing certain keys. I mean, the time it takes to save or load a game on a PC is minimal and you've been able to do this in PC emulators for ages, so why not include it here? I guess I'll have to soldier on without it, but it would have been nice to have the option to use it for some of the more bastard-hard sections of the games. Medusa heads, I'm looking at you.

Perfect Dark Zero

I'm planning on picking up a 360 soon, so I decided to have a gander around the used section at GameStop to see if I could find anything interesting. Prefect Dark Zero immediately caught my eye. While I know it's not the greatest of games, I sunk a hell of a lot of time into Perfect Dark in the N64 days and I really wanted to check this out. And hey, it comes with a fake DataDyne security card thing. That's got to be worth €13 all on it's own.

Not-so-live Blogging Nintendo's E3 Conference

It's E3 once again and today was Nintendo's turn in the spotlight. I was going to take the massively original step of giving my impressions on Twitter as the inevitable train wreck unfolded. I ended up missing it when it was on live, but luckily for you, I opened up a Notepad window and jotted down my impressions as I watched it two hours later. Will we find out more about Cammie's son, will Ravi Drums return and most importantly, will Nintendo be bringing any smiles to this gamer's face. If you want to follow along, you can watch the conference here.

Let the madness begin...

• 10:03:11AM And we're off. Look at how happy all those fake gamers look.

• 10:03:49 Holy crap, might want to tone down the crazy flashing animations guys. I wouldn't want to have epilepsy right now.

• 10:04:20 "Everyone's Game". Oh goody, lots of casual shovelware to look forward to, I suppose.

• 10:04:28 Cammie! The stage is engulfed in what can only be described as "Gamecube purple". So sick of that colour from back in the day. I wonder if there are more Wiimakes on the way.
  

• 10:05:17 Sales data incoming.

• 10:06:00 Oh! Everyone's game. As in everyone is up for gaming. That's sort of clever.
  

• 10:06:42 "A grin or a shout buried in the middle of a level." What?

• 10:07:07 Mario reveal on the way. A little retrospective of Mario games begins.

• 10:07:29 Super Mario World. Fuck yeah!

• 10:08:04 Mario in the fourth dimension? Mario on PS3 confirmed!

• 10:08:30 New Super Mario Bros. for Wii. Excite!!!

• 10:09:24 So, Mario Four Swords then. I like how the Treehouse guys have shirts to match their characters.

More after the jump.

Feature: Inside the Toy Box

Before Christmas (2008), I came across an old box of toys that me and my brother had when we were kids. After more than ten years, I had half forgotten what was inside, so expecting to finds all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, I grabbed a camera and got ready to have a good poke around.



Here's the box itself. It's from an an old Sharp microwave that recently expired in a plume of black smoke. I guess 15 years isn't too bad for an electrical appliance. Let's pop this sucker open.

Drum roll, please.



And what did I find inside? A bunch of toy cars of various types and states of decomposition belonging to my auto mobile-obsessed sibling.

Great.

Oh well, I don't know what I was expecting to see anyway. I was far too prone to loosing or breaking any toys I had to still have them in here. Let's press on anyway.



First up is a crappy two-piece present from a mall Santa from about 1993. It's a turntable and a....lift thing (move over, Jeremy Clarkson) for small toy cars. I can't remember what I got from him, but I do remember that we got cardboard reindeer hats though. I guess they got binned.



Ooh, it's something of mine. It's an tattered old pair of gloves that I used to ride my bike with. Not strictly necessary, but I thought they were pretty cool at the time.



Another of my brother's. It's a licensed toy from Gerry Anderson's short-lived 90's show, Space Precinct. I have no idea why he would have wanted this, neither of us were into the show, but he picked this as a Christmas present one year (1995, I think).

By then, Santa had seemingly gotten a bit lazy and decided to forgo the whole letter and workshop thing and let us pick what we wanted ourselves. Apparently he paid for the presents later through some sort arrangement with the shop. I wasn't buying it.



A toy tractor my brother got as a present one year. He was totally thrilled, I mean who wouldn't be? It says "let's get to work!" when you push down the yellow bit on top for crying out loud!



A blue Santa hat that they were giving away with Pepsi around Christmas 1996. If Pepsi got to redesign Santa, he'd wear this and probably have a goatee.

More bad jokes and dodgy camera work after the jump

deviantART Update: Paint Doodles 2

Paint Doodles 2

by JiliK - Apr 27, 2009

Another deviantART update. This time I've put up a collage of odd little doodles I do sometimes in MS Paint - usually when the broadband is out and I'm back to waiting forever for stuff to load with dial-up. I've had these ones stored away for ages, but I finally whipped them into something reasonable looking over the last few weeks. Check it out here.