Possible projects

I'm not the type to write a lot of notes on my thoughts. I'm also very forgetful which makes a horrible combination. So I'll make my blog a place to brainstorm and list possible pixel art I could stitch together. So far my list looks like this:

Tiny Toons, Contra (NES), Animaniacs, Final Fantasy Tactics, Kirby ("Kirby Super Star" on SNES), Enemies from the Mario Bros series, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Johnny Bravo.

I don't have any interest in the Mario Bros themselves. They're a bit over done and I don't have much drive to remake them for the n'th time on the internet or myself.  I found a few Starcraft images, but the only units I'd be willing to make are the infantry of Terran and maybe a few of the smaller Protoss units.  I can't imagine Zerg units looking too good on stitch.  I haven't been able to find a Johnny Bravo sheet, but it wouldn't be too hard to convert any old JPEG image of him into a stitchable image, but I'm a bit too lazy to do that for now. No stitches this update today, but I leave you with a music video I much admire after a friend linked me to it randomly.  I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before so enjoy the encore if you have! If you haven't yet, stand up and join in the dance craze sweeping the interwebs.

"Legal Tender"? More like terrorist money!

 There's an relatively old outrageous story about a man being detained for using LEGAL tender at a Best Buy. Oh Best Buy, as if I needed more reasons to hate you. You're Your unknowledgable work force will try to shove a $200 HDMI cable down my throat but won't tell my grandmother that the 500 DVD player won't play Blurays. I guess I can't hate Best Buy directly for this but the worker there isn't the sharpest tool in the shed...Here's the story in short:

PUT YOURSELF in Mike Bolesta's place. On the morning of Feb. 20, he buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher's car. He pays the $114 installation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper. The $2 bills are Bolesta's idea of payment, and his little comic protest, too.

For this, Bolesta, Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours, finds himself under arrest.

Finds himself, in front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons.

Finds himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he's handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Secret Service is called into the case.

For the full story, click here

Edit: fixed the hard to read story. Sorry!

Anamanaguchi? Sounds delicious.

     I'm an idiot, I mixed up Netflix with Redbox again in my last post.  Sorry if I confused anyone, but hopefully the link and picture cleared that up. Anyway...

    It was inevitable that Anamanaguchi would be mentioned on this blog.  I've been a huge fan of chiptunes ever since the first album "Power Supply" came out in 2006.  All of their songs has the perfect mix of drum, guitar, and the mind-numbing ear candy from a hack NES/Gameboy.  When I first heard their arguably best track from their first album Nebula Helix, I knew that something big would happen in the field of chiptune music.  Hell, I didn't know the term "chiptune" back then.  Anamanaguchi was not the first artists that delve into hacked-hardware music composing (it was a relatively well-known technique known in small circles), but they were one of the first "bands" to really bring the music into huge mainstream attention and eventually got intergrated into current video games and movies.

     Their biggest break was being featured in the hit movie "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" which generated a huge following.  A side-scrolling beat-em-up was released for the Xbox Live Arcade shortly after the movie.  The game included an entire album of Anamanaguchi's songs and fit in perfectly with the pixel art style the game had.

Well that's enough back story. I'll just shut up now and let you listen to some of their best songs.

2005, Nebula Helix. (Their first album is downloadable for free on 8bitpeoples, Get it now!)


2009, Blackout City


Call me a fanboy hipster all you want, but this shit rocks my world.

Catch the Deal 1!

     Just in case you forgot, today is the last and only day to use your free netflix Redbox code from Facebook!  If you haven't gotten your code check out their Facebook and go to my past post for details! I rented out "The Social Network" with my free code.  How appropriate.

  Anyway, today's deal is a BOGO (Buy one Get one free) deal for Chipotle.   They're known for their relatively high quality food and huge portions.  Here's the deal: Click on this link, "watch" the 90-second video, and print your coupon!  You can print multiples of the coupon if you switch your browser or you can even clear your browser's cookies to get a new coupon!  They expire March 3rd so make sure you use it soon! I hope this helped some frugal shopper out there! Enjoy your free (or 1/2 off) burritos...and hopefully that's with a friend, I can't imagine someone eating two of these at once.

Lyn? FFXI? Choices...

Quick update for Lyn, I gave her THREE WHOLE SHADES OF BLUE! ooooh, stupidly slow progress is STILL PROGRESS, shut up!

Sorry that this is a real quick update.  I spent a majority of my time playing FFXI.  I have no idea why I'm playing it...It's such an old game and its UI is horrific. I'll post about FFXI soon once I get my feet a little more wet and I have more positive things to say for the game . As for Lyn...I think I'll hold off on finishing her for a while. I'm half lazy and half scared that the colors I pick for her skin will look fugly, but I'm already this far so I should just wrap it up soon...Anyway, Happy blogging and I'll try to update something more substantial later in the week. 

Lyn.

My guessing game won't work on this character too well.  The game series she's from is actually a LONG running series in Japan and only got its fame from Super Smash Bros Melee from one certain character. After Marth's appearance in SSBM, Nintendo finally got lucky and got a localization team to translate and distribute the first of many Fire Emblem games onto the Game Boy Advanced.  Since then, Many more successful Fire Emblem games were given to North America including the Gamecube and the Wii.  

Lyndis (also known as Rindisu [リンディス] in the great land of Nippon -_-), She is the main character in the very first north america released game simply titled "Fire Emblem" on November 3, 2003.  The game is a tactical turn-based strategy which including permanent unit death which causes real change in the long storyline.  The permanent death feature gave battles a feel of real urgency and since it changed the story depending on which character died, there was incentive to save as many people as you could (and trust me, that's NOT easy).  It's not a game for everyone, but at the time it was a great, complex hand-held strategy game with beautiful Animations to boot.  I'll post some animations after I complete this stitch; I don't want to show you the template sprite before I'm done! haha. 

Jeremy Soule

    When Guild Wars released in 2005, it was the shit.  It proved that games can be innovative, affordable, streamlined, fun, strategy, and not require tons of grinding.  It was, and still is, one of the most innovative online games made.  It is a great game, but one aspect of the game got its hooks into me: The music.

    Jeremy Soule is one of the most famous video game music composers. Every area in the game had it's own sweeping, orchestral song that fit in with the beautiful scenery, be it tranquil forests with falling petals to scorching hellfires, The music was marvelously spot on.  Jeremy Soule, the composer of the entire Guild Wars soundtrack, knows his way around orchestral pieces and it shows.  Jeremy is also well know for composing the soundtrack of Morrowind. I've included both a piece from Guild Wars and Morrowind.  I hope you enjoy!

Catch the Freebie 1!

Sorry I've been blowing off some commenting.  My blog commenting tends to sway towards people that comment on me first, then my followers.  I don't comment ALL the time, but I do visit everyone's blog eventually!

I'm always on the lookout for good deals and free swag, so I thought I'd update the blog with some free things I run into once in a while (blue moon).  Today I found a free Redbox rental that's only valid on Feb 24.  Sure it's limited to use on one day, but it's free! So here's how you do it. Visit Redbox's Facebook (2nd link if the first one doesn't work ).  Click on the "like" button.  Then when you're done with that click on the "FREEBIE" tab near the top and claim your code!  Pretty simple and it only takes 2 minutes to get a free rental!  You can do this with multiple Facebook accounts to get multiple codes, but you'll have to use a different credit card and email address if you do redeem multiples of this offer.

If you have a texting service, you can also get a free Redbox rental every first Monday of the month texted to your mobile device!  The official Redbox website has this offer so you can trust it's legit. Hope someone will get some use out of this!

The boy of met yet again!

I've posted about how great of a game Super Meat Boy already.  This time I'd like to move the spotlight over to a great piano player that has arranged numerous tracks from the game. Brent Kennedy is responsible for over 30 piano arrangements of game music including Aquaria, Plants vs. Zombies, World of Goo, VVVVVV, and many many songs from Super Meat Boy.  Please give this man some props and check out his youtube channel for more amazing pieces!

YOSHI!

Yup, it was Yoshi.  I don't have a lot to comment about this since it actually turned out very well.  Much better than I thought it would. 1 1/2 " X 1 1/4 " inches, I like how the shine on his nose came out as well as his neck area.  The color scheme for his shoes is ugly (in the sprite AND my stitch) but it works for some reason.  Green and orange contrast pretty well though, I gotta admit. The only improvement I could use is more consistant stitching in the nose area: I still tug thethread with different strengths and it causes some visual effects if you look closely in the dark green area of his nose.  I also am not 100% happy with the neck shadow color but it still works. Overall I'm extremely happy with how this turned out.  It's so satisfying, I can't help but have this music play in my head when I look at him:

Guess That Stitch 4!

Today I give you...the color scheme I'm working with along with the WIP photo I took. I churned him out within 2 days, about 2-4 hours per day.  I wish I could give a more accurate work time, but I tend to surf the web, chat online, and multitask while I do my stitches.  I feel really slow for JUST figuring this out, but I found that using the needle backwards (inserting with both sides rather than one) can speed up production quite a lot in certain situations.  I'm still very new to this hobby so I'm still learning what works and what doesn't.  When I feel comfortable I'll definitely make bigger things.

Hints: Proper name. It's a creature from a well known game.  Various known activities: Partying, eating, baby sitting. The photo will fit the entire stitched character if it were complete (well, his head will be cut off by 2 pixel rows, sorry)

Baba-yetu!

     I fixed my Feeds (finally).  If you're still having problems, unfollow my feed and refollow it.  I had to change the URL since I changed my name.

     For those not closely into current gaming news, there was a big milestone reached a few days ago.  Christopher Tin was awarded a Grammy in the category of "Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists" for the piece "Baba Yetu".  What is unique about this is that song was primarily composed for the video game Civilization 4!  It is the first time that a song composed for a video game has won a Grammy!  It gives the composers of video game music a huge boost in the credit.  It is very easy for ignorant people to blow off art pieces just because "it's from a game" but with this latest award given out, I'm very happy that such recognition is finally given for a media that has a lot of negative bias associated with it.  Big congratulations to Christopher Tin, huge props to the choir for singing sublimely, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did and still do today!

     Babe Yetu is actually the "Lord's Prayer" sung in Swahali.  I'm not a man of faith, but GOD DAMN does this song rock so much. The game actually came out in 2005, but the album "Calling All Dawns" containing the song was released in 2009, which qualified it for this year's Grammys.

Castlevania Cover

      Thanks to schattenjager of Youtube for doing a ton of great covers.  One of my favorites has to be from  Castlevania 1 "Vampire Killer" from Stage 1.  It's such a great opening song for the game.


And for comparison, the original.  There isn't really much lost in the translation of the old hardware; The old melody still sticks and makes for a great action packed time.  The guitar just helps modernize the tune. Hope you enjoy at least one of them, Tomorrow I'll have a different layout for my "guessing" games.

KAH-BEE!

This is a quickie stitch for me. Very small, only about a square inch and took one sitting.  I edited out the dark-pink areas to make him solid color.  It looks GREAT in animation, but stitches can't animate sadly.   I wanted to start doing the SNES version of Kirby from Kirby Super Star, but lacked the correct pink colors.  I settled for the NES version of Kirby. I could do a SNES Kirby if I pallete swap the colors to my available colors, but I'll save that sprite editing for some other day when I have more ambition for Kirby. For now this Kirby will have to do, and it's on to bigger and better things. This is a tiny Valentine's Day tie-in thanks to VGcats.

Original sprite sheet courtesy of Dr.Shnaps . 

The stitch that will never be.

I'd like to introduce...Mystery-Delicious-Toast-Shaped-Thing! I started outlining this character but found I had no interest to finish it. None of my close friends would enjoy it either, so I guess I'll leave it alone indefinitely. I won't drag this guessing game out to two posts, so click on "comments" to see what it is.   I'm working on a character that is fairly familiar to most people, so look forward to that.

...Black...cat?

      Barely a square inch, This was a test stitch for me to try to stitch without changing the entire image.  I have had to edit the sprite images for most of the works up until this point, and "The Cat" was the first time I stitched an untouched sprite. It didn't turn out the way I had hoped.  There were two key problems for this one.

       First problem was I chose a bad image to even try out.  The game this little guy comes from is "Wario Land 4" on the Gameboy Advanced.  Most game sprites that originate from tiny handheld systems tend to have weird properties.  The artists like to outline all their sprites sometimes to make them stand out, or choose weird pixel placement to show shadows and depth.  But when looking at these sprites at close range , it becomes fairly messy.  If you look at the 10 X 3 block on the bottom of the cat, it's suppose to be a leg.  When artists only have a small canvas to work on, images need to be fudged a it.  It looks great on a Tiny screen, not so great blown up to a square inch. 

     Second problem was (all of you say it with me now)....COLORS!  I did not have the correct colors, so what is suppose to be shadows look more like really funky hair color.   This problem is partly due to money, I don't have $100 to spend to get 20 shades of grey/black so what I picked up was not very good at blending together well.  So in the future, don't expect to see a lot of darker color figures (Sorry Batman, maybe someday.)

     I still admire the cat a bit, It actually a stray cat in the game so it's suppose to look a little funky.  

Guess that...thing 3!

More guessing games. This one is really quick update, so I'm sorry about the length of this post. I'm a bit busier than before ever since I got my friends into playing tennis. I slept for like 2 hours after I played; I'm so out of shape.  I actually have a lot to comment about this when I'm done with it, but I'll obviously save that until the next post. For now, What is this!?

A classic cartoon!

I'm really surprised by the amount of people that connected a pixel-art cow to Harvest Moon. Maybe I shouldn't be. How many video game cows can there be anyway?!

The Animaniacs is not exactly classic to me, but it is pretty old. Animaniacs was produced by Warner Bros. and Steven Spielberg in the early 90's. The show was full of condensed comedy: Double meanings, non-stop clever writing, great and unique characters in each episode, fourth-wall shenanigans, and very succinct dialog with every line. Animaniacs really pushed the boundaries with how well a cartoon could be written. It was one of those shows that kids would love, but adults love even more for some of the hidden humor (today's equivalent of kids AND adult humor would probably be Pixar). And the best trait of the show was that it was actually educational! They always sang about interesting things for kids to know, such as presidential line ups, the solar system, state capitals, and of course Lake Titicaca (it's located between Bolivia and Peru!). Animaniacs was just plain great.

A female Elephant!

Did you know that a female elephant is called a cow? You can thank the trivia game "You Don't Know Jack" for that useless bit of information. My last guess-my-stitch was pretty easy. Almost everyone got it. I dunno, I think it could look like a pig or sheep. Congratulations! You get to see the finished product!

Original sprite:

Edit:

The piece:

Again, I ran into the problem of not having enough colors. The physical piece only took 5 colors (the tiny nose bits are the 5th). But the original sprite had at 9 I believe. There are 3 colors for the shadow effect, 2 for the brown fading, 2 for the nose, and the rest is obvious (the shadow itself is off-black). I realize that if I want greater depth in my pieces, I'll need to do the shadows but if I do not use the EXACT right color, The piece looks completely horrible. Lighting effects just look like sunburns or miscolors. It was hard to do, but I had to consolidate my colors/shadows into one, making the sprites look flat. I also found that stitching white/off-white/beige on white linen is a pain in the ass. I need good lighting to do it without messing up. You can see on the middle beige area where I was stitching while under bad lighting and "watching" a movie, haha.

Edit: yes, it is the cow from the original SNES Harvest Moon.

Super Bowl commercials!

I'm definitely not a huge football fan, but It's a good reason to gather friends, eat pizza and drink beer. The general consensus is that this year's Super Bowl was....meh, bad. I agree. the commercials weren't as succinct and the halftime show was embarassing. The actual game was...a game, and was relatively close at the end. The steelers were one field goal away from tying up the game, but it was not to be. Anyway, here's my my pick for the best 2010 Super Bowl commercials. It's so sweet and gave me a chill down my body.

As for this years commercial pick:

Guess that Cross-Stitch 2!

Here's a work in progress photo. It's for a friend that loves a certain game. I think I'm reaching my peak at how fast I can stitch. This hobby is becoming more time consuming than I thought before. It's not bad, but I'm a bit impatient sometimes.

Marvel Vs Capcom!

Today's musical choice came up randomly on an internet radio site I listen to ocassionally, Nolife Radio. This is the music you get when you lose your partner in battle while Captain America comes in to fill his spot.

And here is the upcoming Marvel vs Capcom 3 version of the song!

I absolutely hate the new version. It's got way too much of that digital "twang" sound to it. The raw and remixed melody is nice but I wish they would get rid of the techno-y "twang" it's got to it. Either way, this game will kickass when it comes out. Kinda makes me wish I read visual novels. I actually don't know much about Captain America, but he is awesome in the game. Anyway, which song do you like? The original or the new? Also, know anything about Captain America?

Who's that?

Really, I don't know how I ran into this sprite, but I figured it would be a great quick project to do while I think of bigger projects. From a game called "Doki Doki Penguin Land". It sounds very kiddish and Japanese. Here's the original sprite given by "Ragey" of http://www.spriters-resource.com/ and my stitching alongside. I made his forehead a pixel taller because I fucked up counting, so now he's got a giant head. The stitch is about .8 x 1.0 inches. I used the wrong blue, but I'm a cheapskate and I'm using my overabundant colors rather than correct colors. NO ONE KNOWS WHO THIS STUPID PENGUIN IS ANYWAY. He doesn't deserve pixel perfect coloring! It looks like he's frowning, but that's because the way the stitching went. He looks great, but I don't really care for him too much.