Time off!

Sorry guys for the lack of updates, but I'll be gone for a few days more. So I spent like 10 minutes on the bib until I realized I started the 2nd yoshi off center.  It's bugging me, should I restart it?  I'm so lazy I think I'll just continue, what do you think?

FFXI Music

Got something pretty awesome today by Noriko Matsueda which is widely known for his great compositions in the Square Enix (Squaresoft) games.  I thought I'd take a step away from old classic video game systems and give you a piece from Final Fantasy XI called "Dolphin".



This is probably the most well known song for any FFXI players since it greeted you everytime you would login. Despite how much I hate HATE HATE Playonline for its stupid convulted account services,  I find this song puts me at ease...while I smash my keyboard against a wall. Hope you enjoy this song and be glad you probably never dealt with Playonline.

Bib progress

Been busy lately, but I made some good progress on the bib.  I'm extremely happy about how this turned out.  I've only ever worked on 18 count fabric so I was very skeptical about working on 14 count cloth.  The bigger pixels meant it would have much more noticeable gaps in between each stitch but the good side is that smaller art will be about 25% larger than it would be on 18 count cloth and this works wonderfully in my favor at the moment. So here's 1/3 of the bib! I ditched the old crying Yoshi because who wants a depressing baby bib!? Bad idea so I just swapped for a more cheerful pose.

   

I used a very dark grey around his eyes and mouth for shadows but quickly switched to a light grey for the body curve shadow.  It also looks like he has a squashed bug on the bottom of his shoe but that's just because my stitches are not as consistant as I'd like them to be.  I like how the sprites have double layered outlines. I wasn't sure if I wanted to make the outline thinner but I did it in Paint.net and it made Yoshi look shallow.  It still bugs me now with the thick outline, but the thin outline would've bugged me much more. 

I LOVE how this is going so far. Don't worry, I'll update sooner this time since I'm on a roll for stitching. 

Ultima Online

Once upon a time in the early times of the internet where AOL reigned supreme and NetZero was a respectable 56k ISP dial-up provider the MMORPG genre was just getting it's first legs and growing.  Long before anyone thought that Blizzard would make monstrous game behemoths (World of Warcraft duh) there were studios that were paving the way into what would be the modern MMO games of today.  There are a few worthy of mention: Everquest, Never Winter Nights, Nexus: The Kingdom, MUDS, and Neopets (haha).  But one really took to a whole new level...and that was....

ULTIMA ONLINE!

*cue music*

(Nifty Song, eh?  All noble and shit!)

Ah yes, back before when "Player Versus Player" actually meant killing someone that looked funny at you rather than killing someone for some abitrary point system, where thieves weren't preying on those stupid enough to give their passwords but were ACTUALLY stealing within the game's mechanics. Where Murderers roamed outside the city limits for the purpose of being a dick.  Where players pirates roammed the sea and openly attacked Fisherman and stole all their treasure. In Ultima Online the world was ruthless and with a real sense of loss on the line whenever you played, you grew attached to your character and goods.  I've revisited Ultima Online thanks to the In Por Ylem Shard that recently opened.   And letme sum up my experience in one picture:

If you're not really into MMORPGs, I hope you appreciate how "noble and shit" this song was. 

Batman (NES) Stage 1!

I've been hooked on old MMO games and I totally should not be spending so much time with them. They're just horrible horrible time sinks.  I'll go into depth with Ultima Online and Final Fantasy XI sometime when I have a clear head but just know I have a good reason I'm playing these versus other recent games such as World of Warcraft or Rift or Lord of the Rings Online or ....etc.

Today I've got THE GODDAMN BATMAN! I will admit that I've never even beaten one level of this game, but I have played level 1 many times! This music is the sole reason I picked it up and tried it out.  The stage 1 music just builds up so nicely with a nice drum intro, works into a catchy melody, starts to get intense as the song closes, and finishes up with great energy! It really added a great atmosphere for me as I feel like THE GODDAMN BATMAN punching flame thrower dudes, floor cleaning robots, and random dude that runs into you! And oh man the jumping controls are spot on with it's great wall jumps.  I'm completely reminded of how well Super Meat Boy did its wall jumps and Batman is definitely one of those games that has awesome wall jumping experience unlike SOME games *coughMetroidcough*.

Enjoy! Tell me if you enjoyed this song!

Amy's Wedding!

Today I went to attend Amy's Wedding!  She got married today at around 1:00pm PST!  Congratulations and I hope you and your husband will have many happy years together!  If you want to congratulate her, head on over to her blog and just wish her a happy future.  She'd really appreciate a sudden surge to her blog as well since she's relatively new! I don't want to post pictures until she approves, so just believe me! I was there, she's married, go congratulate her!

Earthquake and Banner update

I'm STUNNED at the low casualty numbers for Japan's 8.9 earthquake.  News sources say that their ultra strict building standards probably saved many lives.  Haiti's 7.0 quake killed (I think) 220,000 to put that in perspective and Japan will be predicted to have lost just over 1,000 with its' 8.9 earthquake.  Friggin' engineers and building policy writers definitely deserve from praise for preemptively saving a TON of people.  If you haven't heard of all this, I've been keeping tabs on Aljazeera livestream news  for updates and information.

Ninja Gaiden II music is ROCKING

The Ninja Gaiden series of games is pure evil.  The level designers of these games must have been masochists to design such sadistic set pieces.  Each enemy, platform, pitfall, and obstacle were precariously placed to ensure maximum frustration.  This was an era where you got your $50 money's worth from mastering a handful of ridiculously hard levels and Ninja Gaiden was the king of such level designs back in 1990.  If you were a souless robot, you could beat such a difficult game in about 15 minutes but of course it took normal humans many many more hours to master it.  Many controllers were probably broken by pure rage form this game but those than persevered through the game were treated to entire animated cutscenes and a involving plotline which was an amazing feat.  It was one of the first games to involve ANY story on the NES! Most NES games were as simple as "you are this guy, you want to kill this guy, GO!".  In Ninja Gaiden it was "You are Ryu Hayabusa, you want Ashtar dead, GO!" but with supporting characters, a love interest, sacrifices, and plot twists! Sure it's no novel, but it was a novel idea for a video game at the time.

The point is this was a difficult but rewarding game that featured a ROCKING soundtrack. The only problem with the music is that it rocks SO hard it messes up my playstyle.  If you want any possibility of beating this game you need patience, but it's so hard to stand around to survey situations with such bumping tunes!  I had a hard time picking a track from Ninja Gaiden II specifically...that is until I found out about The Nintendo Drummer's Youtube page.  He did an amazing job covering the drums that I felt no need to include the original NES version of the song as his drums take nothing away from the original song but add new life to it.  I encourage you to check out his youtube page. He's done 16 drum covers for NES games and I'll definitely bring him back into my blog again! Enjoy Ninja Gaiden 2's music taken from Act 2 Scene 2 covered by The Nintendo Drummer!

Anyway, how rocking is this shit?!

Rushjet1 - Chiptunes

    I'd hate to impose more of my chiptune music on you, but I really love it.  Rushjet1's best works are on par with Anamanaguchi's pieces, but Rushjet opts to go fully digital.  Rushjet was one of my first dives into chiptunes (not including video game music itself).  Though he has not arranged any albums since 2008, he still has an active youtube account where you can find his various scraps of experimentation.  Give a listen and tell me if it grinds you gears or tickles your pickle!

My next project!

My next project will be a fairly simple one.  The only problem I have now is finding time to stitch it.  I kinda got hooked on Civilization 5, Rift, and FFXI all at once so I have more meaningless timesinks than I would like...But here's the idea.

First of all I'd like to thank Riot Patch of Pixels blog for giving me the idea for stitching on a bib! Thanks. You're much more talented at this stuff than I am!  So here's a tiny preview of the subject of this stitch:

I plan to have a few baby yoshi's stitch on a baby bib for a friend's future bouncing baby! I'm pretty excited for her!  I just wish I didn't have to buy the bib pre-made, it kinda makes me feel crappy since I might've been  able to make a small bib myself, but I'm not comfortable doing so. 

Banelings Banelings Banelings Ooooh!

I'm the master of old content, so today I have you a mashup of Starcraft and Justin Bieber! It's like hot chocolate and fresh sewage, like a pair of snug slippers and foot fungus, like Jack Daniels and Vicodin!  They go so well together! Okay I lie, but I still love this song.  If you don't understand Justin Bieber OR Starcraft, you might want to pass on the video.

Lyn is not so complete!

I'm not sure why I started on stitchin Lyn; I have no real connection to Fire Emblem, so I kinda just suddenly stopped.  I'll finish her someday.  I know it's lame especially since I only have like 30 stitches left haha, I just don't want to dig through my colors just to mess up her skin color. Anyway, Here's the last image of her stitch before I put her away for a while along with a video of her animation in action.  It looks so sleek!

\

Youtube does NOT do this game justice.  It does not capture all 60 Frames per second, so some of the very fast animation frames are not shown here. If you look closely at 0:11, you'll see the frame I captured in the stitch though.

Donkey Kong Country 2

To be honest Donkey Kong Country series was not my cup of tea.  It was a straightforward platforming game released as one of the first SNES games and it featured some crazy (for the time) pre-rendered photo realistic graphics.  It was enough to make it an awesome game, but it has not aged too well gameplay wise. It's just really simple; a bit too simple for me.  I think it's partly because I never got to play SNES games until I found out about emulation and by that time I was spoiled by more modern games like PS1 and N64 stuff.  TLDR: I don't quite hold DKC series on such high pedastals as others might, but I love the one song from the series in particular..

Stickerbrush Symphony.

And the readers that follow me and played DKC2 will all go "OMG YES, THAT SONG" in unison because it is that powerful of a song.  DKC2 has some good songs, but this definitely takes the gold medal hands down. It is relaxing, soothing, and it has a mysterious tone to it.  I really hope you give this a listen if you're having a bad day as it might make the rest of your day pretty mellow.

Ska and boxing!

     Mike Tyson's Punch Out on NES was a fun game.  It was a huge smash hit for me, but it was a great game for its time.   It required fast reflexes, observations of (sometimes) subtle clues, and an iron will to truly beat in one sitting. The game allowed you to block, dodge to two sides, punch in two directions, and super punch.  The controls were simple but to beat the game took some skill.  Aside from how tough the game can, it was a great game!  Today I'd like to give you three versions of the Punch-Out music:

The Original  NES!


And the Nintendo Wii Remake!


I definitely love the remade version so much more.    I have a soft spot for strong trumpets which explains my weird binges of Ska music. Anyway, I'm out for today.  Tell me which version you like most, Original or Remade.

P.S. Yes, there was a SNES "Super Punch Out" Game.  Quite frankly the game was mediocre and the music was not as iconic as the original NES music.

P.P.S. How did they not remake the training song for the wii game?! HOW? It must be in the Wii game, it MUST BE...my google-fu is not strong enough.  20 virgins to the first person to give me this Wii remade music!

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.

A Gusty Galaxy appears!

I'm trying to stray away from classic NES chiptune type songs more than I'm used to as they're not as universally enjoyed by all than more modern game soundtracks. On that note, I give you the best track on Super Mario Galaxy 1. I still get goosebumps as it builds up. Even if you hate Mario with every fiber of your being or anything related to Nintendo just because you think everyone is a bunch of NES-hipsters clouded with nostalgia, You HAVE to admit how awesome this song is and Mahito Tokota deserves some major props for the entire soundtrack. I encourage you to listen to more of the soundtrack if you liked this.

A small behind-the-scenes and 100 followers!

Wow, 100 followers! Woot. Even though there are still a few bloggers from before my hiatus, I'll just say Thanks to my current readers for following my ACTION PACKED AND THRILLING STITCHING ACTION! YYEEAA. Thanks!

I'm really new to cross stitching, so I'm primarily using Paint.net to organize and recolor my sprites. The easiest way for me to get templates is to use video game sprite sheets, so I used a Powerpuff game (The Powerpuff Girls: Him and Seek!) on the Gameboy Advanced. It was a bit tough because I was not happy with the original look of Bubbles in the game. Her hair was the best aspect of the original sprite, but I lacked the colors so I chose to make the hair one solid color.

Before(ripped by Kenshin Himura from http://www.spriters-resource.com/):

The #1 gripe I had with the game sprite was the grey outlining. These photos are at 8x magnification, so the grey lines were originally there to make her features more noticeably on a tiny tiny Gameboy Advanced screen. But if I wanted a 3 inch cross stitch, the grey lines would just look very ugly so I scraped it but kept some of the shadowing on her hair and skirt. I also wanted to stay with the cartoon's art style of sharp solid colors, so I opted to remove the gradient on her eyes and skirt. Lastly, her smile on the ripped sprite is just so akward. She's making the duck face! So that had to go for a more traditional smile. And....

After (My edit):

Tada! Overall I'm happy with the edit. I would have definitely kept the original hair colors if I had the colors to do it. Stay tuned, I'll have a quick mini project up soon!

Finished Bubbles

She's done! It actually did not take as long as I thought it would. Outlining her took more time just because I had to count each pixel to make sure she was proportional. After that it's just a matter of filling in the color which is more straight forward. I'm very happy with the way she came out especially since I'm only working with 36 colors. I had to make do with a slightly off-color but it's near perfect. I had to recolor her sprite to make sure I could work with the 5 color limit I set for myself but for future projects I definitely need to expand my color pallette to get quality looking finishes. I'll post the difference between the original sprite and the recolor I did next time. If/When I do expand my color choices, I'm gonna have trouble organizing my floss. Anyway, it's done!

A great composer!

Since everyone knows my next piece already, I'll skip the boring Work in Progress photos until it's done for good. It's not too exciting to update them unless they're still unrecognizable or completely done. I should be done with her by tomorrow or the next day. Also, made a Title banner for my blog. 10 minutes in Paint.net, fun.

This update I'd like to show some appreciation for Richard Jacques. He's well known for composing some of the songs for Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future, Super Smash Bros. Brawl!, and Headhunter. Headhunter's gameplay was very close to Metal Gear Solid (action, stealth, etc). I've never played it, but the reason I want to bring Mr. Jacques up is because I've admired one of the soundtracks from Headhunter for as long as I've been watching GameCenter CX (I'll post about this show in the future). GameCenter CX used "Jack's Theme" from the Headhunter soundtrack and I've got to say I can't of a better song to use as a montage than this. Sure you can use songs like Chariots of Fire, but I really love how orcestral Jack's Theme sounds. It's sweeping and dramatic. Here's the song on Youtube, give it a listen and tell me what you think!

Guess that Cross-Stitch 1 again!

I must admit after I read the comments about my last picture, it DOES look slightly phallic so no hard feelings. I did like the Gun/heart balloon guess; I didn't even see that before. I'm sure this time the picture will be much clearer. I actually messed up already, but it's not noticeable. Though for future works I'll have to be more careful because a single mistake/miscount can ruin an entire row or column, making my subject look fatter or skinnier than I anticipated. I've only been doing this for a little over a week, so I'm still going at a really deliberate pace and I have to slow down when I mess up or cause a knot, wasting a lot of time to backstitch and correct myself.

Please tell me you recognize it now!

Guess that cross-stitch 1!

Work in progress:

I think it's pretty obvious, but that's because I've been staring at the template for days making sure it works. But if you need a hint, check my previous post.

What do you think this stitch will be?

Sup Bub?

Say hello to Bub. I was never a big fan of either the Bubble Bobble NES game or the Puzzle Bobble games, but the tiny little Dinosaurs just have a really awesome and distinctive look to them that I couldn't help but make at least one of them. I think it's the little buck-tooth that makes it so lovable. My next project will be about four times as large, so I'll be posting Work-In-Progress pictures.

Sugar.

The boy of squishy red juices

I'm not done with my current stitch, but I'll post it up tomorrow definitely.

The latest game obsession I've had is with Super Meat Boy. There's already enough great things said about the game, so I'll keep it brief: Awesome soundtrack, challenging but fair level design, and just an enormous amount of value for the price. My favorite soundtrack has to be "Hell, Light world", but a close 2nd is the "Hospital, light world" music. You can listen to the soundtrack HERE . Here's my progress and the Hospital theme. Enjoy. I'm only a few levels away from 100%, but I haven't played in a while.

CHARMANDER!

Hm, I'm a little worried about my sprite choice. I wanted to do a small work so I chose this Charmander from the Mystery Dungeon Series, but I don't think the background foot is easily recognizable. Anyway...this took longer than I'd like to admit.

A boo is born!

I'm back after a long Hiatus and hopefully I'll be updating regularly. I'll post some of my cross stitches (assuming I keep this up).I'd be happy to take some suggestions for what to make next. Just try to keep it small for now.