[10] No Passport

console

< Piro >

"gate? what gate?"

Monday - September 4, 2000

I finally get a real, honest to goodness holiday for a real three day weekend... and I end up working instead. (sigh) No breaks, I guess. Heaven forbid i got like soft or anything. -_-;;

I did have a pretty good weekend, art-wise. For the first time since megatokyo started, I was able to finish a strip a good six hours before midnight. Woo. I keep this up, i might get a whole day ahead. Actually, I would have had two strips done Sunday night, but I took some time to sit and draw some other stuff instead. I wanted to draw a nice drawing of Sanae-chan for Rave, a fellow True Love Story fan and artist who sent me a really nice gift art a few weeks ago. It came out really nice, actually.

After that, i thought about what to draw next. There are so many characters and series to choose from.I'm not really sure why I end up choosing one character over another to draw at a particular time - I guess it has something to do with how much that character sticks in your head after watching the anime, or playing the game. I was going to draw Naru-chan from Love Hina, but for some reason I wasn't in the mood. While flipping thru NewType, I came across a Gatekeepers article... ah, Fei Feiring, there we go.

Gatekeepers is a odd show. I swore I wouldn't like it when Ifirst read about it. It was like Keiji Gotoh had gone trippin andwent nuts in his studio developing a plethora of cute girl characters. Goto is, of course, the character designer for Kidou Senkan Nadesico, and the brilliant genius who designed Ruri-chan. I figured that anything less than RuriRuri would be a waste of time.

Well, I was quite wrong it seems. The darn show has turned out to be one of my favorites this year... which grinds me, because it is SUPPOSED to be Love Hina. It's like it was some sorta subversive plot. The show is a little corny (the battle cry "open the GATE!" and the 'Aegis Salute' are enough to make you groan each and every time) but there is a lot of time spent with the characters. For example, I didn't really care much for Fen, until the episode where she helps out this old fella... It stuck in my mind, and so I felt like drawing her. I'm dying to find out how it ends now... (sigh)

Largo, you can clean up your own tar and feathered mess - and stop tracking that in here. It's your ownbig mouth that gets you into these problems, so keep that tar off of me.

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< Largo >

"the future."

Monday - September 4, 2000

[Largo] - 00:01:16 - [link here]

The strip has really taken off as our audience doubles every few days. We never imagined this would happen, and this has made us both really happy... This is unacceptable, I must destroy this happiness...

To help ruin any favorable image I may of had with our viewers, I'm going to tell you all a deep dark secret. I like the X-Box.

Okay, let me explain ... err.. guys, put the tar and feathers down for a sec... uh.. guys?

It has been my opinion that the X-Box could end up being the salvation of the wounded PC games market. Developing for the PC has become increasingly more expensive, with less and less huge money makers each year. Yes, it's true that the PC world has it's share of regular top sellers, big money makers from Bioware, Interplay, Blizzard, etc., however these guys are theexceptions to the rule. It is more expensive to develop a game for the PC then for a console system. Smaller game companies have to struggle to get a title out and turn a profit on the PC, where it's a lot cheaper to produce for a console. Next question from some of you may be; "Why?", well the answer to that question is there are a lot more problems associated with PC games when you need them to run on a variety of differently configured PC systems. Every year PC game makers test, test, and test their games on dozens of different video cards using 3dfx, OpenGL, etc you name it. This is one of the reasons PC games end up with so many patches after release, they spend so much time testing to make sure their product will run on all the hardware out there, rather then spend all their time just testing the game itself. Console games don't have that issue, instead consoles have a single platform, with unified hardware, it's a breeze compared to making a game for the PC.

From Carmack to Molyneux, I've heard only good things about what the X-Box means for gamers, and as for developers themselves, PC game makers should have no trouble handling the transition to the X-Box.

In my case, I only use windows to play games. I spend several thousand bucks each year on a top of line kickass system for the sole purpose of playing PC games. What I can't reason is if the X-Box can do a better job, for only a few hundred bucks, then why are people complaining? In the end we'd finally have a standardized PC game system, everybody wins.

Of course.. Since PC games are the best... I expect the X-Box to crush all other consoles who oppose it...

uh... guys... the tar.....