[125] a big break

console

< Piro >

"color sketching"

Thursday - May 24, 2001

Ah, good to be back... well, for the most part. ^_^

I'm having a wee bit of trouble getting fully back into the groove of a three-a-week schedule, mostly because i keep getting distracted and working on other things (for example, the colored drawing of Yuki shown above). It felt pretty good to sit down and do wednesday's comic. Hopefully i can get my act together tonight and have a new comic for tomorrow. I *might* have to put it up saturday.

This weekend i need to wrap up my review of our trips to both Anime Central and E3 - I had a lot of fun on the trips, and the E3 trip deserves some time to write up a good report.

I had a chance to hang with some other web comic artists on the trip - in particular, Hot Soup of Lethal Doses (he's in the process of moving his site to a new server, as well as revamping it) joined Largo and I in the hotel lounge saturday night as we sat and tried to see who could draw the most 'wrong' piece of art. Freesketching at it's worst, my Corona addled brain (i knew i shoulda stuck to, like, Guiness or something) produced this drawing. What is sad is... Soup produced a drawing far far more disturbing. No, i won't scan it. Never in a million years... ^^;;;

Anyways, enjoy the new artwork over at Fredart today, and with any luck i *will* finish a new strip tonight. If not, i'll have it done satuday morning. ^_^ You know me tho, if i can make it tonight, i will.

...

Mornin all - as you can see, i didn't get the comic done for friday. This isn't laziness, its actually two other factors. First off, the art is a little more complicated than, say, what i did for wednesday. Its the type of thing you HAVE to start the day before (which i didn't - i goofed off and colored that drawing of Yuki instead ^^;;) secondly, I had two 'false starts', which i ended up crumpling up and tossing in the trash. Nothin blows holes in a tight schedule like trashing an hour's worth of struggling work. :P

Actually, i don't really do that very often. Typically, if i abandon a drawing i've started working on, i'll just put it aside - not in the trash. So that was another sign that it wasn't gonna happen today.

I'll finish it up later tonight and post it. thanks for your patience ^_^

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< Largo >

"E3 Wrap Up"

Tuesday - May 22, 2001

[Largo] - 10:21:00 - [link here]

I just flew back from E3, and boy are my arms tired.

::crickets::

After returning from a veritable gamers' paradise (minus the rampart excessive commercialism), I'm beat.

E3 can be a draining experience. I started off the first day with a two-hour wait in the infamous "Line of Hell" to get my badge. From there it was off to the main hall. Now let me explain something about E3's main hall - It's big, not just big in the normal 'gee that's big' big. No, instead it's big as in, "good god!, the assets on the babe at the Tecmo booth are big!" - big.

Speaking of Tecmo, I've got to give some props to them for their use of Dead or Alive costumed booth babes. Normally I'd frown on such blatant use of sex appeal to sell your product, but there was this certain honestly about their efforts. They don't even try to pretend that their games sell so well because of 'great game play'. I figure next year they'll show case "Dead or Alive 4 - Nude Edition".

I continued my tour of the main room, again - a draining experience. The reason for this is the hall is ten times louder then all of downtown Dallas's raver joints put together. In order to compete for every guest's attention, each vendor's exhibit has to be bigger, more visually stimulating, and louder then the next. I can only guess that E3 has had a sort of arms race in the last few years - except instead of nukes, they stockpile 60" woofers and jumbotron video displays.

Some of the coolest things in the main hall that I got to witness was, Mullet -- I mean Metal Gear Solid II's new teaser trailer. It was so cool I can now forgive Snake's new haircut.

Silent Hill 2 looks creepy, nuff said.

Warcraft III- I had the misfortune of being right next to the speakers on this exhibit as the trailer started. I'm not sure if Warcraft III is going to be a great game - but I am positive that the Orc Army is loud. I lost my sense of hearing for several hours after this encounter.

I got into the backroom screening of the new Bioware game, Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic. The game is a 3D engine over the shoulder based adventure game using the D20 system / Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG system for character creation and advancement. I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, for one thing - I've been disinterested with the entire Star Wars franchise after sitting thru that 'Episode I' garbage. Phantom Menace was just missing that mood, that feeling that Lucas was able to paint into every scene in the first three films. I can only assume that the developers of KOTOR are trying to follow the original path - cause what they are making completely rocks. The game is all about atmosphere, Even in this very early release, they've put a lot of their focus into interacting with any other NPC in the game. You can talk to anyone, well - except all the dead people on the ground, but I doubt they'd be in the mood to talk with you anyways. Another nice thing about KOTOR is the way they handle 'cut scenes'. From what their demo showed, they are doing all the scenes in game - within the 3D engine itself. This happens so smoothly that I couldn't even tell if they were true 'cut scenes' while the scene went forward, or not. Very clean transitions here, very sweet.

Heh, and the Jedi light saber duels rock too ;)

Tomorrow I'll cover what was the heart of the show for me, Neverwinter Nights. Mmm, I can almost taste it.