[54] I guess I can't show dad

console

< Piro >

"envelope..."

Saturday - December 16, 2000

Ok, I'm gonna keep this REAL short tonight. I spent a good part of the day re-hashing and editing 'envelope', that illustrated short story doujinshi I've been talking about, and now ... it's ready to go. Well, sort of: I need to get the final Japanese version back from Tsubasa, but that can go up in the next few days. Everything else should be in order.

'envelope' is a story based on the True Love Story 2 game and focuses on Nanase Kasumi, one of the main girls in the game (without a doubt Tsubasa's favorite). Former knowledge of TLS2 is not really required, and i think the story stands well on it's own. I'll know as soon as I start getting some feedback if that is indeed the case.

I think the real relevance of 'envelope' is the fact that it pre-dates Megatokyo - i finished envelope back sometime in July. It was really my first large, cohesive project. The successful completion of envelope led me to the fantasy that I could handle a project like Megatokyo. It was the first time I got away from drawing just single illustrations and concentrated on telling stories with my drawings.

A word of caution - 'envelope' is not Megatokyo. It's a love story. It's not sappy, but i like to think it's cute, and a little subtle. It's not gamer humor. It's a bit like a dating simulation or visual novel game itself - it has the feel of a gal-game, or at least that was my goal. I tried to get the 'feel' of True Love Stories 2... which is what a good doujinshi story should do. According to the MJ-12 folks, I seem to have done a pretty good job of capturing the TLS2 'feel'. So perhaps this is the best way to share that 'feel' with people who have never played it.

At any rate, here it is. read and enjoy. I hope.

The presentation has some nice features - for each frame, I've included a link to the preliminary sketch that the final drawing was drawn from. I've also included higher resolution images. For the first few weeks, i plan to disable the high res images. If you are interested in higher rez images, you can go back in a few weeks and they will be active. I just don't want to bog down the poor server.

Ok, gotta do Monday's comic. Enjoy.

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< Largo >

"master of orion"

Wednesday - December 13, 2000

[Largo] - 11:03:00 - [link here]

Looking out my window, I see a layer of ice is covering the road… This is not acceptable.

Lately I've been keeping one eye on the upcoming Master of Orion 3. I have fond memories of wasting many a day playing the previous Master of Orion in college. In some cases I just wasted many days, period.

Master of Orion was ground breaking if not simply addicting for its time. Here you are, leader of a species ready to take over the Orion sector, all you need is people, guns, and beer! Well, maybe not the beer part, but you'd still want guns and other devices of mass destruction. For those who missed out on the MOE experience, understand that the game was not a RTS, it was a traditional strategy game using turn based combat. You conquered planets, colonized them, and thus expanded your empire, with the goal always being total domination, etc, etc. Though if you were really good, you could simply negotiate most of your problems away.

This week I began reading the designer diary for MO3, uncovering some facts that had previously escaped me. They decided to reduce the number of alien races from the original twenty-something to only eight, but expand the differences between them. I can accept that, a more developed and unique race beats several dozen races whose only difference is a few more points in their ugliness score. In general, the developers are just doing 'more', more AI, more political situations, more treaties, and a hell of a lot more lines of code.

It will be interesting to see if the new game lives up to the classics, you never can tell when it comes to sequels but from what I've seen, they have a good shot at pulling it off.

Have I mentioned how much I love Little Gamers? This strip rocks, It's on my ever growing list of ultra-sweet comics that must be read each and everyday. They did not one, but two sweet strips that feature a certain pair of characters from MegaTokyo.

Aphex sent in this link to a comic called Error Level 3, and went on to say "it's actually funny". Next up is a comic that begs the question, What's a Life? When I figure out the answer, I'll let everyone know.

I've been looking at a new toy that I'd really like to try out, the iPaq pda. Before I get blasted by you PalmOS guys, know that yes I know the Ipaq is a PocketPC (read: Windows CE) device. However, if I get it, I was thinking about dumping Linux and X-Windows on it, I found some neat screenshots over at here that show linux running on the ipaq. I'd kinda like to be able to telnet into my systems from a handheld with wireless Ethernet. The real advantage I see is I'd finally be able to compile my kernel while in my pocket, a real wang-kernel as it were. I get chills just thinking about the sweetness factor of it all

Besides, if I put apache server on it, I can finally be given the line of, "Is that is a webserver in your pants or are you just happy to see me?"