A couple of weeks ago, another web site editor expressed his disgust with sprite comics, the strips published on the Internet that use altered artwork from video games rather than original drawings and characters.  He's got a right to his opinion, but if you regularly visit this site it's pretty clear that I don't share it.

What really bothered me about his editorial was his comment that sprite comics demonstrate a lack of creativity on the part of their creators.  That's not always true... some of the Flash films and comics I've seen were clever satires and tributes to the games that supplied the artwork.  In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that taking the characters directly from the games helped the authors deliver their messages more effectively than hand-drawn characters would.

There's also the issue of time.  I don't know about the rest of you, but it takes me hours to pencil, ink, shade, letter, scan, and apply finishing touches to a comic.  I'm willing to take that time if the comic stars my own characters or if I'm drawing a strip as a favor for somebody else, but if I just want to point out Sakura's silly attire in the Street Fighter series, hell yeah I'm going to take the characters and backgrounds directly from those games!  It's just not worth spending an obscene amount of time drawing my own loose interpretations of the characters that my readers may not even recognize.

That's why I personally have no problem with sprite comics.  Sure, most of them are pretty lame, but the best ones can take situations and characters from popular video games and not only parody them extremely well, but perfectly illustrate how the games would have looked if Mario got sick of rescuing the princess or someone offered Sindel from Mortal Kombat 3 a Tic-Tac after enduring her scream fatality.

I just wanted to get that off my chest.  Anyway, since we're talking about comics, I just thought I'd mention that Byron, the official Gameroom Blitz mascot, is going to be one of the contestants in a celebrity edition of a comic called Eleven Must Die.  Don't get too excited, though... he won't actually be killed.  Instead, each of the comic's guest stars will be given a crystal ball that keeps them anchored in another world... if the ball breaks, they're thrown back to their own realities.  What's great about this is that nobody knows for sure who will be the last character standing.  Although Eleven's creator and the guest artists can influence the story, only a handful of volunteers will be able to write characters out of the storyline.  Each of the volunteers will be selected randomly, and the person chosen will in turn be able to remove one of the guest stars.

Yeah, we've seen this premise in a lot of television shows, but it's an innovative idea for a comic, especially a furry comic that reads like a tounge-in-cheek Dungeons and Dragons.  It's going to be tough for Eleven Must Die creator Chris Farrington to make characters from twelve entirely different artists interact convincingly, but judging from the quality of the last two chapters of Eleven, he's got a pretty good shot at it.

3/1/02

Yikes... it's been a month since I last updated this site!  Looks like I'll have to make up for a lot of lost time.  Let's see, I'll add a Virtua Fighter 4 review here, some guest reviews over there, a new addition to Fighter's Misery here, and... there, that ought to do the trick!

If I'm gone for another month or more after this, I've got a pretty good reason for it.  I'm working on upgrading my computer from a wimpy Pentium 166 to something at or near the gigahertz range.  Soon, even the most inefficent emulator won't be able to stop (or more accurately, slow to a crawl) my newly empowered PC.  I'll even be able to- dare I say it?- step into the 90's with MAME!

I don't know if I'll be upgrading to Windows XP, though.  As tempting as it is to help phase out that obnoxious paperclip (even Microsoft's turned on that thing!), I'm not really fond of the operating system's new, overly glossy look.  Bill Gates has taken a lot of ideas from Apple in the past, but I don't think he's ever been as transparent about it as he has with XP.  Plus, it's even more resource hungry than previous versions of Windows, and I can't justify wasting all that power if there aren't any appreciable benefits from doing it.  Of course, I said pretty much the same thing about Windows 95 five years ago, and I eventually fell in line just like everyone else.  I suppose it's only a matter of time before I upgrade to the new operating system... but you can be sure that it'll be a long, long time. :)

Speaking of eventualities, I just bought the original Shenmue for about ten bucks, since every Dreamcast player seems to be required by law to pick up a copy.  I'm not as excited about the game as everyone else was... it's got a lot of problems that you weren't hearing about in the reviews, like awful control and inconsistent graphics.  Ryo's got all the precision and grace of a rusty farm tractor thanks to your typical Resident Evil/Tomb Raider style control scheme, and to make matters worse, the analog stick positions the camera rather than the character.  Shenmue's the kind of game that doesn't require perfect control, but it would have made selecting between two adjacent objects (the toy capsules in many of the towns come to mind) a lot easier.  Getting to my next complaint, the graphics are incredible.  Wait, I mean mediocre.  Hold on a sec, I meant excellent.  No, no, they stink.  It's really hard to decide because some characters, and even some parts OF the characters, look a lot nicer than others.  One of the biggest problems is that Yu Suzuki tried to drape photorealistic textures over low polygon builds, rather than balancing out the two as was the case in, say, Soul Calibur or Crazy Taxi.  There's a lot of detail on the faces of each character- they look more genuinely Japanese than the saucer-eyed stars of most video games- but their arms have rather obvious edges and some of the textures on their clothes are hideously pixellated when you get near them.  There's just no balance artistically.  Maybe AM2 should have considered sacrificing some of the wrinkles on the old ladies' foreheads and just improved their overall appearance.

Shenmue does have some merit, though, and I'm not just talking about being able to play Space Harrier and Hang-On in the local arcade.  First of all, it's set in the 80's, and who could complain about that?  Secondly, it's a nice peek at the rural side of Japan, which often gets neglected by the media.  Shenmue demonstrates that there's more to the land of the rising sun than towering skyscrapers.  Finally, it's hard to find a game with this much attention to detail... outside of Metal Gear Solid 2, of course.  It's fun to just buy stuff even if it has little to no bearing on your quest for revenge.

Ah, yes... revenge.  I could use some on that Evil_Shito guy, whoever he is.  In case you don't know who I'm talking about, check out my message board.  Judging from his attacks on Pat Reynolds and myself, it's safe to assume that he's an old acquaintance of ours from our days in fandom (personally, I think he's just cranky because our newsletters kicked the living, uh, Shito out of his).  I wonder if this person will have the grapes to reveal his true identity.  Even if he doesn't, it shouldn't be too hard to find out who he is now that the forum displays IP addresses.  Now, choosing a suitably cruel and unusual punishment for Evil_Shito after he's caught, now THAT'S the tough part.