Nesagwa tells me I should write something whenever I post a drawing or stuff.

I don’t really know what he means by that so I’ll just talk for a bit about why Q is so fun to play as.

For starters, he’s a bottom tier character (nowhere near as bad as Sean or Twelve though) so if you ever do win with him you’ll get a certain amount of satisfaction out of winning with a character that is inherently inferior to the majority of the roster in 3rd Strike. He has a couple of decent normals, his dashing punch is relatively safe, he has one worthless super and can play decent mindgames in the corner. His taunt is probably the best in the game: get three in and you’ll take reduced damage for the remainder of the round which is almost a necessity to win with Q.

But really, the main reason why I enjoy playing with him is because of how hilarious the character is. His intro has helpless civilians running away from him, his stance has him slowly swaying from one side to the other and in one of his winning poses he steps on your downed opponent’s head. He never says a word (his dialogue consists of mostly grunts) and his dash is probably the most ridiculous looking dash in the game. He wears a trench coat, a fedora and an iron mask. Nobody knows a thing about his storyline or where he came from yet he’s a midboss in the game.

If those aren’t enough reasons to want to make you play as Q, then watch this video where arguably the best Q player in the world (Kuroda) humiliates top-tiers Ken and Chun Li (scrubs Ricky Ortiz and Justin Wong respectively):

So anyway, here’s the full drawing:

Mainly a crosshatching work-out, something I’m finally starting to get decent at.

I can’t remember at what point I decided to use colored pencils to color the eyes but I thought it’d be a good way to make him stand out a bit from the rest of my sketchbook. I toyed with the idea of coloring the red part of his fedora but then I’d have to color the whole thing and that wasn’t really what I was going for. I also thought of making the background black but all that graphite would make a mess out of the opposing page. I think one eye is bigger than the other but aside from that I’m pretty OK with how this came about, especially considering how little time it took.

This isn’t probably the best choice for my first drawing to put up here but I thought I’d try to post something you guys haven’t seen before for a change.

Now the big question is whether or not Nesagwa will approve of this post.

Click on this link for a ton of Q sprites.

So Sonic has been advertising their Chocolate Whopper Milkshake lately. I love milkshakes. I love Whoppers. How could they fuck up mixing the two?

Surprisingly (unlike every piece of food on their menu) it was probably the best milkshake ever. They actually blend up the Whoppers into the ice cream so you don’t end up with thick chunks of candy. Thick chunks of candy can quickly turn a sippable milkshake into a melted Blizzard. Spoons arent for milkshakes folks. It is a little thick, but not so much that you cant drink the thing.

Go get one. But dont get a hamburger, they are awful.

Recently I’ve started to listen to more current and up to date bands. While in Borders a few months ago I came across the newest Apples in Stereo album New Magnetic Wonder. My friend Chris had told me about it and recommended I get it. My experience with the band only went as far as the single Let’s Go they released on Cartoon Network as part of the Groovies segments. Jump ahead to October of this year and I am seeing the Apples live with Sara and Chris at a dive in Ybor city. Again Chris tells me about a handful of new albums he thought I might enjoy. That is how I came to obtain The Power Puff Girls – Heroes and Villains.

It’s pretty obvious that the Powerpuff Girls cartoon is heavily influenced by music. The fact that there is an entire episode composed of nothing but Beatles lyrics and parodies is proof enough. The entire show is somewhere between 60′s Bubblegum pop and mid 90′s Japanese techno / punk. Taking all of that into mind this album will probably come as no surprise. This is a concept album in the vein of Sgt. Pepper or Ziggy Stardust. Each piece builds upon the previous to tell a story and produce a cohesive experience for the listener. An ambitious project for a Saturday morning cartoon soundtrack.

The album starts with the standard show opener and some dialog to get the story moving. Mojo Jojo is destroying Townsville. Go Monkey Go by Devo is what you’d expect from the group. More reminiscent of their later completely synth style (as opposed to the earlier Q: Are We Not Men rock style), it has a really great upbeat synth riff that compliments the bass drums track awesomely. The whole song is has a quirky uneven sound when combined with the vocals. The hallmark of Devo has always been the off kilter singing of Mark Mothersbaugh and it shows here in spades.

Next up is a really great rock song by Frank Black (the Pixies). Pray for the Girls’ bass and piano give a foreboding sense as it recollects a shared premonition of Townsville citizens about a coming tragedy from the perspective of a dog watching his masters. The lyrics are some of the best on the entire album and evoke powerful imagery of panic and worry. Probably my favorite song on the whole thing.

Signal in the Sky by The Apples in stereo is probably one of the better known songs on the album. It was featured on Cartoon Network nearly every day for a year or two. While this song isn’t exactly in their normal style, it is a fun bubblegum pop number in the style of Josie and the Pussycats and just about anything featured on Scooby Doo in the 60s. Focusing on how often the PPG have to save the day, it highlights situations where they have to drop everything to fight the bad guys. The album begins a mood change here. We move on from the coming trouble and focus on the girls and what they are doing.

An oddball on this album is Walk and Chew Gum by Optiganally Yours. Done in the style of a wax cylinder recorded ragtime / jazz number it reveals some character flaws the Mayor possesses. Great harmonies and chorus in this one. Really fits the character it is about perfectly.

The next three songs are about each of the girls – Buttercup, Blossom and Bubbles – respectively and their fight with Mojo. First is a Japanese pop punk song by Shonen Knife also featured on the Cartoon Network Groovies segment. A little basic but it gets the point across. A little overproduced in my opinion, but this entire section of the album dips a bit into that category. Next is B.L.O.S.S.O.M. by Komeda, a Swedish pop band. Sort of sounds like a Fatboy slim track and samples a Koto throughout. Not a bad song, but these techno tracks seem the most out of place in the midst of psych rock and bubblegum. Bubble’s song (Dressy Bessy) is right back to a psychedelic bubblegum track. Captures the innocence of Bubbles perfectly in my opinion.

I said earlier that Pray for the Girls was probably my favorite track but Fight the Power might be my even more favorite (yes, even more favorite.) Bis, who also perform the show’s end credit theme, have a really great baritone male vocalist. When paired with the heavy rock riffs, sax samples and bass line its a driving force. Really gets you pumped up. From the perspective of Mojo Jojo it let’s you root for the bad guy without feeling too bad.

A short news broadcast informs us that the girls have been defeated setting up the Professor’s song Dont Look Down by the Sugarplastic. This song is kind of nerdy, kind of Buddy Holly, kind of They Might Be Giants. The twangy guitar and almost monotone lyrics paired with an upbeat presentation make it a fun song with lyrics any parent that has seen their kids go out into the world could relate to.

The album takes another dip with a techno song that I feel probably could have been left off or replaced easily with something stronger. The Fight by Cornelius takes samples from the opening theme and remixing them with various guitar riffs and synth bits it just comes off as bland. I usually just skip this track as it adds nothing to the story or album as a whole.

This all of course leads into another great song that rounds out the story of the “episode.” Friends Win by Bill Doss (currently a member of The Apples in Stereo and rocker of the mutton chops) offers up a great piano track. All about the villains of the show planning their next attack it really has a Beatles / Brian Wilson / Elton John vibe mixed up with synth and win and good. Hard to place it really. Also one of my favorites, only wish it were longer.

And of course like all episodes we end with the shows end theme – presented here in its extended form. I am still incredibly impressed that this album exists and is as good as it is, especially since it was produced for kids. The themes and lyrics presented are things you never really hear thrown around in “kids” programming. It doesn’t speak down to the listener. As simple as the story is, there are complex wordplays existing in almost every song. It’s a rare thing that something comes out that can appeal to kids and adults – especially when those are things based on a Television show. It really is a sum of all of its parts and something that must be listened to as an album. I’m sure there are those that will read this and scoff, but you are really missing out on a little known gem of an album.

** There is also a secret song on the album after the final credits. If you are familiar with the cartoon it will be a pleasant surprise.

I would say that there are three types of great games:

a) Games where every single aspect of them is excellent and it all comes together in a brilliant package, i.e. Metroid Prime, Ocarina of Time, Ikaruga and Metal Gear Solid.

b) Games where some or most aspects of them, like story, music or aesthetics, take a backseat to great gameplay, i.e. Devil May Cry 3, Halo and most fighting games.

c) And then there are games like Ico, Rez and killer7 that aren’t necessarily as fun to play as the games in the previous two categories but still end up being rich and engrossing video games experiences that really push the boundaries of what can be done with the medium.

I think Portal fits nicely in that third category.

It’s hard to box Portal into a category like “action” or “adventure” or “puzzle” so I’ll just go ahead and call it a “first person puzzle” game because that makes the most sense to me. The premise is very simple: You’re a test subject issued a Portal gun in the Aperture Science Laboratories and your goal is to get to the exit of the room in which you’re dropped in. The Portal gun itself is a device that shoots two different portals (one blue, one orange) creating a warp that allows you to traverse instantly from one to the other when you pass through either one.

Developer Valve, as you may or may not now, puts some rather heavy emphasis on physics in their video games and this is no exception. Put a portal high on the wall and jump from a platform into another portal far beneath you and the momentum from the fall will send you hurtling from the portal on the wall across chasms or other obstacles. It’s a simple mechanic that, among others, gives a fair amount of depth to Portal that is almost fully exploited, if not in the main game then in the advanced maps and challenges where the real difficulty lies.

It’s not that Portal is an easy game but the puzzles in the main storyline won’t test your wit like some of the challenges will and the game itself is fairly short. The advanced puzzles, unfortunately, leave a fair amount of the puzzle solving to randomness and chance and I found a few of them to be rather unsatisfying but the challenges can be real brain-teasers. There are three types of challenges: Least Portals, Least Steps and Least Time. Least Time is the most frustrating of the three (as time challenges usually tend to be) and Least Steps can be annoying because it’s hard to gauge just how much a “step” is in this game. Least Portals is brillaint though and will really have you scratching your head for quite a while. Getting bronze in any of these challenges will probably be challenging but getting gold will be absolutely devilish. One of the gold medal Least Portal challenges asks you to complete one of the later puzzles with 2 Portals (two shots from your Portal gun) and was the cause of one of my greatest “Eureka!” moments in video games in quite a few years.

It’s not just the gameplay though, Portal has this fantastic atmosphere that brilliantly manages to be funny yet very, very ominous at the same time. There’s a female, robotic voice that guides you through these puzzles that manages to make you smile by some of her comments and then after thinking about that same comment for two seconds you’re half-way creeped out and fully paranoid. Case in point, when she tells you that a box you’re carrying might speak and try to give you advice and for you to disregard that advice, I laughed at how ridiculous that sounded. I then proceeded to spend the remainder of the puzzle wondering if the box was ever going to talk to me. A box. It’s quite brilliant and thoroughly entertaining.

In the end, Portal is a brilliant piece of software that absolutely no one should be without playing. It’s smart, it’s witty, it’s challenging, it’s engaging and it has a great beginning, middle and end. It’s just a really great ride, short as it may be. I’d have no trouble recommending this game on its own but considering that it’s part of The Orange Box which comes with Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2, there is absolutely no excuse for people to not play this game.

And when you do, just remember to think in Portals.

If you’ve seen the Team Fortress 2 “Meet the…” trailers like I have (and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and reach to the bottom of this post for high definition links to all of the ones released so far) then you’re probably also thinking the same thing I am, i.e. “these videos are great, hilarious, amazing!”

I’ve watched each one of these videos at least a dozen times and the same thought keeps crossing my mind, a thought that I plan to expand upon in this post: these guys should make a feature film.

A word of warning before I proceed: I do not intend in any way to talk about the game that is Team Fortress 2 in this space. That is not my goal here. I’m here to tell you why a feature film based on the game could be amazing. With that out of the way, let me tell you the main reasons why I think these 1 1/2 to 2 minute shorts can be evolved into a feature length film.

1) The animation:
I’ll be as straightforward as I can here: these clips have some of the best character animation I’ve seen in a game in the past 5 years, if not ever. The style Valve and the Team Fortress 2 team have chosen for the game lends itself beautifully to animation and what they have accomplished in these trailers is nothing short of amazing. These clips on their own could stand easily to the majority of computer animated feature films out there. Give these guys some resources, take them out of the constraints of having to program everything to run in real-time, flesh out the models and settings and they could easily surpass the sea of mediocrity in which most computer animated feature films dwell. With enough time and effort, they might even reach Pixar.

2) The characters:
A war-obsessed, loves-to-listen-to-himself psychopath? A self-assured, articulate guitar player builder of killing machines? A black Scottish cyclops? How could anyone not want to know more about these characters? Considering that Team Fortress 2 is strictly a multiplayer game where context is as about as much of a storyline as you’ll get and considering just how well they managed to define these four characters in their short, respective trailers, well, don’t you feel like you want to know more about them? Imagine what backstories they could have, how they’d develop over a two hour long movie, how they’d interact with one another. There’s just so much material within these little snippets of info we’ve been given about these characters that just boggle my mind and it’s a shame that it’ll be, most likely, never be exploited. Heck, even the voice acting is fantastic.

3) The direction:
These guys know comedic timing. All of us that have seen these trailers know this because they’ve probably made us laugh or smile at least once. They also know about characterization. And lighting. And cutting. The big question mark is how they could handle this over a much larger scale in a much larger production. Still, what’s shown in these trailers is nothing short of brilliant and I’m sure that, with the right help, it could be pulled off successfully.

4) The market needs it:
How many more computer animated “talking animals that get taken out of their environment” movies do we need? The animation industry is stagnant and has been unfortunately for the past 5 years or so. Pixar is the only company still making excellent animated movies. But only Pixar. Go outside of what they offer and be ready to settle for mediocrity. A Team Fortress movie as it were if it kept the spirit shown in these trailers would be edgy and bloody and filled to the brim with dark humor. It would immediately set itself apart from everything else out there and, if commercially profitable, could inspire other studios to try to market animated movies to people other than kids that can’t really tell a good movie from a bad one. This is, unfortunately, the very reason why a Team Fortress movie could never come to be: the public would never embrace it.

It’s a shame really but no producer would pick up a movie like this without turning it into a generic cash cow. No producer would give a movie like this the budget that it needs in the first place. Furthermore, the developers behind Team Fortress 2 (or behind these trailers at the very least) might quite simply not be interested in turning this into a feature film. They’re game developers after all, and they’ll probably want to make more games after this one is done and I’m not sure if sending it off to another studio would keep the spirit intact. Unless that studio somehow ends up being Pixar, which would probably never happen either.

And there is the question of plot, which Team Fortress 2 doesn’t have. They’d have to come up with a solid storyline if they were to make a decent movie out of this. This is just a matter of brainstorming, of course. I’d be fine with some old guy gathering these 9 characters of different specializations to infiltrate a base, or “fortress” if you will, to steal intelligence with some betrayals, conflict and backstabbing in the way.

I think I’ll go cry myself to sleep now for an amazing movie that’ll never be.

Videos follow.

Meet the Heavy

Meet the Soldier

Meet the Engineer

Meet the Demoman