I’ve been spending the last 2 weeks at home now, since my job has ended. I’m currently looking for a job in programming or, even better, graphic design, because for the last year I worked in photoshop, illustrator, bryce et similia for more time than in Delphi. Probably I’ll take some courses about advertising design and other illustration softwares or even get back to university but that’ll be on august. There’s time for that…

Time that will be spent to unlock the new weapons for The Sniper! Our fellow australian wanker is next on the… *polishes scope lens* list of Valve’s class updates. No hints have been given so far but many people speculated a Boomerang with “bonking” capability as a melee weapon and a coil-less sniper rifle. For me, it’d be good to give The Sniper the possibility to snipe faster and be more “active”. In every game I played (except Team Fortress 2, of course) I never camped because it was way more useful running around, grabbing power ups and shooting the head passing by (ask Catman about Time Splitters 2).

The development of my map for Team Fortress 2 is in progress. I’m fixing the skybox and changing some awful looking rocks. Unfortunately, looking at the center of the map produces a sever frame rate decrease. I put too much stuff in it, I think, but I can’t do anything since it’s a very wide map without corridors or closed rooms.

Too much Team Fortress 2. Let’s talk about Halo! Now that Master Chief is in the hands of Microsoft, the headmasters in Redmond are planning to make Halo cross-platform. Down your hands, Wii and PS3 owners. We’re talking about XBOX360, PC, Mobile and Web. Well, about time! But first, I want the port of Halo 3 and I’m pretty sure they’ll make it because it would be another shovelade of bucks and porting from XBOX to PC isn’t that hard, just look at Gears of War.

The last news is about Will Wright. After playing the god and creating countless combinations of creatures he decided to evolve (woha! What’s before god? Chuck Norris?) and left EA. He’s now working at the Stupid Fun Club (no, really. No jokes here) to create new and innovative intellectual properties. We can’t expect anything better from the man that could make a bureaucrat enjoy a couple of paper clips and a rubber band.

I’m playing various games lately. Mainly Left 4 Dead and Megaman oldies. I played Megaman 2 and X both with save states and I don’t have any doubt about people preferring Metroid over Megaman. Why sould I die and come back to kill a boss because I don’t have enough energy for special weapons? That’s a pretty shitty gameplay there! And why does Megaman has welt knees? Dammit! God bless Super Metroid and all of its detailed sprites!

End of rant…

Oh, yeah… Left 4 Dead, nice game, really. A bit laggy on public servers but very enjoyable. One of my favourite parts in Half Life 2 was the village of Ravenholm. How couldn’t I like L4D? It’s Ravenholm all along with hunters trying to get your gall bladder like fast zombies do and smokers trying to rape you like headcrabs do. Here you can have a little preview of the new campaign from the first L4D update (click for huge full-view).

Last thing, should we start a petition? We haven’t had a Wipeout game on PC in years, damn SCE. Vista can’t run Wipeout XL and I miss the mix of 400 km/h and electronic  beats. My senses are in grief since Psygnosis and The Designers Republic died. Isn’t there anything similar/freeware/open-source I can play?

Side-note: your reading these words on a page generated by Wordpress 2.7.1. I might have upgraded to Comicpress 2.7 as well but that’s not worth the trouble because I’d have to rewrite the css almost completely to get the same features I already have.

Actually, mine is an elephant bank but it serves its purpose well.

After the E3 i browsed www.VGreleases.com and took notes about the release dates of some games. I’m going to spend 400€ or more within December 2009.

If you expected me to list all that I’ve seen at E3 (e.g. on other websites) You’ve come to the wrong place. That would be just a copy paste. Now, here are my impression:

Left 4 Dead 2: I hope the promised updates for L4D aren’t going into this one. I’d be greatly disappointed. The look is ok. I just can’t stand the daylight for a zombie game and the new characters. I love the L4D foursome because everyone has character but seeing the new survivors didn’t excite me at all, except for the white-dressed Nick the gambler.

Project Natal: Incredible! A device that can’t work if you change your pants while you play. Jokes aside, it’s a very interesting project. I’m just a little disappointed about the lack of buttons and physical feedback. This way it looks just like the power glove for 4 limbs.

Halo ODST and Halo Reach: Cool, more info and another chapter in the Halo saga. Too bad Bungie is stuck to dual stick controls in his FPSs.

Milo: Enough tamagotchi, thanks.

XBOX communities: Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm are coming to X360. Good, but often who spends time on these communities likes keyboards to write.

Assassin’s creed 2: Awesome job on the visuals. Though I don’t like the game and I’m never going to play it from what I’ve seen Ubisoft is doing an amazing job on the dubbing (side note: I’m Italian and Venice is in north-eastern Italy).

New Super Mario Bros Wii: a 4-player, 10-years old, dream that comes to life for me. I’ll play it alone from start to finish. Maybe it’s just me, but Instead of the yellow toad I’d like to see princess Peach as in Super Mario Bros 2.

WiiFit+: no comment. Why don’t you release WiiWeightLifting? I’d need that.

Super Mario Galaxy 2: The best title in videogame history is getting a sequel? I’ll need to borrow some drool from my friends.

Wii Vitality Sensor: Don’t ever think about WiiRelax. Release something like… WiiZombie that detects your heart beat and places the zombie horde accordingly. Oh, and with rumble support it could be great for WiiMasturbate too.

Metroid: Other M: I’d have to spend several rows on this. Let’s just say that I’m very afraid of the development team and the possible outcome. But since Itagaki isn’t around any more maybe Team Ninja will use their breast jiggle engine to animate some monster’s gelatinous tentacles (I’m not thinking about hentai).

PSP Go: Smooth move! Really worth the price in my opinion but they’re still missing a point: protect that damn screen!

The Last Guardian: Expect some more poetic puzzles from this one.

Sony’s motion controller: Good thing they used already-on-market hardware like the PS3 Camera. Bad thing they copied. Again. Apparently people likes to throw away dignity in the effort of making money.

Final Fantasy XIV: I haven’t been into MMORPGs for 4 years now and this won’t change my mind but I hope that it’ll be far more playable than FFXI.

Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil for PSP: Sometimes more of the same is good. Oh, and the 4-player co-op in MGS will have some granted hilarious implications.

New Castlevania and MGS arcade: Sometimes more of the same is good. Oh, and the 4-player co-op in MGS will have some granted hilarious implications. Yes, it’s a copy-paste of the above comment.

New Legend of Zelda in  the works: We’ve got only a pic of that but it’s enough to make us wonder why Link doesn’t have a sword and he’s accompanied by a queen-of-the-fairies-like blue creature.

Little Big Planet PSP: I don’t know how they’re going to coordinate graphic and physics processing but this is another interesting title for sure.

For my private life, after quitting my job I’m going to do the entrance examination to the academy of fine arts in October. I’ve got plenty of time to study and practice new stiles until then (as you can see it from the new cinematic shots in the latest story).

Also, after years of honoured duty, my SNES is going to have a long vacation. There’s no more space for him under my TVs (damn DTTs!). I’ll have to put him in a box an save it for the future generations. I think games like Super Mario Kart and Yoshi’s Island will be highly enjoyable even for my sons.

Room #200 is finally published! Honestly I never thought i’d have been able to keep the comic going this far without slow downs. Unfortunately I’ll have to slow down in October to have more time to study so expect to have one comic a week and not two.

About the latest story (that I used to also change the physiognomies of the characters without a clean cut) I want to show you the little piece I’m so proud of and I should be hired at Crytek or Epic for: the galactic federation sniper suit.

As you can see I changed some small details in the final realisation, like the knuckle pads and a wider visor. Basically I took some ordinary GF trooper concept arts from Metroid Prime 2 and 3 and worked out my own suit, designed to be more flexible and comfy than armoured. The idea was that a space sniper must be able to change his position quickly even in high-gravity environments.

Environments like the ones in Mechwarrior 5. A trailer popped out of nowhere tells me that I’ll be firing EMPs again in the near future. And that’s a good thing, because a 7-year-long “near future” has just passed.

So, what do you think? Do we have any chance to see mad cats in hi-res textures?

Meanwhile, you might want to check out some L4D custom campaigns. Valve made it easy with the double click, install and play function so you don’t have to worry to put the right things in place. Take a look at the awesome Death Aboard and Dam It. Death Aboard will force you to escape from a prison through the docks and an amazing wrecked ship while Dam It is set (guess where?) in a dam but the fun part is that there are no safe rooms. If your team die the game is over, like a real zombie chase would be. It only has some small tank issues but the whole map is really well done.

Last news: I’ll be away from July 25 to August 1 for a little vacation that I plan to spend in the arcades as soon as I learn how to hack the Neo-Geo cabinets. You know, 99 players, 9 credits with a coin, that sort of stuff that leaves your wallet much heavier. Don’t worry, I’m drawing three comics in advance so you won’t notice my absence and when I’ll be back I’ll show you some doodles I’ll make down by the sea, hopefully.

EDIT: Mechwarrior confirmed. Now I’m cleaning the drool off my keyboard.

A lot of things happened since august 15th but if we see it from an all different perspective we could also say that nothing special happened. Let’s go step by step.

Final Fantasy XIII got a japanese release date. It’s December 17th. It’s like any other date for me but not for japanese people. They’d better start saving money for corrupting the guys ahead of them in the queue.

Sega is working on a new 2D Sonic game in HD. They didn’t promise us that it won’t suck though. A couple of words for Sonic: “Stop hanging out with Tails & co and get the hell out of Nintendo games.”

Valve showed off more of L4D2 at Pax. New special infecteds and new campaigns with a working funfair. I don’t get why they didn’t do it all DLC. Oh, yeah, they like the moneys. Also, I’m working on an expo like pax: the GIX. It reads just like geeks, which is hilarious, see? People will come from the other side of earth just to spell it.

I renewed my hatred for macs. Nothing can justify €2000 for a low-profile laptop, not even DDR3 memory (NEDM, I’m sure it’s correct this way).

I bought Street Fighter 4. Zangief is still over-powered, Dhalsim is still a mummy and Cammy has still got buns. So fun with a friend next to you, so painful over the net. Small lag often prevents you from inputting combos and that’s not funny at all.

Ps3 slim: new console, same games. Hirai, what were you thinking about that day?

Final Fantasy Dissidia is out. Please, people, stop making fighting games with ultra-cool dudes compensating with their huge swords and sexy babes. Also, you’ll never defeat the colorful colors of Katamary Damacy, so focus a little more on style. Sad but true, Street Fighter 4 is the best fighting game you can stick to lately.

And, last but not least, Valve declared as “cheat” the external idler known as “steamstats”. I won’t discuss if this is correct or not, I’ll just say that adding frustration to frustration isn’t a good thing. Every player that used the idler had a little clean-up in his inventory and every player that didn’t use it got a limited-edition fake-halo hat called “cheater’s lament”, promptly modded as a real-fag hat by the community. Who got this hat? Uninterested, inactive and unaware players. They really deserve it after the hundreds of hats they dropped in 3 months. Seriously, Valve, make a “best player gets a hat” system and I’ll be back playing. Fuck your medals and exclusive status symbol hats, as for now TF2 has been replaced by Mass Effect on my HDD.

Also, new poll opened. You may request other options commenting here.

Remember that we got a steam group! Join if you feel like playing with us once in a while.

My father turned 50 this friday. Best wishes!

I bought Metroid Trilogy and Kirby Super Star Ultra (finally). Both very good port/remakes, especially the Kirby one. Kirby Super Star was the first Kirby game I ever played and I beat it countless times. Replaying it is like having an HD deja-vù in my mind.

I’m also playing Final Fantasy X and P.N.03. The second is a very good shooter I shouldn’t have missed for so long while the first is giving me the same feeling again. I don’t know why, but in every Final Fantasy, when I get the airship and I can wander around looking for side quests the game becomes boring. Apparently because there’s no actual countdown to the end of the world and our heroes could loaf about for the rest of their days. Maybe the player should be compelled to fight the final boss once, before being able to complete the rest of the game starting from the last save point. My two cents.

About a week ago I was playing L4D in a public game. We were just outside the airport terminal when a tank charged and killed Zoey, leaving all of her stuff on the ground. Then Louis walked by and this happened.

A Halo 3 ODST comic is on schedule. Sorry to keep you waiting.

You heard about Super Street Fighter IV, right? And probably you’re complaining about it, right? Let’s see this thing from some different perspectives analysing three cases.

Case 1: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Super Mario Galaxy was a great game, complete and pleased the players. That’s why we said “welcome new galaxy” when SMG2 was revealed. That’s the point: it was flawless and nobody can be angry if such a product gets a sequel. “More of the same”, in this case, is justified by Miyamoto saying that during the development they had so many ideas that couldn’t fit in one disk.

Case 2: Left 4 Dead 2

“You promised us updates and you’re going to release a sequel within an year since its launch?”

This was the main reason people got angry with valve after the L4D2 trailer, saying that it should all be DLC or paid update, not full game. Let’s be serious: software houses are firms. They need you to pay them so then can keep on coding. The point is that L4D2 is really a whole new game, just having the five infecteds from L4D as old material. On top of that, L4D’s flaws have been patched via steam, updates have been made in a one every four month average and there are more coming. The only defect is that the community will be split in two, which it’s a sad thing for two games with the same background, gameplay and platform.

Case 3: Super Street Fighter IV

We only know about the gameplay fixes (to Zangief and Seth, I guess) and eight to ten new characters, with only three of them revealed. Considering that the disk space that every character takes on my HDD ranges from 30MB to 40MB the ten new characters would need about 375MB of free space to install. 400MB if you wan to throw in special music a other various fixes. I’ve seen bigger DLCs so the disk space is not the problem, at least on PC. What I want to remind you is that they have to balance the books at the end of the fiscal year. Most things of this world are not for free and saying “but valve does it” won’t mean anything to Capcom. You can’t even demand the character fixes for Abel’s ultra combo or Zangief’s spinning top attack. You played until now with them and you wouldn’t say anything if it wasn’t being patched in another game. Still, the problem is that the community will be split, again, and the number of players will decrease, due to a reduced number of challengers and possible matches. It’s simple math: 8 players on one game -> 56 possible matches. 4 players on two games -> 12 possible matches (24 total). It’s up to you now to choose of buying Super Street Fighter IV or waiting for Super Street Fighter IV Turbo.

In summary: the community is the most important customer for online games. Pleasing it can lead your game to success, in a different way than individual players for single-player games. I hope that really Valve and Capcom realize this and find a way to merge the online experiences of the sequels to those of the originals or their new games won’t give the financial support they expect.