30 Minute Comic

So this was just a 30 minute comic with some guys on IRC. Pretty self explanatory, I suppose.

30 Minute Comic

The other comics can all be found here (opens in a new window.).

Scribblenauts – Reviewed.

Scribblenauts. The game of the moment. I heard it was alright, so I mished on down to the store, and got my copy.

I’ll be honest, I’d heard about the game, and I figured it’d be good, but, shit, this is a whole new level of good. This is mind-numbingly incredible. The core concept of the game is that you can summon anything. Anything at all. You then supposedly solve puzzles with them. I started simple, summoning a ‘dog‘, and a ‘bone‘; throwing it, which to my delight, made the dog run quickly away. I spent hours, making my creations, and subsequently finding an object to defeat them. Finally, I hit the end of my chain with ‘Cthulhu‘. I tried many methods of defeating him, and yet nothing succeeded (I object to using God and Goo (Slime in U.S. versions). They are far too overpowered). Finally, out of frustration I summoned a ‘saddle‘, and gleefully threw it on the demons back. I thought for a second, then decided, hell, I can always try again, and ran toward the bane of my game. Yep, It worked. I hopped on his back and…sat there. Despite my best attempts, I could not budge the dark monster, until A brilliant idea crossed my mind. I summoned a ‘mind control device‘, and, yes, Cthulhu became my mighty steed!

SUCCESS!

I decided that I had reached the end of this chain of command, and began further experimenting, which resulted in some interesting finds.

‘Gamer‘ and ‘Virgin‘ summon the same character, a fact which surprised me. It generally isn’t smart to insult your entire target market. Odd play 5th Cell.

Here you can see Maxwell (left), Gamer (middle), Virgin (right). The quality is rubbish, I'm afraid, but you can see that the characters are the same.

‘Over Nine Thousand‘ summons a scouter to wear. Unfortunately, it didn’t inform me of the relative power levels of characters: I summoned ‘man‘, ‘god‘ and ‘Krakken‘ to test.

When ‘Atheist‘ sights ‘God‘, he gets absolutely terrified on the mind-blowing conclusions this summons, and instantly flees.

But the one thing that intrigued me the most was the inclusion of ‘Slave‘. The word summons a elderly white man in a suit, obviously to avoid racial overtones, and this brings me to an issue completely unrelated to the game, that is, implementing caucasian slaves in media. I can understand why it is done; nobody wants to be racist, however to make him white still implies racial inferiority, and I fail to see how this is more acceptable then the commonly avoided alternative. True, the slave must be some colour, but an easy way around this issue, would be to simply exclude it from the game, or better still, consider it a typing error, with servant as the suggestion, A far more acceptable concept, as it is essentially a ’slave’ who is being paid for his labour.

Back on topic of the game, however, I find that despite the amazing concept of the game there was one extraordinary problem with it: the controls. The game is entirely stylus based, and the amount of times I’ve tried to pick up a rope, and sprinted off a cliff can no longer be counted. As well as this, it is nearly impossible to place an object accurately, as it is incredibly hard to lift the stylus, while not moving the object. Despite this, the game is easily the best Nintendo DS game out yet, and quite possibly the best game out this year, hell forever, even. This game transcends gaming, and can appeal to players of all levels, softcores or hardcores, young or old. A game that challenges the imagination of the player is a new concept, and a brilliant one, at that.

Scribblenauts is an incredible experience, and one that everyone can enjoy. I only hope that the control issues are resolved in Scribblenauts II, because as it is now, I can only give the game a 9.5/10, a rating which I would love to be able to surpass, but feel I cannot with this game in its current incarnation.

The Macabre, Pt 1

So, this has been lying around for a long time, so I thought I might post it here. It has been previously posted elsewhere, but very little of my work had been seen previously, so I thought I may as well post back from the beginning.

This is the first part of a series that I call my Macabre; they all have extremely simple, and perhaps even fun design, but carry dark, and somewhat disturbing meanings. All of the images were hand drawn in my maths class (my maths book is over 50% filled with my sketches), and then I redrew them on the computer. Unfortunately, the only tool I had was the pen tool in MSN messenger, which is the explanation of the red on the top and the bottom. I am currently saving up for a new version of CS4. I had CS3, but it broke. :S