742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, Minecraftia

Block with Greatness

My first night in Minecraft was spent by the soft, warm light of cooking sand, squatted in a hand-forged hole in the side of a hill. Over the coming days, this hill was slowly leveled and in its place sprung up a home of most stirdy brick. Already, life was quite comfortable, and I knew the next thing I wanted to do was start a large building project, as was the style at the time.

Lollipop Lane

I chose this subject because, it being a symbol of something I have great passion for, I figured I'd be less likely to become disenchanted and abandon the build. Plus, I could do a bunch of fun quotes and stuff.

"That should do it."

A perfectly cromulent quote.

The first step was to decide on a place to set up and turn it into a large area of flat grassland, and what better construction site than my own front yard? As I set to work steam rolling the neighbourhood, I found I suddenly had a lot of mind-numbingly repetitive time to contemplate the future. I figured I was gonna need a lot of wool down the line to dye pink, so I started making a habit of punching every white sheep I could see, as well as brown and light gray ones for the roof and driveway, respectively.

A Car Hole

Most of the land I wanted to clear out consisted of hills that didn't stray too far from sea level, but there was one mountain, which I sliced down the middle, completely mining away one half, and making a huge natural staircase from the other.

"My doctor says I have the wrists of an 80-year-old."

Soon enough it was time to place blocks. Taking in my hand more stacks of white wool than was probably ever necessary, I set to work, using the screencap included above as a reference image.

"Lisa's window is the next one."

Naturally, a lot of time at this point was spent standing around thinking, plotting and planning, placing blocks and taking them back again, seeing how things looked and staring at empty spaces to try and figure out the best possible design. This was definitely the most fun part of the project, by far the most involving, and is pretty much what makes any Minecraft build worth doing. Hence the Creative mode eventually making it into the full game.

"That's okay, the box is empty."

Once it was all done up in white wool the house looked a lot like one of Doc Brown's unpainted models. The only difference being that I had all the time in the world to paint it. And painting it meant lots of roses. Also bonemeal.

Bare Backside

At first I was going exploring for roses and using bonemeal to make pink dye, but before long, version 1.6 came about and suddenly I could grow my own roses where ever I pleased. And with that, Skeleton hunting by night became a long-term quest, while my days were spend scrounging up some clay, frying up some cactus, and keeping on the lookout for those brown and gray sheep.

"Remember, you can always find east by staring directly at the sun."

Once I got some pink dye going, I started taking out the white wall blocks and pinking them up, but then I realised I could get up to 4 wool from a single piece of dye by colouring and shearing sheep. So most of the white wool I'd already gathered ended up going in the incinerator.

The incinerator (on the right).

Eventually the only thing left to colour was the roof. By this point about 1% of the job had been done using brown sheep, but I was going to need a better method. Unfortunately, there wasn't one around, so I decided to put the build on hold until a more efficient method of gathering brown wool was implemented, whether it be wool regrowth on sheep, animal breeding, or a way of farming cocoa beans.

"We need some more vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream!"

A little while later, 1.9 prerelease 2 became available, and as it turned out, sheep breeding was the way of the future. However, it turned out all sheep were born with white wool, so it was back to waiting, for the moment. It wasn't until the sixth 1.9 prerelease that I was delighted to hear that baby sheep had been updated to inherit the wool colour of one of their parents.

The Simpsons' House in Minecraft

I immediately started trying to round up a pair of brown sheep, which didn't take as long as I was expecting. Miraculously enough, two spawned together around the back of the Simpsons house. Since I was still in 1.8, I couldn't use wheat to lead them around, so I quickly captured them in a ring of fence and then, with some difficulty (those passive mobs are wily buggers), funnelled them into a pen closer to my home.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

And so MineCon went down in Vegas, and at last the official release of Minecraft was here. I started a wheat farm and set to work breeding up a storm. The end was in sight now, but I soon learned that wheat grows very slowly. And here I thought my days of Skeleton hunting were over.

And that's the end of the story.

"Just don't look! Just don't look!"

Always the Last to Know (About My Own Affair)

More than the frustrating car chases, the poorly thought out interrogation system, or having to comb every inch of the environment waiting for the music to chime, the thing that annoyed me the most about L.A. Noire was the fact that Cole Phelps cheated on his wife and didn't tell me.
 I strongly believe that video games have the greatest potential for storytelling of any medium today, except, perhaps, for novels. With settings and themes as varied as any other medium, and little to no limits or guidelines on things like length, stories in video games can range from the latest wartime FPS to the most twisty-turny, convoluted JRPG you can think of.
 Now here's the part that's relevant to L.A. Noire. If you're going to tell your story through a video game, you need to take into account a very unique narrative element that you won't find anywhere else: the fact that you are the protagonist. From Pac-Man to Skyrim, video games are about assuming a role. Whether the main character is an empty shell for the player to occupy (Gordon Freeman) or a fleshed out individual with their own personality (Niko Bellic), the protagonist is always embodied by the player. It is for this reason that you ought to be privy to all your character's actions from the time the game starts onwards. Unfortunately, Team Bondi seems to disagree.
 In any other medium, the main character is their own entity separate from the audience. They are free to partake in events offscreen that may be revealed at a later time, usually lending to a twist. But since a video game actively places you in the lead role, withholding information that your character learns after the game starts is like keeping a secret from yourself.
 Even if a game's story is extremely linear and I have no control over my character's plot-related actions, I still want to be there when they happen, and to know why I'm doing them. I have no idea why Cole had an affair. Had he fallen out of love with his wife? Did he find some reason not to trust her any longer? Or was he simply smitten by Elsa? Maybe if they had shown that Cole and his wife were becoming distant or something, I would have at least understood where he was coming from.
 The other thing that I wanted answered was how long the affair had been going on for. Did it only happen once? Or had it been going on since that first time Cole visited the jazz club by himself? This leads me to the cutscene where Cole shows up at Elsa's home. I suppose it was designed as a hint at what was going on, but I certainly didn't think it would go where it did, especially since there had been no indication that Cole would ever want to betray his wife.
 Basically, as I've said, the last thing I want to see in a video game's story is ambiguity or omission of my player character's actions. I think this story would have worked better if it were anything but a video game.

We're Gonna Skip and Hold Hands

27. Big Brother

Why is there reality TV? Jersey Shore of all things has just started showing on 7mate. The promos boast hot tub promiscuity and general trashiness. Somehow I don't think this is what they had in mind when television was being invented. Part of me wants to talk at length about reality shows and why I do and don't like Big Brother, but another, more reasonable part just wants to say that The Mole is awesome and then never think on the subject again. So I will. The Mole is awesome.
 About the strip: I'm really happy with how the staging turned out. The view of the action is from the PoV of the diary room camera, which allows for some interesting shots of the character as he moves around in a static frame. This along with the BB watermark in the corner sets up the final panel, which is inspired by all those wonderful Simpsons stand by cards, particularly this one.
 The more I think about this premise, the more absurd it seems. Somehow this guy has made it onto Big Brother without ever realising he would be constantly filmed. Also, the diary room camera is the only one in the entire house that isn't hidden in any way, so it doesn't even make sense that he takes a little while to notice it. However, one thing's for sure: Greg is not loving himself sick.

Make It Up as We Go Along

25. IMDb's Lost Board

Back when Lost was still going on, I used to spend a huge amount of time on IMDb browsing the show's message board. As is the case with most forums, it didn't take long for an extremely tight-knit clique to form, and with it came a veritable laundry list of in-jokes and memes. One day I went to the (dead as it'll ever be) Via Domus board on GameFAQs and started posting a bunch of those memes in a thread. As of today, the thread is 338 posts long and locked because I ended up forgetting to bump it often enough.
 Why this ever became a Masterpiece, I don't know. It certainly doesn't meet my current quality standards, but I'm not about to go and change the numbers on all the ones after it, so here it is. In an attempt to compensate, I'm including the next Masterpiece in this same post.

26. LOST is Lost

These two Masterpieces kind of go hand in hand, anyway; this one is also inspired by the Lost board on IMDb. I suspect that the particular thread I ripped this dialogue from might have just been someone trolling, but people say similarly stupid things pretty much constantly on this here innernet of ours, and it still captured everything I was looking for. It even had that horribly tortured pun I've come to loathe so much.

Well There's Your Problem

24. MythBusters

I really love MythBusters. It's interesting, entertaining and generally a whole lot of fun. But there is this one flaw that I fear will irk me until the end of time. They go into that one room with a whole bunch of crazy crap on the walls, and start asking each other questions and acting ("acting" being used quite loosely here) like they don't know the answers. When they're out in the field actually doing something, they'll explain things to the camera almost constantly, and it's great. But then they (particularly the Build Team) always return to the Acting Room for one last review of their results.
 I don't know that there's much more I can say here without echoing the strip, except that I miss the original Buster.

Mais Oui? Mais Oui!

23. The Internet Adventure #3

 Two Guys Walk Into the In'ernet...

Episode 3: Lost in Translation

The first site on my Favourites list, and I apparently wasted no time in expressing my fondness for Tim Buckley's work, with no hint of irony or a joke of any kind. Perhaps not the best tactic for keeping people reading, but I still wouldn't take it out because, regardless of what some people think of Tim personally, his work has been a pretty huge inspiration to me, second only to that of Matt Groening.
 The other thing in this strip that I'm not 100% sure was a good idea is the curious Doorway of Unexplainedness, which pops up out of nowhere for no reason and somehow acts as a portal between webpages. The original plan was for Red & Yellow to literally go into my Favourites list as a means of hopping between websites, but I guess I decided it would be too much fuss to put together, so I came up with these Lanes Between-esque corridors which Red & Yellow immediately accept and trust without question. Then I was going to actually show them walking through these corridors, with various choice webpages projected on the walls, which I also decided would be too much hassle to put together, and scrapped it. In later episodes, the characters tend to travel via actual links anyway.
 And then, I was pretty much burnt out on the whole idea. With no direction and few ideas, there was pretty much no motivation to spend time working on it. I realised I needed a story. Of course, that meant writing one. Throughout that year I did come up with a few ideas, such as having a character from some famous web series play the villain (Dr Octogonapus, for example), having him kind of lurk in the shadows while Red & Yellow visit a TV Tropes page about villains, and emerging into view after they leave.
 Another idea was to have Red & Yellow find a time machine (also on TV Tropes) to go back in time where I could use screenshots from the Wayback Machine to have them explore the internet's roots. But with no actual conflict or goal to drive any of the characters' actions, I couldn't make a plot come together, and there was nothing to really get me excited about putting this beast back into motion. Until one night, sitting on the floor with my new puppy...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: The Movie: The Game

"Fool me seven times, shame on you. Fool me eight or more times, shame on me." - Amy Wong

You can't get fooled again. EA only has one movie tie-in game left, and Deathly Hallows Part 1 is not a promising lead-in to say the least.
 The game starts with an awkward over-the-shoulder-on-rails-shooter section that has you knocking Death Eaters out of the sky from Hagrid's sidecar. Once you've arrived at the Burrow, the wedding is on and you can walk around and talk to various guests including Ron and Hermione who like to do a weird kind of backwards run thing if you get too close to them. At this point the game gives you a spell called four-points that is used to show you which way to go. Using this mechanic over something like a map seems very lazy, and the spell never seems to want to co-operate anyway. If you are facing in completely the wrong direction when firing the spell, it can be difficult to spot or even realise that it worked at all, which it sometimes straight up doesn't.
 During the attack on the wedding, the game's main focus gameplay-wise kicks in: third-person cover shooting, which consists mostly of standing around and mashing R2 while locked on to enemies. Cover is next to useless, the only time you'll need it is the few instances when there are too many enemies on screen at once. Otherwise, firing Stupefy at everyone and their Protego charms (they only prolong the inevitable) until they fall down will get you through. There are even points when you can simply run past enemies, the rather sad AI is powerless to stop you.
 After the wedding escape, the trio are hiding behind a building and Ron decides that a random person standing at the other end of the street might be a Death Eater, so Harry is tasked with making his way over there to check them out. Putting on Harry's cloak puts you in a first person perspective, which completely kills your peripheral vision, making it all the more difficult to dodge unsuspecting muggles who like to bump into you and make you start again. After navigating around people, poles and metal fence things, as well as standing still to wait for your stealth bar to recharge, Harry looks at the person for a second and somehow deduces that they are just another muggle. Your reward for reporting this shocking news back to Ron is having to repeat the task twice more, with Ron's suspects being further away each time. Turns out none of them are Death Eaters.
 After a few average (at least in comparison to the rest of the game) levels in Grimmauld Place and the Ministry, the trio find themselves tailing Dean Thomas and Griphook through the countryside. As if this shit wasn't tedious enough already, this portion of the game has you traversing Whomping Willows, Cornish Pixies, Snatchers and all manner of other bothers just to catch another snippet of Dean and Griphook's conversation. I'm reminded of a line from the PS1 Emperor's New Groove game, when they are tied to a log in a river: "This scene was much shorter in the film." And how.
 At several points in these wilderness sequences you come upon a boulder blocking your path. The solution is simply to blast it away with a spell. There's no challenge, it's impossible to fail at, and it serves no purpose other than to make an already tedious game that little bit longer.
 Speaking of making things long and tedious, there are a few times throughout the game when the story progression is interrupted by completely disjointed and unskippable side missions that all consist of some form of "Rescue muggle-borns and kill Snatchers/Death Eaters." One of these is set in the Ministry directly after the trio's daring escape and arrival in the woods. One throws unkillable Inferi at you to contend with while carrying out the mission. Another plops Harry in the middle of a deep cavern and tasks you to "Escape the dragon's lair!" with zero explanation for how or why he is there. There aren't even any muggle-borns to save, you just run past the AI impaired Snatchers and fire four-corners until you reach the exit. Not even the dragon can do enough damage to kill you before you've run right past it (the same goes for Whomping Willows).
 Once Harry and Hermione figure out how to destroy Horcruxes, Ron has a tantrum and fucks off. Anyone who has ever watched the Lion King and then gone and played the Pride Lands world from Kingdom Hearts II will know just how much changing a scene's music and lighting and such in the transition from film to cutscene can completely kill the atmosphere. Ron leaving and pretty much all of the story points in the game have this problem. Honestly, I don't understand why developers don't just use actual clips from films as cutscenes any more.
 So Harry and Hermione go on their merry way, sneaking muggle-borns out of Godric's Hollow and following creepy old ladies into creepy old houses. Eventually Ron comes back and it's time to destroy the locket. This is one of the most ridiculously frustrating boss battles I think I've ever seen. As the fight begins, the game informs you that "Voldemort's soul fragments are vulnerable to spells," subtly dropping the hint that you have to shoot the dozen or so black snakes that are in front of the locket. Only the problem is the locket has started lobbing smoke grenades at you in large numbers, which seem to take about 90% of your health in one go if you get too close. So already, standing still for even a second is out of the question. The second problem I had was that it was only after several failures that I realised you could run 360 degrees around the locket, which made dodging the grenades a little easier.
 Once you manage to off a few of the snakes, you start getting chased down by venom-spitting spiders, which would be manageable if you didn't need to run around dodging bombs and shooting snakes at the same time. The locket also switches to a squiggly laser beam attack that is much harder to evade. To compound the frustration, for some reason, every time I died and the level restarted I had a completely useless spell selected automatically, which became very annoying every time I forgot and tried to get a quick shot off on the snakes right off the bat. In the end the only way I could find to beat this boss was to keep a fair distance behind the locket and snipe at the snakes whenever possible.
 The next stop on the Plot Train is the Lovegood residence, which is both preceded and followed by a lengthy galavant through the countryside while defeating/running past enemies. The attack on Xeno's home is a survival level in which you have to defeat an endless wave of Snatchers and Death Eaters and not get killed until the game decides it's time to move on.
 The last level in the woods sees the trio ambushed by Scabior and a whole shitload of Snatchers. The game's helpful advice this time is "Survive the Snatcher attack." Now, to me, that means "This is another survival level so just sit tight and kill these dudes a bunch," which would make the most sense since the trio don't actually win against the Snatchers. But after several minutes of solid battle with constantly respawning enemies and leveling up about three times I started to wonder why it was taking so long and figured I'd better try casting four-points. Sure enough, there is a path you're supposed to take to reach the end of the level. I don't know if it's actually required to beat even a single Snatcher.
 The final battle in Malfoy Manor really is another survival level that has Bellatrix, Narcissa and Draco standing around shooting spells in your general direction while you run around like a headless chicken until the game has had its fill and kills Dobby.

Joined at the Hip

22. Conjoined

This Masterpiece seems rather small and simple compared to the somewhat grander scale of the last two strips. I stumbled upon the inspiration for this idea while constructing a previous Masterpiece (most likely one of those last two), copy/pasting and flipping images like a right lazy bastard, when I placed the flipped character's eye over top of its identical original. The rest, as they say, is bleeding obvious.
 The "hey" is something I thought was pretty funny, as if they've just met up and have not spent every waking second staring at each other.

I'm Feeling Lucky

21. The Internet Adventure #2

Two Guys Walk Into the In'ernet...
Episode 2: I'm Fee

Wherein the situation is assessed, and Yellow shows off his short temper for a moment. This strip was intended essentially to set up the then-planned series of only loosely connected in'ernet shenanigans. Not really having any idea what exactly I would or wouldn't be able to come up with going forward, I used the final line to kind of say, "Okay, maybe "epic journey" is exaggerating a little."
 The title of this episode used to be "Think of it Like an Adventure" or somesuch, which is absolutely atrocious, partly because it's a quote straight from the strip and partly because it's awkward and boring as a title. Then I noticed the Feeling Lucky button in the fifth panel. It's better than the alternative, at least. There have been a few times when I've sat for several minutes on the deviantArt submission page, a title the only thing still evading me.
 Also, did panel three just break the fourth wall? I think it just broke the fourth wall.

Let Me Google That For You

20. The Internet Adventure #1

Two Guys Walk Into the In'ernet...

Episode 1: Enter the Googlix

In this pilot episode, the two protagonists (for the purposes of this blog, let's unimaginatively call them Red and Yellow) first enter the internet, and they appear to be floating. Hereafter I decided it would be better to have the characters walk and climb across webpages. I had them floating here because I imagined their entering the internet like being trapped in a dimension that is devoid of anything. Specifically what I had in mind was the scene at the end of the first Futurama anthology where Fry, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, Nichelle Nichols, Gary Gygax and Deep Blue are floating against an empty white backdrop.
 The Beat Panel Pals were selected to star in this series simply because I knew it was going to become something special, and so called for characters with a little something extra. And of course these guys had been the only Masterpiece characters so far to show real promise with a recurring role, so the choice was easy.
 I wish I could remember what it was that initially sparked this idea (it's possible the Print Screen button had a hand in it), because I think it's one of the best I've ever had, and it's certainly led to one of the projects I'm most proud of (at least in writing if not in art). Originally, the concept for this series was simply for Red and Yellow to travel from website to website cracking jokes and generally mucking about. Every strip or two would focus on a new website, and I was going to basically just work my way through my Favourites list. Not surprisingly, it got old fast, but I'll talk about that in a few posts' time.
 Something I've always expected due to this comic, but never received, is hate for using Internet Explorer. Maybe I just hang out on the wrong forums, but people usually seem to jump at the chance to dissuade anyone from using it for even another second. Also, my toolbar isn't a cluttered mess like in some people's screenshots I've seen, so it's at least aesthetically pleasing enough for webcomic purposes, regardless of IE's debated practicality.