syntheticgerbil

Haha, that's a hard call. I definitely hated The Mask: Hunt for Green October more than the Predator run (Bad Blood, right?), with that awful artwork having a lot to do with it even though it's not his fault, but I guess I'm undecided if I prefer it over World's Funniest. I guess the amount of great artists all combined in one book make it better and I'm partial to Batmite and Mr. Mxypltzk just because they are so ridiculous. I really love the Jim Woodring sequence in there for a couple of pages with his OCD linework. Actually, I don't know if you've had the displeasure of reading it, but that obscure miniseries Wild Knights that he wrote must be the worst thing he's ever done now that I think of it. Besides all of this hate, I have many reasons to love Evan Dorkin and am a big fan. Also I should say he wrote some of the best strips in the Bizarro World/Comics anthologies I mentioned earlier, in order to bring this off topic stuff full circle. For whatever reason DC doesn't like writers drawing their own strips so his artwork is only on other strips done for the anthology that he didn't write.

I always thought it was just "rape you through a hole," without options. I think it was only said once by Jake though, a lot earlier on.

Ah, I have that one too, since I'm an Evan Dorkin fan, but I guess I didn't like it enough to mention it. It's one of my least favorite things by Dorkin besides his writing run on a Mask miniseries.

Also a weird note on the MP3s for these podcasts: I have a thumb drive that I carry around with me that has MP3 files on it because I can listen to them in my car through a CD player that has a USB port that will read MP3s. It does not like WMAs as I have found out. It will play them but does not let me rewind or fast forward through them. I also can't pause a WMA because it will not start where it left off. Also if I turn off the device, it does not play where it left off in the WMA timeline when I turn it back on. This stuff doesn't really matter for 3 minute songs, but it is incredibly frustrating for long pieces of music and radio programs. But what WMAs have to do with this are that all of the Idlethumbs MP3s are read as WMAs for whatever reason on my device. This is incredibly unwieldy unless I want to listen to the thumbs podcast straight through without stopping my car or touching any buttons for an hour or so. So what I think is causing this is that the files may be saved out on a Macintosh computer. This could be wrong, but I regularly download radio programs from the ongoing archive for a local station here in Houston. I also listen to these in long car rides since I'm not much of a live radio listener. What I've found out is that if I save the radio show MP3s from the site archive on my iMac and throw it on to my thumb drive, they are also read as WMAs on the audio device in my car with the same problems. If I save the same MP3s on my WinXP PC and drop them on the thumb drive, they play fine with all fast forwarding, rewinding, and pause functions intact. This is probably the most superfluous post about the podcast ever and I'm not really asking you guys to take me and my obscure car setup into consideration when saving out the MP3s. It's just something I noticed a long time ago and thought I'd blab about it in this thread.

This is just fanboy overload on everyone's part I think.

A DAY OF THE TENTACLE FAN?! I KNEW IT!

I personally feel like everyone usually just looks like their avatars. El Muerte especially.

But this one is not Nick then?

He needs a gold chain with that on the medallion.

It's on page two now too! I love that sweet (terrible) hat.

DIRTY LAUNDRY SPOILERZ Other than that, I will duck out.

Yep, that's true. I guess the way you guys were describing it, I was initially excited it was going to be at the level of Dragon's Lair, Braindead 13, or that other throwback laserdisc type game you guys were talking about 10-15 episodes ago with a ton of traditional frame by frame animation inserted into a modern styled game with each state being covered in that manner. But yeah, it certainly doesn't look bad at all. Also, I caught that, Remo: pEwjV5wt7ns&hl FUCK YEAH DAD

Er... not to nitpick here, but I had to look at Shank because of the excited talk of all of the "hand-animation," which turns out isn't exactly true. There is a lot of "tweening" and probably puppet (or new flash CS4 bone) tools putting arm and leg links together in the game, so it's hardly hand animated. Sure there are completely drawn frames on some parts I saw, but generally this stuff is making use of pose to pose shape swaps in Flash or Flash-like tools and is not what would generally be considered hand animating. With tweens you aren't drawing each frame one by one, so the computer does a lot of here to there stuff for you depending on an anchor point, parent, or bone structure, much closer to what you do in 3D animation. What they are using is definitely a more digital and money saving approach, which maybe isn't as difficult as you guys think as opposed to the old style full on animation or cell layers where you wouldn't have the luxury of moving body parts around on some sort of hinge without making physical cell or paper cutouts. Anyway that bugged me. Sorry to be a dick. I love them cartoons and now I'm going to listen to the rest of this podcast...

Haha if it's the same Vizio, the only reason I can imagine it really sucks is because I can't change the screen size with a button on the remote and instead have to go into a menu. I've heard of Vizios that do have that function on the remote and the funny thing is, it's possible to program the function on a universal remote for the TV, even though it's unavailable on the factory remote. REMOTE CHRIS REMOTE.

SPAGHETTI (birthday!)

I have a 37" 1080p Vizio which I sort of bought because it was relatively cheap at the time. I think it's even cheaper now, running about $500-$550. The color and display look fine to me on the Vizio TVs, which are known for being a less expensive brand. There's also Olevia on the cheap side, but I don't seem to have generally heard good things about them. You can check existing reviews on Cnet that goes into all the nerdy stuff for each TV, half of which I understand. http://reviews.cnet.com/televisions/

I really don't give a fuck about Batman, but I have come across good Batman comics just by following certain creators, a few which have been listed already. Here's some more... Also, all of these are probably extremely non-canon according to some(many). Batman Secrets by Sam Kieth has a particularly nasty and manipulative Joker framing Batman through the media as well as some weird heartfelt moments between the two spread throughout the story. Sam Kieth has done a few other projects that involve Batman to a varying degree, but they all suck. This one is good, though. It seems like he really thought it through and DC gave him free reign to tell the story how he wanted. The Doom that Came to Gotham This is a 3 issue mini-series of thicker than usual comics that Mike Mignola wrote (and did the covers for). They are somewhat hard to track down as they have not been collected into a TPB. The inside, as what usually happens, involves an artist mimicking his style. It's a very interesting and creepy alternate universe telling of a 1920s Batman who is sucked into a plot of Cthulu like monsters and cults (as usual with a Mignola story). Batman also has his gun back, which is something he lost pretty early on. If you are curious of how Batman would be if he were some sort of pulp novel horror hero, this is it, although it's not anywhere as creepy as this next one... Legends of the Dark Knight 54 is an issue from this side series that Mignola wrote and drew before Hellboy. It's most interesting because it involves Batman tracking down a pretty gruesome serial killer. This comic is genuinely frightening as far as sequential art goes (and for Batman especially). Also Bizarro World and Bizarro Comics are good for some idiotic Batman comics by various "underground comic artists." There's one somewhere in there where Batman gets drunk and jealous of Superman that I particularly remember. Yeah, maybe you should avoid these.

Haha, yeah it's definitely a good deal. It also sure helps you have this awesome burger turtle avatar now. I'm hungry...

Not to be mean, but I almost thought you were a spambot until I found more posts by you. Hooray!

I have a 37" 1080p TV but have yet to actually see anything 1080p working on it. I imagine it's great as I have seen a channel or two at an older apartment with a different cable company that had 720p channels that really made a difference in appearance, but have not enjoyed it since. I imagine I'll get a PS3 and play blu-rays any day now. Supposedly the original Xbox, which is the only type of Xbox I have, outputs certain games in 720p (I guess through the component cables? Is that possible?) but I guess none of the games I have support that resolution. I did get the VGA box for my Dreamcast and it sure makes the console look better than it has ever looked before, so that was a very pleasant surprise. For now I still get really giddy watching DVDs in 480p with the screen fit to the OAR though, considering the TV I was dealing with before was this bulky Zenith from the 70s that cut off the edges off of everything (I couldn't read the text for the NES Maniac Mansion on it) and had a weird warp going on in the middle.

Haha, I can never sit through someone playing a whole game since I have a hard enough time making myself finish games sometimes. Longplay videos do come in handy sometimes when I'm on a hard part of a game and I can watch someone else complete a portion I'm having trouble with. I've also used them to take note of people's general strategies in puzzle games.

God, I hate the Arcade Fire. I can't think of any band I despise more right now except maybe U2.

Oh wow, thanks Kroms. Looks like it plays like Gauntlet somewhat. Can't wait. That music is ridiculously cool by the way.

I may have played similar... I can't really recall what was going on or what game it was. I remember Grover in some kind of space station or observatory. It was played on my dad's portable computer from his work, Data General. Everything was in shades of yellow. I guess this computer wasn't a big hit, since this is the only webpage I can find on the PC: http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/museum/items/data_general_1.html Other than that my other earliest remembered game may have been some weird boxing game involving a white man, a black man, and a kangaroo with gloves. It was all in yellow on the same computer as well. It would help if I knew what the hell games I was talking about here, but you did say first game.

Well in that case Toblix would make a good boss for a Shinobi or Zelda game.