Thanks to the Ninja Gaiden Super Bowl, the House of Poemato can finally get excited about Super Bowl Sunday! Mato was doing all sorts of programming and testing the other day. Little Zuuly was disturbed by the sounds my phone was making.
My custom emulator sidebar hacky stuff (aka Wanderbar) that I developed about 8 months ago isn’t ready for public release yet, but I’ve recently picked it back up and started to incorporate it into an NES emulator. It’s not at the same level as the SNES Wanderbar but it’s pretty close.
To test everything out, I used Ninja Gaiden II and tried to re-create my old Ninja Gaiden II memory-watching-XNA-program that barely worked and wasn’t fully reliable. It was surprisingly easier to put together using my Wanderbar setup than before, which is a good sign.
(This stream screenshot is with the NES Wanderbar in action)
Speaking of which, our yearly Ninja Gaiden Super Bowl is this weekend! I’m gonna try to get further in Ninja Gaiden II than last year. I better practice up before then. You can catch the stream live here sometime on Sunday.
Mato & I have been watching the New Year Basho (Sumo Tournament) for the past few weeks. It’s our first time really paying attention to the sport, and we’ve learned so much. I’m officially a sumo fan, heck yeah, I wanna see some matches in person!
Sumo is considered a dying sport, so the audience at the Basho was mostly elderly Japanese people. Every once in a while, Mato & I would spot an anomaly in the crowd, and we ended up making at Where’s Waldo game of sorts. Next time you watch a sumo match, keep an eye on the audience as give yourself points if you see:
The New Year Basho ended yesterday and the Spring Basho starts on March 11. If you have access to Japanese TV get yourself ready! Maybe if we see more anomalies we can turn it into a bingo game.
I was working on a thumbnail for an upcoming gallery today. I’m not great at Photoshop, but I can do simple edits. I agonized over the text and speech bubble in this image for sooooo long, picking the right font, the right weight, the right spacing, etc etc. I used Photoshop’s default speech bubble shape, so I had to make the text fit inside and look good and eye-catching:
I knew something was off, but I didn’t know what. Then my friend Nina, a professional comics penciler, shared some speech bubble tips with me and taught me a neat Photoshop trick. With her help, I was able to make this!
It ain’t perfect, but it’s better than what it was! Learn something new every day~
We started out intending to only do the main story of Super Mario Odyssey, which we finished this past Monday. People kept encouraging us to get 500 moons to unlock the last of the super secret worlds, and we were like… maybe. But yesterday we hit 250 moons (thanks to the help of the not-very-helpful official guidebook) to unlock the first secret world and oh man. Burnout was happening quickly. So we called it quits for good after completing the first secret world in English and Japanese.
A couple years ago, we ran Yokai Watch into the ground by attempting to complete every side quest in the game after beating the main story. That burned us out on the game pretty badly and we didn’t want the same thing to happen with Odyssey.
But hey, if any of you are still working your way up to 500 moons in the game, please get screenshots of the text in the final secret world for us! We’ll pay ya for your trouble. Thanks~~
As we’ve been playing through Super Mario Odyssey on our daily (and now marathon) streams, I’ve been taking notes of the paths we take in the English version so we can take the same path when we play the Japanese version. In doing so, I’ve had to come up with very descriptive ways for how we’ve found some of the moons. They’re really funny sometimes, and Dominator_101 photoshopped one of them onto a screenshot:
So here’s a list of some of the other really bizarre moon descriptions that these streams have produced:
We now have an official guidebook to help us get up to 500 moons, but maybe some crazy moon descriptions will still happen as we wrap things up.
Mato & I were at the Fangamer office having an LoL meeting with Tony today in one of the conference rooms. We got distracted by some complete copies of Japanese Neo Geo games in there, and holy cow these carts are huge!
There was a comic in the instruction manual, too. I saw a CUSS! (But seriously, Mato wanted me to snap this pic for the the “DON” sound effect used for knocking in Japan)
UPDATE! Last week I was scared to contact book distributors, but Mato’s advice about “attacking the problem” and the encouragement I got from the comments helped me to knock out my goal in one day.
And today the fruits of that labor are already forming! Well, maybe the fruit blossoms are blooming.
I got a call from one of the book distributors yesterday and had a very business-y conversation about contracts, industry databases, percentages, volume of sales, deadlines, etc etc. I learned a ton, and boy there’s so much to consider when it comes to serious distribution.
We’re not there yet, but the train is moving!
In my work improving the main LoL site, I needed to get a better scan of that weird, creepy cover of that Mario comic for this page. The scanner software had defaulted to “Text” when I opened it up, and I was greeted by the most horrific image of Mario I’ve ever seen:
Not that the color version is nicer to look at, but holy crap.
I’m on day ??? of organizing our big folder full of localization pics. Some game series have so many localization mishaps that I’ve given them their own folder. Most recently I added Breath of Fire, Ace Attorney, Harvest Moon, SMT, and Persona. And there’s also a Mario folder, not because those games have a lot of mistakes, but because it’s surprising when a mistake slips by the editors and QA team at Nintendo.
Below is my favorite pic of the day. I don’t know what game it’s from, but holy goodness gracious, that sounds like a horrible ailment. What an awful person!
Come to think of it, a non-poisoned marsupial pie doesn’t sound all that appealing.
