Getting back on track

So I don't know what's caused it, but I finally feel like I'm coming out of my little rut lately! Planning projects! *doing them*! I feel a bit like my old self again, and I hope the streak continues! First off, it's a bit late, but I still plan on going over my Katsucon experience in the near future, especially the import games.

Last week I had the chance to see Jonathan Coulton at the World Cafe in Philly, and it was awesome! Of course, he played Still Alive from the game Portal, and of course, we all started waving our cell phones, DS's, and such in the air instead of lighters as we're all such dorks (I was waving my PSP). He played lots of other great songs too, Future Soon, I Feel Fantastic, Re: Your Brains, Code Monkey. And I got my picture with him afterwards! Lucky!



I've been wanting to get back into making little games, and took the first baby steps today by making a simple Breakout game. It's extremely barebones right now, but it's gotten me a bit more familiar with how to do it so hopefully I can move on to a bit more complicated things in a little while. For now though, I'll most likely try to add some more things to the Breakout game, see if I can make it a bit more fun than it is at the moment.

Lastly, more drawing! I've really been wanting to get back into drawing and painting! So I decided to start off with some fanart. As I'd just finished up Apollo Justice, I thought it'd be fun to go back and do a nice picture of Phoenix Wright, pre-hobo days. I might do a few more portraits, Edgeworth and Godot at least, before moving on from PW fanart. Speaking of art, I'm hoping to start working on video game T-shirt designs again, I really liked doing it but was having a bit of trouble as far as the workspace for doing the silkscreening, but I'm hoping to do something about that soon.

Sorry for the rambling nature of the post!

Professor Layton and the Curious Marketing Campaign

So earlier this month L and I enjoyed three days of anime and games and other things otaku at the Katsucon convention in Washington DC. I plan to go into a bit more detail on the ups and downs of this year's convention a bit later, but for now I wanted to share with you a strange marketing phenomenon that Nintendo has been doing this past month. For some reason, a week after the game's release, there were the craziest forms of advertisements for Professor Layton and the Curious Village all over the convention! Some of you may be familiar with some of them by now, as a short while later they used these same tactics at the Game Developer's Conference, which gave them a bit more of an online presence. I thought it would be fun to run down some of the ways Nintendo was trying to get this game in our geeky heads that weekend.


The LaytonMobile!

This was actually taken on our last day. In fact, L and I were leaving the convention and heading to the train station. I had already packed my camera, figuring that I wouldn't really need it for the two block walk. Needless to say, one look at this and I quickly dug my camera out to snap a photo! A large monitor on the side of the van plays the trailer for the game in a loop, which seems to have one particular cosplayer entranced! Of course, a large-scale Layton transport vehicle can only go so far. What to do when your marketing blitz needs to go toe-to-toe, one on one with the people while still covering as much ground as possible? You hire...


The Layton Patrol!

Sporting the professor's snazzy hat and segways with the game's artwork on it, these guys went around handing out postcards with example puzzles from the game. The major problem stemmed from their primary hangout location, which was the already over-cramped merchant's room, where hundreds of people crowded around booths to buy stuff. The tightly packed aisles were not helped by having a couple of segways rolling down them!


Interactive Floor Displays!

Sitting in the middle of the game room was this Professor Layton floor...thingie. I'm really not sure exactly how interactive it truly was, it seemed to me that it played the trailer in a loop, and an example of the game, and all you could really do was use the motion of your feet or body to make little designs flow across the screen (the designs were the little DS screen logo it seems). Not the most exciting, but when combined with everything else Layton-related we were seeing, taken as a whole it was all pretty impressive.

There was one more part of the Layton ad blitz that I failed to photograph, and that's people walking around with the Layton hats on and big monitors strapped to their chests playing the Professor Layton trailer. They too handed out postcards when you walked by them. It was all very strange to see Nintendo pushing this game so darn hard! The craziness fit right in with the setting of an anime convention, however, where everything feels surreal from the start anyway.

a Fox News parody

The very talented folks over at Loading Ready Run have just put up a video that is too good not to share with everyone, poking fun at the crazy journalistic integrity of Fox News and their sensationalist piece on Mass Effect. Pure awesome.

Burn My Dread

I finally finished Persona 3! It certainly was the longest RPG I've ever dedicated myself to, I clocked in at around 105 hours in the end. My previous record was 94 hours for .Hack volumes 1-4! I will say that if I knew going into it how long the game would take to complete, I probably wouldn't have even started. I am not really a fan of long games. But there's something pretty amazing about this game that was just so compelling. I really think it must be the great characters. All the characters in the game, either in your party or just people at your school or around town, all are really well fleshed-out and interesting. You get certain benefits by continuing your relationships with people, benefits that come into play when making new Personas to fight with you, but beyond that you get the benefit of having known them. By the end, I really felt that the end of the world would be a terrible thing because of all the great people I'd met, and it really helped draw me into wanting to prevent it.

While I'm certainly glad to be moving on to other games now, I know that when Persona 3 FES is released, I'll definitely be going back to that place that we said we'd meet at, back to meet with my friends.

Speaking of other games, I believe L and I are going to try and coordinate some kind of Phantom Hourglass blog as we both trek through Link's latest adventure! Should be fun! I played it for like an hour when it came out, then put it down to continue with Persona. Also, I just picked up No More Heroes today, so if you'll excuse me, I've got some gaming to do...
(Feel free to converse with spoiler-filled Persona posts in the comments! But no discussing the events of FES please, just Persona 3!)

Playing catch-up

Wow, a lot of time has passed! I'm still here, really! Since I'll just keep putting off putting up a nice sized blog if I think about it too much, I decided it would be best to simply list some of the things I've been doing/playing/enjoying, and perhaps elaborate on them in a future post.

Super Mario Galaxy - Okay, I won't really be talking about this one much I don't think, because really, I think enough has been spoken of the greatness of Mario Galaxy. It's awesome.

Persona 3 - Man, this game is long! It's great though, so I keep playing! Unfortunately, if I haven't played Other Awesome Game X yet, it's because I'm determined to beat this game first! At 85 hours in, I'm making good progress, and plan to put in a few more hours tomorrow after work.

Game Center CX - This show is amazing. It's a show that any retro-gaming fan should not miss. I'm hoping to pick up the DVDs and the DS game at the upcoming Katsucon. Speaking of which...

Katsucon - I am so looking forward to another crazy good anime convention time! Expect lots more crazy cosplay photos and blogging when I get back from it (it's in Feb, btw). L and I are discussing the possibility of even doing mini-podcasts after each day to wrap up what we saw, which might be fun.

Scott Pilgrim - L loaned me the first two books, and I immediately went out and bought the next two. I am absolutely in love with these graphic novels. Lots of great video game references sprinkled throughout, and some wonderfully charming art and characters!

So that wasn't so hard. Hopefully this will help me jumpstart back into the blogosphere...