Aside from playing videogames, I also enjoy crafty kinds of things, like needlepoint, 3d art, or making my own costumes or accessories. I was looking around for info on making stuff out of Sculpey (polymer clay) for an unrelated project (superhero-themed accessories to be specific), and started thinking about how it would be neat to make videogame-themed items out of Sculpey. I then looked around on LJ and google, and at some point I came across someone's awesome idea of making videgame characters out of perler beads. It's a very cool idea, and I only wish I'd been the one to think of it. ;) Each pixel is a bead; it's as simple as that. I had perler beads as a kid but never did much with them, because all the designs on the box and stuff were pretty stupid looking, and I couldn't think of many designs to make myself when the beads were so large. It's amazing how perfectly suited to videogame art these things are, though.
Anyway I'm going to start with my earliest videogame memories, namely Jumpman and Kirby and then go from there. I'm so bizarrely excited about this. I'm also seriously considering trying to make a Jumpman bolo-tie out of Sculpey for my dad. I will definitely post pictures in all their geeky glory when I have a sizeable collection going on.
Maltiriel Blog
Lost and Impatient Forever
by Maltiriel on Comments
On Monday my copy of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow finally arrived. I had been planning to buy it later after I finished my huge backlog of unplayed DS games, but it's getting increasingly hard to find and the prices on Ebay and Amazon are steadily rising, so I went ahead and got it. This of course is the same thing that happened to me with Phoenix Wright, Lost in Blue, Trauma Center, and Trace Memory. Now 2 of those games are back in print. Oh well, I didn't pay much over retail for any of them, and I made sure I had them.
Anyway, I started playing DoS this week and I've been loving it. Unfortunately I've fallen prey to the same problem I always have, in real life and in games: I get lost like nobody's business. I swear I can't find my way out of a paper bag. I can follow a map, but I can't remember what stuff is where so it really doesn't help that much. I wish I had a better head for this kind of thing.
I've also been playing Golden Sun, as I mentioned previously, and it's reminded me of one of the things that always drives me up the wall about RPGs, namely the endless cut-scenes. At least the cinematic ones are more like watching a movie, but the ones in Golden Sun make me want to throw my DS against the wall. They're just endless text-boxes and characters making vague head-movements. I sit there hitting A and mentally yelling at the game, particularly when the characters go on about needing to run or whatever. I'm just far too impatient. But I want to finally play through Golden Sun, so I guess I'll just have to suck it up.
Anyway, I started playing DoS this week and I've been loving it. Unfortunately I've fallen prey to the same problem I always have, in real life and in games: I get lost like nobody's business. I swear I can't find my way out of a paper bag. I can follow a map, but I can't remember what stuff is where so it really doesn't help that much. I wish I had a better head for this kind of thing.
I've also been playing Golden Sun, as I mentioned previously, and it's reminded me of one of the things that always drives me up the wall about RPGs, namely the endless cut-scenes. At least the cinematic ones are more like watching a movie, but the ones in Golden Sun make me want to throw my DS against the wall. They're just endless text-boxes and characters making vague head-movements. I sit there hitting A and mentally yelling at the game, particularly when the characters go on about needing to run or whatever. I'm just far too impatient. But I want to finally play through Golden Sun, so I guess I'll just have to suck it up.
Burned out and bored!
by Maltiriel on Comments
I've been playing a bit too much AC in the past few days. I think I'm going to give it a bit of a rest for a week or two. I'll probably still play half an hour or so, but no more marathon sessions. ;) I'm just getting bored with it at the moment. Oh, and the town to which I drove this weekend for the TRU AC:WW promotion got flooded Tuesday, including all the roads going towards it from here, so I'm very glad that didn't happen this weekend! We've had ungodly amounts of rain lately...
I'm really in the mood for an RPG right now, so I'm going to go back to Golden Sun, which I haven't touched for probably 2 years. It was a fun game but I never really got very far; probably I got distracted by something else. I wish there were more DS RPGs out right now. The choices now are pretty limited. I may pick up LostMagic soon, since it looks interesting.
Mainly I play my DS and GBA games during lunch and breaks at work, so the next thing I'm hoping to start at home is Morrowind. I would've started it yesterday but my friend Matt borrowed it and still hasn't brought it back. Bah. I played a bit of Fable last night instead and remembered why I stopped mid-game: an annoyingly hard boast for one of the missions. I'm probably going to have to give up and just lose that boast. It's the don't kill any thieves boast for the Twinblade's camp mission. I've tried it dozens of times and still can't manage to sneak past the guards in the very first part of the mission. Perhaps I just suck.
Animal Crossing Adventure
by Maltiriel on Comments
Saturday I drove an hour to the nearest Toys R Us store in search of the infamous Mario items and monkey villagers. I dragged along my spouse and our good buddy Matt; they were game mainly because my birthday was Thursday, so it was sort of a birthday present. To my vast relief the download station was not only on but also set correctly, so we were able to get all the items without too much trouble.
We had 3 DSes and 3 copies of AC:WW. One DS was mine (a Lite and a birthday present to myself), one was my spouse's, and the 3rd I stupidly dropped last week and broke its hinge (leading to the purchasing of the afore mentioned Lite), so it'll be traded in soon. Depressingly all 3 copies of AC are mine. One I bought at the US launch, the second I bought for my spouse, who ended up not liking it or playing it, and the third is a European version I purchased just to practice my German, because I'm a huge dork. Each of us operated one DS and game, so it didn't take as long as it would have if I'd been alone.
I rebuilt the second town since it was unused and thus was able to get 5 monkeys in that town; interestingly they did not move in with the first 5 bottle messages as I had been under the impression that they would. It took quite a few (15, maybe?) before all 5 had moved in, so apparently you aren't guaranteed a monkey with each bottle note, despite Katrina's message about a simian moving in. The other interesting thing was that we actually got about the same amount of each item amongst all three games. The thing was, each game had one or two items with many more copies than the others, while there were one or two that didn't appear until the 20th bottle message or so. It made me wonder if there had only been one of us, if we'd have had an even distribution; basically if multiple games downloading at the same time just interfered with each other.
All in all it was interesting, and we weren't the only ones there downloading, either. There was a guy there with his girlfriend (he was downloading items with his DS while she played the demo, looking bored) when we got there. We also wound up buying quite a few games that were on clearance for 10 or 20 bucks, so TRU benefited pretty well. I'm sure there've been people there all week hanging around the videogame section and annoying the employees...
We had 3 DSes and 3 copies of AC:WW. One DS was mine (a Lite and a birthday present to myself), one was my spouse's, and the 3rd I stupidly dropped last week and broke its hinge (leading to the purchasing of the afore mentioned Lite), so it'll be traded in soon. Depressingly all 3 copies of AC are mine. One I bought at the US launch, the second I bought for my spouse, who ended up not liking it or playing it, and the third is a European version I purchased just to practice my German, because I'm a huge dork. Each of us operated one DS and game, so it didn't take as long as it would have if I'd been alone.
I rebuilt the second town since it was unused and thus was able to get 5 monkeys in that town; interestingly they did not move in with the first 5 bottle messages as I had been under the impression that they would. It took quite a few (15, maybe?) before all 5 had moved in, so apparently you aren't guaranteed a monkey with each bottle note, despite Katrina's message about a simian moving in. The other interesting thing was that we actually got about the same amount of each item amongst all three games. The thing was, each game had one or two items with many more copies than the others, while there were one or two that didn't appear until the 20th bottle message or so. It made me wonder if there had only been one of us, if we'd have had an even distribution; basically if multiple games downloading at the same time just interfered with each other.
All in all it was interesting, and we weren't the only ones there downloading, either. There was a guy there with his girlfriend (he was downloading items with his DS while she played the demo, looking bored) when we got there. We also wound up buying quite a few games that were on clearance for 10 or 20 bucks, so TRU benefited pretty well. I'm sure there've been people there all week hanging around the videogame section and annoying the employees...
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