So in today’s post, I bring you the result of what happens when you mix a cup of Soul Caliber 2 with 12oz of hatred for Todd McFarlane’s neverending defecation of unimaginative bi-product. The subject at hand: Necrid. It was a discussion that came up as some friends and I lunched at a Chinese buffet, talking mindlessly about video games and the like; in this particular case, Soul Caliber 2 was the day’s fare. Now as anyone who has played the game knows, there is a somewhat loose story line surrounding each of the characters in an attempt to justify their presence in the game. Take the case of Siegfried/Nightmare as an example. Siegfried was a mercenary who fights through the game in Soul Edge, only to find a piece of the demon blade, become possessed, and turn into the abomination known as Nightmare. In Soul Caliber, you play as Nightmare, and in the end you free yourself of your curse, and revert back to Siegfried. Somewhere between Soul Caliber and the sequel he must have gotten nostalgic for that whole demon-with-limitless-power thing, and he becomes Nightmare again. Not all the details are there, and it’s not a fantastic story. But it gives the character some flavor.

Which brings us to Necrid. Now I’m not sure as to why Namco wanted Mr. McFarlane to design a character for their game, or maybe Namco owed him a favor, and he really really wanted to make a wicked cool character. Or maybe a man from space came to Todd’s door one night, asking where soul edge was, thus inspiring him to do something new and awful, as opposed to all of his old awful work. In any case, from what I can gather, Necrid’s origin is that he came from space. Perhaps he hurtled into earth after his ship was damaged, crash-landed in a schoolyard, and as he climbed from the flaming wreckage screamed in an unintelligible tongue “I R NECRID! I R HERE FOR TEH GETTING OF TEH SWORDS!” Or so our lunch conversation ended, with us stupified at the existence of such a crappy frog-man who just has a bunch of moves from other characters. I mean, I swear McFarlane was playing with old He-Man figures while in the midst of the character design process. Like a bastard offspring of beastman and that leech guy. The end product of our mockery is this lovely desktop, available in 1280×1024 resolution.

I can only hope you lost more brain cells reading this than I did making the image. Enjoy.

So, I went ahead and slapped a little character sketch up in the color gallery, more or less unfinished, but as it’s done as far as I felt like taking it. Not bad, no, but not anything all that special either. After you draw so many things, you start to feel like you’re repeating over and over. I really think I need to do something drastic color/contrast wise to get back that feeling of productivity. Whatever. Hope you enjoy the sketch of “Mr. Wire.”

-sullivan

I could totally use one of those as a mascot. The E3 gallery is finally up (for those of you who are “special” you can find it under the gallery link), and it only took me 3 days to put it up. So lazy am I. For those of you who were just interested in finding the ladies, I kind of made it into a game. Click all the links, and find out which ones have vixens on the other side. It’s like a prize. What I think would be funnier though, is if I ran a porn site, and interspersed pictures of santa claus and jesus at random. Just to let you know that you’re being a bad girl and/or boy. More sexy art soon. I don’t promise, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have some stuff to slap up in this biznatch.

-sullivan

Yeah, yeah, so it’s not exactly tomorrow…or it kind of is since I updated after midnite when I said I would put “More tomorrow” but I suppose it makes no nevermind now. Anyway, I’ve updated the gallery to include an E3 section (soon) for anyone interested in browsing the glittery lights and lovely ladies that tie together to make one fantastic disaster of a video game expo. I’m still trying to decide if we did what we were supposed to do there, which was play games, get swag and just wander about awe-struck at the sheer immensity of the place. In retrospect, I can think of only two actual ways of dealing with the show: A) you can be there to wander around and see as much as you can, relaxing and viewing at your leisure, or B) you need to map out a battle plan of all the lines you want to stand in to catch all the presentations, a task that can and will eat up your entire E3 experience. I think our problem was that we weren’t ready to commit our entire trip to languishing in queues for 30 minutes of sound and fury, emerging with about 3 hours of actual E3 experience. I thik our problem was that we tried to do both, which resulted in us playing a fair amount of games, but being too non commital to stand in any lines to see any previews of the latest and greatest products of the digital world. We saw the presentation for THQ’s Stalker, which really seemed to be an amazing game as far as the engine was concerned, and we had just happened upon the line on accident while it was still fairly unnoticed on the first day. We waited for maybe an hour to get a sneak peak at Darkwatch, which had a very cool mix of genres behind it, but didn’t seem to present anything new to the world of FPS games. Although the presenter assured us that there was still a whole year left for them to work on it, it didn’t really assuage any fears the crowd seemed to have of the game falling victim to being “just another” FPS. The only other presentation we managed to get into was Square Enix’s, which, in the proud tradition of Square, was visually stunning…but ironically, I have to say that I’ve played and enjoyed several games in the long line of FF, but I’ve never completed a single one. Nothing against square, I guess I just don’t have the required attention span, as much as I love RPGs.

I think the way we handled the show was rather good for first-timers, especially since I’ve been out of the loop for quite a while now. I managed to see lots of new titles, and revivals of old classics, such as Konami’s Contra Neo, and Gradius. Nothing like playing on childhood memories. One game that captured my attention with it’s unique, just-for-fun approach to gaming was Katamaridamacy, a game where you play as a tiny alien prince who controls a sticky ball, the goal being to roll said ball to and fro, collecting as much material as possible to increase the diameter of the sphere, and proceed to the next level if you meet your goal. I think my favorite part of the demo I played was when I started rolling over cats and dogs, who had been previously knocking objects off of my precious sphere, and adding them to the collective of my sphere-o-doom. Other attractions included Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Cowboy Bebop, Onimusha 3, the 16 player kill-fest known as Iron Phoenix, Viewtiful Joe 2, Samurai Legend Musashi, foremost among the multitude of others that I sampled.

The things I missed? Well, I never saw hide nor hair of Halo 2, we didn’t find Halflife 2 until the last day, when the line was absurdly long, skipped the Nintendo line which made the Halflife 2 line look like a walk in the park, Stealthily avoided Ubisoft’s latest iteration in the Splinter Cell series, and didn’t scope out any of the new PS toys. I suppose my goal was an attempted re-education in the gamer world, so just knowing that half of these things existed was enough to sate my appetite. I DID however get to sit and chat a while with the friendly people at the Phantom booth. They seem to have the beginnings of a good concept, up until the part where you pay 30 bucks a month to have their service, and have to pay full retail price for game downloads on top of that. You’d think that with a subscription to a game network, they’d be able to cut some corners with developers and give a hefty price reduction. All I really want from that system is the neat-o mouse/keyboard setup.

In summary, great games, lovely ladies, and a hell of a lot of fun. I’d say that everyone should go to E3, but then there’d be less room for me. So you stay the hell away! MINE. ALL MINE! In other words, I look forward to going back next year, if for nothing else, to find out exactly what the HELL NC Soft’s Alter Life is all about

-sullivan

Going to post more on this tomorrow, but you can just imagine what you would expect to see inside a place that has a 50 foot Atari banner looking something like this plastered on the building:

I mean, the place literally makes you drool with anticipation to get inside, and once you’ve stumbled your way into this most holy of shrines, it makes you paw at things with all the fascination of a strung out half-retarded junkie kitten with epileptic tendancies. I couldn’t remember where the hell I was going, or trying to do half the time with so much eye candy screaming to the fat man who lives in my occipital lobe. I mean, I want it all. Like one of these. Or one of these. And I DEFINTELY want a few of THESE. Teehee. Yeah, more tomorrow.

-sullivan