God bless the Xbox Live Marketplace.

One of thew things that sucks about being a freelance artist (aside from the burpy cash flow) is that it leaves little time for actually playing games, especially anything as long-winded as Twilight Princess (which has been collecting dust for the better part of a month).

I have been tinkering around with quite a bit of Wii Sports however (199 bowling score last night, BOOYEAH!), some Virtual Console games, and much more importantly - my brand-spanking new Xbox 360. The funny thing about that is that because my time (and cash flow) has been so scattershot recently, I've been using the console almost exclusively to download bite-sized game demos, who'se 10-15 minute-time-duration is custom suited to my current work schedule. (That didn't keep me from picking up a used $15 of Perfect Dark Zero, though, which is a sordid tale in of itself. Bleh.)

Anyway, a quick recap of my most recent week in gaming:

- Lost Planet (XB360): A fucking fantastic little demo, despite the fact that combat with ice monsters ("shoot the glowing spot!") and energy-lozenge/health system is about as sophisticated as anything you'd see in a 20 year old NES game. The game's graphics (and creature animation, in particular) are fantastic, and the sound design is top-notch. I only hope the finished game features as much mech-based combat as the demo does. Christ, I sound like a plant.

- Gunstar Heroes (VC): Hey, this game actually lives up to some of the hype spewed by it's rabid cult following! It's the lovechild that Contra/Ninja Gaiden/Metal Slug would've producedh after a 3-day long clusterfuck in the Bahamas.

- Alien Crush (VC): Only one pinball map for $6? Feh!

- Ice Hockey (VC): Not nearly as good as my 12-year-old self remembers it being, but what can you do? The Skinny/Medium/Fat team-building dynamic still cracks me up, though.

- Dead Rising (XB360): Holy fucking Christ on a crutch, folks werent kidding when they were kicking and screaming about how stupidly small the text in this game is. How hard would it have been for Capcom to let the player toggle the text output depending on his/her television's resolution? Again, feh.

That said, the demo of Dead Rising is pretty fantastic (bowling balls! baseball bats! katanas!), though I have the sneaking suspicion that the full game is little more than the demo spread across more mall acreage and punctuated with more god-awful cutscenes. Thanks, but no thanks.

- Perfect Dark Zero (XB360): Yeah, I went ahead and picked this up despite all warnings to the contrary - what can I say? I was a huge fan of Goldeneye/PD on the N64, and I thought this game might recapture at least a little bit of that magic, but all it really does is make my ass itch.

The funny thing is that PDZ's gameplay isn't really bad at all (crummy level design aside) - it's just that everything *surrounding* the gameplay in seems custom-designed to rape your eyeballs and make you wish you were dead. I know that this was a first-generation game and that Rare was hoping to make as much use of the 360's graphical effects as possible, but why did that mean that every single goddamned texture in the game has look like it'd been shrink-wrapped in 6 inches of plastic wrap? And sure, the writing/story in the first PD game was silly, but PDZ sets a operatic standard for amaingly bad storytelling (a bad guy named "Killlian"> Are you fucking kidding me?)

And don't even get me started about the game's character designs - the simple fact that when you boot up PDZ's deathmatch mode you find yourself in the guise of a goggle-eyed teenaged girl wearing Chuck Taylors and 15 pounds of bangles BENEATH some hilariously stupid-looking Lazer Tag armor (complete with bicycle helmet!)...well, that pretty much says everthing about the game you'd ever need to know.

That said, I DID have a pretty productive week on the art side of things, and managed to finish a few strips that'll be part of a new game-related webcomic that I'll be launching on Christmas day:

They call me Mister Aids.

So, November was a crazy gaming month here at the Purple Palace - not only are we hosts to those two brand-new Wiis that I mentioned before, but Anne and I also managed to scoop up one of those much-sought after $100 Xbox 360 core units that nearly brought Amazon.com to it's knees a few weeks ago.

Even cooler is that Joshin picked up a 360 harddrive as a birthday gift for yours truly, so I've been spending a ridiculous portion of the past few days getting my ass kicked in Halo 2 by foul-mouthed children from all over the world.

In other news: the Wii forum for which I created some avatar artwork has gone live, so check it out if you're starving for up-to-the-minute Wii-related-news throughout the day. (And I guess this as good a time as any to post the artwork I created for said site):

Mr. Tinkles was the kind of guy that rooted for bad guys in the movies.

As far back as I can remember....




...I always wanted to be a small, strangely-hatted dwarf living in a community populated solely by gibberish-spewing animals.







To me, being a small, strangely-hatted dwarf living in a community
populated solely by gibberish-spewing animals was better than being
president of the United States.



Even before I went to Tom Nooks
for an after-school job...



...I knew I wanted to be a part of them.




It was there that I knew I belonged.
To me, it meant being somebody.....in a neighborhood full of nobodies.

They weren't like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted. They
trampled Miss Kitty's flowerbed and stole her fruit. They crafted
constellation designs of an unspeakably pornographic nature. They
chopped down their neighbors' trees and left leaf-shaped garbage
strewn all over the beach.

When they played K.K. Samba all night....
...nobody ever called the cops.



So, the day I got busted for posession of stolen fruit was a busy day. I had tod drop a Thanksgiving-themed sofa off at Jimmy's to match the curtains he had. I had to pick up my townmate from the train station, and on the way home, plant some flower seeds for Tom Nook. On top of all that, I had a shipment of dinosaur bones from Mr. Snuffles that needed to be delivered to that damned owl at the museum...



Now here I am, in facing 13 charges of flower trampling, accepting stolen stationary from Poopytown, and defacing Stink City's public message board.

So unless an advance copy of Animal Crossing DS graces my mailbox this week, I'll have to wait around to relive the good ol' days like everyone else. Hell, I can't even get a decent Gyroid these days - right after I got here, I asked for a mini Gargloid, and instead I was given a Drinky Bird toy with a "Happy Birthday" song-chip buried in it's miserable little head. I'm an average nobody... get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.

I could have been your daddy....

Joshin and I managed to botch our attempt to snag a Wii console during last night's midnight launch not once, but twice (I blame the ridiculously long screentime of Casino Royale for screwing up our finely-honed plan to spend 3 hours engaged in a line-wide Mario Kart DS tournament with the other people waiting in line, but that's the best laid plans of mice and men for ya, I suppose.)

In an effort to console myself, I knocked out the above doodle in salute to the game that'll have to tide us over for another week before we can get our grubby little mitts on Twilight Princess. (I haven't been particularly happy with my shading methods lately, so I'm focusing on flat color/detail for the time being. If you've ever played Halo, then the above image should be pretty self-explanatory - if a little needlessly chaotic).



,,,and speaking of Zelda, here's a little Link for the ladies. Most people seem to dig that Link here seems to be a little less fey than he's usually depicted - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.