Robot Claw – Page 246 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Beading

November 10, 2019

Over four years ago I made a masterpiece using Perler Beads. It was a day of the highest highs and lowest lows but from the ordeal emerged what it still one of my favourite possessions.

And yet despite using 3364 beads that day it was only a tiny fraction of the beads we had bought! Perler Beads, purchased in bulk, are cheap and I had tens of thousands remaining! And in time – now and then over the intervening years – I have used them for what they are most often used for: making physical models of game sprites!

The process is somewhat laborious to be honest, but it’s a fun diversion every year or so and the results usually look ok. Ironing them to melt the beads together is still the irritating part, since it’s difficult to get them regularly melted. Color matching can be iffy too, at least for me since I just use what I have.

The above was made using very tiny beads and the finished invader is only about 2 cm wide. As you can see I melted him thoroughly so you can’t even see the holes in the beads any more. I think he looks good!

For most of these I superglue magnets on the back and they live on our metal doors. The lower left frog was an original creation made by JK (and also uses tiny beads) and the squirrel – which is quite large – was originally made for my mum but due to fragility I haven’t brought it to Australia for fear of it breaking!

That’s a black mage from Final Fantasy. He took longer than I expected and almost fell to pieces during ironing. My heart skipped a few beats!

For a couple of years now I’ve entertained the thought of doing another large scale project, albeit not as big as The Masterpiece. But then I recall that 7-hour nightmare and reconsider 🙂

But who knows… maybe one day I’ll get to it…

Inktober 2019

November 1, 2019

I did ‘Inktober’ again! This is where artists – such as myself – create and share a new piece every day in October. I used the same app as last year and once again followed no theme, making each piece up as I went along. You’ve already seen one example in the previous post; here I’ll show more.

They started off rather simple. The above was inspired by a dream in which I was tending a strange plant just like the one drawn. I was still getting refamiliarizing myself with the app at this point.

That was drawn after listening to Bela Lugosi’s Dead over and over again (“The virginal brides file past his tomb…“). I wanted to superimpose a window over it with Dracula looking out but lacked the skill.

This one was inspired after watching a YouTube video about the days of airships flying over NYC. It also features silhouettes, which were a common motif this year.

One day, when I was very tired after my 11.5 hours at work, SMC sent a dazzling photo of an ocean sunset in Vanuatu. I used it as inspiration for the above. To be honest I could have put more detail in but I was simply too exhausted!

Around halfway through the month I developed a few new tricks that allowed me to squeeze a bit more detail out of what is a very limited drawing app. This simple sketch of a tower was an early example, but things progressed in time to pieces like this:

And eventually this:

The above is my favorite drawing of not just this years group, but last year as well. I feel I – finally – achieved what I wanted with the starfield and the lighting of the silhouette and enjoyed reusing the tower from earlier. I wonder who lives there?

Another Inktober is now over, and my talents will – at least for the next 11 months – remain exclusive to cards and postcards. But I’m sure I’ll be back for Inktober 2020!

The Early Days

October 27, 2019

In the last year I’ve added a few interesting games to my collection. They’ve come from various sources, but they’ve all been ‘rebuys’ of games I used to own back in my youth.

Even though I can’t actually run any of this software, the nostalgia value for me is high. I’ll cover them in reverse historical order…

The above two were purchased at a local comic show about a year ago, and I paid a mere $2 each for them. The seller had even more, including the second Xeen game and some early Heroes of Might and Magic titles, but none in as good condition as the above.

I bought Might and Magic 3 back in 1991 when it was first released, and it was amongst the first boxed PC games I ever bought. I recall loving it at the time and (probably) testing Bernards patience by how much time I spent using his computer! I’d been a fan of the series beforehand, and had played the first two in pirated form, and was pleased to own the latest iteration. I continued playing the series well into the Heroes offshoots, and once arriving in the US had a great time replying MM2 on an Apple and then the Genesis, as well as the NES and SNES versions. A great and important RPG series.

The SSI ‘gold box’ series of AD&D computer games were amongst the more important and influential RPG games of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tabletop RPG fans had been dreaming of computer versions of their favorite game for years and SSI delivered in spades. Starting with Pool Of Radiance in 1988 there were many games (and spinoffs) in the series and I played them all! I recall particularly enjoying the Krynn titles, including the two above, the Amiga versions of which were given to me with an Amiga 500 by a colleague.

In fact the gold box was one game series that spanned the shift to the USA, since I even purchased Unlimited Adventures for Macintosh after moving here and wrote – and somehow put online in those very early days – my own ‘module’ called Dead Swamp Destiny (for which I even designed the enemy sprites!). Ah I wish I could load that up and post screenshots to this blog today 🙂

The gold box series is now long dead, but the basic game design lives on in countless tactical games still going strong today (such as the Fire Emblem series). But I’ll always remember the series as one of my favorite of all time.

And speaking of favorites, the above is the 1987 USC64/128 release of the original Wizardry (which first came out in 1981). I bought this copy earlier this year for $40.

As you can see it’s complete and in amazing condition. Does the disc work? I’ll likely never know, but I couldn’t resist this piece of history. Wizardry isn’t just an important game to my personal gaming history, it’s one of the most important games ever released, and has gone on to directly influence the design of many other juggernaut game series including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

I’ve got a collection of many Wizardry titles for seven or eight systems and many spinoff games (the series and its variants is still going strong in Japan) and the ‘dungeon crawl’ is to this day one of my favorite game styles. Over my decades many a long hour has been lost in the labyrinthine mazes of the Wizardry series, and I hope many are still yet to be lost in my future…