joe randel's art dump

Okay… how adorable does this game look?

too damn cute

It’s for the DS and what it’s about is your a zoo keeper and you have to raise a bear girl for two weeks in real time.  Things actually still happen in the game world while it’s turned off.  I don’t know much about the game other then what you can see in the pictures.  Looks like you can exercise your bear girl, listen to music, get her some book learnen… take a bath with a bunny girl… hang out with a cheetah girl.  Oh man does this game look super cute ^_^

I doubt it’ll come over here, but then Cooking Mama did so you never know.  It’s being developed by Vanillaware of Odis Sphere so you know it’ll have to 2D goodness that Joe loves.

Here’s the game’s site although there isn’t much there right now.

http://www.dmpl.co.jp/kumatan/

Want to know the thing I get the most compliments on in regards to my drawing?  The feet.  It’s true.  Out of all the years I’ve been doing this I think that, past the over all quality of my art, the feet have been getting the most attention.

I remember way back when I first got a compliment on some feet in a pic, I thought… “really… the feet?”  I know some out there are all about the feet, I’m not one of those people which why I’m a bit shocked.  I never try and put extra work in to the feet, if anything I worry that they look funny and strange.  Feet are hard things to draw some time.  That and hands, hands are hard to do too… but I don’t get the focus on them as much ^_^

So yeah, just a quick post on the feet I draw.  Apparently I draw them well. ^_^  Thanks to everyone who thinks so.  I’ll continue to draw cute toes in future drawings.

Okay, so I came across a CD of art from the last AC I was at which was… oh… 2004 I think. On it are scans of the drawings I did in peoples sketch books. Some of them I really like and I would love to maybe turn some of them in to finished pieces. Is that an okay thing to do? Is that an insult to the owner of that sketch? I mean, now instead of having an original doodle from my hand in their very own book, they have the first draft of a finished piece that the world shares with them.

I don’t know the owners of these drawing so I can’t contact them to see if they’re cool with it or not.

What should I do? Should I finish some of these doodles regardless of if I can’t contact these people?

o_O

Every play a game that was so hard that you got fed up and decided to quit playing only to come back to it later because you refused to let it kick your ass. Yeah… that was me and Bonesaw. I saw this game on one of the indie game sites that I travel to and thought… that game looks pretty good. I think I’ll try it out… Two and a half months later I finally beat it. Finally.

It didn’t start out hard. It starts pretty easy actually. The fighting is nice, although the range of your character is a bit small and the enemies can take cheap shots, but other then that it was very enjoyable. I got through the first world and actually thought that was the end of the whole game as most indie games are rather short. Boy was I wrong… a grass world, a snow snow, a lava world, a sky world and a space world later I finally made it to the end. This game is HUGE! And there are so many levels to each world and then the levels them self are really long! Far longer then I would have imagined. And that’s not counting the special levels and the golden pucks you can find to make your player stronger.

The difficulty gets really hard as the game goes on, but not hard as in… the game just gets cheap, although it would seem so sometimes, I can look back and say that the levels are actually extremely well planed out. There are some “leap of faith” jumps but mostly really excellent level design to keep the player hunting and looking on how to progress. Very well done too in my books, better then in some commercial games too I would say.

So yeah, I played the game, I got frustrated and quit it only to come back after a day or so. I wouldn’t let the game beat me, plus I thought if this guy put that much time in to this game then I need to finish it.

I can’t believe I did it… such a relief ^_^ I thought I would be playing that game forever as I refused to start another game until this one was done.

Now it’s time to move on.

Have you played a game that was so hard you refused to let it kick your ass? Did you ever finish that game?

I draw and play games, but I have another hobby. One that I don’t get to do as often as I like but I really do enjoy. Photography. It started when I found a site called SushiCam. It’s about a guy from the states as he goes and begins his life in Japan. He blogs about his adventures and takes pictures of everything he comes across. You can see his photo skills develop with each post and I watched in awe the land of Japan through his lens.

Now I’ve always had a passing interest in photography but his work really pushed me forward to try it out and I must say that I really do love it. I don’t have as much time as I would like to perfect my skill but it’s coming along. I try and see the beauty in all things around me where ever I am. That’s the trick I find because anything and everything can be shown with a sense of beauty.

My favorite things to snap are old fences and other country things, but I’ll take city stuff too.  Anyone else out there have a hobby that others might not know about?

Remember that DS English teaching game I posted about a few days ago?  The moetan one?  Yeah… that one.  And you thought… oh my… Japan is crazy and/or awesome and/or scary?  Well, Joe’s got ya covered for another dose of sexy DS English learn’n.

^_^

This one has a promo vid too.  It’s called Moe Sta and has three cute characters named Grammar, Idiom and Word.  All I have to say it why can’t we get some of this cute/sexy language learning over here? T_T  I know I would have loved the heck out of school if I had these as learning characters… Instead I remember having a talking pineapple try and teach us French.  Yup, that really worked…

sigh…

On a DS related topic.  There’s an adult PC game that has been released in Japan that mimics the DS packaging.  It’s called Lyrical DS and it actually had me fooled in to thinking that the DS had an actual adult game.  No suck luck though as the DS means Dramatic Story.  So it’s just clever packaging but I do think the game is played and set up like a DS on your monitor which is kind of cool.

I’ll just have to keep on dream’n ^_^