Who’s got two thumbs and gets to replace Blastoise’s video card already? This dood!

I was on Blastoise earlier and decided to play some more Mass Effect 1 (since I had to restart as my old saves were on old Blastoise). I get to the Citadel to do its clusterfwegh of side missions, and… o hi, BSOD! Well, in this case it’s more like “go directly to black, do not pass go or collect $200, just press the damn reset button.”

Big deal. Even the best machines burps now and then. Pick yourself up and try again! (Also auto-save FTW.)

I get a little farther, into Chora’s Den and… ow, geez, another BSOD. This is starting to get a little scary. True, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated my video drivers… but then again I’d just built Blastoise in December, so it’s not like that should affect things either because he was just fine before today! I made a note to look into that later, I just wanted to get this Citadel crap done so I can go get Liara. (VA nerdery: her VA is Lightning! :D)

I’m just about to wrap up the last side mission and during the chatter… oh wow, total meltdown. Blastoise freezes up mid-syllable and won’t visibly reboot properly even after hitting the reset button or even doing a hard reboot. I let him sit for a few and try again while I go get another Pepsi, and I hear the Windows startup sounds. Oh good, he recovered, right?

Noooope. It’s, like… the keyboard and tablet LEDs flash like normal, and his webcam orients itself like normal… but the monitors aren’t having any of this nonsense. Even after checking the monitor connections, it’s still a no-go. I’m guessing Blastoise’s card went bad in such a way to kill video export but not enough to completely brick itself (or else I don’t think Windows could even proceed, heh). Whatever the case, if I can’t see anything, it’s no good. I don’t have any spare cards to throw in as a temporary measure, either (remember, the one in his old body is impossible to extract, I must have cemented it in or something), so I get to loot a new card.

If you forgot from the previous “let’s rebuild Blastoise” posts in November/December, he ended up using the N560GTX (I actually bought it through NewEgg since Amazon was sold out at the time). I’m wondering if I should just get the same card again or if another kickass mid-range go-to card has cropped up since. I would like to stay nVidia, and putting a soft cap @ $300.

Bleh. I was hoping not to spend major coin for awhile (since I did get mother her iPad and I still need to get new glasses) but, well, poop happens. :\ Looks like this will be my Yoshi Day loot (in place of Tales of Graces f and another mega-sized Angry Birds plush), haha. That aside, I’m only mildly pissed that there’s no Mac version of Mass Effect so I can at least continue through Dinah. :P

And, of course, it’s when Blastoise goes down that I really want to paint. Boo!

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Speaking of Angry Birds… dude, Angry Birds Space kicks ass. I got it on Dinah– you really do benefit from having more screen space here compared to the other variants. No wonder Rovio partnered with Samsung for this one (to pimp out the phone version of the Galaxy Note).

Also, I swear that the Space version of Red Bird looks like Kamina from Gurren Lagann. “Who the squawk do you think I am?!” or something. :D

In which I get my TOTALLY NOT A CREEPER Yuri Lowenthal fangirl on. This time we throw a birthday party for a handful of his characters. Shenanigans ensue. Also I want that cake.

Seriously, though, I think my game cards for FF4 DS and Tales of the Abyss are making nasty faces at each other and fight over who gets to sit in the 3DS card slot while I’m not looking. It’s true that Asch could have just dropped Explosion and be done with it, but having him steal Mieu from Luke is funnier. :D

And now I’m going to crawl into bed with my 3DS and Abyss it up until I fall asleep… or the Morning Stream starts, whichever comes first. :P

I wonder if this would satisfy the “WAIT I’LL FIX IT” entry in the request queue? XD

When in doubt, don’t kill it with fire or nukes, kill it with Force Arrow. Charge Beam doesn’t have squat on this!
One of these days I’ll have to do at least a pencil-render animation of Chelsea using Force Arrow, complete with Noisy Cricket-esque recoil. Yeah, the recoil in Tales of Destiny is actually pretty minor (she just staggers back a little) but here we like to take it to 11!

Flea Vest mode because we like pink pajamas with random F prints.

Also, YouTube version since this was last night’s Instant Ramen LIVE episode, after all:

It’s pretty much settled now that Instant Ramen LIVE will be a weekly event on Wednesdays at 7pm PT. It is a little late in the day, but for me I know I’ll have a definite 3-hour block that I can dedicate for live painting for all the internets to see. And, uh… even if nobody shows up, at least Justin.tv autorecords server-side so I can at least have a recording for the record. Together with the 10-minute YouTube versions that I post the next day, everybody wins!

For now I’m keeping the pieces on the live show to those I can knock out in a single session, but this doesn’t rule out more complex, multi-session pieces in the future. :)

Hi. I have a Nintendo 3DS as of 9:30 this morning. (Early delivery is EARLY! Damn.)
Aqua Blue, of course! It’s close to being Maximillian-blue as I’m going to get.
Of course, you can’t have a game system without a game* so I looted Mario Kart 7 with it, and Tales of the Abyss is on preorder, to drop next week.

Graphically, holy smoo on a cracker did Nintendo win it this time. I’ve had low expectations of Nintendo on a graphical level for quite awhile (see: the Wii and its lack of true HD, using component barely gets you widescreen but you’re still capped at 480p). The original DS was… okay with its graphics that were Nintendo 64-equivalent and all matte-looking and still bitmappy in places, but the 3DS really is a dramatic jump ahead in this department. I’d put it on par with late-phase PS2/GameCube. There’s actually reflective/shiny surfaces, and the lens flares actually looks like a convincing lens flare and not like a bunch of bitmaps synchronized to simulate a lens flare. :P

One tiny little problem, though… and this isn’t really Nintendo’s fault as it is just the great Random Number Generator that I got stuck with during Real Life Character Creation. Seems I’m stereoblind! Doh! Though… looking back, I never could get those stereograms to work for me. I remember getting a headache trying to get a stereogram print of Luigi to “pop out” and it never did. (Amusingly enough, so says Wikipedia: stereoblindness is common among artists. Hah!)

Fortunately, even us stereoblindies can still enjoy the 3DS. Nobody in their right mind would code a game dependent on the ability to see stereoscopic 3D. Not to mention, since this is useless to me, I can just turn it off and save on battery charge. :D

It’s going to rock next week when Tales of the Abyss drops. I don’t think it adds anything that wasn’t in the PS2 version, but I had to get it on principle. It’s like how I MUST own every variant of Final Fantasy 4 that gets released here. >:D

Now that Disgaea 4 and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky have stopped nibbling on my soul for awhile…

What’s this? “HD” Hikaru? (in b4 stupid gag about how her initials are also HD. trolololo high definition)

Have some Numair, too. Because it would be nagging me forever until I did just ONE frame.

RT graphics fodder, yes. And probably I shouldn’t have gone right to the final equipment, but this is just an HD test to see what the minimum fullsize I can comfortably work at– in this case, 800×800 to be shrunk to ideally 150×150 but no smaller than 120×120 before too many details get lost and I have to dive back in for repairs. Both field and battle sets will be done like this for consistency (as opposed to the current system which has, uh, low-res sprites for the field and “SD” sprites for battle).

“HD” is kinda misleading– high definition implies you can jam in more details, right? Yes and no… you can certainly add some, period, but not too many since you have to account for things being blended or nearest-neighbor absorbed in the great shrink.

Drawing HD sprites like this… well, it demands a bit of a drastic shift from my usual tactics. For one thing, I have to make the head about 10% bigger than normal– that is, I have to turn off “anatomically/proportionally-correct” because otherwise on shrink, most of the face details are lost and would necessitate a repair dive. And then, of course, I can’t go drybrush at all– the paintjob is ENTIRELY 3px Detail Brush out of the Acrylics subtools, and restrict to 3 colors per “thing” (skin, armor, hair, etc.), exception being metallic parts where I can have two midtones, a shadow and a highlight.

Hikaru’s going to be the most time-consuming to convert, of course, since being the main character she has THREE outfits (cavalry plate with and without the Majestic Goat, and the Maximillian), a mount, and more “emote” frames than the others. Oh yeah, and a freaking DRAGON. Oh well. That’s what you get for being the main character, after all. :P