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This is just one recently redrawn background for a very long-term project I began about a year ago, and have been working on slowly but steadily. The finished product will be colored, of course, but I suck at the whole coloring business, so I'm getting the help of someone much more skilled than I for that purpose.


And with some sprites:

Indeed, the character name "Segata Sanshiro"  is a play on words created by the marketing folks at Sega, and a parody of the name of one of Kurosawa Akira's movies, "Sugata Sanshiro" (A movie about a man that wishes to learn Judo) (imdb link). The pronounciation of "Saturn" is 'Sataan', so by taking the 'ta' from the middle, they changed it to fit the name correctly.

As Kinoko mentioned 'Shiro!' is the command form of the japanese verb 'suru'. (One of the only two irregular verbs, incidentally, in the japanese language), therefore making "Play Sega Saturn!". And, at the same time, they also included the message that the Saturn's chassis color was white (Also 'shiro' in Japanese), which was a large part of their pitch (As all sega systems before it were black). So "Sega Saturn, Shiro!" becomes "Segata Sanshiro!"

As far as the character himself is concerned, because 'Sugata Sanshiro' was about Judo, they hired famous Japanese samurai/martial arts actor Fujioka Hiroshi to be their spokesperson, and catch the attention of the TV watching public with a series of frightening, memorable ads. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Information according to the Segata Sanshiro Wikipedia entry (Japanese)

My apologies to Greg and Ian for defiling their character thusly.

I present you:

2x
Bip! A raider chieftan, terrorizing the sands around the Oasis of a Thousand tears.

(It's actually more of a paintover than an original sprite, so I suppose it shouldn't count... Oh well, it was fun to make).

Sounds valid to me - the sport is up to you. I suppose, ultimately, that this opens it up to rather broad interpretation, but I'm leaving it up to you (That's the broad, all of you you). If you think of it as a sport, and can express it in comic form, go for it.

[What's this about:]

What's this about:

• Participants will draw a comicstrip following the given theme and rules.
• You are allowed to use any technique in your drawing. But if you use computer you are not allowed to copy and paste ready pictures.
• Each competition will last 15 days.
• The starter of each competition will decide the winner.
• The winner will decide the theme for the next competition.

Unsung sports

I've read a whole lot of comic books about sports, but it seems to me that 99% of the time, it's something like baseball or basketball - all of the sports comics today seem to be latching on to the more popular sports, and the greats, like sumo or whitefish jigging, seem to fall through the cracks of the proverbial comic world's massive floor. So your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to draw me up a comic themed around a less popular sport. What sport it is I'll leave to you, you can even make up a sport, - just avoid the big, highly televised sports that have been turned into a zillion comics already.

Now draw, pardner!

Wow, thanks a lot! I'm glad the comic was liked - I realize the last panel was a little hard to understand, but JudgeDeadd nailed it with the 'getting undressed for bed' thing, and Rui was right on the nose with 'honey' being very dead. I was going for abhorrent, and it would seem as though that was achieved. Thanks, everyone, for reading the comic - I'll start the next contest right away.

70x150, 17 colors
x1 x2

Edward "Blackbeard" Teach - One of the pioneers of psychological warfare.

It's not exactly the most original idea I've had so far - I got it looking at Tiki's, but he was definitely one hell of a leader.

Ahoy. Here's my entry into the contest: Enjoy.

For a two-hour throwaway piece, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. He was supposed to be sitting on the edge of the bed in the last panel, but I messed up in the inking process, so he ends up not looking like so much of a necrophiliac... Oh well. Hope y'all like it.

I'm not exactly sure how it works in the rest of the countries of the world, but I've noticed that in Japan, movies usually are released late because they actually show both subtitled and dubbed versions of the movies simultaneously in the theatres (It was that way for the third Harry Potter movie, at least, when I went to see it - pretty sure the same applied to Spider Man 2).

I imagine that the larger movies cater more to the 'I don't want to read subtitles' crowd in that respect, so the extra month probably has something to do with the voice over work.

This background looks great. I only have two or three nitpicks, one of which you probably already are on your way to fixing.

Firstly, there's the pond - at the moment, it doesn't really jump out at you or say "I am a pond". If you hadn't mentioned it, I may have assumed that it was some sort of rock garden without flowers. The tree seems at the moment to be coming up from the ground, which I imagine could be remedied by having the ground/roots ever-so-slightly visible below the surface of the water. The water itself could also use some reflectiveness (Edit: After another look, I noticed that the roots are visible below the surface of the water, so I suppose some reflectiveness is all it'll need).

I love the dirt pile next to the pond as well, but at the moment it draws attention away from the pond. It kind of has assumed the role of 'second point of visual interest'. Now, if it's one of the more important parts of the background, I'd suggest leaving it exactly where it is, but otherwise it could stand to be nudged a little further back, towards the fence.

The other thing I might suggest for this background is that in the original, you had a bush as a foreground element, whereas there is none in this version: It's by no means even a rule of thumb, but I am of the school of thought that unless you're able to walk off the bottom edge, it should be obscured in some way, telling the player 'This is not an exit'. Maybe a bush, or something that obstructs view, or even walking would really tie the background together. Now, if it takes up too much space on the bottom of the screen, however, it isn't necessary.

Honestly, if this background wasn't so great, I'd have just suggested using the original. Bringing the cottage further into the foreground to make the back yard seem more intimate could fix the percieved vastness - the composition is great, but it's awesome on both, and the new background does offer a few things that the original didn't (Namely, more detail on the house and a simpler layout for less complicated navigation and fewer scaling issues later on).

As always, Dan, you deliver awesome work. I'm really eager to see The Legend of the Lost Lagoon come to fruition.

I have no clue at all how this works, either. However, you can play around, testing theories by manually entering numbers into the fields below the dice, instead of randomly rolling. All I've figured out so far is that the order the dice are in does seem to matter.

For me, the creation of an opening sequence usually comes to me in a visual sense through the music I listen to. When creating a cinematic sort of introduction,I usually treat it like one big informative music videos, allowing images to form flowing with the music as I listen. It helps, of course, to be able to compose music of your own for this, since licensed music can be a real pain, but I think the Byzantine demo had one of the most engaging opening sequences I've ever seen in an AGS game. If only the music was licensed. It set the tone, and even though it wasn't particularly complicated (Though the effects on the opening credits were groovy), it worked perfectly.

Office Space had another great example of this 'story opening set to music' thing. And if Kubrick didn't insist on using the entire damned arrangement of Blue Danube in 2001: A Space Oddyssey, the Cosmic Waltz Scene (I know, Dawn of man/Also Sprach Zarathustra is the logical choice, but the actual meat of the story started with Cosmic Waltz) would've been captivating as well.

So, yeah. It's all about listening to music for me. Usually my intros write themselves that way. The biggest setback, mind you, is that you kind of commit yourself to whatever song you choose, unless you can find another with the same timing... Assuming you're not talking about dialogue and just general scene-setting, in which case this doesn't necessarily apply.

Kinoko beat me to the punch on the whole 'Japanese pronounciation' thing, so I won't say anything other than "I agree completely".

I'm not entirely surprised, actually, that the Ring 2 is bombing if it's based off of the Spiral (Rasen), or its merciful successor Ring "Let's pretend Spiral didn't happen" 2, Japan's sequels to Ring. It would make sense, as they didn't do so well over there either. Altogether, I didn't think it was a particularly scary story to begin with. Maybe I'm desensitized by slashers and other freaky stuff that my brother would subject me to when I was a little kid, but now pretty much nothing short of gory freaks me out anymore (And that's mostly just 'coz I'm kinda gore-squeamish). The whole attraction of the Ring, especially in Japan, is the element of the supernatural, so if you aren't really freaked out by the concept of ghosts and things that go bump in the night in the first place, it oughtn't to have much of an effect.

That said, I'm still likely going to be going off to see it tomorrow with some friends, and will be better suited then to give it a review. As far as the first is concerned, I have both the original Japanese version, and the American remake. They're good for entertainment, but I didn't find them overly scary, really. I just like Nakatani Miki, she's one of those rare actors I actually go to movies to see (Another wierd trait in and of itself).

Let's just hope that they don't remake the Korean Ring spinoff, "The Ring Virus". That would be bad. Or something like "Tomie", which though has nothing to do with the Ring series, was just so bad, I felt the need to mention it.

If you're looking to use sounds from a pre-existing game, I might suggest 'Stronghold' for just about anything you could need that has to do with medieval warfare, they have chopping noises, no shortage of sword swings and clangs, crossbows being wound, and for those who find it funny (Like me), a whole myriad of sounds of people getting skewered with arrows. And to top it all off, it's a great RTS. All of the sounds in-game are plain .wavs, so if you install 'er, you could easily find them in the 'sounds' folder (if memory serves).

And though I'm not sure if it's been mentioned on one of the linked threads, I'll just pitch FlashKit for public domain sounds. They may have what you're looking for.

I'm using broadband, so maybe I'm biased in this respect. I frivolously download 50-100 meg files and delete them without a second thought, but even when I used an old 14.4, I at times connected and left an 80+ meg download running all night when I had to. For dial-uppers, programs like GetRight and so on (if my memory serves me) have built in 'hang up after download finishes' options.

I guess the bottom line is that if the game looks good, people are more likely to download it no matter what the size is. Regardless of filesize, it seems that most of the people here have played Apprentice II and the King's Quest remakes. Of course, there are always going to be  people who just shun larger files simply because they're the size they are. Your best bet is to use a split archive so that people on dialup can get the game in chunks (5 or 10 megs, or whatever), and to have a seperate file for those whose bands are broad. Or you could just say 'Sorry, it's a big file', and let people decide whether it looks good enough to download anyway.

Hades was marryed to his niece?

Yup, lots and lots of inbreeding in the Greek pantheon of gods, but hey, they're gods - genetic mutations aren't a big thing to them, I'm sure. And they're one of the only two godly couplings that didn't produce offspring. Aside from Aphrodite and Hephaestus.

maybe Persephone needs to pul her top up a bit, her right breast is showing... i can hear those complaints to MTV now...

She's a greek goddess, it's a wonder she's wearing any clothes at all. And it's partially covered - no nipplage here. I figured that with most of the representations of greek gods in art having them in a sash at most, I portrayed her as relatively demure. I mean, there's a grand total of one non-naked person in this artistic rendition.

Nudism rocks.

Good Idea: H2O to quench your thirst.
Bad Idea: H2SO4 to quench your thirst.

(Adapted from "Johnny the Chemist")

75x75, 15 colors

Persephone, Queen of the underworld, wife of Hades, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, holding the pomegranate.

Seems to me that the most logical place for Stan to have a shop would be right where he was on Booty Island. The demographic for a coffin shop: Older pirates who are less likely to end up just floating face up in the middle of the ocean are most likely to be there. Plus he already likely owns the lease to that position. Woodtick doesn't really seem the best place to open a business that doesn't involve ships. If Stan were reopening his shipyard, I could see a use for it on Scabb, but as is there just doesn't seem to be enough population on Scabb for a lucrative coffin business, so... Yeah.

With the exception of his crypt on Blood Island in CMI (Which he converted simply because it was convenient), he's always seemed to be located somewhere where there are people to buy his products. He's a businessman, y'know? Even Blood island was considered a hot business location, looking to have business pick up in the event that the Volcano started flowing again.

Remember - With business, it's location, location, location. Wally and the carpenter had business because they catered to the locale. Hell, even the bartender wasn't seeing much business (Though largely due to Largo LeGrande). And the Voodoo lady? Well, it's more aesthetics in her case.

So if you're intending to shuffle around business locale, you'll need to justify it, and I second Puddin's opinion in that the carpenter's shop should stay as-is.

Happy Birthday, Eggie. You're now the legal marriage age in the UK (And have been for 2 years, with parental consent in the US). So... Go buy some scissors and find yourself a bride, good man!

And regarding the Ninja Turtles... I wonder why they decided they didn't want them to be ninja in the UK? I mean, They're not even remotely ninja-like in the cartoon, so the name almost fits better, but still...

And Alvin and the Chipmunks wasn't anywhere on that list. Maybe it's only me, but I think that they at least belong in the top 100.  And the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon came in at #29... Above Transformers and He-Man? Blasphemy. I liked the D&D cartoon, but still...