It's a good thing I love my Playstation 3 so much as a DVD player, because otherwise I'd be going through some serious buyer's remorse right about now.

I gave Valkyria Chronicles a go today. Absolutely gorgeous game.

And I can't play it worth a crap.

I wiped out on the second mission because I suck at 3D games that aren't completely turn-based. If things are shooting at me while I'm trying to figure out where I am or what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm going to die. Horribly. On the second mission of the game, I can't figure out exactly where my guy is supposed to go once the game shifts from the 2D map to the 3D third-person view, and as a result I run around like a headless chicken and get shot and killed. And as I'm going through the FAQ, I'm seeing things like decoys? Cover tactics? Forget it.

To make matters worse, the game just dropped to $20 retail, which means I now have a worthless game that's going to sit on the shelf unplayed since it's not worth getting rid of and I can't play it. It won't sell on eBay at its current value, and I'm sure I won't get more than five bucks or so for it at Gamestop. So it's just going to sit on my shelf and mock me for sucking so bad at 3D real-time games.

I still have Cross Edge and Disgaea 3, and Gyromancer and Record of Agarest War are going to be purchased one of these days when I actually start having money again, so my Playstation 3 will still see some gaming action. But it pisses me off that there have to be so many first- and third-person games. I know I'm an old-school gamer and for that there's a new Dragon Quest for me every couple years or so, but as more and more cool-looking RPGs start coming down the line I'll look at preview screens, start getting excited, and then see "real-time combat" and my heart sinks. About the only real-time combat RPGs I can actually PLAY are the Tales games.

Looking over my XBox 360 games, I already know Star Ocean and Infinite Undiscovery were wastes of money, and Fable II and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion look like they're going to be beyond me too. Even Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the pauseable real-time game, proved too difficult. I'm simply not good at games in 3D that require the same hand-eye coordination that I used to be able to handle well in 2D games.

Heck, I never even opened Final Fantasy XII, and if the combat in XIII is similar, I might not even buy it.

Thank goodness the DS still has games I can play coming out.

And for everyone out there that says "practice makes perfect," well, if I'd started practicing on these things when they first started coming down the line several years ago, I might have the patience to try to practice my way through these things now. But when I can't even get through the second battle of a game? I think I'll put it away and bust out Dragon Quest VIII or Pokémon, thanks.

Need some assistance, Pittsburgh-area peeps!

If I decide that the Pittsburgh area is where I want to end up, I'd like an idea of where I should be targeting, based on neighborhood, cost of living, how many different places I'd pay taxes to, anything else I should know about, etc.

Here is a link to all the Walmart stores in the Pittsburgh area.

Are any of you familiar with the areas near where these stores are located? I'm looking for 1-bedroom apartments in the high $500s to low $600s, no pets, with parking.

So.

I've pretty much decided that I'm just about done here in the Kansas City area. While it's been neat living near my biological sisters, I don't think I want to settle down here. My lease is up end of January, and they'll let me go month-to-month at no penalty so I can stick around through end of February to ensure I can do Naka-Kon without difficulty, but I'm thinking end of February it is time to move on.

At the moment there are four options I'm considering, ranked in order from most likely to least likely. If any of you would like to chime in with your Hot Sports Opinions, feel free to do so.

1) Atlanta area, preferably Newnan.

ADVANTAGES: Close to my mother, sister and one remaining grandparent and several high school friends that I've become reacquainted to thanks to Facebook. In an airport hub city, so continuing to do anime conventions that involve flying to other cities outside of driving distance would not be a problem. Within easy access of Knoxville and Tampa, where my other relatives live. Ability to see my beloved Braves more or less whenever I want to.

DISADVANTAGES: Tremendously long drive, would definitely take two days in a U-Haul. High income tax liability. Apartments near where I'd be working are as expensive as where I'm living now.

2) Austin area, preferably around Cedar Park.

ADVANTAGES: Close to friends I made during the six years I was there before. The store I'd want to transfer to is one I worked at before, with management that should take me back no problem. Central area to add darn near all the Texas and Oklahoma conventions back into my repertoire if they'll have me, without a heavy financial commitment on either side. No state income tax which will result in a boost in pay. Round Rock Express baseball.

DISADVANTAGES: Far from family on both biological and adoptive sides. Not near quite as many friends as in other areas, though at least now I can actually drive and visit them and not have to rely on rides everywhere like I did during my last stay there, which means I might actually get to SEE Brett and EK every once in a while.

3) Dallas area

ADVANTAGES: Close to friends. Central area to add darn near all the Texas and Oklahoma conventions back into my repertoire if they'll have me, without a heavy financial commitment on either side. No state income tax. Potential boost in pay depending on where in the Dallas area I end up. Was always happy with the variety of places to go in the city to nerd it up. Baseball whenever I want between the Rough Riders and those little red-shoed Rangers.

DISADVANTAGES: Far from family on both biological and adoptive sides. The fewest number of friends, and seeing them could prove to be difficult depending on what side of the city I'm on. Potentially either the most expensive or the most dangerous area living-wise.

4) Kansas City area, only to a less expensive apartment complex further east

ADVANTAGES: Not having to transfer from the store I'm working in now. An easy and inexpensive move. Will continue to be close to the few friends I've made here and my biological sisters. Kansas City Royals baseball (though I never went to any games this year). Cheaper cost of living, though I will probably have to buy gas a bit more often.

DISADVANTAGES: Snow, not very many friends apart from Jason and Katie and people from work (who I really shouldn't hang out with since I'm a supervisor). Still don't want to settle down in the area, so this would be a stopgap before I move somewhere else.

5) Pittsburgh area

ADVANTAGES: Close to friends, assuming I haven't alienated myself from many of them due to my blowing up over Tekkoshocon. Pittsburgh Pirates baseball. Relatively easy access to conventions in the Great Lakes and northern areas.

DISADVANTAGES: Snow, snow, and snow. Far from family on both biological and adoptive sides. Will get the crap taxed out of me. Tremendously long and difficult drive in a U-Haul dragging the Greggomobile behind. Potentially expensive cost of living depending on where I am.

...aaaaaand I have one Whammy. No surprise; this is basically what's happened every time I've put out an open call for drawings since 2004. Darn ADHD kiddos. =P (Just kidding, I love you guys.)

I guess it's time to open up the wallet.

$20 bounty for each and every completed Whammy that passes muster and is delivered unto my email inbox (jgwicker@gmail.com), payable after August 20th. Absolute deadline for any art is September 30th.

http://gregwicker.livejournal.com/159586.html for details on what I'm looking for.

Pass it on to your artist friends. I can't afford anything more than this.

Thanks, guys!

The version of Anime Press Your Luck seen at Otakon has a couple of major flaws in it that have nothing at all to do with the lack of whammies. My version has neither of these flaws.

1) There is little incentive to keep pressing your luck. The player with the highest score at the end of the game does not win everything they've amassed over the course of the game like they do in my version; they win a predetermined prize that (at least in the one game I saw to its completion) doesn't particularly make one excited to play the game. A box of trading cards for a card game nobody really plays? No thanks.

2) There's nothing really *ANIME* about it other than the questions being anime-related and a couple of whammies that have to do with video games. On the other hand, my version:

• has anime prizes you can see and win right on the board, instead of stuff like "Cancun" and "Golf Clubs,"
  
• has anime or fandom-themed whammies throughout,
  
• has a Japanese flavor in that all the spaces on the board are in yen instead of dollars,
  
• is hosted by a fairly hardcore otaku who actually understands his audience, as opposed to someone who just wants to host Press Your Luck in front of a crowd to boost his ego.

Furthermore, the dude running it is now calling himself "Anime Press Your Luck East" and credits me in the closing as an executive consultant and "Anime Press Your Luck Midwest." First off, the only things I "consulted" with him on were sending him a copy of Flash so that he could work on his own programming, and constant pounding into his head that you have to ask questions that the average Adult Swim and Kids WB-watching anime fan would probably know, so you can rack up nice spin totals when you get to the part of the game people actually want to see. So I really didn't do anything other than tell him what not to do. Second, I'm not "Anime Press Your Luck Midwest." While it's true that the majority of the conventions I've done the game at are in the midwest, I'm not confined to those boundaries and won't choose to be. I've done the show in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and eastern Virginia. I'm going to West Virginia in October. If a convention wants to invite me and bring me out to do the show, it doesn't matter where in the country (or in the world, for that matter) they are, I'll gladly come out and do whatever they'd like.

Finally, when a new rep from Tekkoshocon apparently approached them, this guy, knowing full well the history that I have with the convention and with Anime Press Your Luck there in particular, he didn't decline as a nod to his "executive consultant." That's just plain disrespectful. I don't think they'll be doing it there now anyway, but still. Come up with some other show or event to do there, but do the one I'm known for doing at the con I'm known the most for doing the show at? Plain disrespectful.

Thanks for reading.

Chances are I'm going to be drawing/scanning all of these myself, but it's time to start working on Anime Press Your Luck 3.0, and that means I need Whammies! Fanartists, get ready to scribble!

What I'm looking for:

Chibi- or parody-style fanart of anime characters drawn to resemble the little red guys you can sorta see in this picture.

The whammies are red in color, wear a yellow mask, have little horns and pointy ears, beady eyes, and wear a yellow cape. They also have a big ¥ symbol on their chest when they're not wearing any particular costume.

They do stuff like this.

Some ideas to get you going:

Afro Samurai whammy slicing through the contestant's scoreboard
Aria whammy springing a leak in their boat
Bleach - leekspin whammy
CLANNAD - Kyou whammy throwing a dictionary
Death Note - Light whammy
Dragonball Z - Goku Kame-hame-ha ing your money away
FMA - Anything
Negima - Negi using his staff to magick away your money
Evangelion - Shinji "running away" with your money
Naruto - Any of the ninja doing their hand jive
Pokemon - Ash whammy throwing a pokeball, Big Ugly Thing pops out and eats him
Sailor Moon - Chibi-Usa whammy cries away all your money
Strike Witches - Whammy flies over and divebombs your score
Katamari Whammy - Whammy rolls big katamari ball over your scoreboard, wiping out your score

Any other ideas you can come up with; these are the result of fifteen minutes' worth of brainstorming.

What it entails:

Three to four frames' worth of drawings. For example, the Light whammy would be sitting at a desk, scribbling away in his death note (I'd then zoom to a close-up of the note, where he's writing "YOUR MONEY.").

I will most likely wind up drawing these guys (badly) myself, since I can't offer any sort of compensation other than heartfelt thanks and hey, want to have some fun being a part of a game show? But if anyone on here would like to give it a go and wind up in the credits of any and all Youtube videos made from the footage we shoot from APYL here on out, give it a go!

Con's in early October, and would like to have the program completely wrapped up by end of September. Whammies will be the last thing to go in.

Pencil-sketches and rough stuff is fine...I'll be scanning them into Flash and drawing over them to make the actual animation. Badly-drawn is fine, too, so long as the character is recognizable!

Fire away if any of you would like to give it a try, and thanks for checking the post out!

ZOMG CLANNAD Kyou arc OAV was full of DELICIOUS KYOU.

So now that K-On is over I find myself torn between well...all of the girls. Each one has their own little bit of awesome that makes me moe for them. It's odd; this is probably the first show where there wasn't one main character who I shrugged off.

If I were to rank them:

1) Mugi (I like rich girls who play down the whole being rich thing and who just want to be normal, while still maintaing a certain naiveté. cough elisel cough, this character is definitely how I'd picture you if you were 16 and Japanese.)
2) Azu-nyan (Twin tail tsundere! topleka must cosplay!)
3) Yui (Ultimate cheerful idiot!)
4) Mio (Her shyness got a little tiresome towards the end as she was overtaken by Azu-nyan)
5) Ritsu (Last but certainly not least, especially in the last episode!)

Honorable mention: Ui and Sawa-chan-sensei!

There were just so many appealing characters in this show. Way to go, guys. I still only gave the show an eight out of ten, though. I'll still be rewatching this like a mofo.

Meanwhile, the fourth OAV of Higurashi came out, ending an interesting arc with WALL OF TEXT. After watching it, about the only response I could come up with was: "Indeed." All that's left is the Daybreak OVA, and then that's it for these characters. Meanwhile, gearing up ever so much for Umineko. Can't wait to actually be able to babble insanely about it with narugami and other fans. (Keep them spoiler tags up, please!)

Also looking forward to the next cours of Saki and Cross Game. Now that I understand a hell of a lot more about mahjong, Saki is equal parts moe and sports for me, something Shion no Ou never quite accomplished because I just never got interested in shogi. I loved that show to death, though. And Cross Game? Can't say enough good things about it. It's fairly predictable how it'll end up, but if there are going to be more episodes like the most recent one, I'm totally going to enjoy the ride. Baseball + tsundere = ultimate win.

I kind of lost interest in the other shows I'd been following (except Higashi no Eden, which I completed and liked, despite not having much to say about it). I've been dividing equal time between my XBox and anime, and XBox has won over watching more Hatsukoi, Basquash! or Shangri-La.

I fixed the issue. Would you believe it's because I didn't have QuickTime installed on this machine? Found an online resource that explained what caused the error message I was getting, I hopped over to Apple, grabbed QuickTime, reinstalled Flash, and boom diggity, we are back in business, BABY.

Adobe Flash CS4 crashes every time I try to import sound effects. So we won't be programming anything, or working on game shows any more. I have no patience for computers when it's the fault of the software and not my programming. So there you go. No game shows for you.

Been a while since I updated here.

The sixth anniversary of ASK-C, the local anime club that's not affiliated with any kind of school and whose membership is mostly people around my age or older, was a lot of fun. It was nice to nerd it up with people outside of a convention situation. Of course, I did get to show a bunch of my old game show stuff, and the people there loved it. They're trying to rope me into Naka-con. I went ahead and downloaded Flash again and am looking at it as a "wait-and-see" kind of situation. Naka-con already has an established game show staff and I certainly wouldn't want to step on any toes there, plus I still don't know whether or not I really want to jump into a convention where there will be so damn many kiddos running around.

If I do go to cons again, it'll be small ones. The big ones have all sold their souls to the musical guests, and I just can't compete with that. I was most successful with conventions with a smaller audience, and that'll be where I decide to go if I decide to go anywhere at all.

The following was cut-and-pasted from Facebook:

On Thursday I began laying the foundation for a new Flash program that'll be the game board for Anime All-Star Blitz, the first game I'm working on for a potential comeback to the anime convention scene in 2010. Not much work so far, but it's the first programming I've done in about two years, so it's a start.

I'm basically trying to fill every possible niche for guest games. I can do Squares if a con is rambunctious enough to have nine guests in the same place at the same time, but more realistically I have Battlestars for 6 guests, and now All-Star Blitz for 4 guests. I have a feeling if I come back and do smaller cons, 4 guests is a good target to have for shows involving guests.

I'd like to have ten shows more or less ready to roll and a bank of questions set by the beginning of the year, but I think that's rather ambitious. I also think Press Your Luck needs a Whammy overhaul. Maybe I'll be luckier finding people willing to draw Whammies than I was after the original 10 were commissioned.

The rotation I'd like to see? All-Star Blitz, Battlestars, Password, Match Game, Tic Tac Dough, Joker's Wild, Blockbusters, Press Your Luck, Now You See It, Chain Reaction, Pyramid, Jeopardy! Okay, that's twelve shows. I'm a lying liar that lies.

*****

Anyway, would I do Tekkoshocon again? Probably not. It's gotten big enough to where my style of programming really doesn't fit anymore as a guest, and as a panelist or staffer I can't afford the cost of bringing myself in and putting myself up. If I were to ever come back, it would be strictly as an attendee, and even then I probably would stick to something more local if I got the urge to go to a con. Now that I have a car there are several possibilities for cons I can drive to, from Texas to Iowa realistically.

Work continues to be stressful due to lack of staffing, and W*M is finally starting to feel the sting of the economic downturn. We're having to cut hours across the board for at least the next two months since at the moment we're going up against the numbers from last year before the new store opened fifteen minutes away. The fifteen to twenty bucks a paycheck that's going to cost me will hurt a little, so I'm definitely grateful that I'm having a great time lately on CardShark. Had my second-best week ever last week (and I've been a member there for almost six years). That plus the bonus we just got from work will be put straight into savings and paying the credit card back down. I did splurge a little bit, though...picked up another external hard drive, a webcam, and the sound recording software I use to get the sound bites for my game show software. If I can ever manage to clean up my apartment I might try a video blog or two. Maybe.

I am still hopelessly addicted to Pokemon. I am playing three games right now, and they're ALL POKEMON: Platinum, Sapphire and Colosseum. At least I'm finally putting sorakirei's Gamecube to work. The batteries I picked up for my Wavebird controller are still good...man, I love Nintendo.

So for those of you who are on the other networks, you can find me by my LJ name on Facebook and @DasGreggo on Twitter. I update those far more often than the old LJ at this point, unless I have a particularly large brain dump to leave to the masses.

Enjoy your weekend.