Euphoric Blog

Designing favicons is harder than you would think. A favicon gives you only a 16px X 16px square to work with, and it can be quite difficult to fit any sort of design into that small of a space. I totally sympathize with the guys at Google and their pretentious new lowercase Web 2.0 “G” logo. They’ve gotten a lot of negative criticism on the new logo, but think how hard it was to come up with that. The letter G is their only identifying symbol, and they’d already gone through so many iterations of it, and by making it lowercase they hoped to project an image of being less corporate. Not to mention the fact that its infinity symbol appearance symbolizes the huge amount of data their site helps to organize!

I got lucky with my hippo icon. I just used an online site to convert it to an .ico and amazingly, the vector graphic is still legible even at that small a size.

The Cinematic Titanic logo was much more difficult. The show’s logo has the silhouettes of five people and the time tube in it around the show’s title. That is waaay too much information to fit into 16px square. Just the scaffolding gets blurry and distorted beyond recognition at that size.

I tried a lot of variations on the letters CT, and on just Joel Hodgson’s head in silhouette. But just the letters were too simple to be a logo, especially since the show logo’s font is just a plain sans serif. And just Joel’s head looks like a dot, which is boring. And just the time tube looks like a hamster dropping. Sigh.

Several other people submitted designs too. They all had something good going for them, but none was quite right. Just letters are boring, but there aren’t any good singular icons to represent the show and its shadowrama style and movie content.

Time was running short, so I tried just one more time to incorporate everyone’s opinions into one logo design. And apparently 8th time’s the charm! My final logo submission was the one chosen to represent the Cinematic Titanic website in people’s bookmark lists and browser tabs. I am very proud of this tiny pixel graphic! The logo looks like this: and is viewable as a favicon at the Cinematic Titanic website.

More and more recently, I’ve noticed how much I like a movie depends on where it is set. I think this is because I’ve been watching so many bad movies lately, and if the actors don’t do or say enough to make the movie interesting through the dialogue… Well, I need *SOMETHING* pretty to look at while I’m killing time til the next plot point. For this reason, I have to watch movies like “Iron Man” in the theater. Desert scenes are boring to look at unless they are huge and you can feel almost like you are there. (Except for that pesky theater air conditioning that works against the illusion… Hey, somebody should built an interactive theater where the climate changes to match what is on the screen! You’d have to wear a parka to watch The Day After Tomorrow.)

So, let’s test this theory against the movies I watched this week.

I Am Legend — I hate this movie. It wasn’t just a “meh” like I thought it would be; it actually made me angry. I don’t usually get angry at movies. Usually, I can laugh off their failure to suspend my disbelief. But this one’s violent and ugly, and the “Dark Seekers” aren’t supposed to be 28 Days Later zombies at all! We still haven’t had a good movie with a post-Apocalyptic world full of vampires, though Omega Man came fairly close for me and at least had the right atmosphere. As far as setting goes… maybe I’ll like it better if I can make myself watch it again. I’m told there were some interesting mise en scene details in the abandoned apartments Will Smith is checking, like an apartment that was abandoned just before Christmas by a family expecting a baby. But otherwise, Manhatten just isn’t much fun to look at. How come all the CG animals disappeared after the first ten minutes? And even RiffTrax didn’t salvage my enjoyment of the movie after we meet the Brazilian lady of magical faith. Blech.

The Wicker Man — Here’s a movie whose *only* saving grace is its setting. Some folks on the RiffTrax forum were laughing that there is an HD-DVD version of this one, but I can totally understand why someone would buy this in high-def. It was set in the forests of Puget Sound in Washington, which is in my opinion the most beautiful part of the United States. I got nostalgic during the scene where Nicolas Cage is on the ferry boat. I had a nice New Year in Seattle with my boyfriend last year or so, and I would love to live somewhere where you have to take a ferry fairly often to get around. There was also some decent art direction on this movie, with its weird field of beehives with honeycomb walking paths, pickled babies and God only knows what else in Sister Summersisle’s house, and the old-fashioned bicycle Nicolas Cage bikes around on. And I can only imagine the swarm of HD bees stinging the heck out of Nicolas Cage’s giant puppy dog action hero face. Again, when the movie sucks, just look at the beautiful deciduous rainforest in the background and ignore the screams of “Not the bees!” and the smacks of Nick Cage hitting women for your entertainment. For interesting dialogue, just add RiffTrax and you find that this is actually a comedy disguised as a bloodless horror movie. If you have a good HD entertainment center, the setting plus the RiffTrax commentary make this stinkburger worth the price of admission. Especially if you bought a used copy on Amazon for $0.01.

Glitter — Well, aside from this being a terrible Mariah Carey vehicle of epic fail, it’s set in urban New York again. Two interesting apartment sets plus a lot of boring grey. Without RiffTrax, it’s a total honk-shoo. Awesome job by the way, Mary Jo Pehl! This plus X Files won me over so I now like both CinTan *and* RiffTrax.

X-Files: Fight the Future — Yup, another movie saved by the scenery. Two hours is too long for a TV episode, even if it is the season finale. When I saw this one in the theater in 1999, my brain kinda glazed over until they left dusty Texas behind. And it wasn’t til I listened to the RiffTrax commentary that I could pay enough attention to follow the early scenes. (More kudos to MJ for making this fun and also making me realize the movie is much more mockable than I thought when I first saw it and bought the action figures. ) This one only had my full attention when it got to the part with the bees and all the running through cornfields. And Antarctica. Hmm. Desert = boring, but ice = interesting, especially with all the special vehicles they had for moving through the snow, until Mulder reaches the pretty emerald green alien host containers. In the desert all you get are jeeps and camels.

Signs — Another one that kinda made me mad, but at least it succeded at being scary. I had to check the dark, empty bedroom next door to mine for aliens before I went to sleep last night. And here’s some more evidence that cornfields work for chase scenes. The thought that aliens were hiding in the corn was enough of a distraction that I forgot how much I hate Mel Gibson for a few minutes. I hope the RiffTrax team tackles this one someday.

But that’s enough RiffTrax/mainstream studio movie talk. There are also the two released episodes of Cinematic Titanic, of which I finally watched Doomsday Machine today.

Out of the two episodes I’ve seen so far, my favorite is still The Oozing Skull, due to the boring metal or space matte painting scenery in Doomsday Machine. The jokes were good in both, but Doomsday Machine drags more as the original movie and even with the riffing the last half hour was a chore to get through and I found myself thinking thoughts such as, “Huh. At least they *tried* to make the inside of the rocket more interesting. Note to self: if I make a space movie, add lots of multicolor lights to the budget to break up the greyness of metal walls painted in Air Force base colors. With good dialogue and an actual plot, this could work! Too bad *this* movie had neither of those things…” The different plastic spaceships were interesting, but they went by too fast for me to appreciate them. And on my second viewing I’m going to look harder for the fingerprints on the clay planet models.

In contrast to the boring scenery in Doomsday Machine, The Oozing Skull had a lot of interesting visuals, and the set changed often enough, and there was even a chase scene albeit a really boring one. Even though the building in Khalid was a postcard, it was at least as pretty as a postcard. And there was a field, a laboratory with brightly colored fluids in test tubes, some woods, and a dungeon with an interesting set of stone steps. So, outside of the riffing, which is too close to call, The Oozing Skull is still my favorite CinTan episode. Because of the movie’s background scenery.

WOOT! It turns out you can run the Spore demo in Tiger after all! It involves a slight bit of file trickery. Thank goodness I subscribe to so many RSS feeds and occasionally I even check them. This makes me sooooo happy!

I’ll post some creatures here when I make them.

Edit: So apparently, it’s not the operating system that matters, but the graphics card. So you can run the demo on a desktop Tiger Mac, but not on a Macbook. Sigh. I’ll just have to wait til I get home to my parents house and can try the PC version of the demo.

it brought me much joy today when I mentioned to an online friend that I was watching Glitter and he had no idea that that was a movie. Sometimes the short cultural memory and short attention span of my generation is a good thing.

For the record, I am not brave/stupid enough to watch Glitter in the raw. I paid $2.99 for a RiffTrax mp3 to make it watchable and soothe my morbid curiosity. But I need to stop there so I don’t become addicted to the microtransactions. This is pushing the Movie button in the same way that visiting the Papa John’s website is pushing the Pizza button. But I kinda want to watch one more terrible/pretentious movie that I would never ever pay to see in a theater. Like maybe Saw. Hated Saw. Took pictures of Japanese classmates being scared/depressed/bored by Saw. Or the Wickerman. Avoided that one like the plague when it came out, but that’s exactly the sort of movie that makes for a great RiffTrax.

I also watched X Files: Fight the Future, which was waaay more mockable than I remembered from the past decade when I saw it in the theater and bought the action figures. It was still a complex plot, but now I realize that it was complex in a boring and stupid way as opposed to a clever and insightful way. As a two-hour season finale for the TV show, it works ok, but it could never stand on its own as a movie. And it *is* easier to call both agents “Mulder.” And they *do* mumble a lot so it’s hard to make out their lines. And there are a lot of cheap deaths. Especially the bomb scene in the beginning.

I am already realizing the benefits of being both a Cinematic Titanic fan and a RiffTrax fan. Cinematic Titanic is more creative, and still funnier in my opinion. They make references to older things, which makes it the homeschool equivalent to film school for me. I always try to look up the jokes I didn’t initially get, and I usually learn a new bit of pop culture trivia in the process. RiffTrax, on the other hand, is a bandage for box office shlock. It makes terrible movies like Glitter less of a waste of time, and it puts huge successes like Jurassic Park in perspective. Though I am less likely to watch the ones for the movies I liked when they were originally released. You *can* make fun of good movies too, but it’s really not my style. Additionally, RiffTrax could potentially make things better when one of your friends wants to put on a movie you really don’t want to watch. You could listen to the RiffTrax together or just you could put on a headset to hear the mp3 so no one’s good taste has to be compromised and both people can have a good time.

And on the blogs, the writers in both camps are talking to the fans occasionally. The RiffTrax team is inviting the Titans to collaborate too. So of course all the fans are hoping for a Joel vs Mike riff off.

It’s a good time to be a MSTie.

So first, the bad news.  While spending the night at our apartment last night, my roommate’s sister’s boyfriend’s car was stolen.  (I’m glad for once that my car is a broken-down piece of crap that I can safely leave the keys in without fear of theft as it’s filled with junk that is only important to me, and it is surrounded by nicer cars with new paint jobs. )  Luckily, most of their belongings and expensive electronics had been carried in to the apartment, but still most of the sister’s clothes were out in the car.

The good news is, the police caught the thief within a day of the car being taken.  He was heading toward Louisville, a little less than an hour away from here, when he ran out of gas.  He was being loaned gas money and assisted by a local minister when the state trooper noticed him and confirmed that his story didn’t check out.  His own sister refused to vouch for him and told the police he had stolen cars before.

The punchline is, the thief left a couple of PlayStation games in the car… including Grand Theft Auto.

Here’s the story.
And the hil-AR-ious Amazon customer reviews.
So the facts as I understand them are:

*Majestic Studios is a three person team and it took them nearly a decade to release a slideshow adventure game.  Like, one of the easiest genres of games to create.  Mostly writing and art, very little programming.
*They didn’t create any original art for this game, and barely Photoshopped the assets they stole from successful games such as Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Unreal Tournament.
*They got all this blatant plagiarism past a publisher and actually got the thing released commercially.

The game’s story reminds me of a cross between Myst and maybe King’s Quest(?) but I’ll withhold judgment on that since it doesn’t seem like anyone is complaining about the story.

What I can’t believe is how long it took for them to get to this point.  I haven’t actually done it yet, but I don’t think it should take so long to get an adventure game out there, especially if all you do is write the story. If you’re not making your own art, then creating a slideshow adventure game should be pretty similar to writing a novel.  And once they were actually looking to produce the thing commercially, how did they think they could avoid hiring an artist to create original art for them? In what world is it ok to release screenshots as though they were original IP?

Though, as a game enthusiast and wannabe developer, I take comfort in the fact that stuff this horrible actually gets released somehow.  This should mean that games of genuine quality from newcomers have a chance of being picked up by a publisher.

When I myself have produced such an original game, recalling this story will give me the confidence to start shopping it around, secure in the knowledge that at least I’m NOT the guys at Majestic.

Ratzen-fratzen EA… Apparently I have to upgrade to Leopard if I want to use the Spore Creature Creator. But I don’t want to upgrade because I have read articles saying that it is a bad idea to do so if you only have one working machine and you use Adobe software. (That’s me!) So, if I want to try it I’ll have to make a new partition and do a clean Leopard install. Or fix my Windows box. Which I should do anyway. Sigh. Or I could just wait for the DS version of Spore, which is probably the one I will actually buy anyway because I like the idea of it being portable. I play online with my DS more than I do with computer games, actually.

Cuz I am one. I’ve been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since the Comedy Central days, and it’s the only TV show I’ve ever been fanatical about. I mean, sure, Doctor Who is great too and I wouldn’t miss an episode. But I’m not nearly as tempted to do Doctor Who fan art, even though it lends itself to fan art more than MST3K does. MST3K is the only show I can watch each episode more than five times over and still learn something new each time.

Anyway, the show’s creator, Joel Hodgson, has a new project called Cinematic Titanic. With all of my favorite writers from the old show, he’s riffing on bad movies again and making them watchable for the rest of us.
It’s minus the robots, but otherwise it just is MST3K. It’s available on DVD at their site, or for download at EZ-Takes, and the second episode, Doomsday Machine, will be out on June 19th.

And I made this banner myself, from images in their trailer (which you can watch on the site or by searching for “cinematic titanic doomsday machine” on YouTube.

I don’t know if anyone reads this blog, but if you do, you owe it to yourself to check this out:

Jeff Gullett doesn’t think DS cartridges can hold Lucasarts adventures, and Chris Norris says the company has considered porting games to DS or Wii but he doesn’t know if they actually are. Their apparent cluelessness suggests to me that they aren’t really into adventure games.

Maybe Jeff was thinking of Grim Fandango. Admittedly, the games from the mid 90s are larger and might not fit on a DS cart. Those could be ported to the Wii, where the remote is a decent replacement for a mouse.

But the older games such as Maniac Mansion or Loom are tiny DOS games. They would easily fit on a DS cart and could be released as bundles like they were in multi-CD packages in the mid 90s. And with the popularity of Phoenix Wright, releasing more adventure games for the DS seems like a no-brainer.

Maybe they don’t think the SCUMM engine games would sell because they have historically had a niche audience. And that niche audience is already playing them on DS and Gamecube anyway, as the homebrew community already ported the SCUMM engine to both systems.

Still, I think Lucasarts is missing out on a great opportunity to expand their audience. And if they actually redid the artwork for some of the classics, and made it easier to save games, they would get sales from both new and old fans.

Please, Lucasarts, don’t forsake us! Bring back Maniac Mansion!

I agree with one of my compatriots on The Iris Network, the violence in the Grand Theft Auto series is not nearly as deplorable as its portrayal of female characters. I love getting my jollies out with a rocket launcher and dodging the cops as much as any other denizen, but my enthusiasm is somewhat dampened by the fact that I always have to be male. As if only men do drugs and shoot weapons. The women of GTA are either girlfriends or prostitutes, angels or whores, and we’re long overdue for some real women in Liberty City.

You might say, but there have never been any female drug lords. You might say that, but you would be wrong.

A female drug lord is currently Mexico’s sweetheart. Since she was arrested last September, Sandra Avila Beltran (aka La Reina del Pacifico or Queen of the Pacific) has been the subject of pop songs as well as news stories. She is the “highest profile female drug trafficker in Mexico” and the head of PR for a cartel smuggling cocaine from Columbia to Mexico. Her marriage to a Columbian drug lord was likely made to form an alliance between their businesses as much and more than their families.

This woman would be the perfect protagonist in a GTA game. In fact, I’m going to call it here and say that sometime by the 10th Grand Theft Auto title, there will be a game with a protagonist at least partially inspired by her.

If I were designing it myself, I would also throw in references to the blaxploitation movies of the 70s and to Nancy Botwin on Weeds, but the main story would be about the hispanic gangs of Liberty City. In the late 1980s, our heroine arrives in Liberty City with her husband to handle distribution of cocaine. We’ll call her Alexandriana, or Alex for short. Her husband dies early in the game, and Alex takes full control of the company.

Would my Grand Theft Auto play differently from Rockstar’s GTA? Not particularly. You would still steal cars and weapons and even helicopters and use Liberty City as a sandbox. I would also, however, throw in some diplomatic missions to form alliances between local gangs. Everyone wants to date Alex to gain control of her position in the cartel, and she can use local social events to manipulate them. But she is not a whore and never parks with anyone. Unless it is a male prostitute hired to be used and then possibly killed for cash. (Hey, those are the breaks when you’re a prostitute in Liberty City.) Social or dating missions would be short and based on talking to the right people. They would then be followed by assassination missions to take out rival gangs or show the new allies who is boss.

I think I’ll start a design doc myself. If I finish it before professional studios make it a reality, I’ll have a good writing sample that also shows I can predict trends in the game industry.