Indecision

Posted by Bob on May 6, 2005: And here now the comic. Couple art things about this one. First of all, I dunno why I drew the character to look like Steve's dad. Not his real dad, because he does not look like that if I recall correctly, but comic Steve's dad. I mean really, he looks like an old Steve. I should have saved that design. Ah well. And the other thing was that the second to last panel is very much influenced by Frank Miller. I was reading "The Hard Goodbye" when I drew this, and it just seemed to make sense to make an homage to it. The only thing about it that disturbs me is that I took a simple lighthearted comic and turned it into Colossus murdering a guy.

It's kind of funny; You can easily pick out a Bob comic 'cause chances are someone gets beaten in it. You can always tell when it's a Steve comic if A) Colossus has a speaking part, and B) Someone ends up electrocuted and on the floor. Kinda funny that Steve's comic is a sentinent ticket machine that hardly ever sells tickets.

You know, has Colossus ever sold a ticket besides this one? Man, he really sucks at his job.

In other news, I registered us with the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards. So make sure you check out the site and register yourself, if you've got a comic! Then make sure to nominate us for something! Steve and I would appreciate it very much.

Oh yeah, since I really don't update my art site anymore, (my hatred of HTML crap,) I'd like to point you to my recently updated Deviant Art page. I try to update that once a week, but sometimes I don't and then I deluge it with 14 different things at once, which was the case with the latest update. Anyway, If you're interested in seeing some more of my non Think Tank stuff, that'd be the place to look.

I don't really have many links this week, so I'll get right to it. First off, here's a video of an underground nuclear bomb test. It's crazy. Almost like looking at an earthquake where things go back to normal afterward.

So, if you've been reading us for a while, you probably have seen this before, cause I'm sure Steve or I have linked to it at least once. Kinda funny how Nintendo's commercials have changed over the years. But now, I'm seeing commercials for the phenomenal looking Donkey Konga 2, (And if you haven't played Donkey Konga 1, shame on you!) and the commercial stars Good Charlotte. So, I have to wonder if we've really improved in Nintendo's commercials at all.

This is the second baseball video I've posted. Strange but true.

This is just scary. If I saw this, I'd probably just shit out my intestines in fear. That's just crazy stuff.

I've been reading the book "Live From New York," which, as you would expect, is about how Saturday Night Live came to be. It talks about how Lorne got the idea, and how they gathered the talent and such. It's not told as a story starting at point A and ending at point Z. it's told through interviews with almost everyone that worked on the show, and it's really pretty interesting. I think the best line so far was Dick Ebersol telling someone to "Shut the fuck up and sit in the corner!" I like that line, it'll probably end up in a comic I write someday.

All right gang, that's all I've got in me tonight. I've gotta get crackin' on next week's comic; it's gonna be a big one.

Posted by Steve on May 6, 2005: We've got the comic thing going on here. To be honest, the script doesn't necessarily say the guy dies, so I suppose he could have survived. Actually, it never occured to me that he wouldn't live until Bob brought it up. So, you know, either way.

I continue my brave adventure into the PC world. This time with a game purchase(!) I picked up the PC version of Psychonauts, mainly because I'm cheap and it's 20 bucks less than the Xbox version. Basically, you use psychic powers and play out levels in people's minds. It's a neat concept, which is what first got my attention. So far it's pretty cool. It's my kind of game; a platformer with a good sense of humor. At first it might seem like an overwhelming collect-a-thon, but it's really not that bad. It's not that there's millions of things to collect, it's that there's a few things to collect but they tell you about all of them right off the bat. Really it all seems to add up to the same thing, raising your rank, which earns you new powers.

Oh, and the level and character designs look like something out of a Nightmare Before Christmas, which is always good.

Truth be told, I've always been leery of PC games in general. The whole idea of a game being released with known bugs, then corrected with a patch, never sat well with me. I always thought that developing for a non patchable console forced developers to get it right the first time. Lately however, I've been rethinking my stance on this. That's mainly because more and more console games seem to be coming out, bugs or no bugs. Sports games seem to be the best example of this. Pick any well known sports game, and chances are it shipped with at least one nasty bug in it. Some ship with so many bugs that they're just about unplayable. So, if the game's going to have bugs anyway, and the developer can use the time between the game going gold and actually hitting shelves to patch things up, I guess that's the way to go. Sure, I'd like to see games ship with zero bugs, but I think those days might be over. In fact, I'm not sure those days ever existed. Ever play an old NES game and have the thing suddenly start running in slow motion? That's not done on purpose.

So anyway, I continue exploring this curious new world of PC games. The only trouble is that it's like getting a whole new console, I don't have a fucking clue what game is what. I was gonna try out an rpg, but since I don't even follow rpg's on consoles, I'm hopelessly out of my league on the PC side. I was gonna check out Baldur's Gate, but I hear it comes with an instruction book that doubles as a phone book, and a difficulty that ranks somewhere between "smash your keyboard" and "chuck your monitor out the window." Besides, that's that party management thing, which I'm not really big on. I'd much rather a single player, single character type game. Something like the style of Fable or Ultima 9, minus all the stuff that made Ultima 9 horrible. Which I guess would be closer to an action/adventure game than an RPG, but you get the idea. Any suggestions?

Anyway, I think that's it for now. See you next week.