I was informed by a rather lazy family member that if we don’t post the animations to this blog they don’t know how to find them, so I might as well just post them before that person goes and breaks a nail -_^

First up is zee Impatient Chef!  Not that it is required, but if you want to go full screen with either of these two, 720 HD is available.  (Thought any higher would be over-kill XD)

Second one has a cool ending, actually.  Remember waaaay back nearly a year ago now with Developer Appreciation Week?  I did David Jaffe and the rest of the Eat Sleep Play crew as my first post?  Well, after this animation someone linked it to him on twitter and he mentioned that he wanted to post it on the official Twisted Metal blog.  How cool is that?

Working on a a sequel to it right now.  It’s pretty much set, but the wording might be a smidgin’ off so I’m chipping away at it.  Also had two more Walking Dead ani’s planned, but we might just scrap those even though the next one was gonna have Daryl in it.  Doubt we’ll have time before the season ‘starts up’ again, but we’ll see.

Anyhoo, enjoy the animations and have a good day, everyone!

With Christmas brought a lot of RL hassle, but I also netted some great gaming goodness as well.  Must have been a good boy this year ^_^  I ended up getting two doubles of PS3 games that I returned recently.  Was assuming I’d get forty bucks back from em in total as it is Gamestop, so surprised was I to hear the clerk tell me I have a balance of one-hundred twelve dollars waiting to be spent.  As the Misses got me Twisted Metal way back for muh’ b-day, that was prime gamin’ real estate.  Got a hefty pile as prices are low, but one of the games I did get with some trepidation was Mass Effect 2.  Turns out the demo for it was ungodly bad, but the game is pretty solid.  Still some goofy bugs now and then, the audio is especially off during cut scenes, but quite a solid game for 20 bucks brand new I’d say.

As for the other time sink, zee animation.  We made two more since the pig, and we are tryin’ to do one a week.  As the Walking Dead did little to please us this season and I think cartoon characters might deliver the point better than text dripping with venom, we opted to do a few Walking Dead jabs which you can watch at your perusal below.

Part 1

Part 2

I already have the script and audio up to part six or so (depends where I cut the scenes and how long they run) but I’m taking a break from zombie tongue-in-cheek and doing something else.  Given my current gaming selection, odds of it being about Mass Effect 2 are quite high hee hee

Just wanted to touch back down with yall.  Hope the videos explain and entertain the radio silence.  To all you still reading this post, have a wonderful week and if I don’t post until then, a wonderful weekend as well!

Rather, it came from somewhere *very* high up.  It was reportedly made from an “alloy unknown to man” that appears to be a sphere that was welded together from two identical pieces.

This leads to only one possible conclusion.

Thank you for your loyalty, support, and participation in the GamePro.com community.  At noon on December 5, 2011, the U.S. version of GamePro online will shut down as an independent site.  GamePro will become part of PCWorld.com (http://www.pcworld.com/gamepro) offering gaming news, reviews, and how-tos from the PCWorld team. Thank you to the entire GamePro staff for their hard work and dedication.

-GamePro

I’m not going to ebb on and on about how it was better ‘in the day’ or even harp about the internet killing the magazine star or anything like that.  I will say I remember a lot of the ’cast’ of characters in there and that I could pretty easily find an old copy of one of their mags in some drawer I haven’t opened in years.  Egoraptor even included one of their characters in an animation about Ninja Gaiden, which is where I’ll end this post.

Kudos to Jeb and the rest at Mojang.  He had a lot of good ideas already, and based on a few tweets in the past, I was slightly more in favor of Jeb’s than Notch’s when it came to things like Jumping. Notch wanted it to be you only jump once per pressing of the Spacebar, while Jeb wanted it to stay the same.  At least I think that was Jeb’s take… it’s been a few weeks since and it’s a wee bit hazy.  Either way, he was in charge of structures and all that, and I think those are awesome so again I say congratulations to Jeb and enjoy your mini-vacation Notch!

If you don’t have the patch already thanks to the Background Downloader, fire that baby up.  Looking For Raid is live, so think Looking for Dungeon/Group only a lot bigger.  You’ll get an actual shot at loot and seeing end game content without requiring a guild (finally!)  It’s a bit of a godsend for those stuck on smaller or really uneven population realms.

There is also the Void Storage which will help all ye’ packrats hold even more items.  Better still, you can Transmogrify any item you can normally wear for your class, which takes the item you like and makes your current gear slot look identically like that very item.  Somewhat of a vicious cycle for all the aforementioned packrats ^_^  Already have a bud with a completely full Void Storage and the patch has only been live for like an hour!

It costs 100 gold to unlock the storage and 25 gold to store each item, in case any of your were wondering what the final gold costs were for using the Void Storage.  I didn’t PTR at all so I’m glad to hear it is rather low overall.

I’mma hop on and take a look-see.  Have a great day, everyone!

-Edit-

Completely forgot that Tyrael’s Charger is now live as well!  So go and get your Diablo 3 tentacle angel love a flowin’ outside the AH or bank.

And that sounded a lot dirtier than intended.

Minecraft News

As Notch has praised the awesome that is Quake 3 in the past via his tweets, it comes as no surprise that the man is a fan of shooters.  Team Fortress 2 popped up a few times recently and I even posted the video of his match with Valve and other internet celebs a few weeks ago.  Since then, Valve suddenly gave Notch his very own hat to use in-game!

Basically it is a cardboard box decorated with colored bits of cardboard boxes.  With a hat.  It looks clunky, angry, and awesome, but also makes me warp back to Aqua Teen’s Boxxy Brown:

There’s a minor bit of language in there a minute or so in, so a slight NSFW warning.

To further emphasize the importance of the hat, they gave it possibly the longest detail text of any item in Team Fortress 2:

Welcome to a secret society so exclusive it makes the Illuminati look like a Costco. How exclusive? You are the only member. This is the only item of its kind in all of existence. So don’t craft it, Miney

Tongue-in-cheek with the ‘don’t craft it, Miney’ of course relating to Minecraft, but also because you *can* craft in TF2.  Just… when you do, the item breaks into bare components.  And I don’t think cardboard is really a major aspect to more than a handful of items.

“Fair Enough”

Oy, this one is a doozy and a half.  Short version of it is, allegedly, Notch got wasted during the after-party of Minecon and started trashing Yogscast quite badly.  Which lead to Yog’s site getting DDOS’d several days making their website inaccessible and… yeah.  Bad stuffs.

Yogscast ended up posting a detailed play-by-play here, stating they not only had to pay for their own airfare but that Notch sold the video rights to IGN without their consent.  Their podcast of the event was going to be property of IGN.  And they weren’t going to be paid for attending, either.  Shortly after Notch tweeted a picture of a brand new watch he got for $5,000.  Bad timing?  Bad taste? Eh, just plain ol’ bad I say.

After that long post by Yog that they had to post on reddit because their site was more or less taken down by the DDOS attack, Notch responded with only “Fair enough.”  Those two words exploded the comment section, possibly converting any that were still on Notch’s side by his cryptic and nearly shrugging statement.  Yog put in a lot of time and effort that went unrewarded minus meeting many fans, who quickly turned against them by the ranting of Notch. That very ranting hurt the Yog’s crew pretty deeply.  After making their statement available, Notch merely dismissed it with “Fair enough.” and that was that.

Stranger still is that just hours prior they held a pretty lengthy interview where the three were carrying on like long-time friends.

Strange indeed.  Hope this gets worked out soon, as Notch is pretty much getting some nasty PR beatings while his game is getting glowing reviews.

I heard a tad about this here and there, but would not have really known much about this bit if it were not for bud of the blog, Banhammer’s post. Give ‘em a look-see!

Hope your week goes a bit smoother than Notch’s, everyone!  Happy crafting, and see you never Minecraft Monday!

You may very well recall our precious Nyan Pig/Cat parody that we posted months back. It is a cross stitch pattern that we posted up on etsy. This eventually lead to a bit of a partnership, and in the end, we done got an animation completed for it! Posted it juts a few minutes ago up on youtube. Check it out, but before getting too comfy, I suggest grabbing a pair of CSI-style sunglasses to keep your liquified eyes in their sockets because your mind is about to be blown.

Happy Turkey Day, all!  Have a good one, and eat lots!  May we recommend bacon? XD

Minecraft 1.0 is out. No longer beta. Thank you, everyone. =D

-Notch

So break out that Minecraft client, dust off any of those cobwebs it might have sprung.  It’s a-live!  Igor, it’s A-LIVE!!

For example, here is the video that quickly earned their place in my heart many years ago.  Normally, Mesh plays with Mack right at his side.  This time he must have lost a bet, as he played the game completely in the dark and alone!  He screams bloody mary during the day and with a friend, so this was quite a sight.

Time passed, they disappeared.

Sad face  

But they came back!  Last year they even started a mini-series on Minecraft that quickly became their longest running series yet.  I’ll do a post about that next week for Minecraft Monday.  It’s good stuff, ya’ll love it XD

Too often do big companies completely forget the bottom line, the sole driving force that got them that comfy chair and massive empire of sales: The Consumer.  They have more often than not just set a deadline, tacked on a higher number at the end of the title, and forced games out of the developer’s doors and Mack and Mesh had enough of it.  Thus lead to Indie Month which lasted all of October.  During which they even had little bonuses for the fans in that you could win one of the games they played for the Indie celebration by sending them an email and answering one of their questions at the end of the respective video.

Here is a vlog of a very suave Mesh telling the fans who just won copies of what games, but first we are presented with a lovely rant about the evils of DLC, the very thing that helped spawn the idea of Indie Month in the first place. Here’s a link to a particularly good part, but be mindful of the surroundings when you hit play.  Previous video was bleeped, this one is not.  (The part linked to directly is safe, but just a heads up if you watch it ’till the end at work, etc.)

The question was, if Mesh gave a black berry (the fruit, not the smart phone) to a developer, would they make a DLC out of it?

In case you missed it in his accent or deep, ivory eyes, we won a copy!  Specifically, I won a copy for the Misses.  She doesn’t even know I entered, and she loves tower defense games and mods, so she’ll love this.  I already played the first two levels and had a blast even on the training stuff as I unlocked a bunch of achievements that I cannot seem to erase after two attempts of uninstalling and even wiping out all traces of the game off the computer.  Those achievements will be slightly awkward to explain, but I don’t think she’ll mind too much XD

So there you have it, folks!  Mack and Mesh approved and all that!

I was going to make this the splash/banner image up top, but that meant I had to crop everything out minus his eyes to the bottom tip of his ‘stash and it got pretty darn creepy awful fast  haha  Sorry Mesh!  Maybe once it’s shaved off I’ll toss one up there.

Check out their youtube page here to see what antics and other crazy-scary games Mack got poor Mesh to play already.  If you like what you see, feel free to subscribe and let your friends know about em!  Their goal is 3,000 subscribers and they are darned close!  Let’s help get it for them!