Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Anti-Matter You're welcome.

Cool, I didn't know about that with Yokai Watch.

Nice, glad to hear you enjoy them. I haven't played the Bluey game, but I have seen the show. Honestly, really good kids show. Watched some episodes when I had Disney+ (it's on Disney in the US, not sure where else in the world it's broadcasted).

I think I saw the trailer to that awhile back when it was recommended on YouTube. Not sure if it's coming out to the US since it was a Japanese trailer I saw of that game.

@Tyranexx I was. I did get a cool shirt out of it.

Cool. Also, Typing of the Dead is the same game as House of the Dead 2, only difference is typing instead of light guns. Indeed the voice acting is campy, but that's what I like about it too. The House of the Dead series feels like a really poorly acted horror movie at times, and it's kind of the charm of it to me. Monster Bash is fun, but also hard even on easy. Had to use the included hint and cheat sheet (back in the old shareware days, Apogee actually gave you a cheat with the registered versions, the catch, the cheat wouldn't work on the shareware) to help me with the game, but it's a good DOS platformer. Glad you had fun with Vampire Survivors and hope you enjoy it when you get around to picking it up. The upgrades really make the game. I had fun standing still after two garlic upgrades and having bats walk right into me, lol.

@Sunsy Yeah, sometimes I do swap a bit with games I am playing to other ones. I was playing Yo-kai Watch 2 with the intention of beating it last month but I just suddenly swapped to mobile games at the moment, but there are a couple more games I own that I need to get to later on. I don’t really keep up with newer game releases (and I actually think I never played a 2024 game at all) but I’m just waiting till there is a game that pops up that will pique my interest, but I also do limit myself with game genres a bit too much. There is one game I am considering buying, being that Perfect Dark reboot on the Xbox, but I have no idea when it’s releasing (reports said its estimated to release in 2025 or 2026, though those release years are not confirmed) and I’m a bit nervous about whether it will deliver upon release. I just need to see what other games are out there that bear similarities to the games I usually like playing. The games you plan on playing and buying seem to be fun games. I never played either of them, but I do remember seeing review headlines of them on NL and they liked them a lot. I hope you enjoy them!

Speaking of the snow, I find that where I am, it doesn’t snow a lot. The only time I recall it happening recently was about 5 years ago nearing Christmas. It snowed so much from December to mid-January (I want to say) and I remember the backyard had hills of snow and the snow covered up sidewalks and parts of the road, but I heard it caused a lot of issues on the road with driving, plus some people apparently got out of their cars to go play in the snow and it caused traffic. While I was pretty happy with how much snow showed up that one time, it caused a bit of trouble on the road.

There are so many episodes on that show that I remember so much. It has been a while since I did last watch it too, but it’s the episodes with the goofy plot lines that are the most memorable to me, like this one where they grew a corn patch inside of the garage and the garage overflew with popcorn, and one where Ginger and Hank made a cardboard fort around the garage and blocked off Tom and Ben’s workspace and refused to move, so they had no choice but to role-play to make them stop. I used to watch the show on Netflix before they took it off, but I just swapped to watching it on YouTube since it had more seasons and episodes. I never really watched the later parts of the show, but my sister did watch a few more of season 4 and 5 if I remember, but the only episode that I recall that she told me a bit about it was this episode that involved noodles or pasta or something? I can’t exactly recall the plotline of that one, but I remember I was laughing at the description because the plot for that sounded ridiculous but funny from how they used the pasta in it. It was a fun show when I watched it, a shame that it apparently never got finished.

Time Extension is pretty cool, since I am a fan of playing retro games, but I haven’t visited the site in a while. I have been way more active on NL out of all the Hookshot sites.

I really don’t like making accounts for sites that have been known to harbor constant negativity and, I would even say, hostility toward others for small things. Plus, with the changes they have been making to the block feature on there (being that blocked people can still see your posts but can’t comment or engage) sounds terrible and kind of concerning, and it pretty much misses the entire point of the block feature. And seeing how people acted on there from YouTube videos I watched, plus the people talking about the downfall of the site with its management, I want to stay away from Twitter, even if I did make an account only just to follow artists and game developers I admire and enjoy and even if I never used a Twitter account to post and comment. I do think that Instagram is one of the better sites, although I only started to use it in February of this year, and it’s actually the first social media app I actually use as a registered user rather than a guest. I have had good interactions on there, and I absolutely am loving the artwork and art accounts Instagram has recommended me, being that Instagram is more focused on pictures and imagery rather than chatting about random stuff like what Twitter is about.

It was an enjoyable Halloween. I think that normal days are fun, even if I don’t do much on them besides my hobbies and working. Sometimes, ordinary days are very enjoyable, even if something new does not happen on them.

@Anti-Matter You do digital art too? That’s very cool. I only stick to traditional art, since my digital art skills are very unpolished and I can’t get used to applying my traditional skills to a digital screen. I am hopeful I can get better at it later on though.

I do wanna check out some more of your art! I’ll look at a few of them later.

@Tyranexx I really think that the eyes on Funkos don’t work the most for characters that are supposed to look adorable or for anime characters cuz the eyes on Funkos have no eye shines or detail to them at all, and the eyes look the same on almost each Funko and there isn’t a lot of variety in the way they look on each character. I have heard of First 4 Figures and I do think some of the statues and figures they have look so high quality and nice, but I don’t think I would buy one. If I were to buy a figurine of a character I like. There were a few times I did see some high-quality figures in stores and did like the way they looked, but I am satisfied with the amiibos since they are small and could be considered statues, but I haven’t purchased any of the newer ones they released for the DLC fighters in Smash Ultimate and Splatoon 3.

Yep, although that rhythm game is a freemium game and does have some gacha mechanics in it, I think it’s a pretty solid game with the presentation, gameplay, and music, plus the best part is that you don’t have to spend any actual money on it and it’s only optional. There are a ton of good mobile games out there among some of the shovelware games that make some people think of mobile games negatively. I find that mobile games can fit in my schedule a bit more, since the ones I have are small and can be played in short sessions. With ports of classic games, the one that comes to mind for me is the classic Sonic the Hedgehog games, I played Sonic CD on the phone and really loved that, and I plan on playing the mobile ports of the other games very soon as well.

I am really wondering how it broke despite it being left untouched for maybe two years, but I am slightly unbothered over it being broken since I can just plug earphones in, though I am going to be super careful with making sure that the volume doesn’t hurt my ears a lot. I think what I could do is just put earphones in but don’t plug any of the buds in my ear, so that I can still play games on the 2DS quietly without worrying about my ears hurting from loud and harsh sounds. Still kind of stinks that the volume slider broke, but as long as the 2DS is only slightly broken and is still usable, then it’s good!

@Pastellioli
I used Corel Draw and Corel Photo-paint for my digital arts.
I used Corel Draw to create the characters and various design by using vector tool.
I used Corel Photo-paint to enhanced the digital arts after I made by Corel Draw with some bitmap effects.
I have update my profile with my Deviantart link.
My digital arts are dominated with cute Boxing characters, human and animals.

@Tyranexx Ahaha.. Yeah. Seems you made a couple typos here too. Btw, been busy?
It's not necessarily that it was a planned Tamers sequel, because it apparently did come out, in Japan, as an audio CD.
02 was...exceptionally tame after the whole Ken thing. In spite of multiple elements being brought up to be explored. I mean, at least we got Tamers, but I'd have loved if 02 had gone a little more seriously. Instead, we effectively got a team rocket duo, and, admittedly this is good, Darkwargreymon. And the whole world tour arc.
I've effectively dropped Pokemon Go. I hear too much about it from my younger bro when I'm trying to keep my mind in a good place, plus it just isn't all that playable where I live. Last two or three attempts resulted in something going wrong or breaking.
Mario and Luigi has my hype level up, but I just looked at the review, and uh... random encounters are mentioned in the bullet points? I go preorder the game later today.
Also, Ni No Kuni popped back into my thoughts again.. Though I dislike it, the WotWW battle system does have some fair depth. NNK2 is good, but after the first game filled pretty much every possible location on the map with pretty much everything it could, it's hard going into the second game, where many areas are just random chunks of land without any story. And I still wonder what the DS original was like.
@Anti-Matter Ironic that you'd praise the humanoid designs. Those are the ones Pokemon fand seem to occasionally rail on. Because bipedal.

@Mariotag
Well, I prefer bipedaled / humanoid fictional characters than the quadrupedaled animal characters.

@Anti-Matter Truly fair. I can't imagine lots of Pokemon as quadrupeds. Charizard is still my fave. Can't see him on 4 legs.

@Anti-Matter I haven’t heard of Corel before! There are a lot of art softwares and programs out there. The one I used to use the most in my digital art attempts was Ibis Paint X, which is a pretty popular free art software in Japan and America. That was a nice art software, but I sucked at using it since I used my fingers instead of a stylus and I didn’t know what tools to use to make nice artwork. I even got a drawing tablet for Christmas years ago and planned to make a lot of digital artworks, yet I never used it besides one time because I found it too hard to draw without using my fingers directly on a screen.

For my drawings, I really like drawing animals a lot and making them look colorful, but I especially love making my own renditions of video game characters. I found that a lot of Yo-kai Watch characters fit my art style well. I do want to make original characters soon to go alongside the video game characters. I just have so many ideas on what to draw next!

@Pastellioli
When I worked with my digital arts, I only used point, click and drag with my mouse, no touch pen, no touch screen.
I used Corel Draw to make vector drawing, just like making polygon lines that can be manipulated into curves, changed the outline thickness & color, the shapes can be changed with weld / trim / intersect / etc to get specific shapes, the colors can be changed as easy as clicking the mouse, etc.

I have some ideas for my hand drawing in the future that involved my fictional character David as myself with other characters from video games such as Pokemon, Yokai Watch & Nexomon, so here I will become the trainer / owner of Pokemon / Yokai Watch / Nexomon with two different creatures from their franchise.
My pick for Pokemon are Sawk and Pachirisu.
My pick for Yokai Watch are Slugger and Komasan.
My pick for Nexomon are Bedam and Weavolt.

@Sunsy Yep, I realized that Typing of the Dead was basically the same game as House of the Dead 2 since I played the arcade version of the latter at one point. The voice acting is in "so bad it's good" territory lol. I might have to try out Monster Bash in the future...on low difficulty settings. Vampire Survivors is quite fun; indeed, I enjoyed standing still and nuking enemies with garlic!

@Pastellioli Most Funko eyes look freaky and kind of soulless lol. I think I've maybe seen them work for two character designs ever...and I don't recall which ones since it has been a while. First 4 Figures does good work for sure, but they definitely charge for it too. I don't blame them since the figures are high quality, but the result is I have yet to justify buying from them. I can afford their figures with budgeting, but it comes down to the fact that I can use that money for other things. I mostly stick with amiibo, the rare plush, and the rare LEGO set if I want them badly enough.

Mobile games CAN be good, and the better ones often involve buying the game outright or can at least be adequately played without spending a cent. I'm that way with Pokemon Go and haven't spent actual money in the game after all this time. Though I admit they're making this harder with special exclusive tickets in recent years. Shorter pick up and play mobile games are pretty suitable to the odd break when I'm not at home and am out and about. I don't have much of a commute and often drive most places, so my Switch rarely leaves my house. Mobile is currently the only way I can buy and play an affordable version of Dragon Quest VI when I finally get to it since the DS version is insanely expensive.

On your volume slider: it's very possible the connection was weakened and then finally, quietly gave out while in storage. Hard to say without having someone who knows what they're doing taking a look though. But hey, at least it's still usable! Just be careful with your hearing since that's a sense you wanna preserve as much as possible. My dad has spent much of his life around loud equipment with no hearing protection, and it shows....

@Mariotag I had a fairly busy weekend, though I do moderate how much time I spend online too. Yeah, Digimon 02 sort of fell off a bit after Ken/the Digimon Emperor, though Dark Wargreymon was an interesting yet tragic figure. Actually, there are more implications I recognize with his character now that I'm older, in terms of one's purpose and existentialism. The world tour arc was pretty good too. There's still a Pokemon Go community where I live, which is saying something since the largest town in the area is 12k. We're mostly rural. The player count has dropped though, especially during the winter months. Which is understandable.

Mario & Luigi is still an eventual buy for me, but I'll have to wait awhile on the game for budget and backlog reasons lol. I can deal with random encounters as long as they aren't too intrusive, though modern games have spoiled me when it comes to enemy encounters. I know both Ni No Kuni games have their positives and negatives from what I've heard/read. I still might give the original a try someday. I'd love to try out the DS game sometime too!

Having a good day today. Ate a lot of tasty food and recently finished donating some art supplies and a bunch of markers a few days ago, and I’m feeling great! While at Dollar Tree on the weekend, I got this pack of two pens that have two differently colored pen tips on them that make 3D-esque effects when you write with them. Dollar Tree has great stationary. Excited to use them, but I think I need to put an end to my pen craze very soon. I don’t want a big pen collection where half of them go unused haha.

@Anti-Matter Ooh, Komasan! I can’t wait to see how you draw him. I actually had a work in progress Komasan drawing, but I haven’t finished it because I was kind of unhappy with how he looked. I have a few more yo-kai on my drawing list, I have wanted to draw Kyubi, and I might draw Jibanyan and some feline yo-kai more, though I have other video game characters I want to draw, and I also want to redraw some artworks I made last year.

Your digital art process sounds interesting. Because I never had a proper stylus, I sometimes would use a 2-in-1 pen that had a tip for writing and a point that could be used on the phone, though it wasn’t good quality and was very off, so I always tried to draw with just my fingers, but it requires me to zoom in close on the drawing so it would take long to make sure the lineart was accurate.

When I draw traditionally, I really like to use ballpoint pen and gel pen. What I tend to do is I usually ink a pencil sketch with a pink pen, and then erase the lines underneath when they dry, and I add shading and details with either a pink or blue pen. Then I layer and use other ballpoint pens to color the picture and have the colors overlay and blend. It’s fun, but super time consuming, so I always use markers to speed up the coloring on some parts of my drawing. I got really inspired by the way an artist used pens in their artwork, and how they used it when drawing animal characters.

@Tyranexx Yeah, if I were to buy a figure of a character I’d like, I’d make Funko my last choice. I just think the eyes don’t work for a few of the characters that have official Funko pops. I would absolutely love to own a good quality figurine of a video game character or a plush for them; I even had a plush of a video game character as my profile pic on here once. I think the way some characters look in plush form is cool and adorable, especially for characters that are animals. I don’t have a huge urge to go out and buy one, but I wouldn’t mind owning maybe one or two. There’s this grocery store that has a section with little crane game machines filled small plush toys in them, and I would maybe like to try it once for fun, but if I do get a plush from there, I’d probably give it to my sister.

I always go for mobile games that I can play in short bursts and can quickly put down, but I only play those at home rather than outside. I think there is a lot of good mobile games out there, my weekend was full of mobile games! I mostly just play ones from Sega and find those great, but I also have played some of Nintendo’s apps. I remember having Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and thinking that was a decent game, though the leaf tickets absolutely drove me insane and were kind of infuriating. Although I deleted it off my phone years ago, I like the approach they are taking with the game and keeping it playable despite shutting it down; that’s an approach most game developers don’t do when shutting down their games on phone, in fact, I can only recall one other instance of a game developer taking that approach to another game that got shut down. I also remember downloading Fire Emblem Heroes while I was playing Three Hopes on Switch a few years ago, and I also do think Heroes is a kinda decent game. I cleared the currently available chapters in it, and although the story isn’t amazing, some of the parts and twists the plot takes at times sometimes surprised me. I am looking forward to seeing how they end the current Book. If they do get to the point they shut it down, I am hoping they take a similar approach to Pocket Camp since I made a lot of progress on Heroes. I also loved Miitomo and was sad when they shut it down rather swiftly, though that was more of a social media app than an actual game.

That could be it, I think it maybe could have been from me moving the slider too much when I was using it in the past, because constantly moving buttons and control sticks around on controllers and systems can damage it over time, plus I used my 2DS a ton in the past way more than the other consoles at home, so I think that could have played a role in the slider no longer working. I have a white controller I got with my Xbox a few years ago and the sticks are kind of damaged and drift. I think that could maybe come from wear and tear, but it is also caused by debris and dust build up. I will absolutely be careful with my hearing and stuff, my day would become so terrible if I couldn’t hear at all one day.

@Pastellioli
Actually, I already have my hand drawing of myself as fictional character with Komasan and Whisper in June 2021.

Slugger, Sergeant Burly and Reuknight are my Top 3 Yokai Watch creatures.

Well today will be a dark day in the history of the US.

@Tyranexx The DS NNK is Japan only, unfortunately.
02 kinda like, brought up a bunch of interesting stuff, and a change in design, only to throw it all away.
I have a budget more limited than I'd like, and it may largely go away soon.
Limiting time is fair.
Pokemon Go kinda just bothers me now. I'm in a rural area too. Middle of the woods in fact.
Mario and Luigi Broship, I asked, and apparently the "random encounters" thing was a mistake to say?

Anyway, what's been up? What games you been playing? I've been on Castlevania Dominus Collection, as I continue to shy away from Ender Lilies, FF7R, and Bravely Default.

@Mariotag
I still have Bluey, Barbie Project Friendship & Ice Age PS5 to finish.

@Anti-Matter Ah. Can't say I'm really interested in any of those.
Possibly the biggest offenders in my backlog are a handful of anime games, notably SAO, that I got because fan of the series. Second and third biggest offenders would be the really difficult and grindy games that I'm simply not up for touching too soon. Gotta wrap up all the Hollow Knight trophies too. Only have pantheon of Hollownest and a couple sidequests left. But it's that first part that's the problem.

@Anti-Matter A lot of the yo-kai fit your style so well! You drew Komasan really well, so I can’t wait to see your next drawing of him. He is my favorite character design-wise.

Wait, Anti-Matter draws stuff? Where?

@Mariotag
I posted my hand drawing and digital arts on Deviantart.

@Anti-Matter Ahh. Nice!

Good morning.
Today is Heroes Day in our city Surabaya on 10 November 2024.