update archive

Bah. My PC is acting up. My "new" video card doesn't work with high colour modes without screwing up. >:(

New J-MP3: Rainy ai no Shirabe by Janne da Arc. I LOVE this song. I listen to it repeatedly and never get sick of it. OMG, I need a life.

Also, 2 new pieces of art, pencil sketches of Krallen and Xed, have been uploaded.

A couple of friends came over on Saturday. The highlights (for me, at least), were the fact that I would get to pla Guilty Gear X2 for the first time (yay!) and that I could play against some humans in KOF.

GGX2 was fun, even though I couldn't use the DualShock pad to save my life. My other friend had brought over his XBox and I engaged in some button mashing in Dead Or Alive 3. Again, it was fun. Much more so than a certain Tekken 4 :p

What wasn't so fun, though, was watching both my friends play Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. Which I happen to think is an extremely degrading and boring game. Watching them buying swimsuits for the onscreen characters didn't exactly help to change my opinion.

Sometimes I don't know why people can't think with their heads instead of their....you know.

One PC failure and restoration later, here I am, back again!

First things first: I've revived the J-MP3 of the week! New MP3 has been uploaded: Super Love by Sugizo. This is probably the only nice-sounding song performed by Sugizo after leaving Luna Sea (the rest sound like crap). Has a very Luna Sea-ish feel to it, very upbeat and lively.

While my PC was down, I was doing all sorts of other stuff. Like my IAQ - expect an update soon - new art (expect a big new piece up soon too), and other stuff (like my new PS2). Mainly, though, I was keeping my eyes on news from E3.

For the (unfortunately) ignorant, E3 = Electronic Entertainment Expo, an annual exhibition by game developers of their latest stuff. And there was a LOT of stuff worth looking at this year. I'll just quickly go over the highlights (for me, anyway).

• Sonic Heroes - The first multiplatform (PlayStation 2, XBox and GameCube) Sonic game, and it looks awesome. The gameplay is totally different from the Adventure series, with players controlling a team of three characters at once, making use of their unique abilities to traverse 14 different levels. The teams currently confirmed are Sonic/Tails/Knuckles, Shadow/Rouge/Omega(some new robot dude), Amy/Cream (Sonic Advance 2)/Big and get this...Espio/Charmy/Vector (all from the long-lost Knuckles Chaotix). And if that isn't enough to get any Sonic fan going, two words will: Metal Sonic.
• SNK vs. Capcom: SvC Chaos - Dodgy title aside, I've had my eye on this one for a while. It's Playmore's take on the rivalry between the two 2D fighting game titans. So far, so good. The cast is OK, but nowhere near as large as CvS2's. The current cast:
  • SNK Side: Kyo, Iori, Mai, Terry, Choi, Earthquake (Samurai Shodown 2), Ryo, Shiki (Samurai Shodown 64), Mr. Karate (Takuma, actually :p), Kasumi.
  • Capcom Side: Ryu, Ken, Chun-li, Guile, Tabasa (Warzard), Hugo, Dhalsim, M.Bison, Balrog, Gouki.
  I can't say I'm not disappointed with the roster currently...after all, where's K'? Or Leona, or Andy, or any of the new-generation characters from either side? Still, it has been said that more characters will be revealed, so cross your fingers and wait for the beta test starting on June 6th.
• Half-Life 2 - What can I say. It's the sequel to one of the most groundbreaking first-person shooters of all time, and looks to be as groundbreaking as its predecessor. Plus, it's got multiplayer out of the box (unlike a certain Doom 3). I'm sold on this one.
• PlayStation Portable - Yeah. Sony decides to battle Nintendo on its home turf. So far, the device seems promising. It has the processing power of the original PlayStation with a disc size the size of the GameCube's, and with a storage capacity of 1.8GBs. I see great things for this device in the future.

Oh, and like I mentioned...I have a PS2 now. Problem is it came with crappy games (Tekken 4, WWE Smackdown and some pirated PlayStation games). Winning Eleven 6 is good though, very good soccer game. Now if only I had a copy of Guilty Gear X2... :(

Ah well, I shall get lost now.

Looks like I'm going to have to get back to drawing. A lot.

Speaking of which - the ON comic I was working on with other artists now has its own site. There are 3 chapters up already, drawn by myself, Denieru and Bluebird. The URL is http://www.geocities.com/jsccomix/onlinecomic.html. So go and see how the story progresses! It's coming along pretty well so far. A lot of mook art for the comic is also posted on that site, including some art drawn by me :D

New art of another comic character Cyanide aka Cyan has been posted up. My first attempt at drawing a female character. It's OK, I suppose. Check it out at sketch|book. Also, new update to my IAQ Sonic the Fighters Neo.. This brings it up to version 0.2. I'll begin to add the Speed Chains from the next update onwards. This update, of course, is located at mind|werx.

In other news...I'll be heading off to UT at Austin in August. Yep, I FINALLY got accepted there, so I decided to bite.

No J-MP3 yet. I'm wondering if I should even have such a feature, seeing that no-one seems to visit my site anyway...

View update archive here.

...on the J-MP3, that is. New one is uploaded, Triptych by Siam Shade. It's an instrumental, but what a damn good one it is...you know where to get it.

I finally added more art to the sketch|book section. Three pics of characters from the Orochinagi comic have been uploaded, and they're in colour! I hope you like them. This is my first serious venture into shading on a computer.

Other than that, life drags on as usual.

Long time no update. Well, I was busy.

The response to my five pages has been positive, mostly. Thank goodness for that. I wouldn't want to have to engage in any redrawing. Now I'm back to work on my IAQs, and as a result I've made an update to the Sonic the Fighters Neo IAQ. I completed Espio's and Shadow's movelists, but there's still some way to go. I haven't added the Speed Chains yet as those will take a bit of thought.

I finally finished reading Diablo: The Kingdom of Shadow. It's a few hundred times better than The Black Road. Much more tied in to the Diablo universe, as opposed to the other one, where you could have stuck any name on it. No surprise, since the author has also written several popular Dragonlance books. Now I'm ploughing through The Lord of the Rings, and have finished the first section. A lot of material failed to make the cut for the movie, obviously, but both iterations of the story are very much worth watching.

And even more happily, I tracked down a fansub of Sonic X! :D There's plenty of action. Not too much depth, though, so fans of character-focussed anime may want to stay away. It's all good for Sonic fans and even action fans in general. Definitely a good start to the series.

Will stop blabbing now.

For that is what I became after finishing the first 5-page chapter of the Orochinagi comic. Check it out over at sketch|book.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed drawing it. And check out future installments of the comic over at the Orochinagi Forums. Click on the topic that says "Zany online comic idea" and go to the last page for the latest issue. :D

Will upload a new J-MP3 tomorrow.

Watched two more episodes of .hack//SIGN. Am I the only one who thinks that Tsukasa reminds me of Shinji (Evangelion) a lot? Not surprising, given that the character design is by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto...

I managed to get hold of the pilot episode of Sonic X! (Whee!) But no subtitles. (Boo) Anyhow, the animation is good, there is some pretty funny humour (although I didn't understand most of it). Plenty of action too, and very few of those "use zillions of lines to create the illusion of speed" things. It's certainly better than what I expected it to be. The opening song (Sonic Drive) is....OK, though I would have liked it better had they used Open Your Heart or Live and Learn. Now how about some fansubs? ^_^

Anyhow, anyone who wants to download it, go get it from Shadow of a Hedgehog. It's pretty nice.

I just finished reading Diablo: The Black Road. It's an OK take on the Diablo universe. The storyline seems a bit contrived though. Now to finish "The Kingdom of Shadow (another Diablo book), and then on to the granddaddy of them all, The Lord of the Rings, which I picked up for a cool $8 at a warehouse sale ^_^

Crap! I've got two more days to finish drawing 2 1/2 pages! And I haven't even gotten my scanner fixed yet.

Up to .hack//SIGN episode 7. Man, this anime is interesting. My brother can't understand it though. Maybe I gravitate towards stuff like this like he does towards literature. Hey, it's his loss :D

Also digging into the new TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) series now airing in the US on FOX. I like what they've done with the series - it's almost like an anime! AND THANK GOD, no more pizza jokes or surfer lingo. And Shredder is no longer a bungling evil dude. Glad to see he's getting some respect. TMNT was the first cartoon I liked, so this brings me some nostalgia too ;)

Sonic X premiered on TVTokyo yesterday. For the uninitiated, that's the new Sonic anime series. So far what I've seen of it is good, but that's static images and screencaps. Hopefully I can get hold of fansubs in a few weeks. Then again, I can't think of any people who would want to fansub it. Sonic fans are a bit scarce these days :(

Comic is progressing well, but my scanner broke down. Bah. I'll need to get it repaired tomorrow. Anyhow, here's a new J-MP3 for your listening pleasure: Yakusoku wa Iranai (No Need for Promises) by Sakamoto Maaya. This song is the Escaflowne opening theme. It's got a nice "floaty" feel to it, and fits the mood of the anime perfectly. Grab it over at the j|mania section.

Maybe I'll go draw a page or two more.

Watched a couple of episodes of .hack//SIGN. It's not bad. A bit confusing, but nowhere near as confusing as the first few episodes of X. Escaflowne now has its own section over at j|mania, so check it out.

What is this fun thing I have to do? Well, Bluebird over at Orochinagi has started his comic project. It's about a group of martial artists teaming up to fight some unknown evil. And I'm drawing the first chapter! Yay! :D

Once I'm done, the pages will be uploaded here, as well as to a site on Tripod that I'll use for storing stuff. I'll also upload my concept art of the main character, and the two characters that I'm allowed to put into the comic.

As a slight damper - I got rejections from both U.Penn and Cornell. So it looks like a three-way battle between Northwestern, UT at Austin and NUS. Actually, the decision's not that hard :p

That SARS stuff is scaring the hell out of me. I've decided to stay at home until stupid people decide to stop going to Hong Kong. Picture this:

Guy 1: Oh no! I've got high tea with Tung Chee-hwa in Hong Kong tonight! Gotta go!
Guy 2: Isn't going to Hong Kong now risky, with SARS and all?
Guy 1: What? Not go to Hong Kong? And miss out on tea? Drinking tea with Tung Chee-hwa is MUCH more important than the possibility of contracting a highly contagious disease for which there's no antidote!
Guy 2: Uhhh...right.

See my point? I don't understand why people absolutely HAVE to go to HK. Maybe they're just thickheaded. Or they work for Osama bin Laden. Anyhow I hope this episode blows over soon.

Anyhow, new J-MP3 up today, Gravity by Luna Sea. You can grab it over at j|mania. I'll be scanning those old comic pages later as well, and posting them up in the sketch|book. Enjoy.

New poll too. In this one...I ask what your favourite fighting game series is. PLEASE VOTE. I got a grand total of 3 votes in the previous poll -_-;;

I'm starting to collect pics and stuff to give Escaflowne its own page at the anime section too. Got any good ones? Contact me.

...for my .hack//SIGN episodes to finish downloading. They seem to be taking forever...-_-;;

Uploaded the review for Cowboy Bebop to the Anime reviews section under j|mania. Read it and reap.

I've stuck up two pieces of art (at last), a crappy Iori picture I drew a long time back and a picture of K' I drew for a university application. The rest will remain un-uploaded for some time. I won't spoil the surprise :D

I think I'll post up those Sonic comics tomorrow.

View update archive here.

Interview went well yesterday. I actually managed to get a few smiles out of the people interviewing me. I think that's a good sign ^_^

The university admission letters are trickling in - Northwestern (that's near Chicago) has accepted me but the one I wanted to get into the most (Stanford) has declined my application. Oh well. Still four more to go (five if you count NUS). Cornell might be nice :D

I'll be posting up whatever I've done of the Sonic the Fighters Neo IAQ today. It's progressed to about 60% complete, and I just need to complete the movelists for Tikal, Espio, Eggman, Chaos Zero, Super Sonic, Hyper Shadow and the boss. Um, that's a lot. Anyhow check it out at the mind|werx section.

I dug up some of the OLD Sonic comics I drew way back when, when I was still learning the ropes. I might scan some of those pages just for kicks and upload them to the site, so people can see how lame my stories were back then. :D

Over and out...

Blah. As if life couldn't get any slower than this.

Played a bit of Diablo II, finally got my Barbarian into Act IV. It's quite amazing how a game based on such a simple concept (click on everyone until they're dead) can be so addictive. Phantasy Star Online comes close, but D2 has the hack-and-slash RPG down to a science.

Minor updates here and there. I updated the anime page to reflect the fact that I finished watching both Cowboy Bebop and Vision of Escaflowne in the time it took for this site to be ready. -_-;;; Expect reviews of both to be ready soon. Currently obtaining .hack//SIGN, which seems interesting. Apparently the PS2 game based on the anime isn't half bad either. Now if only I had a PS2 :(

I think I'll go work on my IAQs now. Got SingTech scholarship second round interview on Friday. Wish me luck. I heard all successful applicants get a free handphone :D

chaotic|light is born! *Insert rapturous applause here*

I hope you enjoy my attempt to expose myself to the wild world of the web. Most sections are complete, except mind|werx (requires a LOT of work) and sketch|book (need to dig up all my old art). Other than that, roam the site, sign the guestbook, blah blah. This space will also serve as a journal of sorts, I'll update it periodically with my thoughts on life and the insanity that it is.

Just got back from Bangkok today, and trust me, being holed up in an excessively cold hotel room with only my dad's notebook to keep me company is NOT fun. However, since his clock speed is three times mine, I took the opportunity to play some GBA games using an emulator. My time was primarily spent on Sonic Advance 2 and Pokemon Sapphire, and both are EXCELLENT games. The visuals and sound are top-notch, as is the gameplay. SA2 is a top contender for GBA platformer of the year, in my opinion (It doesn't have much competition other than Mario anyway).

J-MP3 of the week: Rusty Nail by X Japan. Get it at the j|mania section or by clicking on the link above. And participate in the poll below to pick next week's MP3, or I'll put J-Rock up here forever! Muhahaha!

You know, that might not be such a bad idea :D