Wednesday , March 24 , 2004

An apron with the words "piyo piyo" and a picture of a baby chicken on it, appears at least once in nearly every one of Rumiko Takahashi's manga. Piyo piyo is an onomettapia for the sound baby birds make.

"Birth of a Forum"

I hope you've all been enjoying the shiny comics, don't expect a regular flow of them though, those ones take a lot of time to make, but I was very happy with the "Return of Game On!" comic, so it's very likely that I'll do more of those old movie-style strips. Oh come on, stop your groaning!

In site related news, Game On! now has an official forum! That's right, no more crappy linking to my old forum! This one's a million times better, and has monkeys!* So just click the forums button, sign up and away you go! I'm so nice, I've even included avatars for you to pick from (or you can use your own if you really want to).

The poll has ended with a tie! After taking the lead from the start, Ranma ½ became matched with Chobits, which was successful in gaining some last minuate votes, bringing the poll to a tie. Today's question is actually a useful one, "What do you think of the shiny new forum?"

*monkeys not included

"A Romancing Saga"

Before you get that lynch mob on line one, allow me to explain myself. Today's comic is technically a screen capture. Not a sprite comic. If it were the latter, it would would have been made by pasting sprites into a background in Paint or Photoshop, often with crappy results. Fine sprite comics such as Beyond the Pixel and Bob and George are exempt from that last statement (the part about them being crappy of course). See, I'm too lazy to even do that, so I just fired up ZSNES, hit print screen and added humorous speech bubbles. Before anyone emails me with the subject line of "OMG!!!!!!!!11 i've n3v4 seen those FF characters b4!!!!!!!!!!1111 is there a secret FF game??????// OMG!!!111 WTF!!! LOL!!!111" allow me to tell you here an now that it is in fact, not a Final Fantasy game, but you're close.

It's from Romancing Saga 3, one of Squaresoft's (Now Square-Enix) lesser-known RPG series that never came out in English. Which is a crying shame, because it's one of the most original console RPG series ever made. It plays more like a PC RPG (think Baulder's Gate), in that it's non linear, you've given quests (which you're free to accept or decline) and there's lots of characters who can join your party (if you choose to have them). It's got a familiar turn-based combat system, but with once big difference : You can't teach your characters moves. In most cases when you equip a character with a weapon, all they can do is smack the enemy with it. But as they use it in a few battles, and gain experience with that type of weapon (what? You expected that because you mastered axes you also know how to use broadswords?) they'll make up moves themselves, usually in the heat of combat (complete with a little lightbulb going "ding!" above their head) which they can practice at and master. There's no levels either, but as you fight your various stats (HP, dex, vit and the like) will increase, in most cases one of your characters will gain a stat every time you win a battle, which makes the leveling up process less boring.

And thanks to the wonders of the modern internet, we can now play this wonderful series in English! Grab your translation patch HERE! Now all you gotta do it find the ROM, which I'm not gonna tell you (legal reasons and all).

Oh, and by the way I'm back. See, after not working on the while I was in Japan (I went to Japan BTW, but more on that later) I got rather lazy and stopped working on it. But today while I was playing Romancing Saga 3, I saw a chance for a quick (read : cheap) comic idea, and a few of my friends have been asking about the status of the comic, so I thought "Oh bugger it. Let's get going again". Now the next push will be to make the normal vector comic.