Con Queso's Cross-Stitch/Game Blog

Time off!

2011-03-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

Sorry guys for the lack of updates, but I'll be gone for a few days more. So I spent like 10 minutes on the bib until I realized I started the 2nd yoshi off center. It's bugging me, should I restart it? I'm so lazy I think I'll just continue, what do you think?

FFXI Music

2011-03-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

Got something pretty awesome today by Noriko Matsueda which is widely known for his great compositions in the Square Enix (Squaresoft) games. I thought I'd take a step away from old classic video game systems and give you a piece from Final Fantasy XI called "Dolphin".

This is probably the most well known song for any FFXI players since it greeted you everytime you would login. Despite how much I hate HATE HATE Playonline for its stupid convulted account services, I find this song puts me at ease...while I smash my keyboard against a wall. Hope you enjoy this song and be glad you probably never dealt with Playonline.

Bib progress

2011-03-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

Been busy lately, but I made some good progress on the bib. I'm extremely happy about how this turned out. I've only ever worked on 18 count fabric so I was very skeptical about working on 14 count cloth. The bigger pixels meant it would have much more noticeable gaps in between each stitch but the good side is that smaller art will be about 25% larger than it would be on 18 count cloth and this works wonderfully in my favor at the moment. So here's 1/3 of the bib! I ditched the old crying Yoshi because who wants a depressing baby bib!? Bad idea so I just swapped for a more cheerful pose.

I used a very dark grey around his eyes and mouth for shadows but quickly switched to a light grey for the body curve shadow. It also looks like he has a squashed bug on the bottom of his shoe but that's just because my stitches are not as consistant as I'd like them to be. I like how the sprites have double layered outlines. I wasn't sure if I wanted to make the outline thinner but I did it in Paint.net and it made Yoshi look shallow. It still bugs me now with the thick outline, but the thin outline would've bugged me much more.

I LOVE how this is going so far. Don't worry, I'll update sooner this time since I'm on a roll for stitching.

Ultima Online

2011-03-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time in the early times of the internet where AOL reigned supreme and NetZero was a respectable 56k ISP dial-up provider the MMORPG genre was just getting it's first legs and growing. Long before anyone thought that Blizzard would make monstrous game behemoths (World of Warcraft duh) there were studios that were paving the way into what would be the modern MMO games of today. There are a few worthy of mention: Everquest, Never Winter Nights, Nexus: The Kingdom, MUDS, and Neopets (haha). But one really took to a whole new level...and that was....

ULTIMA ONLINE!

*cue music*

(Nifty Song, eh? All noble and shit!)

Ah yes, back before when "Player Versus Player" actually meant killing someone that looked funny at you rather than killing someone for some abitrary point system, where thieves weren't preying on those stupid enough to give their passwords but were ACTUALLY stealing within the game's mechanics. Where Murderers roamed outside the city limits for the purpose of being a dick. Where players pirates roammed the sea and openly attacked Fisherman and stole all their treasure. In Ultima Online the world was ruthless and with a real sense of loss on the line whenever you played, you grew attached to your character and goods. I've revisited Ultima Online thanks to the In Por Ylem Shard that recently opened. And letme sum up my experience in one picture:

If you're not really into MMORPGs, I hope you appreciate how "noble and shit" this song was.

Batman (NES) Stage 1!

2011-03-16T20:53:00.000-07:00

I've been hooked on old MMO games and I totally should not be spending so much time with them. They're just horrible horrible time sinks. I'll go into depth with Ultima Online and Final Fantasy XI sometime when I have a clear head but just know I have a good reason I'm playing these versus other recent games such as World of Warcraft or Rift or Lord of the Rings Online or ....etc.

Today I've got THE GODDAMN BATMAN! I will admit that I've never even beaten one level of this game, but I have played level 1 many times! This music is the sole reason I picked it up and tried it out. The stage 1 music just builds up so nicely with a nice drum intro, works into a catchy melody, starts to get intense as the song closes, and finishes up with great energy! It really added a great atmosphere for me as I feel like THE GODDAMN BATMAN punching flame thrower dudes, floor cleaning robots, and random dude that runs into you! And oh man the jumping controls are spot on with it's great wall jumps. I'm completely reminded of how well Super Meat Boy did its wall jumps and Batman is definitely one of those games that has awesome wall jumping experience unlike SOME games *coughMetroidcough*.

Enjoy! Tell me if you enjoyed this song!

Amy's Wedding!

2011-03-12T21:12:00.000-08:00

Today I went to attend Amy's Wedding! She got married today at around 1:00pm PST! Congratulations and I hope you and your husband will have many happy years together! If you want to congratulate her, head on over to her blog and just wish her a happy future. She'd really appreciate a sudden surge to her blog as well since she's relatively new! I don't want to post pictures until she approves, so just believe me! I was there, she's married, go congratulate her!

Earthquake and Banner update

2011-03-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

I'm STUNNED at the low casualty numbers for Japan's 8.9 earthquake. News sources say that their ultra strict building standards probably saved many lives. Haiti's 7.0 quake killed (I think) 220,000 to put that in perspective and Japan will be predicted to have lost just over 1,000 with its' 8.9 earthquake. Friggin' engineers and building policy writers definitely deserve from praise for preemptively saving a TON of people. If you haven't heard of all this, I've been keeping tabs on Aljazeera livestream news for updates and information.

Ninja Gaiden II music is ROCKING

2011-03-07T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Ninja Gaiden series of games is pure evil. The level designers of these games must have been masochists to design such sadistic set pieces. Each enemy, platform, pitfall, and obstacle were precariously placed to ensure maximum frustration. This was an era where you got your $50 money's worth from mastering a handful of ridiculously hard levels and Ninja Gaiden was the king of such level designs back in 1990. If you were a souless robot, you could beat such a difficult game in about 15 minutes but of course it took normal humans many many more hours to master it. Many controllers were probably broken by pure rage form this game but those than persevered through the game were treated to entire animated cutscenes and a involving plotline which was an amazing feat. It was one of the first games to involve ANY story on the NES! Most NES games were as simple as "you are this guy, you want to kill this guy, GO!". In Ninja Gaiden it was "You are Ryu Hayabusa, you want Ashtar dead, GO!" but with supporting characters, a love interest, sacrifices, and plot twists! Sure it's no novel, but it was a novel idea for a video game at the time.

The point is this was a difficult but rewarding game that featured a ROCKING soundtrack. The only problem with the music is that it rocks SO hard it messes up my playstyle. If you want any possibility of beating this game you need patience, but it's so hard to stand around to survey situations with such bumping tunes! I had a hard time picking a track from Ninja Gaiden II specifically...that is until I found out about The Nintendo Drummer's Youtube page. He did an amazing job covering the drums that I felt no need to include the original NES version of the song as his drums take nothing away from the original song but add new life to it. I encourage you to check out his youtube page. He's done 16 drum covers for NES games and I'll definitely bring him back into my blog again! Enjoy Ninja Gaiden 2's music taken from Act 2 Scene 2 covered by The Nintendo Drummer!

Anyway, how rocking is this shit?!

Rushjet1 - Chiptunes

2011-03-06T15:59:00.000-08:00

I'd hate to impose more of my chiptune music on you, but I really love it. Rushjet1's best works are on par with Anamanaguchi's pieces, but Rushjet opts to go fully digital. Rushjet was one of my first dives into chiptunes (not including video game music itself). Though he has not arranged any albums since 2008, he still has an active youtube account where you can find his various scraps of experimentation. Give a listen and tell me if it grinds you gears or tickles your pickle!

My next project!

2011-03-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

My next project will be a fairly simple one. The only problem I have now is finding time to stitch it. I kinda got hooked on Civilization 5, Rift, and FFXI all at once so I have more meaningless timesinks than I would like...But here's the idea.

First of all I'd like to thank Riot Patch of Pixels blog for giving me the idea for stitching on a bib! Thanks. You're much more talented at this stuff than I am! So here's a tiny preview of the subject of this stitch:

I plan to have a few baby yoshi's stitch on a baby bib for a friend's future bouncing baby! I'm pretty excited for her! I just wish I didn't have to buy the bib pre-made, it kinda makes me feel crappy since I might've been able to make a small bib myself, but I'm not comfortable doing so.

Banelings Banelings Banelings Ooooh!

2011-03-04T16:59:00.000-08:00

I'm the master of old content, so today I have you a mashup of Starcraft and Justin Bieber! It's like hot chocolate and fresh sewage, like a pair of snug slippers and foot fungus, like Jack Daniels and Vicodin! They go so well together! Okay I lie, but I still love this song. If you don't understand Justin Bieber OR Starcraft, you might want to pass on the video.

Lyn is not so complete!

2011-03-03T17:40:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why I started on stitchin Lyn; I have no real connection to Fire Emblem, so I kinda just suddenly stopped. I'll finish her someday. I know it's lame especially since I only have like 30 stitches left haha, I just don't want to dig through my colors just to mess up her skin color. Anyway, Here's the last image of her stitch before I put her away for a while along with a video of her animation in action. It looks so sleek!

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Youtube does NOT do this game justice. It does not capture all 60 Frames per second, so some of the very fast animation frames are not shown here. If you look closely at 0:11, you'll see the frame I captured in the stitch though.

Donkey Kong Country 2

2011-03-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

To be honest Donkey Kong Country series was not my cup of tea. It was a straightforward platforming game released as one of the first SNES games and it featured some crazy (for the time) pre-rendered photo realistic graphics. It was enough to make it an awesome game, but it has not aged too well gameplay wise. It's just really simple; a bit too simple for me. I think it's partly because I never got to play SNES games until I found out about emulation and by that time I was spoiled by more modern games like PS1 and N64 stuff. TLDR: I don't quite hold DKC series on such high pedastals as others might, but I love the one song from the series in particular..

Stickerbrush Symphony.

And the readers that follow me and played DKC2 will all go "OMG YES, THAT SONG" in unison because it is that powerful of a song. DKC2 has some good songs, but this definitely takes the gold medal hands down. It is relaxing, soothing, and it has a mysterious tone to it. I really hope you give this a listen if you're having a bad day as it might make the rest of your day pretty mellow.

Ska and boxing!

2011-03-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

Mike Tyson's Punch Out on NES was a fun game. It was a huge smash hit for me, but it was a great game for its time. It required fast reflexes, observations of (sometimes) subtle clues, and an iron will to truly beat in one sitting. The game allowed you to block, dodge to two sides, punch in two directions, and super punch. The controls were simple but to beat the game took some skill. Aside from how tough the game can, it was a great game! Today I'd like to give you three versions of the Punch-Out music:

The Original NES!

And the Nintendo Wii Remake!

I definitely love the remade version so much more. I have a soft spot for strong trumpets which explains my weird binges of Ska music. Anyway, I'm out for today. Tell me which version you like most, Original or Remade.

P.S. Yes, there was a SNES "Super Punch Out" Game. Quite frankly the game was mediocre and the music was not as iconic as the original NES music.

P.P.S. How did they not remake the training song for the wii game?! HOW? It must be in the Wii game, it MUST BE...my google-fu is not strong enough. 20 virgins to the first person to give me this Wii remade music!

Possible projects

2011-02-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not the type to write a lot of notes on my thoughts. I'm also very forgetful which makes a horrible combination. So I'll make my blog a place to brainstorm and list possible pixel art I could stitch together. So far my list looks like this:

Tiny Toons, Contra (NES), Animaniacs, Final Fantasy Tactics, Kirby ("Kirby Super Star" on SNES), Enemies from the Mario Bros series, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Johnny Bravo.

I don't have any interest in the Mario Bros themselves. They're a bit over done and I don't have much drive to remake them for the n'th time on the internet or myself. I found a few Starcraft images, but the only units I'd be willing to make are the infantry of Terran and maybe a few of the smaller Protoss units. I can't imagine Zerg units looking too good on stitch. I haven't been able to find a Johnny Bravo sheet, but it wouldn't be too hard to convert any old JPEG image of him into a stitchable image, but I'm a bit too lazy to do that for now. No stitches this update today, but I leave you with a music video I much admire after a friend linked me to it randomly. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before so enjoy the encore if you have! If you haven't yet, stand up and join in the dance craze sweeping the interwebs.

"Legal Tender"? More like terrorist money!

2011-02-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

There's an relatively old outrageous story about a man being detained for using LEGAL tender at a Best Buy. Oh Best Buy, as if I needed more reasons to hate you. ~~You're~~ Your unknowledgable work force will try to shove a $200 HDMI cable down my throat but won't tell my grandmother that the 500 DVD player won't play Blurays. I guess I can't hate Best Buy directly for this but the worker there isn't the sharpest tool in the shed...Here's the story in short:

PUT YOURSELF in Mike Bolesta's place. On the morning of Feb. 20, he buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher's car. He pays the $114 installation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper. The $2 bills are Bolesta's idea of payment, and his little comic protest, too.
For this, Bolesta, Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours, finds himself under arrest.
Finds himself, in front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons.
Finds himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he's handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Secret Service is called into the case.

For the full story, click here

Edit: fixed the hard to read story. Sorry!

Anamanaguchi? Sounds delicious.

2011-02-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

   I'm an idiot, I mixed up Netflix with Redbox again in my last post. Sorry if I confused anyone, but hopefully the link and picture cleared that up. Anyway...

   It was inevitable that Anamanaguchi would be mentioned on this blog. I've been a huge fan of chiptunes ever since the first album "Power Supply" came out in 2006. All of their songs has the perfect mix of drum, guitar, and the mind-numbing ear candy from a hack NES/Gameboy. When I first heard their arguably best track from their first album Nebula Helix, I knew that something big would happen in the field of chiptune music. Hell, I didn't know the term "chiptune" back then. Anamanaguchi was not the first artists that delve into hacked-hardware music composing (it was a relatively well-known technique known in small circles), but they were one of the first "bands" to really bring the music into huge mainstream attention and eventually got intergrated into current video games and movies.

   Their biggest break was being featured in the hit movie "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" which generated a huge following. A side-scrolling beat-em-up was released for the Xbox Live Arcade shortly after the movie. The game included an entire album of Anamanaguchi's songs and fit in perfectly with the pixel art style the game had.

Well that's enough back story. I'll just shut up now and let you listen to some of their best songs.

2005, Nebula Helix. (Their first album is downloadable for free on 8bitpeoples, Get it now!)

2009, Blackout City

Call me a fanboy hipster all you want, but this shit rocks my world.

Catch the Deal 1!

2011-02-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

Just in case you forgot, today is the last and only day to use your free ~~netflix~~ Redbox code from Facebook! If you haven't gotten your code check out their Facebook and go to my past post for details! I rented out "The Social Network" with my free code. How appropriate.

Anyway, today's deal is a BOGO (Buy one Get one free) deal for Chipotle. They're known for their relatively high quality food and huge portions. Here's the deal: Click on this link, "watch" the 90-second video, and print your coupon! You can print multiples of the coupon if you switch your browser or you can even clear your browser's cookies to get a new coupon! They expire March 3rd so make sure you use it soon! I hope this helped some frugal shopper out there! Enjoy your free (or 1/2 off) burritos...and hopefully that's with a friend, I can't imagine someone eating two of these at once.

Lyn? FFXI? Choices...

2011-02-23T14:02:00.000-08:00

Quick update for Lyn, I gave her THREE WHOLE SHADES OF BLUE! ooooh, stupidly slow progress is STILL PROGRESS, shut up!

Sorry that this is a real quick update. I spent a majority of my time playing FFXI. I have no idea why I'm playing it...It's such an old game and its UI is horrific. I'll post about FFXI soon once I get my feet a little more wet and I have more positive things to say for the game . As for Lyn...I think I'll hold off on finishing her for a while. I'm half lazy and half scared that the colors I pick for her skin will look fugly, but I'm already this far so I should just wrap it up soon...Anyway, Happy blogging and I'll try to update something more substantial later in the week.

Lyn.

2011-02-22T14:20:00.000-08:00

My guessing game won't work on this character too well. The game series she's from is actually a LONG running series in Japan and only got its fame from Super Smash Bros Melee from one certain character. After Marth's appearance in SSBM, Nintendo finally got lucky and got a localization team to translate and distribute the first of many Fire Emblem games onto the Game Boy Advanced. Since then, Many more successful Fire Emblem games were given to North America including the Gamecube and the Wii.

Lyndis (also known as Rindisu [リンディス] in the great land of Nippon -_-), She is the main character in the very first north america released game simply titled "Fire Emblem" on November 3, 2003. The game is a tactical turn-based strategy which including permanent unit death which causes real change in the long storyline. The permanent death feature gave battles a feel of real urgency and since it changed the story depending on which character died, there was incentive to save as many people as you could (and trust me, that's NOT easy). It's not a game for everyone, but at the time it was a great, complex hand-held strategy game with beautiful Animations to boot. I'll post some animations after I complete this stitch; I don't want to show you the template sprite before I'm done! haha.

Jeremy Soule

2011-02-21T14:44:00.000-08:00

When Guild Wars released in 2005, it was the shit. It proved that games can be innovative, affordable, streamlined, fun, strategy, and not require tons of grinding. It was, and still is, one of the most innovative online games made. It is a great game, but one aspect of the game got its hooks into me: The music.

Jeremy Soule is one of the most famous video game music composers. Every area in the game had it's own sweeping, orchestral song that fit in with the beautiful scenery, be it tranquil forests with falling petals to scorching hellfires, The music was marvelously spot on. Jeremy Soule, the composer of the entire Guild Wars soundtrack, knows his way around orchestral pieces and it shows. Jeremy is also well know for composing the soundtrack of Morrowind. I've included both a piece from Guild Wars and Morrowind. I hope you enjoy!

Catch the Freebie 1!

2011-02-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry I've been blowing off some commenting. My blog commenting tends to sway towards people that comment on me first, then my followers. I don't comment ALL the time, but I do visit everyone's blog eventually!

I'm always on the lookout for good deals and free swag, so I thought I'd update the blog with some free things I run into once in a while (blue moon). Today I found a free Redbox rental that's only valid on Feb 24. Sure it's limited to use on one day, but it's free! So here's how you do it. Visit Redbox's Facebook (2nd link if the first one doesn't work ). Click on the "like" button. Then when you're done with that click on the "FREEBIE" tab near the top and claim your code! Pretty simple and it only takes 2 minutes to get a free rental! You can do this with multiple Facebook accounts to get multiple codes, but you'll have to use a different credit card and email address if you do redeem multiples of this offer.

If you have a texting service, you can also get a free Redbox rental every first Monday of the month texted to your mobile device! The official Redbox website has this offer so you can trust it's legit. Hope someone will get some use out of this!

The boy of met yet again!

2011-02-19T00:26:00.000-08:00

I've posted about how great of a game Super Meat Boy already. This time I'd like to move the spotlight over to a great piano player that has arranged numerous tracks from the game. Brent Kennedy is responsible for over 30 piano arrangements of game music including Aquaria, Plants vs. Zombies, World of Goo, VVVVVV, and many many songs from Super Meat Boy. Please give this man some props and check out his youtube channel for more amazing pieces!

YOSHI!

2011-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

Yup, it was Yoshi. I don't have a lot to comment about this since it actually turned out very well. Much better than I thought it would. 1 1/2 " X 1 1/4 " inches, I like how the shine on his nose came out as well as his neck area. The color scheme for his shoes is ugly (in the sprite AND my stitch) but it works for some reason. Green and orange contrast pretty well though, I gotta admit. The only improvement I could use is more consistant stitching in the nose area: I still tug thethread with different strengths and it causes some visual effects if you look closely in the dark green area of his nose. I also am not 100% happy with the neck shadow color but it still works. Overall I'm extremely happy with how this turned out. It's so satisfying, I can't help but have this music play in my head when I look at him:

Guess That Stitch 4!

2011-02-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

Today I give you...the color scheme I'm working with along with the WIP photo I took. I churned him out within 2 days, about 2-4 hours per day. I wish I could give a more accurate work time, but I tend to surf the web, chat online, and multitask while I do my stitches. I feel really slow for JUST figuring this out, but I found that using the needle backwards (inserting with both sides rather than one) can speed up production quite a lot in certain situations. I'm still very new to this hobby so I'm still learning what works and what doesn't. When I feel comfortable I'll definitely make bigger things.

Hints: Proper name. It's a creature from a well known game. Various known activities: Partying, eating, baby sitting. The photo will fit the entire stitched character if it were complete (well, his head will be cut off by 2 pixel rows, sorry)