938 Resonating.

Since I’ve been in my old boxes of stuff I’ve been checking to see what games still work. I already knew that most of the pokemon games need their batteries replaced (which I don’t have the right screwdriver for.) but it seems as though Pokemon Yellow still has a valid save file. Not that it really matters, but I could potentially rescue some old pokemon data from the N64 colluseum games. Not that I need to. They’re just as usefull to me there as in the gameboy game. It’s just comforting knowing that the system still works for some reason. XD

I’ve also found that I have doubles of some games. I expect that I picked them up again because I didn’t realize I already had them, or I just inherited them in some way. Every so often someone would wander in to Gamestop and not want to deal with carting back a box of stuff we wouldn’t buy. So they’d just give it to me. Or the stuff would be broken and they’d just tell me to toss it, but of course I just salvaged parts and made working systems out of the usable bits. Generally the games just needed cleaning, or having the leads sanded a little. The Wii download service made some of that stuff redundant too. I always thought it was a shame than you couldn’t send your old games to Nintendo for a credit, or something. I mean I already bought the damn game once. Whatever… In any event I thought I had a spare of most of the old systems, but haven’t come across them yet. Found the box of cords and stuff. I may try to hook up the Atari with NES cables. I know you can get an imperfect signal by doing that, and I could prove the thing was working. I think the power supply is the problem now. I have a replacement someplace, I think. I thought it was in that box, but apparently not. Now that I think of it that one might be with the Dreamcast stuff…

I wonder if anyone ever set up private servers for PSO. I still have all my data for that. In fact, that game is where I started using Crave The Bullet as my net handle. I have no memory of what it was before then. Anyway, that’s why the comic server knows me as Crave rather than just my name. When it asked for a username I entered Crave in without really thinking about it. In retrospect I probably should have just used J.T., or some mutation of my given name. I don’t know if it really matters though. They all mean me.

Part of the reason Thomas is named the way he is is because I used to joke that if I was ever a famous comic guy I would need a douchebag name like J. Scott Campbell. So when I was deciding on a name for Thomas I made it sound like that. My mother suggested Blackwell as his surname and it sounded close enough to Campbell that I went with it. I almsot dropped the Jay right before I made the fisrt page because I thought having the character’s name be so similar to mine would confuse people. Then I was like ‘fuck it, whatever, people will figure it out”. Of course not all of them did, so there has been a certain amount of confusion. Complicated further by my use of Crave for the blog, Deviantart, and FA. The fact of the matter is that the comic is autobiographic in some ways. Which is why I am very hesitant when people want to licesence it, or what have you. My actual personal history is tied to the story by a certain percent and it feels like losing a part of me. Which is crazy on some level, but all we are is a collection of stories about ourselves. If you sell the stories then what?

I suspect the Penny Arcade guys go through similar problems, magnified thousands of times over by success. At this point they’ve monied all the bullshit into the ground, but there has to have been a point where the “are you Gabe & Tycho?” thing must have been super annoying. Money is, of course, the best solution to those sorts of problems. It’s amazing how much noise gets filtered by a bed of 100 dollar bills. As far as me goes, I still have to deal with accusations of Thomas being a self insertion. Which is stupid because of course he is, but the whole damn thing is my voice. What difference does it make? The next character in the hierarchy would just take over the role, which would be Nina, by the way. After that probably Reggie, who people are often surprised to find out I am more like than unlike. If not him then Edward. Wes is actually the character I am least like, or attatched to, and, in spite of his flaws, I still like, and am like, him on some level. It would be different if any of the cast were irredeemable monsters, but they just aren’t.

Even then I’m not sure because even though Vegeta kills literally THOUSANDS of beings at various points in Dragonball Z you still end up liking him. He is a psychotic murderer! There’s no question of that, and yet over the course of the story he is redeemed in some way, and people forget about just how completely evil he is at the start. His arc is completely mental because he goes from psychopath to family man over the course of the story. Sten in Dragon Age is kind of the same way. He kills a bunch of innocents, but by the end of the story he’s basically a hero because he saved more good people then he killed. So, by that logic, if you kill 3 people you should still be able to get away with it if you save a certain number of other people. The exact number hasn’t been determined, and the math makes no sense no matter how you look at it. If you kill 3 people, but save 3 it should cancel out, but it doesn’t. For some reason after you kill a person their value goes up exponentially. Right up until you actually kill someone they are of equale value to any other jackoff, then suddenly there’s a spike when they are gone. What a weird line of thought.

Deep meditation on literature is not always a good thing if it uncovers major flaws in stuff you like.

36 Comments

Nina is right. That is absolutely precious.

I’d be tempted to ship it too, actually. If I wasn’t already shipping Brooksie and John.

There is, in fact, at least one private server for Phantasy Star Online still functioning. Alternatively, you could join me for PSO2 which is starting Open Beta in 3 days. Of course, only if you don’t mind playing it in Japanese… Though somebody might make an English Patch soon.

Me and a small group of my friends run a free private PSO server, in english. We are also working on taking many of the japanese quests and translating them to english. My apologies for saying this here, but I am ALWAYS trying to hunt up new members. Information of it is two posts below this one…. I really need to work on keeping all my info in ONE post! ^.^’

I have a private server as well, and there’s two major ones out there, one for English players and one for JPN players.

Would you happen to be referring to Schthack? That hive of scum and villany *tosses Lucas a nickel*? That place is terrible! The GMs and Mods are complete self-absorbed assholes! They care very little for the players! They blacklisted half the items in the game! So even if you found an item that is worth a lot to trade/sell to other players for photon drops/other rares, you took pictures of it to prove you found it legit, posted them on the forums, and even had EYEWITNESSES of the item’s drop, you wouldn’t be able to sell it! They blacklisted monster parts! MONSTER PARTS!! It’s a terrible place.

…. sorry, I…. whited out a second there!

Okay, by panel 2 I was my out-of-online face was already going :3.
By the end of the comic I was cracking up. I can safely say that this is my favorite strip of your comic!

You hath captured us geeks well!
I commend thee!

ABOUT PSO CRAVE!!
“I wonder if anyone ever set up private servers for PSO.”
Yo! Right here! While it can’t connect to your game system, and we are a reletively small server. Yer welcome to join!
We use Freeforums as a base, but we keep the game generally untouched, since we are a little sect of PSO-diehards… and a few game designer-wannabes! The only things we’ve really altered are the exp drop rate to x2 (since it gets pretty hard to level), and working on making many of the unobtainable items obtainable, things like Parasitic Gene Flow and Red Ring, and many MANY others!
Lemme know if yer interested! We are of course free!

Here’s the link! You can chat with us and Download from here. I go by SolstaceWinters there!
PSO Crystal Argo: http://psocrystalargoserv.freeforums.org/index.php

But I bet the two of them are still going to try to take Mike and Brooksie down in order to win whatever the prize is.

And they won’t get the prize, because everybody forgot about Thomas, whom I think has yet to be targetted.

Hm…well in terms of old systems, I’ve powered my Nintendo with a charging cord from a flashlight, so if you can find anything that has the same plug; you might as well try it. ‘Course I dunno what the cords for an Atari look like…my Atari was an Atari 400 (thing had a keyboard) and the power cable was built in. Plugged that in a few years back and all I got was a low electric whine and nothing else. RIP, buddy.

Now the battery thing is something that always confused me…were the batteries in Pokemon just not as good, or something? I’ve heard of folks replacing Pokemon batteries before, but barely with anything else. I mean my friggin’ copy of Final Fantasy 1 on the NES still has my save intact, and that’s even after the cartridge was drowned in a flood. You’d think NES save batteries would be dead by now…

In pokemon you were likely to save hundereds of times a day if you were trying to do something whereas in older games you had to go to a specific location to save, so they got used less. Although I barely even played Crystal and the battery went dead before any of the others. There may be other reasons for battery death too.

XD
I love Mike, he reminds me of my old GM. Same name, plus sized gentalman, LARPer, and no spine in the workplace. And a complete NERD! ^_^

So… was that all ad-libbed or were those quotes too?

Ad libbed, but the knighting oath is a bastardization of the one they used in Excalibur.

ah, it’s so hard to tell sometimes because i’ve heard similar things before and there are so many movies, books, comics, and games that i’ve seen/read/played and even more that I haven’t so I was a bit confused

Weee! Nina is back <3

That aside it seems most our characters are in various teams now. I look forward to seeing how this all plays out.

And as for the author comment, reggie has some qualities to him as well. He's not a bad guy at all. Just self centered and has a bit of an ego going. But he's not really despicable at all. I'm not surprised he's got a lot of reflection of you.

This is why I read this comic religiously. I love the characters, and how they interact with each other. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

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