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About this blog

Mostly Atari-related projects, and other ramblings. Home of the Artie the Atari comic strip.

Entries in this blog

And then...

Well, it's January. Barely, but it's still January.   So it's time to dust off the old "To Do" list, and see what I have left to do in the upcoming year.   First, let's check the previous list(s)...   From February, 2006: Make "To-Do" List - This one never ends. Finish Colony 7 Sprites - Done! (game in progress) Finish Lady Bug sprites - Done! (and in the store) Make label for Four-Play - Done! (and in the store) Make Juno First sprites - Done! (game in progress) Make list of w
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

7

Star Trek 3... and beyond

Since the Star Trek reboot seems intent on recycling old story elements for their films, I thought I'd help them out with a plot summary for the next one.   Okay… it starts out with a group of space hippies who steal Spock's brain.   Their society (which is based on ancient Rome) is under the control of an intelligent supercomputer named Landru (who talks like a 1930's gangster), and they need Spock's brain to build a weapon to defeat their enemies (space Nazis) on a neighboring planet. And
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

10

Back up!

So, I've been playing a lot of Juno First lately, since I'll be making sprites for it.If you haven't checked it out in MAME, you should. It's a really challenging and fun game. Although it looks like a standard vertical shooter, there's more to it than that. By controlling forward/reverse movement of your ship, it adds a completely different dimension to the game. For about the first three waves, it doesn't make much of a difference.But then... they break out the homing missiles.These little bug
Guest

Guest

17

Movie review - Bolt

The last number of years* haven't been kind to Disney. They haven't had a real hit animated film in a very long time.   * That number would be 14. It's been that long since The Lion King came out. But since I hated The Lion King, I'd put the number at 16 (Aladdin). Of course, the reason for that is because they haven't had a real good animated film in a long time.   The move to CG didn't help any, as Chicken Little was one of the worst films I'd ever wasted my time seeing, and Meet the Robi
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

8

Tomorrowland - Spoiler-free movie review

Okay.... if you read my last review, I was pretty-much done with going to the movies.   So, yeah. About that...   After that final disappointing trip to the theater, I began to realize something: going to the movies had become a chore. And it had been for quite some time, too.   Besides the two trips to see Age of Ultron, I'd been to a string of bad screenings. Dim projection, bad sound, dirty screens, and just really poorly run theaters. Snacks were marginal - flat, diluted soda, stale po
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

3

Making Labels - Part 1

When Jess Ragan asked for help in coloring his line art for his 2600 game Solar Plexus, I thought it would be a good opportunity to make a "how-to" for other people who want to create label artwork. Whenever there's a label contest at AtariAge, people invariably ask for tips on creating labels, so hopefully this will be of some help. So here we go...     Part 1 - Line Art   If you're going to draw your own label, that means you're going to end up with line art somewhere in the process. How
Guest

Guest

7

Homebrew Art, part 9 - Strat-O-Gems Deluxe contest entries

Strat-O-Gems Deluxe (2006)   Strat-O-Gems Deluxe is John Payson's excellent color-matching puzzle game. I followed it during development and really looked forward to the game's release. But despite how much I liked the game, when the label contest rolled around, I had absolutely no luck coming up with any ideas for it.   When the contest began, I'd had an idea to make cartoon versions of the gems. Perhaps on some level I was inspired by the classic commercial, but I can't say it was a co
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

3

X-Men: Days of Future Past - Spoiler-free review

I'll admit I didn't have much interest in seeing the latest X-Men film. While I thought X-Men: First Class was good, the rest of the films in the series were very hit-or-miss. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was pretty bad, X-Men: The Last Stand was awful, The Wolverine was kind-of boring, and even in the first two movies which overall were pretty good, I felt that some of the characters were never really captured very well (Cyclops, Kitty, Rogue, Nightcrawler). The actors or writing for them just miss
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

1

The wrong way to do it

Buried somewhere in this blog, I've been keeping a running list of apps I've gotten for my iPhone. (I suppose if tags were actually working in the blogs, I could tag the entry with something useful so people could actually find it. )   One app I won't be getting is the recently released Namco Arcade.   Even though it's free.   Of course, it's not really free. If you want to play the games, you have to pay for them.   Now, this should come as no surprise, since Atari does the same thing.
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

5

CarZzzz2...

The first Cars movie wasn't Pixar's best. Oddly enough, after playing the PS2 game, I began to like the characters more, and therefore, I began to like the film more.   I don't think that's going to work this time.   Cars 2 isn't Pixar's worst film - that dubious honor still belongs to A Bug's Life - but it's certainly their second-worst. After more thoughtful efforts like Wall-E and Up, and the funny yet emotionally touching Toy Story 3, Cars 2 is a huge step backwards for the studio. The e
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

8

Homebreviews - part 29

I've been looking forward to this one...     Juno First 5/5   Welcome to the best shooter on the 2600. Every once in awhile, a homebrew game will come along that makes you rethink what the venerable 2600 is capable of doing, and Juno First is one of those games. A port of the classic (if not well-known) Konami arcade game, Juno First is sort of Defender flipped on its side. A vertical shooter, your view is above and behind your ship, flying above a moving grid, blasting everything in sig
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

6

Upping the ante

So many potential "Up" puns... but I had to pick just one for this entry's title. Such is life.   I finally managed to get out and see Up today, in glorious 2-D! Hey... it was an Imax theater (although not an Imax print), so at least the screen was huge. But we decided as a group that our past experiences with 3-D weren't worth the extra five bucks. Maybe it would have been, since I certainly would have paid more to see Up if I'd had to. (Although after getting lunch first, then tickets and a
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

10

Disney gets something right

Just to provide a balanced counterpoint to yesterday's post, there is proof Disney isn't entirely evil. (And of course, there's always Wreck-It Ralph. Now on Blu-ray!)   They're producing new Mickey Mouse shorts, and by the look of the first one... they've actually got it right.   A funny Mickey Mouse short... who'da thunk?
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

6

Two months later...

Well, it's been over two months since my last blog entry. I was going to go for three months, but since I'll be seeing Pixar's Up sometime this week, I figured I'd be posting about that anyway, and might as well post an entry now.   Mainly it's been work that's been keeping me out of the whole blogging thing. As with last year, the end of the school year at CalArts (where I work) keeps me extremely busy.   This year, we had some 144 animated films turned in, running just under 7 hours. Putti
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

5

Technology steps backwards

Sony finally announced the new, long rumored, slimmer, cheaper, PS3.   Uh... wait a sec.   Cheaper isn't the right word... what's the word I'm looking for?   Oh right... pricier. The base PS3 now costs $269, instead of $249.   I suspect most people were expecting $199. I certainly was.   After all, they did away with the slot-loading Blu-ray drive, for a (presumably) cheaper top-loader. Generally the reason products like this are re-engineered, are to make them more cost-effective to p
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

12

Predictions for 2010

So here we are... the year Jupiter explodes and turns into a miniature sun, causing the Soviet Union and United States to finally declare the Cold War over, and millions of innocent black monoliths to die horribly in the resulting conflagration.   Which brings up the inevitable question, what else is going to happen this year, and how were my predictions for last year?   Let's find out! First... 2009:   Nothing spectacular from Apple, but steady progress and upgrades. - Right. But that
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

36

Toy Story 3 (spoiler-free review)

In a word - perfect.   While Toy Story 3 was in production, a friend of mine at Pixar (who was sworn to secrecy) would only describe it as "like visiting with old friends". I have to agree with that sentiment. I was concerned that Pixar had an uphill battle in making a worthy sequel to two of the best-loved animated films ever, and the commercials that they've been showing didn't really alleviate those concerns. However, this is easily my favorite of the three. The sense of adventure in this f
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

18

Inside Out - Spoiler-free movie review

Pixar has an interesting history of making terrible trailers for what turn out to be great films. The trailers for Inside Out did nothing to pique my interest in seeing the film. But at the reception to this year's Producers' Show, I talked with some people from the studio who were genuinely excited about the movie. Now, if the people who have to spend day after day working on something, still like it after several years, that's a good sign. From my standpoint, I was just glad to see Pixar makin
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

5

Tron 1.5.2

The first episode of season 2 of Tron: Uprising aired tonight. (Some episodes are online, depending on your TV provider, or through iTunes, but it's crazy-expensive there.)   Tonight's episode was "The Reward", in which Tesler offered up a shiny-new car to whoever turned in The Renegade.   Needless to say, that worked well. Because there were dozens of Renegades turned in. Way to clean up the streets there, programs. Of course, none of them were the real one.   Beck decided to lay low in h
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

10

Summer Full 'o Movies pt. 7 - The Dark Knight

I hated the Tim Burton "Batman" film. Michael Keaton was a chinless, scrawny twerp and Jack Nicholson was a puffy, over-the-hill buffoon. The series actually got worse after that, with each film further devolving into camp versions of the original comic books, making the 60's TV series look like serious drama.   When Batman Begins came out a couple of years ago, it seemed to be a very promising reboot of the franchise. It took things much more seriously, had far better casting and directing, a
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

14

Ant-Man - Spoiler-free movie review

Ant-Man? Really? I thought Marvel was scraping the bottom of a pretty low barrel when they dusted off Guardians of the Galaxy and turned that into a movie... but Ant-Man? Then again... Guardians of the Galaxy turned out pretty well. Oddly enough, so did Ant-Man. Better than Age of Ultron, certainly. And as far as Marvel solo movies go, I'd put this right up there after Iron Man and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The reason it works so well, simply put, are the characters. Paul Ru
Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

6
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