#I just REALLY REALLY love machines. Especially old-timey steampunk stuff.

[trixies-tricks]

I’m not sorry for posting trinkets and automatons. It will happen again.

[askroahmmythril]

Reference List for amiibo Fighter Names (Set 1)

A supplementary post for the amiibo card art I recently posted over on Twitter, here’s a listing of all their names, and where they came from.  Order will be the same as the order they were posted in.  Going to stick to 12 entries per list because otherwise hoo boy this would get ridiculous for a single post. :

1) Bayonetta : Lunatic - This is a Touhou reference, Lunatic being the name of the (usually) highest difficulty setting.  Given luna is associated with the moon, as is Bayonetta herself, putting the bullet witch in a bullet hell game seemed fitting.  Given Bayonetta 1 even had a shooting minigame, Angel Attack, it seemed to work all the more perfectly.  Basically the full setup of this card is designed to look like a Touhou game being played, with Bayonetta appearing in full as a “spell card” image.

2) Bowser Jr. : Steam-Punk - When it comes to more recent Mario games, when Jr. decides to confront you, more often than not it’s with various machines and mechs.  Thus, I thought of him with an inventor style, and went with one of my favorite aesthetics, steampunk.  The fact that he is kind of a punk little brat works quite well.  Some of the overall look of this card was inspired by the fact that I was playing the Bioshock games while drawing this, which Neo made a more solid reference to it on his version, putting in an Andrew Ryan quote.  I also snuck a reference to Tinker Knight’s mech from Shovel Knight in the background.

3) Bowser : King Dad - Nintendo has gone out of their way to portray as Bowser, for all his faults, as being a good dad for his son, and I love that interpretation.  Furthering this, there’s the fact that the Koopalings in the old Mario cartoons from the 80′s - 90′s tended to refer to him as King Dad, hence the name.  I wanted to go with sort of an old era sitcom look for him, the family dad sitting with his pipe and newspaper.  I thus also wanted to give the frame an old timey TV look.  This one was drawn by me in the period before Neo suggested we try using character specific icons in all the nameplates, so he added a Bowser insignia to the channel knob.

4) Captain Falcon : DJFalcon - This is a play on Captain Falcon’s canonical name (at least, the name for one version of him, since I guess according to lore Captain Falcon is less a single person and more a title...?  F-Zero canon is tricky to follow sometimes.  Doesn’t help that the Cap has been cloned a number of times).  Falcon’s full name is Douglas Jay Falcon, thus shortening it, DJ Falcon.  He wants to see your moves!  Your DANCE moves!  Not much else to say on this one, except a bit of behind the scenes info : I was most of the way through drawing this one when we had a power out.  GUESS WHO HADN’T SAVED THE FILE FOR A LONG TIME!

5) Charizard : NotADragon - The eternal Pokémon joke of Charizard, one of the most dragonny looking Pokémon, not ACTUALLY being a Dragon type (unless you count his Mega Evolution I guess, but still, the point stands).  Neo made the point even more, including Goomy in the image, a major case of “How is THIS a dragon, but THIS ISN’T?!”  Not too much else to say on this one, though Neo did throw in a Pokémon Snap reference on his version, having the Dugtrio mountain in the background.  Nice touch, that.

6) Cloud : Smash Star - This was a suggestion from Neo actually, we joked about how FF was such a “Sony” franchise that it seemed funny Cloud got invited to Smash, rather than Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale.  So we went with that idea, using stage elements from the last stage of the game, and using three of my favorite characters from it in the background : Sackboy, Sly Cooper, and PaRappa the Rapper.  Would have also included Ratchet & Clank, but didn’t want to overcrowd the background.

7) Dark Pit : FaceMyself - This one’s a Persona 4 reference.  As the game often states, “I am a Shadow, the true self!”  With Dark Pit basically being Pit’s “Shadow” from within the mirror, I couldn’t help going with this reference.  I greatly enjoyed Persona 4, so had a fun time drawing this one.  The back of his card is meant to be the back of one of those Kid Icarus Uprising AR cards.  Neo also added some Persona 4 imagery to the stack of TVs.  The roman numeral on the card in his nameplate, XXXIX, is 39, the release number of his amiibo.

8) Diddy Kong : Nerfed Gun - A bit of a meta joke, this one.  Diddy was seen as one of the most broken characters in Brawl, but in Smash 4, he got nerfed pretty hard.  So the idea of Diddy looking nervous, his weapons having been replaced with harmless Nerf equivalents, amused me way too much.  This one might be a little outdated though, as I’m fairly sure he got buffed a bit in Ultimate.

9) Donkey Kong : Sunwu Kong - A reference to the character from Journey to the West.  Sun Wukong, the monkey king, has been reference in a lot of media.  Heck, even Buster Rod G from Mega Man : The Wily Wars is based on him.  The specific version I reference with DK’s outfit here was Sun Wukong’s appearance in the Warriors Orochi series.  DK faces are really fun to draw.

10) Dr. Mario : The Doctor - A reference to Doctor Who, a show I... really need to watch more of.  The idea of it fascinates me.  I styled the viruses after various baddies from the show, the red virus being a Dalek, the yellow, a Weeping Angel, and the blue, the Half Face Man.  Mario himself is wearing the long scarf worn by the Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker.  I just always really liked how that scarf looked.

11) Duck Hunt : Quackshot - Pure and simple, just a pun name on the term “Crackshot.”  Only a duck is involved.  So Quackshot.  I want to say there was a Donald Duck game that also had this as the title, but that’s purely coincidental, wasn’t specifically referencing it.  I put some Target Test targets in the back to go with the theme.  Man, I do miss Target Test mode, especially the Melee variation, but these days, I can see the issue with having a personalized Target Test for every character.  I’d still love it though, haha.

12) Falco : Hyperdrive - I had trouble coming up with an idea for Falco, so I got to thinking about space travel type stuff since he loves flight.  Then I ended up with the idea that he’s a falcon (at least his name would lead you to believe so), and Star Wars had the Millennium Falcon, so the idea just sort of took off from there.  I tried to go with the style of how the stars sort of look like they “stretch” in preparation for the jump to Hyperspace.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: BakaGaijin30's Bubblegum Crisis Meiji

Look Ma, it's a historical AU!

Yeah, that's right, two posts in one night and I've got another one in me coming right down the pipeline that isn't a fanfic review. I read this one in a few sittings over today, all 84k words of it, and I gotta say... this one does what I otherwise would have thought impossible.

Because, let's be real here, is it really possible to extract Crisis from its cyberpunk setting without some damage being done? The only other AU like this I can think of is Sylia's Choice, and the framing device for that is a dream of all things, and the setting is Oriental Adventures from D&D 3E... and it's hardly a good fanfiction, anyway. Moving along...

Meiji is more a 2040-derived AU, mind you, but it has enough 2032 elements, and enough original setting material ripped shamelessly from Lone Wolf & Cub and Rurouni Kenshin to make up the difference; it really ends up being its own thing in most respects, especially in how the fight scenes play out. But we'll get to that in a bit.

Anyway, Linna Yamazaki is a geisha with martial arts training (purely for self-defense) who comes to the rapidly transforming Tokyo in a time when Japan is struggling to find its footing, beset by racist foreigners hell-bent on making it another colony. I bring this up because it's most of the politics of the fic, Glorious Nippon trying to prevent Westerners from fucking it over with blatant racism and warmongering... and who's better at warmongering, selling rifles to both sides of any colonial war, than Genom International? At least, according to Brian J. Mason.

So Linna manages to kill three Yakuza who kill one of her geisha buddies, and attracts the attention of Sylia, who buys her contract out so she can join the Sabers; so she and Priss (a half-American on her whaler dad's side) quickly begin a head-over-heels love affair; so Mason kidnaps Emperor Meiji and schemes to get his hands on the Boomer equivalent of this story, essentially a Lewis Machine Gun (which is used, alas, like once - the Sabers with AK-equivalents in this timeline would have been great but it's not to be) and the Sabers must get him back.

Simple stuff, but between the 'shoujo-ai' there is a lot of insane samurai swordfights, with the weapons of each Saber translated fairly well (Nene uses shurikens, a bow, and a naginata; Linna uses twin swords in a sort of flowing tai-chi-esque style; Priss just uses a cavalry-grade greatsword; Sylia uses a katana in various exotic fighting styles) into a bloody mess of slaughtering Yakuza and ninjas and other unkempt folk. Not a whole lot of gunplay, mind you, but the point is that the Sabers take a lot of wounds, and those wounds accumulate, and yet they keep going, more blood and guts are spilled at an ever-greater cost. It's really wonderfully fun to read, I mean it.

Characters are integrated well-enough: Galatea is a genuinely threatening villain this time around instead of whatever she was in 2040; Mackie, Henderson, and Nigel get to participate in later fight scenes; Sylvie and Anri get cameos as plain ol' prostitutes; even Irene shows up for like five minutes before getting stabbed, but is that any different from how she was treated in the original OVAs? If I have one complaint it's that Linna and Priss's relationship gets consummated very fast, and then Leon's a massive dick about it, to the point that the last chapter is literally him and Linna having a gun duel over Priss (not that anyone dies, mind you, but Leon's homophobia is a little over-the-top even in historical context, I dunno).

So! Read this one, even if the author abandoned yuri fanfic to find Christ (no really look at his author page). And I'll try to wrack my brain to see what I remember about the sequel, Crash '81 - I remember it having many more crossovers, much more yuri, and even more bonkers action and old-timey colonial racism, which is all that you can ask for in a fic in this environment, right?

Damn, now I want a more steampunk-y BGC AU. Give the Sabers 'repeating rifles' and clunky Tesla Cannons and suchlike. That'd be stupid fun, even if no one gives a shit about steampunk anymore.