joe randel's art dump

Did you have a favorite toy when you where a kid?  A toy you had to take ever where.  I had a stuffed Ernie and I took him all over the place until one day I dropped him and thought that he got hurt so I never took him out again.  I even put a bandage in him to make sure he was okay.  That bandage stayed on him for close to 30 years before I took it off.  Yup, I still have my Ernie.  My daughter has one too that is exactly the same.  I need to get my son one now too but it’s hard to find.  Or maybe a Bert stuffie.

So what was you favorite childhood toy and do you still have it?

I just got done playing a game of Trivial Pursuit 90’s edition.  My team won ^_^

Playing reminded me that I love board games too and not just video game ones.  I loved playing Life as a kid and my Pac Man board game, but my top favorite one was Clue.  Man, I could play that for hours.  One game that I never got to play was “Scotland Yard”.  I remember seeing commercials for it as a kid but never got it or even seen it in stores now that I think about it.  Other that I owned was this collection of mini travel games called Flipsiders.  They where awesome!  I had a racing one, a rock tour one, a mall madness one, plus lots more.  Ahhh, great memories with those ones.  I still have them actually.  I should break them out and play them with my daughter.

Do you have any favorite board games?

The time has finally come.  That Jo comic I was working on is done.  Actually it was done a while ago and we’ve just been delaying the release.  So yeah, it’s my first ever 8 page (plus a cover page) full colour comic.  It’s up at The Jab Archives store for only $10.  I guess this is also a good time to replug my Candy Girls folio.  It’s a collection of eight pin up girls all done up to represent different flavors of candy.  It’s all in colour and each girl comes with a write up of the design process and it’s only $10 as well.

If anyone picks up ether of these I’d love to hear some feedback on it.  Take care and enjoy ^_^

Tonight I sat down and watched Star Wars Ep III for the first time (yeah… I know…).  I watched it with my brother in law and after we sat at talked geek movies.  We talked about the whole Star Wars series, the books that followed (I’ve read a ton, he hasn’t read any), what we liked and what we didn’t like about Ep III.  Then we traveled to other movie topics like the Alien series, the Terminator series (movie and tv) and even though in some RoboCop.  It was fun and I honestly haven’t done that in a long while.

So for the record… Alien 3 is my favorite of the Alien movies.  Terminators 1 and 2 rock, 3 sucks (so I’m told anyway) and I liked Ep III best of the new trilogy.  But it still lacks the quaintness of Ep IV, which is the best in my books. ^_^

I’ve been playing this little indie called Splunky a lot recently. It’s pretty simple to grasp, you hunt for treasure in caves, but it’s really hard. Really… hard. Your character only get’s 4 hit points (and 4 ropes and 4 bombs) and there are lots ways to lose them. Level traps, falling too far, enemies, spikes, HUGE spiders, etc… etc… I’ve only ever made it to level 5. Even with all this thrown at me, I still love it. Did I mention the levels are randomly generated? Yeah… that’s the best part. The game is different every time you play.

Give it a try. I give it 4 out of 5 Joes ^_^

Okay, so this is old news but still funny. I would seem that in China fake/knock off brands run the country. So much so that an entire mall is going to open with nothing but fake brands and stores. Places like Pizza Huh, Buckstar, McDnoalds and Adidos stores will sell nothing but the “best” knockoffs money can buy.

Oh China. You host the world games to gain attention on the world stage and yet when things like this make the news, people just point and laugh.

This links up with a story of when I bought some GBA games off ebay, only to find that I bought some NIntondo games instead. They played fine but I did feel cheated. Anyone else have knockoffs in their house?