First and foremost, I have made quite a bit of progress on the Dreamcast game. Not as much as I had hoped to by now, but the progress has been substantial. However, I must reluctantly delay the game indefinitely for a variety of reasons. It will still certainly come to fruition; however, my own dissatisfaction with several elements of my creation require extensive revisions. Furthermore, saving using the VMU is apparently possible using an unreleased, private version of FENIX (what I'm using to make the game), which would enhance the game experience significantly if I can ever use such an option.

I am now shifting my primary focus back to working on the first episode of Enthalpy. This episode will be titled "The Beast That Resides in a Rabbit's Grin". The title is not a reference/allusion to anything in particular; I just think it sounds nice... and it's rather (metaphorically) relevant to the episode's plot.

Finally, a big ol' announcement: I have officially formed a company. Rather, I myself am a sole proprietorship. My lawyer-style grandfather was quite a big help in terms of filling out the necessary paperwork and all that, and for that I thank him greatly. This company, Pigeonbox (don't ask about the name), will publish Enthalpy and all related games and such for official purposes as Pigeonbox productions, but keep in mind it's still just me. And no, don't expect any annoying or obtrusive ads anywhere in my Flashes.

They should make a good episode of Suite Life on Deck. That would be awesome.

Enthalpy, the upcoming Flash series based on the characters from Of the Couch, McDarnold's, Raptor Lincoln, and the Nicholas' Weird Adventure games, is nearing the completion of its first episode (as in some time this year).

It is also set to become the first-ever (unless I've missed or forgotten something) Newgrounds animated series to get a commercial console game release! My SEGA Dreamcast game, tentatively titled Enthalpy Super Fun Adventure Game, Hooray!, is now officially estimated to be released by the end of February. You'll be able to order it online, pop it into your Dreamcast system, and... you know... play it. It features original old-school graphics (a "hip" way of saying deprecated 2D graphics that people today would consider "bad" but were considered "good" a decade or two ago), original music, and the same kind of comedy anyone who's seen my Flashes would expect. The disc includes three stand-alone episodes, each of which is about the length of Nicholas' Weird Adventure 2. Yeah, as far as console games go, it's rather short, but it's probably only going to cost eight to ten dollars.

You do have a SEGA Dreamcast.... don't you?

You don't. What are you, some kind of moron? How are you supposed to play this awesome game?!

Oh, right. You can also play it on your DOS-enabled PC. And if you don't have DOS, you can use FreeDOS or DOSBox. See, the game will run automatically on your Dreamcast, but if you don't have one, you can put the disc in your computer, copy and paste an included folder to your PC, and play it in DOS.

You'll buy the game, right?

You won't. What are you, some kind of moron? Oh, I get it. You're just going to wait until it's been pirated so you can download it online for free. Look, just because it's old-fashioned doesn't mean I didn't put a lot of work into this game. Don't think you-...

What? You don't want to play it at all? Then why are you even reading this?

What's that? You want me to stop making assumptions about what you're thinking?

No. Never.

The releases of ActionScript 3 and Alchemy mark the beginning of a new era for Flash game makers. Flashers are no longer limited to making Flash games in Flash or Flex, but can, in fact, port practically any game made with C or C++ to Flash, as long as they have the original source code.

We have seen this already with the port of DOOM that Mike (no last name) has submitted to Newgrounds, which is currently #1 on the Top 50. But, wait... is this right? Is this ethical?

I could understand this if id Games actually submitted it themselves, but Mike didn't make the game (despite the fact that it's not a stone). If this becomes a trend, Newgrounds will be filled with Flash ports of open-source games that the submitters didn't even make. At the top of the Top 50 will be classic DOS games instead of games actually made by Flash artists. Games that were not created by Newgrounds members, but simply run through a conversion program after changing a few lines of code to make them more internet compatible.

Does that seem right? At all? Not to me. In my opinion, using Alchemy to convert C++ games you made yourself to Flash and uploading them here is awesome. Taking games other people made and uploading them here, however, is not. It's the same thing as taking open-source Flash games and uploading them to Newgrounds even though you didn't make them. Nobody would consider that ethical, so why is it OK if they're DOS games?

To take this a step further, I have the same problem with a lot of music video submissions. For example, someone will animate a music video of a song by Weird Al or They Might Be Giants and upload it to Newgrounds. The music video will then receive great acclaim, many votes of 5 and several awards, not because the person who submitted the Flash did a good job, but because the song itself is funny. A great example of this is Super Mario Hyadain, animated by Scott-Falco. He stated in the description that he didn't write the song; it came from a video on Nico. Yet I'd hazard to bet that the reason it has a 4.35 out of 5 on Newgrounds has nothing to do with what Scott-Falco did, but the fact that the song is catchy. In fact, in my opinion, the visuals in the original Nico video are much better.

I'm not normally one to consider things "overrated" (perhaps because I'm called that so much on YouTube), but this is probably the only case where I'd make an exception. And I've felt this way for a long time, but have finally decided to say something about it before Alchemy becomes more accessible to people who aren't as familiar with compiling C++ programs and such (and, of course, to people who can run it on Windows without using Cygwin).

If you're voting on a Flash submission and you give it a high score based on stuff that the person/people who made the Flash didn't do, then, as the saying goes, you're doing it wrong. Hardly anybody seems to share this opinion, but it's something that I stand firmly behind. I'm not blaming the people who submitted the Flashes for this "overratedness"; I think it's awesome that Mike ported DOOM to Flash, and Weird Al himself enjoys seeing people animate music videos of his songs. But when we vote upon the quality of the submission, we should be voting upon the quality of what the submitter did. Otherwise, we may as well give students perfect grades for papers we know are plagiarized.

Yes, I'm combining all four of those things into one journal entry. That's the only way to do it, you see.

Adult Swim County Fair Experience
First off, I wish to commend Adult Swim and William's Street on a great carnival. I had the privilege of experiencing Adult Swim's William Street County Fair and Expo "On Ice" during its visit to University of Texas in Arlington, which was utterly fantastic. That one day proved that going to UTA was the right choice. Everything at the fair was completely free; the only reason you couldn't just go at the claw machine constantly is because of the enormous lines. I got a bundle of free stuff, including a Meatwad squishball thing, a Harvey Birdman pen, a Bear (from Harvey Birdman) air freshener, a free T-Shirt, and... other... stuff. They had so many classic carnival games with Adult Swim themes (Whack-a-Chippy, Xavier's Tree of Infinite Sadness and Possibilities, a Family Guy pinball machine that was way too elaborate to have been made just for the fair, one of those "milk the cow" games in which the cow was MC Pee Pants), I only got to try most activities once. Possibly the most hilarious part was the "Heavy Petting Zoo Animal", which seems to be just a regular rabbit-suit person like you'd see at fairs and Chuck E. Cheese-type places, but behaves pretty much exactly like an animal suit character shouldn't. She pushed me out of the way when I walked in front of her. Once when someone was trying to putt the ball on the mini-golf course, she lay down on the course, completely blocking his putt. (If I were him, I would have just whacked the ball at her anyway.) Not to mention the fact that she often sat down somewhere, took the head off the costume, and picked at her teeth or did something equally unappealing.

Overall, it was the most fun I'd had in quite some time. Adult Swim is notable for not only being a great example of counterculture, but also a great example of counter-counterculture. Whereas the MTV Road Trip event that had visited school the previous day (and MTV in general) tried to seem as hip, cool, current, and urban as possible, Adult Swim went the complete opposite direction and put on an old fashioned county fair. To quote Master Shake, "That's not very urban."

Oh yes, and I had been wondering if they'd actually sculpt Chippy heads for the Whack-a-Chippy game. As it turned out, they were just the same bowling pin-shaped sculptures you'd find in any Whac-a-Mole [sic] game; they just recolored them to look like Chippy. Thus, Chippy was even more humorously distorted than usual. I loved it.

Fallen Angel Episode 1 Review
Like Valhalla Knights before it, I didn't expect a series to ever truly come of this Flash, despite all the time and effort already put into it. It had just been so long, and I've seen so many supposed "series" ostensibly abandoned. For example, what the crap happened to ALIAS: Sewer Mission? I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that Robbie Rob Robin Robert Robertson Roberts had finally finished the first episode. Was it worth the wait? If I had actually been waiting all this time, I'd probably have been disappointed, despite its high quality. However, as I had given up hope of expecting a continuation long ago, I was impressed.

Fallen Angel: Teaser was basically a plotless Mad Max ripoff (or homage, if you insist on being an apologist of derivative works) with terrific drawings and animation. Nothing original about it, but it was fast-paced, stylish, and elaborate. That alone put it way above most internet animation. I am not going to review this, as it's been so long since I first saw it, but I remember feeling quite inadequate about my own Flash skills after seeing it back in 2004. No, for now I will just be reviewing the three parts of the first "true" episode. Note that yes, I did really enjoy what I saw, despite all the flaws that popped out at me despite how much I wished they wouldn't.

Part 1 begins. The logos come up. Ooh, anticipatory feeling! Yay! That's quite positive. Jittery but consistently on-model frame-by-frame walk cycle. Yay again! Then... the opening monologue started. -_-;

"My name's Sarah. I'm 22 years old... and everyone I know is dead."
"I'm Mary. I'm walking down the street... and I have a friend named Donathan."

She continues "But it wasn't always like this." Well, of course it wasn't! If everyone you know is dead, that means they must have been alive at some point. There's a lot of redundant dialogue here, and practically every time Sarah spoke, it detracted from the otherwise sparkling footage I was seeing.

On the plus side, it's quite nice that creative camera angles were actually consistently used (as they were in the teaser). Yes, a lot of the more stylish/artsy shots were directly taken from other things, but at least it has style. Despite the polygoniness of the 3D models and the wobbliness of the FBF character animation, it's still awesome for net animation. And, you know, that's what it is: net animation. So hooray.

Now, let's talk about Sarah's design renovation, or "redesign" if you will. You will? That's a commonly used term anyway? Perfect. I liked anime-style Sarah way better; though drawn quite well, I find the new Sarah to look comparatively unappealing. That's just a stylistic preference of mine, however. I know ol' Robbo mentioned that he wanted to deliberately change Sarah's appearance in post-teaser installments so it wasn't so mangaloid. Though I prefer the anime style over the new one, I don't fault Robby for his change, and I'm sure he's more satisfied with it, as should be the many people on Newgrounds who consider anime style to be derivative and overused.

My rating: 4.5/5.0. Rounded up to 5 when voting.

Part 2 didn't have any of the previous part's bad wordtalking. The emergency broadcast lady's voice was rather monotonous, but that's how it usually is in real life. Something else that bothers me pops up here, though: very inconsistent outline thickness. In the teaser and the first part of this episode, the outlines were all pretty consistent, at least within their respective shots. Here, you see Sarah's head with rather thin outlines and her body with chunky, less detailed outlines. That could have been a conscious stylistic choice, but I found it jarring. It seemed... I hate to say "lazy"... to draw the outlines thicker and less detailed... but it was unnecessary and almost certainly done to save time and effort.

The animation was, overall, still fantastic. Motion blurs, easing when tweens are used, and a great 3D car crash. Unfortunately, I also didn't find it very engaging. I give it great points for great animation and derivative (but still present, and that's a bonus) style.

My rating: 4.2/5.0. Rounded down to 4 when voting.

Part 3 starts off with a glaring inconsistency. The first time we see the surfboard, it's already out through the window and you can see that it only skimmed Sarah's head. In the subsequent external shot, you see it's still stuck halfway through the windshield and definitely would have gone through Sarah's face at that position.

Then there's the blatantly expository exposition about EMPs from two military guys with the same voice and whose proportions constantly shift. "What the hell is an EMP?" one of them asks. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THIS STUFF. Furthermore, EMPS DON'T WORK THAT WAY.

Overall, this part was much more engaging than the second one (the explosions and disentegration are animated fantastically, and the atmospheric burnup was very impressive), but still has some really distracting flaws. For example, certain deaths that are certainly supposed to be dramatic, or at least "cool", just came off as comical due to the cartooniness of their character designs.

The scene of Sarah with a gun in her hand next to the corpses of what appear to be the people who rescued her is a nice piece of "I wonder how that happened" that was surprisingly effective. Why did she shoot them? It's not explained (yet), and it piques my curiosity. That's a very good thing.

However.... eaauurrghh, it ends with Sarah looking with a sad, determined expression at a picture of her deceased family. That's pretty much the most overused, narmiest thing you could possibly do when trying to make a scene dramatic. That really brought it down for me. -___- Yes, there's a short scene after that, though, of Sarah driving off into the distance as dramatic music swells up, which is still quite overused, but not quite discredited.

My rating: Undecided/5. So much greatness, but so much to detract from it. I didn't vote.

Overall, terrific work for an internet animation, despite the fact that it wouldn't stand up nearly as well if it were, say, on television due to so many elements being used so many times in previous works that they've just lost all effectiveness. Since this is Newgrounds, however, and such elaborate, stylish, and serious cartoons are hardly ever seen, it really stands out among its crowd. And a big congratulations to Robbie for staying with this project for a period of over four years. Four years. Now THAT is an accomplishment. This gives me hope that some day, we'll see the rest of Merry Melony and Sonic X: Cosmic Chase (both of which the creators insist they're still working on ).

Matters Pertaining to Youtube Poop
Let's take a step way, way down from Fallen Angel to the most flagrantly stupid and derivative type of internet animation there is: Youtube Poop. I'm sure most people reading this by now are aware of the fact that NAveryW and WalrusGuy are the same person (which I've never tried to hide). Please note that I'm not criticizing YTP for being stupid and derivative; stupidity can be quite hilarious, and of course, since poops are parodies, they're intentionally derivative by nature. Nothing classy about them, but that's why I started making them: as a vent for all the silly, stupid, often more profane jokes that would be out of place in my more "legitimate" animations. Of course my intentions have evolved since I started, but I don't believe my videos' style has.

I have gotten a lot of talk over my time as a pooper that I have jumped the shark, my videos aren't funny anymore, my style has changed, etc. This started practically as soon as I became popular, and it continues to this day. I have, however, gotten a larger than usual number of PMs telling me that my videos after my suspension and subsequent return to YouTube just aren't the same as my older ones, and my style has changed for the worse.

To that I respond that sure, they're not my best, but I still find them funny. I don't put a joke in a video unless I find it funny, and I don't put a video up unless it has a good number of jokes. Comparing The Valley Place What Contains Some Dinosaurs to The Only Mama Luigi Poop Anyone Has Ever Made or Arthur's Massive, Throbbing Hit, of course they're not as good. But compare it to Crap Has a Shadow and Definitely a Good Season for Potato Chips and I think most people (with the possible exception of big Death Note fans) will consider the most recent one the best. At least... I do... =/

Anyway, I always have and always will have had people who think that I've jumped the shark and people who think that my poops are still funny. That is, of course, unless I really do stop caring.

Enthalpy. .yplahtnE
I remember being really satisfied with the animation quality of Of the Couch, McDarnold's and Raptor Lincoln when I finished each of them. Compared to what I've done so far of the first episode of Enthalpy, I'm quite dissatisfied with all of them. But, hey, I still think they're funny and they're still better than the huge majority of internet Flashes, plus they show me how far I've come. It is truthfully hard for me to picture things that are worse than what I can currently do as still being good, even if I would have considered them awesome three or four years ago. I really look back on Raptor Lincoln now and, while I like the concept and jokes in general, I fell all "Awww, they should have been moving around more! They're so unnaturally stiff! The backgrounds look way too much like they just used a few preset Photoshop filters (which they did)! Nooo, that joke was used in Futurama! Zut alooors, I should have had more inbetween frames here!" and so on.

Enthalpy is, of course, not as ambitious as Fallen Angel. After all, I hope to release at least three episodes each year starting with the release of the first one. I'm mainly focusing on trying to make the humor shine through as much as possible instead of making everything look as detailed as I possibly can and taking years to make a single one. Sure, I could animate every episode with the detail of a Brackenwood cartoon and probably not animate more than a couple before I get tired of them and don't even bother finishing. I've animated a couple of Brackenwood-style short shots in the past to see if I could, and I feel I succeeded pretty well (though I'm not saying I'm quite as good as Adam Phillips yet). They just take way too much time to be feasible for a comedy series in which the main focus is comedy and occasionally action and drama.

That's not to say it doesn't have a whole bunch of frame-by-frame animation. It does, and a lot of it is probably so smooth that most people will not recognize where it's FBF and where it's tweened. It also does have a lot of detail in certain places, but only where I find it important to lavish certain parts with detail. Since the main focus is to be funny, a lot of the time just having a character standing there with no movement but lip flap and head bobbing works for what I'm trying to achieve. It's not wow-dazzle stuff for the most part, but I hope that there at least enough segments that make people think "Wow, that's really good" to get at least a 4.10/5.00.

Oh yeah, and Enthalpy's main website should be up relatively soon. In the mean time, here's a shot from the beginning of the first episode. It's cropped for size, of course.

First off, the reason most people are checking my Newgrounds account as of late: yes, my WalrusGuy account on YouTube is back up. Unfortunately, my NAveryW account is not. I suppose I'll try to contact YouTube to have them restore it manually.

Second, there appears to have been some misunderstanding about my Cory in the House post. No, I don't think that they deliberately copied me. When I said that they "stole my joke", I didn't really mean it literally and I suppose I should have made that clearer. What upset me was that a joke that I came up with and really liked was so similar to a joke made on the worst Disney Channel Original Series ever. That should be a pretty big blow to anyone.

As for Enthalpy, I'm making some good progress and am over a third of the way finished with the first episode (at least in terms of its length; the latter half of the episode will certainly take longer to animate than the first). Also, as I've said before, I'm not going to upload the first episode until I'm almost finished with the second one. This is to make sure I don't slack off with future installments. Thus, don't expect Enthalpy out before 2009. However, the official site and probably an alpha will be up rather soon.

I sometimes watch crappy shows for the sake of laughing at their crappiness, or sometimes because I come up with great ideas that stem from their terrible, cliché ideas. I have probably seen far more episodes of Cory in the House than anyone else above the age of twelve has without becoming completely braindead.

The episode that came on tonight, "Presidential Seal", went beyond the show's usual unoriginal, unfunny slop into something utterly horrendous: IT STOLE ONE OF MY JOKES. Not just a simple one-liner that just anyone could have thought of, but... Well, just watch my video Raptor Lincoln at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
278915 and then watch a clip I recorded from the episode at http://projectenthalpy.com/cory.avi for comparison.

This is completely inexcusable. I mean, yes, they may have indeed come up with the joke themselves completely independent from my Flash. And yes, Raptor Lincoln was rather derivative; it was intentionally quite similar to Aqua Teen Hunger Force (as an homage, mind you) and I unintentionally took a joke fromFuturama (the one about all the buttons doing the same thing; I was quite disappointed when I realized that joke had already been done in something I had already seen, as that was my favorite joke in the 'toon).

If we both came up with the same idea independently, that's a pretty big blow to me. That means that I came up with a joke WORTHY OF CORY IN THE HOUSE.

I HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON WITH THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE CORY IN THE MOTHERFRAKKING HOUSE.

I... want... to die.

There is, of course, also the small chance that whoever wrote that part into the script saw Raptor Lincoln and either put that in deliberately as a plagiarism/homage or forgot that someone else had already done it like I did with the Futurama joke. If so, I'm not really sure how to feel. I'd probably be glad, with the exception of the fact that I didn't get any credit for the joke (though I really don't want to see my name in the credits of Cory in the House), except for the fact that my idea was used in THE ABSOLUTE WORST DISNEY CHANNEL ORIGINAL SERIES EVER. That's So Raven is utterly masterful compared to this spin-off.

Also worth mentioning: Watch the beginning of this episode ("Presidential Seal"). Anyone familiar with Seinfeld will be able to tell that Cory's writers aren't above shameless ripoffs.

I have been getting countless messages everywhere that it's possible to get them asking me whether YouTube accounts claiming to be me are actually mine. Since my suspension from YouTube, several accounts (WalrusGuyAlt, WalrusGuyReborn, etc.) have claimed that they're me.

I am trying to talk to Colgate about fair use and such and allowing me to get my account back up, even if it means that I still need to remove my Dr. Rabbit poops. If I am unable to get my original WalrusGuy account back, I will not create an alternate account. I will simply stop pooping.

There is a possibility that I may change my mind, but for now, if you see an account claiming to be WalrusGuy and it's not WalrusGuy, it's a lie.

Just so comments about WalrusGuy being suspended from YouTube don't leak into my previous irrelevant blog post (too late, of course), I suppose it's necessary to post about this.

Yes, my three YouTube accounts, including WalrusGuy and NAveryW, have been suspended from YouTube because of Dr. Rabbit footage on my WalrusGuy account. Colgate-Palmolive has taken down one too many of my videos and my accounts were suspended.

I don't intend to just let this go; I will contact Colgate-Palmolive and try to reason with them tomorrow. However, if I can't get my WalrusGuy account returned (along with my others), I'm not going to start an alternate account. I shall leave poopery behind and focus only on original material.

I just got back from Borders, where I overheard an older teenager explain why the anime Death Note was so awesome to a younger teenager, going into a good deal of information about the plot. Unfortunately, not only did he leave out a lot of important things, but various things he seemed to just be making up for the sake of pretending he knew what he was talking about. I felt like interjecting and correcting that guy several times, but part of me found what he was saying too hilarious for me to interfere.

"And you can write, like... any cause of death, and it'll ACTUALLY HAPPEN! I mean, like if you wrote that a METEOR would fall on someone's head and kill him, then a meteor would ACTUALLY FALL ON HIS HEAD AND KILL HIM!"

"And his girlfriend, who's this really hot blond chick, has shinigami eyes that literally let her see EVERYTHING! Like if you look at someone's face, they'll tell you EVERYTHING about them. How good or bad they are, what their name is, like, everything they'll do within the next, like, five years..."

What? And yes, it gets crazier.

"So now this kid's going after him, I think he calls himself N. No, wait... yeah, I think it's N. And he's like.... a SUPER GENIUS, I mean he, like, graduated from college at age THREE, and now he's 14 and he's like the smartest person on the PLANET... I think his name's... like... Miki or something... Yeah, so Miki's all like, [In a weird voice that in no way resembles Near's voice from either the Japanese or English dubs] 'My next plan to catch Kira will be...' It's really awesome."

Yes, I'll admit Death Note has a somewhat complex plot and that guy said he only came in halfway through, but everything is spelled out as overtly as possible through conversations and internal monologues. For a "really awesome" show, that guy didn't seem to be paying much attention to it.

Of course, neither did the director of the show, apparently, considering in the second director's cut episode that aired a few days ago, a part was added in which Mikami used the Death Note to make a man snap his neck by turning all the way around really, really fast... I tried doing that, but I couldn't even get a decent whiplash.

DISCLAIMER: When reading this post, you may notice I used the word "however" quite excessively. I like that word.

Yesterday I bought the much-anticipated (and much-delayed) Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and beat it in about three hours. This doesn't include finding all of the Teen Girl Squad cards or the Snake Boxer 5 manual pages, but it does mean that I beat the game while finding some of the extras along the way in quite a short amount of time in terms of gameplay. And since the gameplay length is entirely dependent upon how long it takes you to figure out the puzzles, I bet it would take less than an hour to beat if one were to play it all the way through knowing all the puzzles and skipping through the dialogue.

What does this mean? It means my main obstacle developing for the Nintendo DS is not a factor for WiiWare. Readers of my past news posts will know that I have been making a homebrew game for the DS that I had hoped to get published by an independent game publishing company such as O3 Entertainment once done. However, professional video games one finds in stores are different from casual online games. Store-bought games are expected to last several hours or the player will feel cheated. I've never made a game that would take a very long time to complete, so motivating myself to work on a lengthy project was rather daunting.

However, it's different with WiiWare, where you can make ephemeral titles for low, low prices. Defend Your Castle is a perfect example of a title that's simple as the dickens, costs only five dollars, and made it as a launch title for WiiWare. I'd really have preferred to make a Wii title from the beginning, as you can do a lot more with the Wii's hardware. However, at the time I started with homebrew, the Wii had not been successfully cracked yet.

I looked again yesterday, however, and the Wii homebrew community has 'sploded. Executing homebrew applications on an unmodded Wii is now possible for anyone who has Twilight Princess, an SD card, and a computer that can read/write to an SD card. Oh yeah, and you need a Wii. I have all of those things, and was able to get some homebrew games up and running rather quickly. I even made a quick, simple application myself in a couple of minutes (using a template, of course) and got it up without a problem.

Therefore, I am now directing my game developing attention to WiiWare. Since I'm already familiar with the C++ necessary for making computer and DS games, Wii development shouldn't be THAT difficult... right? Plus I can do all kinds of great stuff with the Wii that DS homebrew can't do. For example, cutscenes. The DS libs I was using can't integrate movie files directly into the .NDS, but with the Wii, that's not a problem! And, of course, there's the improved graphics capabilities.

Anyone reading this message who has the necessary equipment will probably be able to play a simple Wii game I've made by the end of the month. Once I'm comfortable with the Wii libraries, I intend to start working on Nicholas' Wiird Adventure, a game similar in style and length to Nicholas' Weird Adventure 2. Of course, it'll have improved graphics and take advantage of the Wii's unique capabilities in some way. Plus I intend to add some mini-games to give it some longevity after the initial game's over. When the game is finished, I intend to pitch it to some game publishing studios and try to get it published as an official low priced WiiWare title. If I can't get it published that way, I suppose I'll just release it as freeware. And no, I'm not abandoning the DS title, but I never got past making the initial engine anyway and I feel that I should wait to make it until I've made some shorter console games.

------------------------

Now, on to Enthalpy. Progress is coming along rather nicely on the first episode, though I don't expect it to be finished before 2009. The first one has some really elaborate 3D scenes and an aerial combat sequence that I hope to get looking as professional as possible. So far, I'm confident that it looks better than anything I've previously made.
I'd like to ask you (that's right! YOU, not any of the other people reading this post!) something about Enthalpy. I've wanted to do some kind of idiosyncratic episode naming for the series. In other words, every episode's title has something relating it to the other titles. For example, early episodes of The Drew Carey Show were all sciency ("The Joining of Two Unlike Elements is a Mixture", "Nature Abhors a Vacuum"), though this stopped with the episode "Science Names Suck". Every episode of Futurama (and most of The Simpsons) has a pun for a title. Every episode of Cowboy Bebop has a musical title. Every episode of Welcome to the NHK has a title of "Welcome to the ____".

I wanted Enthalpy to have some sort of idiosyncratic naming convention, but I'm having a hard time with it. My idea was to have every episode be a portmanteau; for example, the second episode will feature Sea-Monkey type creatures called Shrimpanzees (or Shrimpanions; I haven't decided which yet), and that will work quite well as a portmantitle. Another episode somewhere down the line will feature a Battle Bots parody called "Bot Battles", or "Bottles" for short. However, certain titles aren't that easy to make portmanteaus with. For example, the first episode involves a parody of a certain well-known rabbit dentist. The easiest title would be "Bright Smiles", which I could combine into... "Briles"? Furthermore, somewhere down the line, I have a plot for an episode I'm really looking forward to making that centers around Pokémon. "Pokémon" is already a portmanteau of "Pocket Monsters", so I'm set there, but I'd also really like to use "Zbtb7" as the title (for obvious reasons).

Does anyone have a good idea for an idiosyncratic naming convention Enthalpy can use that will support all these ideas?

Aaand that's it for this post. I look forward to stuff.