GameSpite.net – Verbal Spew

I have been wrestling with a quandary these past few days. And with allergies as well. You’d think after living without a problem for two decades in West Texas, the allergen capital of America, I’d have built up quite a resistance to particulate-induced sniffles, but it is not so. Something about San Francisco has broken through my defenses and reduced me to a runny-nosed heap of headaches. I blame the Blue Angels, whose low-flying antics coincided precisely with the onset of my bleariness. Perhaps noise is not the only pollution they have inflicted upon our fair city, is all I’m saying.

The other, and much bigger, crisis which has been pinning me to the mat of existence is that of the dreaded, long-overdue ToastyFrog ‘Zine Issue 6. Should I just admit defeat, I’ve wondered for the past few months? Every weekend I sit down and try to work on the layout and art, and every weekend I come away with nothing. Today, I’ve made my final decision, as you might have gathered from the title of this post.

I can rattle off a list of reasons for the stupid thing’s failure to launch, but none of it really matters. What does matter is that I’m not a fan of ripping people off, so I’ll be putting together a plan to make sure things get all even-steven for everyone. So please do hold off on mailing me about refunds for the moment — I’d prefer to keep all that info together.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting the content of the issue on the site for the remainder of the month. I finished the text for Issue Six half a year ago, and while I don’t think it’s good enough to justify being sold it seems OK being offered for free. And I might as well make it available while it’s still slightly relevant.

My apologies to all involved. Of all the failed ventures to have sprung like a malformed Athena from the brow of this website, this is definitely the most demoralizing.

These are starting to become irredeemably obscure, sorry. Technically I kind of cheated on this one — the endings in Simon’s Quest don’t really correspond to the quality of your performance. The only positive ending is the one you get if you take more than two weeks. If you blast through the game in less than a week of game time, Dracula returns; if you do a fairly decent job of finishing, Simon bites it. Whatever; in my eyes the worst ending is the “Dracula returns again” one.

I’m pretty sure the people who made Simon’s Quest were a bunch of misanthropes. We’ve all sort of taken for granted the notion that the game’s bizarre and misleading clues were mistranslations, but actually, no — the original Japanese dialogue was useless, too. In fact, Castlevania II may be the most accurate 8-bit translation ever. No, I don’t get it, either.

I know, I know, obvious joke that’s already sort of been done before. I’m just covering my bases here. The sooner I work through this odd “Worst Ending” fixation I have the sooner it’ll all be over and we can move along to happier experiences.

No, really, this isn’t a series. I can’t really think of that many games with multiple endings, and I’ve played only a tiny fraction of them. Go on home, nothing more to see here.

It occured to me after I finished that the cereal kinda looks more like Lavos spikes than Crono hair, but I don’t think I should be held responsible for Toriyama’s fixation with pointy edges.

So I drew a comic, preying upon the eternal fear that the weird waves emitted from cell phones cause sterility. I’m willing to believe it — a cell phone can make a computer flake out just by sitting there waiting for a call, and I’m pretty sure that our essential human plumbing is a lot more delicate than your average Dell.

The comic’s unfortunately kind of a disaster, since I drew it oekaki style (hoping it would speed things up) but was compelled to shade it properly. This caused it to take nearly as long to draw as a normal comic — plus the sketchy style inflated the file size so much I had to scale it down pretty painfully.

Don’t worry too much about the “#1″ at the end of the title. I don’t intend to turn Worst Ending into a series, I’m just leaving my options open.