Exposing my socks to the world

AsylumLAN is having their three-year three day anniversary party starting tomorrow evening, and crummysocks.com will be there organizing a 5 game cross-genre Super Nintendo competition. I’ve made a special trophy to award to the winner.

It all started with generic trophy with a Camaro on top (I got a deal on it because someone else had ordered it from here and never picked it up) and an ASCII Pad that I found at the local goodwill for $0.25. I took the controler apart and painted the shell gold. I decided to leave the buttons their original colors, mostly because the sliders for turbo and autofire are color coded, and I painted over the labels (I actually did that on purpose).

Now, since the controller still works, I wanted the winner to be able to easily take it off and put it on the base. As cool as it might look, it’s a little difficult to play Super Nintendo games for any length of time when it has a two pound weight on it. Since I couldn’t find Velcro in this city for some reason, I opted to use some craft magnets to attach the two pieces of the unit together.

And there you have it! It’s a fairly straighforward project, but the end result actually turned out better than I thought it would.

Video games are known for puttng the characters in some… well, let’s just call them improbable situations. When people ask me for help, I find myself putting words together in ways that, taken out of context, might make me sound like I’ve been eating too much paint.

Here are some examples (I’ll give you some bonus points if you can name the games they’re from):

1. “First, defeat the Ninja beating up the old man, then take his money to the pizza delivery man in the sewer to get the pizza.”
2. “Throw the turnip at the fish.”
3. “Before you go up the stairs, get the pork chop in the wall.”
4. “You can kill that ghost by throwing a hammer at it.”
5. “It is possible to ride the snakes to the top of the room, but it’s not easy.”
6. “Right after you go through the parking garage, there’s a lady on an awning that wants to go to the Tennis Court.”
7. “You’ll have to use your hammer to clear out a section of forest.”
8. “When he winks at you, punch him in the face to get a star.”
9. “If you give him some dried meat, he’ll join your party.”
10. “All you have to do is type the words that appear on the zombie’s chest to kill it.”

And the list just keeps going. This is just the tip of the iceberg. As long as the people who make games insist on putting the characters into these bizarre situations, I’m stuck trying to describe them to people while simultaneously trying to make myself not look like a huge dork… If such a thing is possible.

It’s Halloween again, and what better way to celebrate than playing Castlevania all day?

Trick or Treat indeed!

Stage Select has just gone through a name change, but the site’s just as good as ever. If you’ve never checked it out, you really need to.

Stage Select is a site for video game collectors to get together to track/trade/discuss video games, as well as just about anything else. It’s a great site with some great people.

Recommended!

I decided that the best way to apply to a PC game maker was to create a box the same size and shape of a PC game box and include the resume inside as the ‘instruction manual.’

For this project I used the following materials, feel free to substitute if you’re following along at home:

1 Computer
1 Old Game Box
1 [EvL]exitzer0
1 pizza
1 2L bottle of Mt. Dew
1 Photoshop
1 Kinko’s
1 Post Office
1 Tape Measure
1 X-Acto Blade
1 Glue Stick
1 Roll of Clear Tape
1 Sharpie
1 Digital Camera
1 Pizza Cutter
1 Resume and Cover Letter

One of the first things I had to do was to make sure what size my box image would be, and for that I sacrificed the box from one of the worst games I own, Nexagon Deathmatch. I disassembled the box and determined that I needed to make an image that was about 10 by 13 inches, making allowances for the flaps and folds. I didn’t make allowances for the front flap that a lot of game boxes have for a couple of reasons, but it was mostly because Kinko’s wasn’t able to print on anything bigger than 11 by 17 inches.

After I took my measurements, I contacted a friend who knows much more Photoshop alchemy than I do. We decided ahead of time that payment would be some pizza from a local place and some Mt. Dew. With that out of the way, we got down to work. We pulled together an hand drawn portrait of me courtesy of the fine folks at I.N.R.I.net, got a few ‘action shots’ of me with the digital camera, and tossed around a few ideas and after several hours ended up with a finished product.

Any job seeker should have at the very least a generic resume ready at all times that can be tailored to whatever specific company you are sending it to. I took my existing resume, shrunk the pages down to 5 by 7 inches, adjusted page breaks so that each section of my resume was on a different page and cropped the box so that I had an appropriate cover image.

Now that we did all the prep work, including checking the resume for typos and errors, it’s time to go off to the printers!

I decided to go to Kinko’s because they claim that they can print out just about anything on just about anything. For the box, I picked out the biggest heaviest glossy paper that they had in a bright white. For the manual, I had them use their normal paper, cut down to size, spiral bound, and add a clear plastic cover and a black vinyl back. They were kind of busy when I went in, so it took them about two and a half hours, but the results were very satisfactory.

After picking up the printed materials, I brought them home and lined up the old Nexagon box with the printout of the new box, taped it down and traced the outline with the X-Acto knife. This got the picture down to the exact shape I needed to assemble the box.

The hardest part was figuring out how I was going to fold the box, and how to keep the folds straight since I was really only going to get one shot at this. I figured that the best way to get the folds correct was to use a tape measure as a guide and roll down the side of the tape with a pizza cutter to score the edge and make a perfect fold. It worked like a charm. Then I just glued the loose edges together, waited a few minutes, and then had a completed box on my hands.

Completed box front
Completed box back

All that was left to do was to see if the manual fit in the box, pack it up, and mail it off. I opted for the 2-3 day Priority Mail and got it off to the proper people. Now I just have to wait it out and see if I hear anything back on it. I’ll keep this space updated with the latest happenings.

I know I know, the front page has gotten kind of stale. My job hunt, unfortunately, it taking up all my free time lately. For a time waster, check out this Flash game.

----------------------------------------------------
|                   |    Xx  xX|                   |
|                   | xxXxxXXxx|      Greetings    |
|                   -----------         From       |
|                           |         The World    |
|                      _____|_           Of        |
|                     [_______]      Crummysocks!  |
|                         |                        |
|                        /                         |
|                       /                          |
|                      /                           |
|                     |                            |
|            _________|___                         |
|           [ +  - -  o o ]                        |
----------------------------------------------------

To give you a taste of my video game powers, I’ve put together a short video available here.

Yes, there is a larger version available, but I don’t have the bandwidth to host it. Until I can find a place, you’ll have to settle for this.

Sorry, can’t talk now. Project in the works.

Details forthcoming.

I’m on housesitting detail until the 22nd, so here’s a little something to occupy your time: Freaky Game.