From this, you may be able to hypothesize that I liked Trigun a lot in high school. Thanks to my incredibly forward-looking tagging and sorting system, all sorts of information about this tiny .SWF was easy to locate! Just kidding, it’s all a god damn mess. As near as I can tell, this came about sometime after moving to Mortisland.com (most likely coinciding exactly with it!) but before 2003? There was this one white/blue/orange site back then that had what I thought was the sickest Flash intro video on its doorstep. Because websites need intro videos, of course. So I must have tried to compete and came up with this. It’s pretty good! 40 FPS not the best frame rate, but it’s better than my beginnings. This also shows some of the starts of my fascinating with “machines looking like they are breaking” aesthetic with both the song choice and the color separation blip at the end.
Category: Flash
Enter The Kefka by Mido Valoryn
This one comes from fan Mido Valoryn who I think was more into 8-bit Theater than Mortisland specifically. As always, I didn’t keep very careful notes so I don’t have much info about it other than what I just watched. He used a much higher framerate than I usually did which is something I prefer. For the longest time, I stuck with 24 and other lower ones because That’s How Animation Works. I’m sure Mido will see this and have more to say about it himself. Anyway, enjoy!
Original Intro
I’m not going to watch this one myself because I’m scared of how it might look!
Original Air Date: TBD
Black Mage vs Magus (Boy vs Sprite 2.5) by CRC
This is by an intrepid dude internet-named CRC . It fits in between the second and third Boy vs Sprite things taking the Black Mage character from 8-bit Theater into new and exciting situations. It was startlingly flattering to see fan work like this. I don’t remember if I saw this before I was planning BvS3 or not. I’m pretty sure I did see this and then go forward with BvS3. Anyway, enjoy!
Continue reading Black Mage vs Magus (Boy vs Sprite 2.5) by CRC
Red Mage vs White Mage
I give this one a moderate endorsement. It’s a pretty passable joke with all the stupid dramatic build up. Although, maybe I thought the build up was legitimately cool and awesome at the time. I was unable to sift through my disgusting pile of digital paperwork to locate the date on this one but I’ll come back to it. It’s very likely this was before Kefka 2 or Super Mario Blitz. It features some nice little tweens and toy effects that I enjoyed at the time.
Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED
Mortis vs Dark Age of Camelot
Wow! What craft! After having just looked at the original, this one blows me away with how much it improved. Smooth tweens, interesting music-based pacing, less grating jokes. Truly a child on top of his game. This video was finished and posted on December 18, 2001 at 11:01 am PST. That’s right around when Final Fantasy X and DAoC first released. I spent the majority of my winter vacation playing both simultaneously. It was easy to leave a minstrel on the mana regeneration song and actually playing FFX while everyone else in the group did all the work. Top class.
Also mind-blowing: my old, old, old site actually still exists, preserved at the moment I transitioned to my own domain. I discovered this fact while sifting through digital file folders trying to pinpoint this video’s date. (Also I should try to find the original “air dates” for all these things and add some cataloging info.) Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any record of the single-column-in-HTML version of the original-original site. I would have liked to see what stupid things I had to say about how school totally sucks. Thinking about it now, it was pretty audacious to throw together a stupid website and copy a bunch of other nerds from the internet and actually get a small following. I actually raised enough money as an unemployed slacker to get my own domain name and pay for hosting for a number of years just through donations. What happened to that guy who didn’t know enough to realize things were out of his reach? Who did things just because he found them interesting? We should try to get that guy back.
This got long and not particularly related to Dark Age of Camelot.
Note: I’m leaving the Flash version of this up here too because apparently the YouTube version is too hot for Germany to handle.
Original Air Date: 12.18.2001
Mortis vs Asheron’s Call
This one was real harsh to re-watch. I think I’d describe my 15-16 year old self as “difficult to stomach” with some qualifiers about how the kid probably meant well. There used to be this guild in Asheron’s Call on Frostfell (maybe?) that I somehow ran across in my AC-playing days. They were known as Vitae Rising and their website is now some squatted Japanese domain. The guild (monarch, in AC terms) leader, Hearding, had created a few Asheron-related Flash movies and I thought that was simply the coolest. It’s likely that I server-stalked them for quite a while before actually asking to join them. Anyway, I pretty much completely copied a type of video that Hearding made with both this and the DAoC death reel.
Oh man. A wave of remembrances. The other website I was absolutely enamored with was WTFman.com which apparently still exists but has not been updated for quite a while. Looking at those videos was my gateway to two years of Flash obsession. Also WTFman’s current layout is devastatingly similar to the original Mortisland site design. Because I copied it. It’s kind of startling how blatantly it was copied.
Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED
In case you’re curious, the song is Black Bugs by Regurgitator.
Final Fantasy vs Final Fantasy 7
Well. We were all young once. Right? Somehow I have found this one the most difficult to watch so far. I obviously thought it was funny at the time or I wouldn’t have put effort into it. The world may never know why though. On the Newgrounds page for this one, it mentions that I like FF and FF7 equally. Modern day me has to disagree. FF is fairly unplayable today. It’s very archaic. FF7 is also very archaic but less so. In conclusion, they’re both bad games?
Also, a note: a bunch of comments were removed due to user error. I have now rectified that problem. This site gets a surprising amount of spam bots attacking it and some legit comments were lost in the struggle. I should probably slap a captcha on the comment form. But a different day.
Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED
Black Belt Vs Thief
I very nearly misspelled Thief in the title just now. Embarrassing.
Man! Look at the production values on this one! This is the second short I ever made and it it a whole hell of a lot better than I remember it being. Figuring out that higher frame rates look better, rotating guys, better tweens in general. Still didn’t quite master editing images in MS Paint though. A few white pixels peeking out there. I remember thinking how I was going to blow everyone’s minds!! when the Mortal Kombat song kicks in and the guys start running around. Even though breaking the Final Fantasy battle system convention was the exact same joke from the original. Maybe I thought record scratches were still novel and interesting. It is still the default dimensions for a Flash animation. Adorable.
I just went digging a little deeper through my Ye Olde Flashe Shite folder and there is a lot of stuff in there. A couple unfinished, unreleased things. Also lots of 8-bit Theater derivative jokes.
Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED
AYB vs FF
I would wager this is probably the fourth thing I made, if I were a betting man. I probably thought it was oh so clever at the time. The Lion King soundtrack is still real great.
Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED