DANK ART
BBH is trying different streaming things to keep things fresh and fun and on Thursday evening he tried a raffle-style Arcade request event. If you were selected you got to request any arcade game you liked and it was a lot of fun for me as I got to see a bunch of fun games and draw them. The highlight for me was watching BBH play thru Gunsmoke which is one of my favourite arcade games from my childhood though he was unable to credit clear the game (though he did say he had a video up on his youtube doing that). Currently theres one of those 60-in-1 arcade cocktail cabs in my neighbourhood but it’s in the local vape shop. I don’t really vape so I have no business to go in there to sit on their machine all day popping off game after game so I’m stuck playing the NES port I have for the meantime.
I was very happy BBH came back in the week with this style of stream because as much as I love the randomness of a roulette stream it can be so unpredictable that strange odds that nothing great will come up and only strange and questionable games will…
… You know I’m just going to keep drifting this joke as much as I can. Call me Crazy, but one thing I enjoy is taxiing a joke around because I enjoy seeing their reactions.
Hydlide Special! Macaw spent a whole morning playing thru the PC98 version of Hydlide which is a huge improvement from the crappy NES version most of us got stuck playing. I for one am kind of a huge Hydlide fan as it was a game that one of the kids in my neighbourhood owned and sadly when I was over it was the only game she’d let me play. Serious. That girl had Hydlide and Bart vs The Space Mutants. That’s a quality collection right there.
This version of Hydlide actually has a save file system and a bunch of other things going right for it where the NES port didn’t. I enjoy the game because it’s an example of a very early RPG before the term really game into play and it’s not all that frustrating to play once you know how to play it. The graphics are better in the PC98 version so if you can check out the vod Macaw has up of it now you can see it’s still Hydlide but Hydlide turned up to 11.
I had a really great time checking out ex_Mortis’s stream this week as he was playing around with a bunch of PC Engine games. He was playing through a fan translation of Energy which is also known as Ashe on the PC98. Energy is a very poor port of Ashe, but for what it is it’s still a fun game to pick up despite a few issues. He hooked me up with the fan translation too which I hope to play thru myself in a few more weeks on Sunday, so make sure you tune in to watch that.
Mortis took a few more PC Engine game recommendations from me and it was overall a fun evening. I stayed up way too late watching & working away at my Dank Zine and made a few new friends in chat.
I have this story about why I do Dank Art. I am a trained artist and I have seen some success selling my work and I am well recognized in my community. However, since 2007 I had to deal with a lot of life challenges when I first started to get sick. I could tell there was something wrong with me, but no matter how many doctor visits and check ups I had they couldn’t determine why I was feeling the way I was. It wasn’t until one day I collapsed at work that I knew something more serious was going on.
I was diagnosed with Grave’s Disease which is a common autoimmune disease that effects my thyroid. After seeing a lot of doctors and specialists and reading about what I had, I opted to have mine treated with drug therapy and I have been very healthy since though a lot of stress of dealing with doctors and working with a job and a relationship that wasn’t supportive took a lot out of me. It wasn’t until 2014 that I had enough and had to start making huge changes in my life to not only take control of my disease but to get my life back.
My art has always been there for me when friends couldn’t. I had already made a fun hobby of sketching things along my friends streams and one of the biggest delights I got was hearing them get excited to look at the art I made them. Seeing people enjoying my work was a lot of fun and I started to forget about a lot of bad stuff and just focused on making people happy with my work.
I made this Dank Art for Ian AKA: @pxlsicle because he’s been going thru some sickness and hard times. Often when your down a lot of things can seem terrible and it’s easy to lose sight of where you want to go. The best thing that you can do to get out of this is to focus on what you can do for other people or give what you can, even if what your giving is something tiny. Its a tremendous feeling to see someone enjoy your work which is why I always try to give away as much Dank Art as I can.
Aquas was playing more Ghosts n Demons this week as he’s playing the game in SGDQ and just recently there has been a new patch for the game. I myself am a fan of the Ghouls’ series though I am nowhere near being an expert like Aquas is. Make sure you catch him playing this summer at the event and follow his journey by tuning in when he’s practicing.
There were a few more Macaw Dank Arts as Macaw streams like the world is going to explode tomorrow. The best thing about Macaw’s streams is that he can take things you’d normally think would end up in someone’s computer room trash bin and gets excited to play it. He took up this daunting risk of playing C64 emulated games in the week which I was very excited to see having a huge history with that system as a small child. I am unsure if Macaw has ever touched a C64 but one thing I will admit about that system is you better not be going anywhere if you are committing to playing it. Once you get into the game itself it’s not that bad, but the loading of some of those very early games was tremendous. I remember being over a my pal Jason’s place and firing up the C64 and then him saying “HEY WANNA SMOKE CIGARETTES WHILE WE WAIT?” and the onslaught of bad choices that followed while waiting for some stuff to start up. We wrote a lot of bad Star Trek fan fiction waiting for some garbage to load. I still have those printed off the cruddy dot matrix printer he had somewhere. Hell will be had if I ever find and post those somewhere.
Macaw also had a raffle of sorts on his stream one day and he played thru Cadillacs & Dinosaurs as well as DD Crew. I wish I had more time to stream stuff like Macaw does, but then where would I find the time to make all this Dank Art?