Road to Justice: Superman

Superman
Directed by: Richard Donner
Starring: Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Marlon Brando
Released: 1978
Watched: September 10th, 2015

Thoughts Before: I watched this one a long time ago along with the sequel. Having watched them back to back I can't really remember what happened in each of the movies. I do remember liking them, and Christopher Reeve makes a damn fine Superman. A Justice League movie starring Adam West, Lynda Carter and Christopher Reeve, that could have been awesome. Anyway, after seeing this I'm sure I'll believe a man can fly.

ROM Hacking Diary - Entry Three

A ton of busy work later and I finally accomplished adding in every evolution introduced in generation four! ... With some minor exceptions. First, some of the sprites didn't really hold up very well during the conversion process. Almost all of them were "good enough" (I'm still hoping to find some way to fix them but for now, eh) except for Gallade. Just... Look at him.

ROM Hacking Diary - Entry Two

Huzzah! One of my first major hurdles was passed today, adding in new Pokemon. Wow, what a bitch that turned out to be. I don't want to add in new Pokemon, but as Fire Red is a third generation game any Pokemon introduced from the fourth generation up are left out. Really, I just want to add evolutions of Pokemon already present in the game.

The first problem is the size of the sprites in the DS era of Pokemon games are larger than the GBA games, which is an obvious first problem. Luckily I found a complete database of DS era sprites resized without artifacts on the Pokecommunity, a great forum that I've sporadically followed since I've had internet access really.

Fangasm: The Secret of Cinnabar Mansion

The Secret of Cinnabar Mansion
1 Player
System: PC
Developer: Involuntary Twitch
Year of Release: 2015
Download Here

Made for the website Relic Castle's Game Jam 2015, The Secret of Cinnabar Mansion is a short plot-centric Pokemon fan game made with RPG Maker. Anyone who knows about early Pokemon lore knows what the titular secret is in reference to, the creation of Mewtwo. So from the get go it's kind of obvious what you're getting into. Is this short little game worth your time?

ROMhacking Diary - Entry One

Obviously, I love video games, so it stands to reason that for as long as I can recall I've wanted to make my own. I've made small attempts in the past, reading through a book for making games in Flash, messing around with RPG Maker XP, but I've never made any real headway. Recently I decided to actually do something, anything. Somehow ROM hacking Pokemon Fire Red was what I ended up looking into. For several weeks I read through as many beginner's guides and tutorials that I could find, and finally I feel comfortable starting.

Road to Justice: The New Original Wonder Woman

The New Original Wonder Woman Plus Episode 2
Directed by: Leonard Horn/Barry Crane
Starring: Lynda Carter, Lyle Waggoner, Christine Belford, Lynda Day George
Released: 1975/1976
Watched: August 31st, 2015

Thoughts Before: Originally I wanted to watch the 1974 Wonder Woman movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby, but it apparently wasn't very Wonder Woman-y and I couldn't easily find a copy. Instead we went with the pilot for the show that actually got made. I looked up a list of the "best" episodes of the show, and the second one was among the list, so we threw those in as well. All I know about this show is Wonder Woman twirling to transform, which didn't show up until later in the show apparently. I don't really have any thoughts about this show, other than I'm kind of excited to finally watch a bit of it.

Summer of Screams: Man-Thing (Fear #10-19)

Man-Thing (Adventures into Fear #10-19)
Written by Gerry Conway (10), Steve Gerber (11-19)
Drawn by Harry Chaykin (10), Rich Buckler (11), Jim Starlin (12), Val Mayerik (13-19)
Published by Marvel
Released 1972

Man-Thing is a character I wasn't too familiar with. Sure I knew that which knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing, but beyond that I wasn't too familiar with the big slimy oaf. First appearing in Adventures into Fear, which started out as just Fear for the first nine issues (which look to be just reprints of older stories), the book started focusing on Man-Thing with issue ten. There were still a couple back up stories, mostly fairly lame horror stories, but wound up phasing them out completely by issue fifteen. For ten issues Man-Thing carried the book, setting up the character rather effectively. The real main character though has to be the narration, Man-Thing doesn't think in a traditional manner of speaking, and these narrations boxes drive that point home really well.

Road to Justice: Batman '66

Batman
Directed by: Leslie H. Martinson
Starring: Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin
Released: 1966
Watched: August 24th, 2015

Thoughts Before: I haven't seen this one, though I do have a basic familiarity with the most common tropes of this show. Knowing that there is going to be an overdose of cheese I think it should be easier to take. Still expecting to groan more than anything though.

Road to Justice

I know I'm still in the middle of Summer of Screams, which I hope to still get a few more entries in even if it slips a bit into September, but time is of the essence. On March 28th, 2016 Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice is coming to theaters, and on that day we will be ready. This is the Road to Justice.

Road to Justice Schedule

For no good reason a friend and I have planned out a thirty one week long movie marathon, to watch every single DC related movie before Dawn of Justice comes out. Our schedule will bring us right up to the week of release. There's a lot of garbage to trudge through, and sadly a lot of garbage I had hoped to keep out of my life forever, but we're committed. I've decided to write my thoughts on these movies, as what would be a better time to do so? Expect one movie a week.

These blogs will probably be pretty short in general, I plan to briefly talk about my thoughts going into the film, whether I've seen it or not and what I'm expecting. Then a bit about my thoughts on the movie having freshly seen it. I've also looked into a lot of bonus material to watch alongside these movies (old serials, old cartoons, fan films, cartoon shorts, etc.) and I'll talk about them as well (didn't watch anything along with the first movie though sadly). To finish each one off I'll write about the best part of the movie or the worst part of the movie, depending on what stands out more.

As always, a sincere thank you to anyone who visits here regularly, or even just stumbles on this and gives it a serious look through. Refer to the schedule for the movies here, or above, if you want to watch along, or just want to see when I'll get around to talking about specific movies. We did have to drop a few, and a few are technically TV pilots, but I wanted to include as much stuff as possible. I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I'm sure too! And yes, I did plan out a Marvel movie marathon, but that won't come around until early 2018.

-Adam

Summer of Screams: Salad Fingers Where's May Gone Act 1

Salad Fingers Where's May Gone - Act 1
Point and Click Adventure
1 Player
System: PC
Developer: Geg Games
Year of Release: 2015
Available Here

Salad Fingers is an incredibly odd phenomenon. My group of friend stumbled upon in him back in early high school, and it's quirky style was right up our mostly demented alley. David Firth is the man behind Salad Fingers, and while Salad Fingers and his lust for rust is thoroughly entertaining, he has done some other really great, creepy, off the wall short cartoons that I truly adore. You can find it all on his website, Fat-Pie. Sadly I'm not here to talk about David Firth and all of his off beat creations. I'm here to talk about a very strange, seemingly fan, effort to turn Salad Fingers into a video game. On the one hand I'm certainly not against the idea, especially not in the form of a point and click adventure game, but from the get go things seem amateurish.