matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

Wow! Two posts in one day?! I must be on crack! Tonight I give you another sad venture into art on my behalf. This time it is Terra of Final Fantasy VI fame. If you couldn't tell this one was done in colored pencil.

I haven't been posting here very much lately. Why? Well... I dunno :-P. Firstly, though, I'll get the comic links up to speed:

Plan 4 World Peace (filler)

The Fruit Saga, Parts 1, 2, and 3.

The fruit saga is more or less based on real life. I did purchase a Mac mini with my tax refund and, despite my years of rampant Mac hatred, I must admit that it is a nifty piece of hardware. I do have a copy of Vista installed (thanks to bootcamp), but I haven't booted out of OS X in several days. I haven't done much more than piddle around with stuff, but I'm going to start learning the APIs and maybe write a game.

Full Sail, my college of choice, has been "pestering" me lately and I guess I need to call them back and start getting things setup to sail away in the fall. I'm not sure what kind of course I want to take. Back when I heard about them it was game programming hands down, but I do enjoy drawing and would like to do more film projects. It's a real toss up. I may go with game programming yet because, of those three options, it's probably my strongest area. We'll see, though...

As far as work goes, it's pretty much usual. I'm cashier mostly, but since I recieved my CSM powers I've been doing that some too. Just yesterday, in fact, they pulled me off a register to cover for somebody whilst they went on break. I'm sitting in a pretty sweet position in that I can do almost anything in the store from CSMing, to cashiering, to cart pushing, to unloading trucks, etc.

Well, I'll close this blog post with a little piece of my art featuring Basch, my favorite character from FFXII:

Firstly, today's comic.

I'm not sure if I've said or not, but I'm currently in the middle of my two week hiatus from Wal-Mart (unpaid, sadly, but I'm not one to quibble when it means two weeks of care free goodness). One of the things I vowed to do in my two weeks of freedom was teach myself how to play piano. Overall I'd say it's going pretty well and having a keyboard that totally rocks helps ;-). But don't take my word for it, here's me playing a little piece of Zelda music (actually, I've been passively working on learning this piece for over a year :-P):

I'm hoping that by next summer I'll be proficient enough to play the song in its entirety (without screwing up) along with some others (Final Fantasy X's To Zanarkand being of them).

Speaking of FFX, I am currently enjoying being beaten by the game. The story started off kind of slow (almost to the point of me deciding never to play again), but it's picked up to the point of having me completely sucked in. So I've been playing a bit lately (excluding all my annihilations I believe my play time is somewhere around 26 hours) and hopefully I'll have beaten the stupid thing before I have to go back to work (at which point I'll start playing FFX-2).

I've started on a DS game. That's all I'll say because I tend to make these announcements with all sorts of grandiose promises and give up after about five minutes of coding. Yeah... it's dumb.

Okay, now you're all caught up for the next several months. I'll probably post something again before I go to college next fall.

Comic

Okay, first of all I'm really ticked at myself for spelling crystal wrong in the comic title. Oh, well, I'm too lazy to change it now :-P.

The idea behind this is pretty self-explanitory. Oh, an Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a darn fun game (not to mention probably the prettiest game I've ever seen).

But that's about all I have to say about that.

Comic

Yeah, so I bought a PS2. For me, this is a rather huge ordeal because hating the PS2 (or anything Playstation) was like a strange sort of religion. I grew up on Nintendo, everything else was just... well... evil (though, I never had a problem with the xbox, go figure).

So, yeah, I bought a PS2 for Guitar Hero which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest games ever made. It's kind of like DDR for your fingers, but also has some really great music to boot. From great oldies to some new stuff (like "All of This" by Shaimus). Currently I'm making my way through hard mode which is quite a challenge (especially when the devil pinky won't cooperate).

I do have some more stuff in mind for my little PS2 (emphesis on the little as I got a slim). I bought the Gameshark media player for it which'll stream my videos over the network (very sweet) and, of course, I'll invest in Guitar Hero 2. And probably the Final Fantasy titles I've missed since VI for the SNES (which will always be my favorite, though).

Ah, well, I got a little long winded. Guess I'm enjoying this PS2 thing more than I thought I would ;-).