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Posts Tagged ‘brainscraps projects’

Another Special Project: Digitizing Final Fantasy VII‘s Theatrical Ad

In my heyday of collecting materials and merchandise related to Final Fantasy VII, I amassed anything that interested me, from action figures to demo disks, and including collector’s favorites like “the SIGGRAPH Disk”, “the Versus Guide”, and the limited-edition version of the soundtrack. Although I’ve since slowed down considerably, and even sold off some pieces, I still maintain said collection, which includes a subset titled the “Cloud Shrine”.

Without a doubt, the rarest—and strangest—part of my FFVII collection has been a set of three 35mm film reels dating from December 1997, each thirty seconds long, and containing an identical advertisement for the game. I got them via eBay sometime in the early-mid ’00s for around $35 (the seller included a Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within lobby card as a freebie). Aside from similar 35mm reels for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time that appeared on eBay later on, I don’t know if any other video game theatrical ads from that era have been offered for sale to collectors, or are even still around. Some probably do exist, and are possibly online somewhere.

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Here’s Brainscraps Holiday Card no. 4

Four - Holiday Card 2018Though some bouts of insomnia didn’t help, I have managed to complete this year’s Holiday Card. Thus, I am happy to announce that 2018’s Holiday Card, which is simply titled Four, is now available! Four is somewhat different from previous Cards, though it shares some of their underlying spirit.

I can’t say what inspired this year’s card, as I don’t entirely know; the idea just sort of popped into my head one day. However, I suspect it was a combination of factors, including certain current events. As stated on the game’s project page, my original idea was something quite different, both in terms of concept and execution. Regarding what Four is about, well… you’ll just have to see for yourself.

This year’s engine is Twine, the famed interactive fiction tool which uses a combination of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to enable the creation of text-based games which can be played in any browser. That said, for the first time, you can play this year’s Holiday Card without downloading anything! Here’s a direct link to the game; if, for whatever reason, you’re having trouble getting it to work, an official mirror is once again available via my itch.io page.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season, and here’s wishing you all a great 2019!

ETA (Dec. 5, 2018): A small bug fix was made to Four, which will likely affect save files. The older version of the game has been preserved here, via the project’s page, but not on itch.io. Please see this post on itch.io for more details.

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This Year’s Holiday Card

One of my regular projects is an annual (usually; I’ve missed at least a couple of years) “Holiday Card”, typically a piece of Christmas/winter fanart for my online friends. I had plans to do one this year, and even had a couple of Persona 4-themed ideas stored away well in advance, but when the fall hit, I got a spark of inspiration for something else, which I started working on in November.

Legend of Cascadia This project, a short J-style RPG called Legend of Cascadia, is not holiday-themed, but is my replacement for this year’s Holiday Card. It is based on one of my favorite Peter Molydeux tweets, one which I briefly considered adapting for the first MolyJam, but lacked the time, experience, and overall foundation to do so. However, over this past month and a half (and especially the last four weeks), after finally getting a solid idea in my head, I put it together. The engine I used is RPG Maker VX Ace, which I’d only dabbled with before, and is both surprisingly robust and frustratingly limited. It was also the perfect tool to put together this sort of thing.

Anyway, hope you all enjoy this bit of silliness from me. Before I go, you may have noticed that Cascadia lives under a new menu section called “Projects”. I can’t promise that I’ll make more games in the future, but this is where any similar such works will live from now on. Thanks, have a good holiday season and here’s hoping we all have a great 2015!

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