Friday, May 23, 2014

Guest Comic: 3-Chord Dorks

Here's another comic I did some time ago, this time is a guest comic I did for 3-Chord Dorks, the webcomic that is all about celebrating rock and music in general.

Kevin Griffin (the comic's artist) took a couple weeks vacations, and offered the chance of doing a guest comic for him... which I took inmediatly and enjoyed the hell up of building Kevin and Jolie with pixels.

Anyway, I played this one to both critique our Internet-generation and lyrics websites, as well as making small reference to Don McLean's American Pie, one of my favorite songs of all time.

Read the comic and Kevin's comments right here >>

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Best of BANHAMMERED! Collection

Back in November 2011, Xbox Live seemed to be holding some sort of banning season, since there seemed to be a lot of users being taken down from the service, as I looked into the issue, I went to the Xbox Live’s forums and found lots and lots of people complaining why they were “unfairly” suspended or banned from the online service.

Later on I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. Not only the complaints made by Xbox Live’s users were hilarious (apparently, no one didn’t recall doing anything wrong), but also the way the XBLPET—the Xbox Live Policy Enforcement Team—decided to respond to those inquiries was pure gold; they didn’t hold anything back and let them know the specific reason why they deserved being taken down from XBL’s service.

I knew I had to share this with everyone, so I made an article about it, I called this one: This Banning Season, and  uploaded it into GameCola; here I did some sort of PSA informing readers how to avoid the wrath of the Banhammer by making fun of people being banned from Xbox Live.

Later on, I published this article on Bitmob (the site that started it all) and it caught the eyes of the editors, so it ended being promoted to the first page, and renamed as From the Xbox Forums: The best of BANHAMMERED!

See? This is why I usually trust on editor's judgement. In this case, they didn't only came up with a funnier name, they reshaped the whole concept of the article, and made a bigger enphasis on fun parts of the article. I don't mind if someone's taking away some of my words, as long as the overall message is better delivered.

But last year I wondered if I did a wrong to the world because—for whatever reason—theXBLPET just stopped responding to complainers the way they did pretty much after my article was published. So I went back to those days, and dug up a few more precious posts to share in a second article, this time the theme was to put down the fears of people losing their games over being (once again) "unfairly" banned. So I named this one as The Best of BANHAMMERED! 2: In Defense of Xbox Support.

Still, my collection of hilarious posts from Xbox Live Forums held a lot of great pieces, so I knew it was just a matter of time until I finally released the third part. And here it is, The Best of BANHAMMERED! 3: Retribution.

Because you just can't have a sequel without a subtitle, right? I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did collecting these, I don't think there'll be a 4th part as long as the Xbox Forums remain as boring as they're these days.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Inverted Controls: Can you tell me which way is up?

Everything is fine...
It happens all the time. Whenever someone is about to play on a controller (or a profile) I was just using, there’s always that question I need to make, and—more or less—a dialogue like the following takes place:

-Can you play with inverted controls?
-What’s that?
-It’s like, when you press up, the camera goes down, and when you press down, the camera goes up.
-What? No. I like it when up is up, and down is down!

Yes, that’s right dear readers. My name is Daniel Castro and I play with inverted controllers; this is one of the reasons I’m familiar with the controller settings menu of every game I play. Not only I need to make sure that inverted Y-axis is “on” whenever I’m about to play, I also need to change it back to “how normal people play” when someone el se is going to use that same controller.