Sparrow's Nest

ghostlycaverns: it had to be done :P

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:19:46 -0600

ghostlycaverns:

it had to be done :P

This is legit my dog’s favorite way to sleep

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:48:42 -0600

This is legit my dog’s favorite way to sleep

Eelysia today

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:08:00 -0600

Eelysia today

sparrateams: Team KC by ~Tyltalis This is so adorable and it...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:30:00 -0600

sparrateams:

Team KC by ~Tyltalis

This is so adorable and it needs to be on this blog

And this one too

Rex for Kitten today

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:21:44 -0600

Rex for Kitten today

ohcorny: weepinduo

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:44:05 -0600

ohcorny:

weepinduo

phantom-kat: Happy Birthday, Sparr! Here’s Abigail for you! I...

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:10:59 -0600

phantom-kat:

Happy Birthday, Sparr! Here’s Abigail for you! I hope you had a fantastic birthday! :)

(I didn’t notice until the end that she wouldn’t be able to hold a fish like that due to her webbed fingers. :x)

Heeee, thank you~ She looks so very Abbey-y, sitting there on her little boulder throne showing off her fishies lol

And the webbing is pretty stretchy, so although she wouldn’t normally hold a fish like that since it’d take a little work still to push it back, she could if she wanted to. And it seems like the sort of thing Bubblegum would put into her head because it would make her look like the girls from the fancy paintings or something P:

seenyetunseen: An adorable desert fox walking against the wind...

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:40:54 -0600

seenyetunseen:

An adorable desert fox walking against the wind in Morocco.

Gratulerer med dagen å meg! Drew me a Strudel since it’s...

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:00:32 -0600

Gratulerer med dagen å meg!

Drew me a Strudel since it’s my birthday P:

erryx: I think I’m running out of Sparr’s characters to...

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:01:54 -0600

erryx:

I think I’m running out of Sparr’s characters to draw…

Also, this is the third birthday art I’ve drawn in a row this month! :U

Happy Birthday Sparr!

I can provide you with about ten thousand more if you’re interested, but most are humans.

Anyway, this is perf heehee~ Thank you!

sapphireluna replied to your post: Gonna write my opinions on PMD: Gates to Infinity… oh you...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:59:47 -0600

sapphireluna replied to your post: Gonna write my opinions on PMD: Gates to Infinity…

oh you were a bit harsh! I don’t think it was that bad.

I think it’s biggest problem is probably that the previous PMD games have been amazing and given me really high expectations, and then this one didn’t live up to them very much at all.

It probably would’ve been a fine game on its own- not the best, but pretty okay for what it was. But in association with the other games, especially the Gen4 ones, to me, it just doesn’t compare and I was pretty disappointed and that resulted in a harsher review since I know they can do better.

ghostlycaverns: Happy birthday Sparr! best

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:41:05 -0600

ghostlycaverns:

Happy birthday Sparr!

best

srarlight: Happy Birthday Sparradile! I tried to paint Abbey :Y...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:19:57 -0600

srarlight:

Happy Birthday Sparradile! I tried to paint Abbey :Y The colors are pretty off and I used highly saturated colors because I don’t know why. The picture quality is kind of crummy too :B

I hope you have an awesome day!

sCREECH

starseekers replied to your post: Gonna write my opinions on PMD: Gates to Infinity… They...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:16:22 -0600

starseekers replied to your post: Gonna write my opinions on PMD: Gates to Infinity…

They have a really weird way of getting your Tepig back but you do get it back eventually :B

Well that’s good to hear because I was like NO WAY ARE YOU TAKING MY TEPIG >8C

still though

doesn’t fix how lame the game was otherwise

Gonna write my opinions on PMD: Gates to Infinity because I have a lot. Lots of spoilers...

Sat, 18 May 2013 09:22:00 -0600

Gonna write my opinions on PMD: Gates to Infinity because I have a lot. Lots of spoilers here.

I’m not 100% sure I’ve completed the game at this point, but the main story, at least, is done. But I’m playing as my partner now??? And I’m not sure if there’s a way to change that, haven’t found it yet, but really want to know if I can get my Tepig back because you know, THERE WAS A REASON I CHOSE TEPIG. And it’s because I wanted to play as Tepig! Not as Snivy. I only picked Snivy as my partner because he’s the one Pokemon of the options who species AND sprite I can tolerate (was gonna go with Axew but wow when I saw that horrible sprite in the opening video, haha nope and now that I have to play as Snivy, eeeeextra glad I didn’t go with Axew).

So I hope I can get Tepig back but I dunno, this game has sucked enough I wouldn’t really be surprised if they did for real take away the Pokemon I picked to PLAY as as a play option.

Guess I’ll just have to find a Tepig somewhere and make him join the team and play as him forever after I dunno. Not that that’ll change the running around town aspects… and really I was gonna make a team with Viv and Alec so I dunno if the new Tepig thing will happen at all.

Whatever. It’s dumb.

Anyway, moving on.

Game functionality was pretty crappy in a lot of ways. First off was the text. They said in the instructions that you can use B to speed through text. But guess what? You can’t. That is a MASSIVE oversight on the part of the creators. How did they miss that? That slow text speed that you can do nothing about is a PRETTY OBVIOUS error. Did they just figure that because it was in the instruction booklet that it was in the game? Really guys? You can’t just FORGET that, especially when a pretty good chunk of the general text and dialogue we could really go without reading! I’ll talk more about that later though.

Continuing with functions, in the dungeons, your partners are idiots. They are out to waste all your Oran Berries and Reviver Seeds. They LOOK for opportunities to go kill themselves, I swear. It’s not as much of a problem when you only have two Pokemon on the team, but you spend at least half the game forced to have 3 or 4 Pokemon with you, and things get nasty then. You can leave a room and have an enemy walk in while you’re two or three spaces away from it but one person is still inside and they will LEAVE you to go kill themselves fighting that guy alone. And if you decided to press B and dash down that hall? Well pray that it’s a short one because you can’t go back and save your partner until you’ve reached the end of the hallway most of the time (sometimes you can, it’s pretty random! But usually you can’t and they’re just going to waste your items).

If an enemy comes up on a crossroads that you’ve passed but your partners haven’t, same deal. They will leave you to fight. “Let’s Go Together” is apparently defined by these Pokemon as “Ditch your leader at every opportunity”. I’d advise against using that as a tactic.

Oh yeah, and there’s also basically no touch screen functions, everything happens on the upper screen. I understand they did that so they could use 3D effects but… at least put the dialogue on the bottom or something. The DS has a touch screen, use it please at least to just make little things more convenient.

And they kind of brought back L=A (well, PMD games never had it but they took it out in the G5 main game and so it still feels like ‘bringing back’) and I was all excited except for that it only works for progressing text and you can’t use it to actually initiate interactions with people. And because they made L=A, you can’t use L to pick multiple items anymore, you use R and that was confusing that after so many years they’d just up and switch that. Also most of the time answers defaulted to the wrong answer and wow thanks I’ve just been over here struggling with R instead of L and now you just made me accidentally say ‘No I did not in fact want to sell you those twenty items I just selected’ and I have to go through it all over again. (But not all answers default to the wrong one and so it’s just… ugh. So much of this game is so inconsistent and it makes it a pain to play.)

Steering outside of dungeons was bad- it was better if you used the control stick rather than arrow pad but still not perfect- and I would often end up listening to the same useless comment several times (unable to speed through it thank you game creators) purely because it was so hard to turn my guy around to face the other Pokemon I wanted to talk to. I always make a point of talking to everyone to hear their comments on every new event in a game but wow, I almost broke that habit for this game because it was just so hard to get to everyone in town.

The sprites in a lot of cases were not great either. Elbows, knees, they don’t exist in this world apparently, and a lot of walk cycles looked really stupid because of it (I’m looking at you Virizion). It looks like they’re doing the same thing with the Gen6 Pokemon games too- the arms on the human sprites look as bad as the ones in Fossil Fighters, rigid and splayed and awkward… I excused it in Fossil Fighters because that’s a cheaper game made by a smaller company with little following, but Pokemon can do better, I’m sure of it. A lot of sprites were really awkwardly hunched over too (Axew, Hydreigon…) and I don’t see why? They looked pretty bad though. Gurdurr had elbows, why not anyone else? Snivy’s arms were pretty dumb too, even though they’re just leaves, they still seemed really lazy just the way they were positioned for various actions. Also, the inside of the Pokemon mouths in icons were never shaded and it looked really weird. All these pretty icons and then they opened their mouth and it’s like what.

I didn’t like how they would randomly just hand you a bunch of new dungeons either. In the previous games, during the story, every new dungeon was relevant to it, and then after you’d completed it, to open a new dungeon you would have to first complete the mission touring the length of it so you knew what all of them were and what you’d find in it and all that. But in this game, I haven’t even entered probably at least 75% of what I have access to now, and have traveled the whole of even fewer. Dunno if I’ll ever get around to exploring all of them, to be honest. There’s not much reason to since you no longer get escort missions (as far as I’ve seen, anyway), nor can you do multiple missions and I don’t know if there are treasure chests at the end of these… I doubt it.

The story was pretty-much just a watered-down version of the Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky storyline. Like seriously, it was almost exactly the same, just you’re saving the world from a different thing. But there was the same ~*~SHOCKING BETRAYAL~*~ from someone you were supposed to think was a good guy (but seriously I think we all figured Munna was lying from how many times she said ‘I SOMEHOW escaped Hydreigon again!’ Like really girl, you’re a freaking flowerpot and he’s a giant three-headed dragon, I don’t think you could keep safe from him for more than a minute, much less all the weeks we left you hanging). And how did Munna take control of Hydreigon’s voice? THE VOICE OF LIFE?! And how did she make that false vision? What was it that went wrong for her? How did she meet all those other Pokemon in her gang? What have they gone through together? How did they find Kyurem? So many unanswered questions that could have made the storyline and characters so much more interesting.

The plot was a lot shorter than in the G4 PMD game though, and a lot more contrived… I felt like I was finishing it just for the sake of finishing it, unlike in Sky where I was really invested in what was going on and we learned why what was happening was happening. But here, there were so many questions left unanswered, like… why was everyone in the Pokemon world so nasty and bitter, for one thing? I can understand like one community going bad, but the entire planet? Why didn’t my partner have a family or friends ever in his life? He just says he didn’t and apparently you’re supposed to be really moved by how now you’re changing his worldview but really I was just like ‘dude there’s gotta be more to your backstory than that then’. And how did Keldeo get so good with the Entercards? Was it supposed to see more awesome that he figured them out when Virizion never knew he had messed with them? It would have made more sense if she had said something like, “Well I knew he was interested in them but I never knew he was that good!” instead of “I never knew he was involved with them at all!” How do you think he even reached the Great Glacier in the first place? You guys were BEST FRIENDS and I really can’t believe that he would figure them out and create all those fancy ones while LOCKED IN A JAIL WHERE HE COULDN’T USE THEM. How quickly Umbreon and Espeon figured things out seemed forced at times too… the writers seemed to “excuse” it by having the Pokemon CONSTANTLY compliment their genius, but really.

And then at the end everyone could just… choose to remember? I mean, I can understand that considering this guy SAVED THE WORLD and everything, they’d have some memory of him and that everything to do with my character would just be ‘erased’ from the minds of all the Pokemon seemed dumb, but then everyone’s just like ‘I’m gonna remember you okay’ and they just do even though it’s freaking Hydreigon out because that’s ‘breaking the laws of nature’… I felt like that was just another dumb idea to “add drama” to the story, but they failed. I cried at the end of Explorers of Sky, but I was not moved at all by the conclusion of this one. I was just relieved that I’d finished. And then bummed that I didn’t get to play as Tepig anymore.

A lot of characters were pretty inconsistent too, particularly Emolga. Sure, sure, I understand he came around at the end, but at the start when he had issues with Virizion it was really like one second he is smack-talking her and the next he’s just all grins and happiness and doesn’t mind at all that she’s around and is in fact agreeing with her and getting along with her… way later they called him out on it, but I think everyone just… missed all those earlier moments? It was pretty poorly written.

A lot of things were poorly written. I felt like I was being babied by this game. Yes, it’s rated for kids 7 and up so yeah, sure, help the little kids out, but we have never been provided this level of help and explanation in earlier games and I imagine they made it through just fine. And a lot of these tips and whatever… well once was enough, okay game. You don’t need to remind me every time there’s a weather condition that ‘Oh no you can’t heal because it’s cloudy’ (which was pretty dumb on its own, I think… maybe if you’re a Fire type it’d make sense to not be able to heal in the rain, or Grass can’t heal in hail, but seriously… doing it across the board sucked a lot, especially since suddenly it became a matter of utter luck whether or not you were going to lose all your healing items in this rainstorm or you’d find the stairs quickly). And they had to DEFINE so many dumb things. I’m pretty sure that by the time I was seven I knew what a mirage was. They’re used all the time in cartoons, we learn about them pretty young. And yet they have to waste several lines of slow-moving dialogue considering what in the world a mirage is. And people just repeat junk all the time and most of the dialogue is forced, repetitive, awkward to read, poorly worded, etc. I feel like Virizion and Swanna, and most of the time Dunsparce, were pretty well written but everyone else could really be a pain at times. Also the way they constantly remind you ‘You’ve had a great adventure today, you should take a break!’ wow okay thanks. I think I know how long I’d like to play you don’t need to tell me to stop. The game saying that does not make me want to quit and I feel like little kids might not even know what it’s implying there. “Take a break? Why? How? The game’s still going on :V” And that’s probably more who the warning’s directed at?

The background art was really pretty and the Timburr are super cute but I feel like that’s about all the game has really going for it. And I feel like they used “awesome 3D graphics!!!” as an excuse for everything else to suck because oh boy, it’s a new art form for Pokemon (kind of but only for DS really…) and they must have put so much effort into that! But I’d much rather you concentrated on the story rather than the graphics (reason why I love Fossil Fighters… looks pretty dumb and a lot of it is pretty dumb but golly that story), and considering the art in the past PMD games… well I’m pretty sure they put a ton of effort into that too, and it’s very different from the Pokemon games and they still put together some incredible stories and also included ALL the Pokemon and I don’t see why they couldn’t have done that here. I was really looking forward to making all of Team KC when a G5 PMD game came out but ah well. They’ve even made 3D sprites for all the Pokemon for that 3D Pokedex thing and I feel like they could have utilized those somewhat here so that we could have everyone.

Swanna was by far my favorite character, she was just such a BAMF. It’s too bad she only had a very small part, but that’s also probably why she was so cool because if they’d written her more they probably would’ve ruined her.

Emolga was my least favorite, Virizion had the best development, Dunsparce was the cutest, and the Timburr had the best faces.

Overall, 2/5 stars.

And give me my Tepig back. :I

Also btw if you haven’t played but have read this, when you do (if you do), if you run into a Pokemon that is sleeping and it doesn’t wake up when you walk past it and your teammates don’t attack it, DON’T ATTACK IT unless you’re pretty strong in comparison to the dungeon because it will kill you. Just sayin’. There are a lot of random super strong baddies about in this game.

Cassidy for Kat today Random face because I really don’t...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:01:00 -0600

Cassidy for Kat today

Random face because I really don’t know enough about this character to be drawing him but I wanted to anyway

Video

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:38:10 -0600

Oh right, here’s today’s

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:58:48 -0600

Oh right, here’s today’s

animals-animals-animals: Cape Vulture (by Mark Dumbleton)

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:26:37 -0600

animals-animals-animals:

Cape Vulture (by Mark Dumbleton)

Here’s just a little one before I run off to work for the...

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:24:00 -0600

Here’s just a little one before I run off to work for the day