Resident Evil 4: Merchant Madness

by on October 14, 2016 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog, News, Video Game Playthroughs
resident evil 4 items

Aw yeah, golden eggs.

[dc]A[/dc] feature of Resident Evil 4 I always enjoyed was the Merchant. This mysterious character lets me but new weapons and items, and allows me to upgrade my arsenal.

In my earlier playthroughs, I would upgrade what I could, when I could, without much thought. Now, I’m trying to be a bit smarter about my choices. I’m not spending any money upgrading the basic handgun this time, that’s for sure.


Smart Shopping

Before I could even think about upgrading though, I had to make my first big decision of the game: do I buy the (bolt-action) rifle or the Attache Case M? I couldn’t really do both at the same time, unless I wanted to sell some of the bonus items I found (I picked up a couple of gold chicken eggs in the previous area, and they sell for 3000 ptas each).

What to do? The larger case lets me hold more items. However, the rifle is definitely a must-have when it comes to weapons: it packs a lot of power and lets me pick off enemies safely from a distance (and its scope acts like a poor man’s binoculars).

One of the ways the Resident Evil series ups the tension is you can only carry so many items at a time. Do you pass up on extra ammo to hang on to your cache of healing items? What do you toss away to make room for the more powerful, but larger, weapon?

While RE 4 lets you sell items to the Merchant, it doesn’t always make these choices easier.

I eventually decided it was silly to sell healing items only to hold more items, so I opted for the rifle. I’ll get the fancy fanny-pack next time.

Also: I love the voice of the Merchant. “Over here…Stran-ger.”

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For Patrons: Behind the Scenes – Foxes and Boxes page 6

by on October 13, 2016 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Behind the Scenes, Blog, News

[dc]M[/dc]y Patreon patrons can see a scan of my original drawing for this week’s Foxes and Boxes page. Pledge $1 or more a month and you can see the scan–and all of my other behind the scenes posts, past and future.

Here’s a sample.

behind the scenes.

See the full-page on Patreon.

Speaking of Patreon, I changed up my rewards a bit. The $5/month reward got switched up, here is the full rewards for that level:

  • Full access to patrons only blog posts, including pictures/drawings I won’t post anywhere else.
  • Satisfaction knowing you are helping me make comics!
  • Early access to the latest Clattertron comics and Foxes and Boxes pages, even before they go up on clattertron.com and my social media channels. (Usually the Friday before, Sunday at the latest)
  • (NEW!) Each month I will email you a digital, print quality, black and white, single character head sketch of your choice.

For $5/month, you get full blog access, early access to new Foxes and Boxes pages, and I will email you a digital sketch each month. If you want a physical sketch, consider the $10/month level.

And, $3/month patrons get full blog access and can read next week’s Foxes and Boxes page early too.

Thank you for your generosity! (And helping me buy cat food)

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Resident Evil 4: Here We Go Again

by on October 12, 2016 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog, News, Video Game Playthroughs

[dc]A[/dc]fter beating Uncharted 3 last weekend, I got the itch to play Resident Evil 4 again. I think after a year of playing my way through Dragon Age II, an action-shooter was a nice change.

Now, I never beat Resident Evil 4, despite a couple of attempts over the past few years (but I beat the original, Resident Evil 2-3, and the GameCube update of the original). There’s a special place for the RE series in my game playing heart: the original Resident Evil convinced me to get a Sony PlayStation so many years ago.

resident evil 4

Oh Game Cube. Image via Amazon.

Join me as I give it another go, and hopefully finish this time (I still need to finish Ocarina of Time by the way, but that’s for another day. Or  year).

SD in an HD World

I briefly considered dropping the $20 for the PlayStation 3 HD remaster of Resident Evil 4. Several reviews convinced me not to, as they all pretty much had the same refrain: if you already own RE 4, the HD version isn’t really worth the money, because they just up-scaled the graphics and didn’t add anything (there aren’t any new extras, options, or control settings).

I dusted off my Game Cube version of RE 4, dug out my Nintendo Wii¹ and hooked it up to our HD TV set. The result is what I expected: an old SD game going into an HD TV, and not via an HDMI cable, doesn’t look amazing.

I’m not one to suffer motion sickness while playing video games, but playing RE 4 blown up on my HD TV had me feeling kind of queasy.

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Rewarding Yourself

by on October 11, 2016 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog, News

[dc]I[/dc] listened to the Nerdist podcast episode with Paul Dini (writer for Batman: The Animated Series, and more), and something he said really stuck with me (the episode is worth a listen, Dini talks about being beaten by muggers when he was younger and the change it had on his life. It’s the subject of his new graphic novel, Dark Night).

dini dark night graphic novel

Dini’s new graphic novel, Dark Night. Image via Amazon.

Dini talked about rewarding yourself. Specifically, how in your adult years “parenting” yourself is difficult and we are quick to reward ourselves first, without doing anything to merit such a thing.

For example, playing video games for a few hours instead working on writing (or insert whatever you have to do but don’t want to), ordering a pizza instead of trying to cook something healthy, or staying in instead of going out with friends or family.

It is a good discussion. It really made me think. I’m certainly guilty of this. I know I have stuff I should work on (comics, my in-progress novel¹, things around the house), but I’ll opt to play video games, or watch another episode of something on Netflix or Hulu.

Dini talked about the voice in our heads convincing us to take the easy (or lazy) route, represented in Dark Night as the Joker, saying No, it’s fine. You don’t need to work on anything! Just take a nap! I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the basic idea. I picked up a copy of Dark Night last week, and I highly recommend giving it a read.

The opposite voice, the voice in our head which makes us do stuff is Batman: The hard-ass, the drill sergeant, my dad when I was younger, and so on. In Dark Night, Batman appears to Dini, and doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to telling him get his life together.

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