Video game textmode art part 20 - MIST1015, the Mistigris 21st anniversary artpack!

Long time no post! I've been tied up -- you may have seen hints of the activity in previous posts: rather than interpreting and reminiscing about then-current, now-retro artifacts of technological creative expression, I've been occupied reviving (if temporarily) historical computer art practices, culminating in the Hallowe'en 2015 release of an artpack -- commemorating 21 years since the inaugural artpack release of my BBS scene artgroup Mistigris. If you like, you can download the whole shebang (warning: 200+ megs) or you can browse a gallery of its sights and sounds right in the comfort of your web browser. (For the elevator pitch, here is our video promo clip.)

That was MIST1015, our now-annual collection of new work. But also you probably have caught me yapping about MIST2000, a different collection dating from the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end, a compilation of unreleased works circa 1998-2000, still hidden (but not for too much longer) behind a devious series of puzzles. In today's installment of video game textmode art theatre, which will be showing you sights from MIST1015 (which contained game-related visual artwork, but no game-related music), we'll be opening with a musical selection from MIST2000 (which contained game-related music, but no game-related visual artwork.) Regular readers of this series have been in a situation to already have enjoyed exclusive leaks of two of the gamey tunes that ended up in MIST2000, so here's a third at the start of this post (no, the start was two paragraphs ago!) and a fourth at the bottom:

In the '90s, I was obsessed with a .MOD named "uralvolga fine" by a (now-deceased) Amiga composer named Bruno. The song distinguished itself by eschewing the easy and obvious approach of making computer music that sounded like computer music -- techno, if you will -- and instead making it sound like an Old Country folk orchestra. Due to my perverse tendencies, this electrified me, instilling a curious notion in my head that what I was hearing was klezmer and I ended up making three inferior derivatives of it using his instrument samples: the first was bluntly entitled "uralvolga harsh", the second my demoparty-rejected "In The Old Country... We Make Techno Like THIS!" (whose sampled vinyl noise fooled my father, who should have known better) ... and then there was this song. My "Hello, World" on musical instruments is to try playing the Bubble Bobble theme song on them. And so here we have an arrangement of it on samples of old-style instruments.

Moving right along to the main attraction -- a long-dormant ANSI by Happyfish once and again of Mistigris, dusted off and finished on a whim back in May, then submitted for competition at the NVScene demoparty where it placed ... last. (The last time Happyfish entered an ANSI competition at a demoparty, she came in first place! But Blocktronics did not yet exist at that time.)

I know, I know, you're thinking "I believe you promised me some video game ANSI art, or was that a deceptive lure to trick me into reading your memoirs?" OK, here it is -- Loom fan-art. (Fittingly situated following a musical opening, integrating so extensively with music as that game does.) It opens with the game's first draft, "Open", as cast by seagulls on a shoreside clam. Then we have Master Goodmold of Crystalgard, dissolving into a blue night sky (Loom: candidate for best use of the EGA palette of all time? Making it also eminently well-suited for ANSIfication, despite this being the only such specimen of its kind known.) Then we have protagonist Bobbin Threadbare, holding Elder Atropos' distaff, playing a "D" -- the second note, correctly coloured (which I verified! And consistent with her note-name colouration at the above clam, leading me to assume that they are all assigned their correct colours!) (And though they are are depicted in the ANSI, sharps and flats are off the menu in the game, which utilises only the "white keys" in the C major scale. Nerdy digression -- and considering the context, that's really saying something -- concluded.) Trivia: concealed in this piece in black-on-black is a conversation between Happyfish and myself regarding depiction of what really lies beneath Bobbin's Orko-ish hood.

(She really does have a tattoo like Goodmold's!)

The whole thing that got the ball rolling with Happyfish wrapping up her dusty and forgotten Loom piece (discontinued circa 1998) was my asking her if she remembered working on an unfinished Star Control 2 fan ANSI I'd tried and failed to engage other artists in sorting out around the Mistigris World Tour period (the first half of 1997.) Turns out she still had it, stirring interest in firing up the ANSI lobe of her brain, but put that lobe to work on a different unfinished piece, giving us the awesome Loom ANSI we have just enjoyed. I shopped the Star Control 2 piece around to the current ANSI masters of Blocktronics, but didn't get any bites. Finally, while mentioning it to VileR, a recently-discovered ANSI artists and retro game freak hiding out in plain sight, he noted that he, also, had a Star Control 2 ANSI: "Pretty sure I posted it a few years ago on the Ur-Quan Masters board as an April Fools prank with the premise that UQM now supports ANSI output. Can't recall if anyone fell for it" Such detail! He successfully reduces a 640x480 screen to an effective resolution of 80x50 -- yes, using the unusual 50-line mode I always employed in Telemate to facilitate multitasking by doubling the effective screen real estate (these are the kinds of tricks you will need to resort to if you want to run an underground computer art group in 1995) -- and yet I can still see clearly that his fleet complement consists of three Spathi Eluders, two Earthling Cruisers, a Pkunk Fury, a Chenjesu Broodhome, and ... let's call that an Utwig Jugger in the bottom right. This Thraddash is an unmitigated masterpiece of minimalism, is what it is. Getting it to display in the extraordinary 50-line mode correctly in Pablo and at textmod.es was a pain using SAUCE in ANSIs, so here's an updated version, more true to itself, in ACiD's fortified ANSI format known as XBin.

This humble prank is however only the tip of the iceberg for VileR, whose monumental ANSI works will resume following a(nother) brief detour away from ANSI. Also making a formidable representation in MIST1015 was the artist known as Vordreque, formerly dvandenberg of ACiD. While he did submit a piece of ANSI art, it is non-game-related and hence falls outside the scope of this series... however, he did also contribute a few pieces of music and related promotional high-resolution imagery from a collection of synthwave songs he dubbed "Arcade Summer". Arcades, now those have a hook! Here he presents a simulated mall of the simulated 1980s, including within it simulated video game arcade cabinets entitled "Pegger" and, recursively, "Arcade Summer".

Malls are already kind of uncanny, so that helps in leapfrogging the uncanny valley. KLOV lists no known games by the somewhat lewd name of "Pegger", and what is up on its screen appears to be Stern's 1980 arcade hit Berzerk... which uses a lot fewer buttons than are present on these cabs! (The screen on the "Arcade Summer" cabinet, on the other hand, appears to be displaying another view of the same scene... raising the unanswerable question of the mise en abyme, whether the Arcade Summer arcade cabinet inside of this Arcade Summer arcade cabinet also shows Arcade Summer... what is visible on its screen-within-a-screen, or if it's blinding video feedback all the way down... and, of course, what happens to the hypothetical player at the Arcade Summer cabinet when they move the joystick, and whether that influences the actions of the player in his game. But I digress!

Back to ANSI, everyone! (Cracks whip.) VileR's modus operandi appears to be making ANSI cover art for "the DOS collection" -- I don't know anything about anything, but if I had to speculate I'd guess that these are (annual?) historical collections of MS-DOS software. We begin with number 8 -- he has a picture for 7, but without any game subject, just some floppy diskettes. Here we get both -- disks (each variety -- 3.5 inch, 5.25 inch -- filling in for the appropriately-shaped vowel, well played!) and a delightful Cacodaemon from Doom chomping down on the logo, yum yum!

For the 9th instalment of the collection, the cover model has now turned into the Ghost Pirate LeChuck(tm), in front of some clouds with insanely wonderful colour schemes! (I know, not a lot to say about these, but the pictures really are worth a thousand words.)

Collection number 10 is where things get busy, VileR begging not to be compared to the similarly referentially-dense works by Reset Survivor such as we have seen previously. After a jarring Windows 10 fake-out (there have been many generations of Windows -- nearly all of them -- between the heyday of ANSI art and today), we have several layers of platforms populated by game characters. On top there are characters from Round 42 and Lode Runner, then the next later down we see Worms and Lemmings... downward there is Digger and the (itself Pac-man-ish) cherry Digger seeks, and finally at the wheel is Max Damage of Carmageddon fame.

All in all, VileR had a humdinger of an ANSI art scene debut in this pack. (And when he drops his "ANSI from Hell" the likes of which haven't been seen since 1984, jaws are going to hit the floor.) But for this post, we'll be ending where we began -- with Happyfish, and another song. After getting Bobbin Threadbare in the can, she still had a little momentum carring her forward into the realm of coloured blocks, and told me that next, she was going to draw an ANSI of her favorite podcast. Uhh... synaesthesia much? But it turns out that what she was talking about was the zombie apocalypse exercise audiogame, "Zombies, Run!" (written by, among others, the criminally underrated Choice of Games author Gavin Inglis) ... and so the way to illustrate such an experience could handily be boiled down to reproducing the icon associated with its app. (ANSI app icons for demade smartphones? Why not?)

OK, I've got one more song for you, but before we go, I need to let my local readers know that very soon I'm hosting another one of my vintage games parties -- not this weekend but the next, Nov 21st. Beating the scope of the machines back, we've pushed our earliest generation of vintage games on tap from SNES to NES to Atari 2600, which this time will hopefully be joined by a ColecoVision. As always, there are plenty of PS1 / PS2 / Xbox original games, and we'll see if we can't perform a little Game Boy Advance surgery and get Pac-Man Vs. underway on the big screen! Please contact me if you need further details!

And now, our final artefact in today's gallery -- a rare work by the accomplished musician (and occasional ANSI artist himself) Haquisaq (formerly AKA Handiboy, now known as the chip wizard bryface) from the hazy period after Mistigris closed up shop. The track is a remix of music from Double Dragon -- a fitting counterpart to our Bubble Bobble opening, the latter a game that cannot be truly won without a second player, the former a game that forces two winning players to fight each other to the death. On that happy note -- enjoy! Cheers and hope to be reporting on more of this great weird old stuff soon. Hope you liked MIST1015! We'll start accepting submissions for MIST1016 any time now, so start thinking about what you might cook up 8)

Various & Sundry

A ... very faithful, high fidelity redo of Ryu's theme music from Capcom's Street Fighter 2, this is a video-game soundtrack remix by someone who has (non-videogame-related) contributions in for MIST1015, the Mistigris artpack my call for submissions is still out for (so if you think you might have something for us, let's talk!) Me, I like to do remixes with (like the PMJ) radically new approaches (as I say in my band, it takes a lot of work to end up a bad Tom Waits imitator) and the slick SF2 songs were never really up my alley to begin with (Blanka's I like), but this is clearly a lot of work and executed very successfully!

We have more video game remixes -- some of which you have already enjoyed leaked exclusively here, some of which are otherwise totally inaccessible -- currently released in a convoluted fashion, in an artpack, MIST2000, which awaits anyone who is capable of overcoming a series of oldschool puzzle challenges demonstrating mastery of all the traditional computer arts. In time its remaining game remix tracks will also be leaked here, but for the time being I want to encourage people to try their hands at the puzzles and see if they can unlock the content. Go on and have a try!

So those obligatory mentions having been made, I wanted to nod at a couple of recent Pac-Man observations:

Here he is at a German protest lodging his vote against the Trans Pacific Partnership, being invoked in a kind of Acromania. And sinister as that context is, here's an even worse one...

Pac-Man x #fentanyl ads up around #Vancouver pic.twitter.com/zIut65BLke

— Andrea Woo (@AndreaWoo) August 17, 2015

Fentanyl is a strong narcotic that has been working its way into the local heroin supply, producing a rash of overdose deaths from people not injecting what they thought they were injecting. Public health advisories have been issued, but for those to protect you first you have to be looking for them and secondly you have to understand what they say. This is a guerrilla effort to convey the same message to busy junkies on the go.

Sorry for drifting away; in addition to raising my now-two children, I have also been consumed with my temporarily renewed hobby of assembling and releasing artpacks. By this time next year I should be done with this revival of my adolescent passions and back to my adult diversions of endlessly blogging on highly esoteric matters of digital culture. You should be so lucky!

Video game textmode art part 19.5β - the Blocktronics advance following the Evoke feint

The notoriously mistranslated phrase is from the NES' "Pro Wrestling". But this version of it is from "US-LLDT.ANS" from the most recent Blocktronics artpack, a joint between Reset Survivor (happy birthday!) and Nullfruit (?!) ... this is the only video game reference in the piece that I can see, but there are others in the pack. I should have realised that when the summer demoparty entries started being annouced that the artpacks collecting them would quickly follow. I posted too soon, last time! Consequently, the Blocktronics pack that followed quick on its heels, "Block Fury", contained further textmode video game art. Had I just waited a week or so I could have made one real post out of this great stuff, hot off the presses, instead of two half-posts. Oh well! (To reiterate, for those who haven't been following along so far -- Blocktronics is the "last man standing" supergroup of ANSI art megatalent, a collection of folks who used to express themselves in that arcane digital art back in the '90s, developed their design sensibilities for 20 years... and have then made the odd choice to return to the strikingly minimalist medium. And hats off to them for doing so, it gives me much great art to feature here in this blog!)

While Reset Survivor isn't exclusively a textmode video game art specialist, he is as close as this scene has to one. In this larger piece (R5-KFC.ANS), virtuosic visual vignettes are interspersed with snatches of beat'em up video game history. I won't show you the whole thing, but let's zoom in on our three moments here:

Here we see the elegant brutes of Technōs' 1989 River City Ransom. Then next, a switch to a similar subject in the same medium (and interpreted to the same medium) from Irem's 1985 Kung-Fu:

Finally, we have a segment I needed a little help to identify. The sprite style reminded me of Konami's Contra, but as that is a shooter, not a brawler, that avenue of inquiry was a dead end. Fortunately, one of the experts at Mobygames pointed me straightaway to Hokuto No Ken, the NES video game adaptation of the hugely influential and ultra-violet manga / anime sensation known in the West as Fist of the North Star. I said, "that would explain why the enemy looks like he's been peeled like a banana!"

The interesting thing about all of this textmode video game sprite art adaptation is that the standard MS-DOS textmode, at 80 columns x25 lines, used rectangular cells instead of square ones. (The less-used 80x50 mode had square cells, but I don't think we have featured a single work in that aspect ratio; it was distinctly unfashionable.) NES games, of course, had square pixels. That means that the hard work the viewer isn't appreciating is not just producing something that looks like the original, but making something originally formed out of square blocks using only rectangular ones.

I'll close with a piece by the great Mattmatthew (and a happy birthday to you, too!), in a former life known as ts of the Hawaii-based artgroup "teklordZ". Last time around I talked about how the first thing that would occur to anybody to draw in ANSI is a Space Invader, which would simultaneously be one of the easier ANSI subjects to render, blocky as they are! Well, Mattmatthew doesn't do anything the easy way: instead, have your mind blown by some phenomenal Space Invaders typography, totally unrelated to their subjects' blocky iconography!

Finally, because Blocktronics don't represent the entire history of textmode art (nor do they presume to), I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you, my handful of readers, my call for submissions (deadline: Oct 15!) for the 21st anniversary artpack collection of my own artgroup, Mistigris. As you can see, we cast a wide net. Join us, won't you?

A breaking textmode video game art update part 19.5: Enzo at Evoke 2015

Hi, everyone! Sorry things have ground to a halt here -- lots to say, but when there's time to write, there's no brain left... and when there's a shred of brain, no time. Parenthood, go figure!

In as close as I get to breaking news, I had to do some quick and dirty coverage of an award-winning (2nd place) piece of ANSI art that was just released at the Evoke demoparty in Germany (whose 1999 instalment I competed in with an in-person visit!) Why did I have to cover it? Because it contained video game imagery, of course!

The artist: Brazilian Luciano "Enzo" Ayres of Blocktronics et al. The work? Well, it also contains much that does not pertain to video games, so I give you the lobotomized gamer highlights reel, but you can go appreciate everything in full context at its source. Beginning with some Invaders is an easy-pitch opening gambit. What naturally follows?

Sure, why not some Pac-Man. This looks like a race: who will make it to the centre first? My recent Ms. Pac-Man experience suggests that the ghost will also take second place, but it does raise an interesting question of how the machine prioritizes things if Pac touches a power pill and a ghost simultaneously. But I digress.

This is where things get interesting. You can show someone who doesn't play video games Pac-Man or a Space Invader and they'll have some idea what you're talking about. But what we have here is a video game that is basically installed on all modern computers as an easter egg that virtually nobody knows about. The only reason I was able to place it is because "easter egg games" is kind of a beat I cover over on Mobygames, where I documented this one. It basically works as shown here: in recent versions of the (typically self-updating) Google Chrome web browser (whose deformed logo is depicted in this piece), if your internet connection conks out mid-browse and you try to access a page that's no longer available, you'll be shown an error message with the dinosaur and a cactus, apparently a cute icon to mellow the harsh cut of the malfunction. But what Chrome users may not realise is that the error message's picture is interactive: it turns out that the dino can be made to head out across the desert in a bland kind of endless runner game.

And this is that dinosaur, and I know about it, Enzo clearly knows about -- and now you, the reader, do as well.

Will continue with this series when time permits -- there's no lack of further material to share, just time to process and frame it usefully. Don't give up hope! In the meantime, you can occupy yourself making a dinosaur jump over some cacti. Cheers!

Landyachtz' Pop-Up Arcade

We'd heard the rumours of its approach, but it wasn't really real until the reports from its opening night party: the pop-up arcade at the LandYachtz skate shop, squatting in the space reserved for its upcoming cafe. Well OK, arcades were a really real part of my nostalgia (proximity to the multiple cabinets at the nearby Blue Moon convenience store, compounded with a sporadic allowance that would see me feeling my wealthiest for decades, certainly gave me a temporary boost to punch above my class in the vicious rich-kid social scene of grades 4 and 5 at Kerrisdale Elementary) and I still make sure to check out the (always disappointing) arcade room on the ferry whenever I'm crossing the waters. I guess I had to check it out.

But of course regular hours wouldn't be the same as the late-night booze-slinging opening night hours; I fished a bit without success...

@Landyachtz All right, bros, east van hipsters with kids want to know how early your pop-up arcade opens on a weekend.

— Rowan Lipkovits (@UnwashedMass) July 26, 2015

But after a second prod a week later word came back to me -- looks like it opens and closes in tandem with the factory store's regular business hours. Now where is it...

Ah, this must be the place! Sandwich board made from longboard decks, very clever. Now, just around the corner, and then...

Well, this must be the place! Looks a bit dingy compared to the unforgiving, stark light of broad daylight, but then that is only more period-authentic arcade flavour!

First things first: to instil a healthy interest in video gaming, hook my toddler daughter up with good gaming role models. OK, so what do we have on tap, here?

The answer is: lots of pinball. Mostly pinball, in fact -- over 50%. These machines were not specifically part of my nostalgia (I always knew of them and recognized them to see them, but they were never the targets for my quarters), but derive from an earlier, '70s tradition. What we see here is... Demolition Man, Jack*Bot (there's some tortured wordplay!), the bizarre Wizard of Oz video pinball cabinet, The Addams Family, and ... I'm sorry, my crappy photography has failed me on the rightmost cab, the only one which at that moment anyone considered to be worthy of playing! (Further research suggests: White Water?)

And still more! To the left of Demolition Man, we see: Star Trek, Street Fighter II, and what appears to be the most old-school of the bunch, Taxi. I'm always a fan of exploring the liminal, intertidal areas where genres and disciplines meet, but to my dismay I left the arcade without having explored how the beat-'em-up milieu of SF2 translated into pinball form. I may need to return in order to conduct further research.

Fear not -- there are also video game cabinets, with many excellent selections. From left to right, we have the popular Centipede, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac-Man, Bubble Bobble (!) ...

and more: Puzzle Bobble, pinball machines for Batman and Rollergames, and a Rampage arcade cabinet. But wait, there's still a bit more!

Also an R-Type cabinet (out of service), two-player Atari Tetris cocktail, and another cocktail Galaga I believe (also out of service, not pictured). Not a bad buffet!

Thoughts and reflections: Goddamn, this place was SO NOISY! My toddler, holding her hands over her ears, agreed. I appreciate that the games back in their first-run incarnation were in a sense competing with each other for your quarters, each week's underperformers returned and upgraded into newer, hopefully more appealing games, but that's a concern between the game manufacturers and the arcade owners. As far as players go, c'mon: once you're in the arcade, does it really matter which machine your coins are going into? Never did I end up in a situation where coins allocated for gameplay went unspent just because none of the offerings were sufficiently loud.

(Speaking of audio cues: that "doom" sound when an Atari Games / later Midway arcade cabinet had a coin inserted is hardwired somewhere into my parasympathetic nervous system. They weren't all great games, but they were never less than good!)

My first game played was Rampage; seeing an opportunity for father-daughter bonding, I polled my tot regarding which of the three monsters she'd like to play (A: "the ape" -- and pardon my digression, but whenever she encounters this species of simian in a children's book now she will proudly proclaim how she knows another ape named Donkey Kong!), then tried to (multitaskingly -- while playing) lure her back after she wandered off, the 2P paid for but unplayed... shockingly, despite George just standing there picking his nose the whole time, I (as Lizzie) only outlasted him by 10 seconds. I never realised the game's constant player-health-chipping-away was so evenly calibrated!

Then we installed my daughter on a surveillance chair -- she's at the age where "playing video games" still pretty much means "watching Dad play video games", and got down to business with Ms. Pac-Man... which I performed surprisingly good on, but unused to the speed at which she moves on actual arcade hardware, kept accidentally ramming innocent ghosts! It turns out the second map pattern also is not quite as ingrained in my subconscious, and so I didn't last terribly long on this machine. The joystick seemed period authentic but the unforgivingness of its stark short up/down/right/left seemed hostile to one grown fat and lazy on gamepad thumbsticks.

Another real classic sat adjacent: there it was, Donkey Kong. To help my tot get over the "why should I care?" factor, I carefully explained to her how this was the very first game in which her beloved Mario appeared. That got her attention! This hardware was a bit rough; certain sprites would disappear from the screen when crossing certain vertical locations, only to reappear later. I was expecting it to be tougher; on my first try I found myself trying to remember what came next while wondering how I'd managed to get up to the top so quickly? But he who hesitates is lost; the second time through, inexpert hammer handling hubris proved my downfall, despite that being, via Super Smash Bros., the one aspect of the game I've experienced most recently. Its stubby arcade joystick, from the days before such things were standardized, also threw off my game.

As for Puzzle Bobble - well, it is what it is, which is a thin slice of perfection. There are funner games, and there are more beautiful games, and there are more exciting games, but for my money nothing dresses up such a slim premise so completely. It only pales compared to the original Bubble Bobble, which, well hey, here it is! It turns out that I am apparently embarrassingly good at this game, getting up to level 30 on my first credit virtually solo, despite the game's dip switches being set to a harder mode (the first level's bad guys aren't typically Incendos -- ah, I see the game had been set to "Super Mode".) While playing this game, my wingman finally made it, and we whiled away several minutes discussing how we'd play something together "as soon as I die"... which, stubbornly, refused to happen. I didn't finally shuffle on until just after he joined in; feeling that abandoning him was a gesture in poor faith, I popped in another credit only to blow through all the lives within a single level. Sprees: go figure.

I played a round of Jack*Bot for a "classic" pinball experience, then had to try the Jersey Jack Wizard of Oz video pinball machine, with its 2013 creation date almost certainly the most recent of all the room's denizens (even including my toddler!); while fun enough, it filled my head with ponderings of its being symptomatic of the industry's slide into side avenues of guaranteed profitability, like Williams' wholesale transition into the video poker business and Konami's pachinko sideline... adapting the film version of the story from 1939, it was issued to celebrate its 75th anniversary, and featured a video-screen with what would have been highly distracting animated motion graphics and film clips during gameplay -- had I raised my head from the mechanical action down below. Maybe it's intended to catch the attention of spectators? Sorry -- I digressed from my digression... I was going to say that perhaps the pinball connoisseur demographic had now slid up high enough to overlap with the fans-of-films-from-1939 demographic, conspicuously a lucrative cohort to target. Maybe the next machines made would be for Casablanca and Metropolis? But maybe this is just sour grapes, given that both the recent Batman and Star Trek film relaunches had their machines present and accounted for -- was it so paining to me that the floor wasn't 100% pandering to youth popular culture trends?

My big regret is that I didn't play the cocktail Tetris, which to me was always the authoritative version of the game; all my life I've confused gamers discussing the great music from Tetris and talking about the kazachok dancers between levels, unaware that in the grand scheme of things it was the Game Boy version alone that achieved cultural canon status. This had, I'm sure, some intriguing competitive multiplayer modes. Next time! Next time for this and the Street Fighter 2 pinball.

Speaking of SF2, there's a game (heck, a genre) whose absence was conspicuous, and where were the Capcom / Konami brawlers in the Final Fight / Ninja Turtles vein? In my experience, those were the big quarter-hoovers -- four friends playing through TMNT simultaneously (did I tell you yet about how I distributed a strategy guide for this game through my elementary school's C64 lab?) could be expected to drop about $5 in quarters each. But maybe that becomes unsustainable with the new prices of $.50 per play for arcade games, $1 for pinball? And what's up with that inflation? Has a monopoly on period-authentic setting of the nostalgic experience taken on such a swollen premium? San Francisco's incredible Musée Mecanique, last visited in 2010, still only demands quarters for its amazing machines, ranging from the 1800s to Death Race to the present day, and one of my favorites, the Avalon in Portland, charges a flat fee for entry and then only a nickel per play.

All the machines in this arcade were sourced from East Van Amusements, which only raises more questions than it addresses: this company started in 2012? How did I miss getting in on a piece of that action? How come it has no representation at any of obvious local "nerd bar" locations such as the Storm Crow, EXP, etc., just the square footage premium of Vancouver real estate? These guys rent machines for weddings? A video recounted how, being stationed around the corner from La Casa Gelato, this site sees more than a few couples on their first dates visiting... I fear that had this site existed on my first date with my partner, there might not have been a second date: learning a little too much, too quickly...

You know, you really can't go back again, but though I could have enjoyed a very similar experience on my laptop through the Internet Arcade without leaving my living room, I don't regret going to get a feel for the trappings of the bygone era. The room was even decorated with pinball backings and video game marquee artwork, hung like animal heads in a hunter's lodge. I wonder what my 3-year-old daughter made of it, and if this experience will even be possible when she's my age. Or is it just one of those dwindling throwbacks like going to the opera or the horse races that is destined to slowly fade away across a couple of generations?

(I appreciate that, in uncharted climate change territory, a couple of generations hence may have far bigger fish to fry than celebrating the leisure electronics of the late cold war. But I still wonder!)

August 7, Edited to add: the arcade is open during regular shop hours, as noted, but in addition to their opening party they are hoping to do a late-night arcade party monthly until the space is renovated into being a cafe after October, where you get all of the games (plus new ones being added), as well as a DJ and the sale of alcoholic beverages. Admission is free with Facebook confirmation, which can be obtained here (though the games retain their somewhat inflated pricing.) I will probably miss out on this next one, but hope to find my way there in September -- that SF2 pinball game demands some kind of review. Cheers!

Atari, the super-hero

My friend's first gift to this blog isn't even a guest post, but grist for a post from me! During the great grand hardware pickup, he shared with me an anecdote regarding a barely-remembered Yellow Peril pro-Atari comic book in an early gaming magazine. Because the fans are rigorous, a little Googling turned up the remembered pages: the superhero Atari adventured through the pages of The Atarian magazine, foiling the plans of the sinister Ninja-Endo. (Subtle much?) In the tradition of Ming the Merciless and Fu Manchu before him, Ninja-Endo was an inscrutable Oriental mastermind who really had it in for the wholesome Aryans over at Atari. The scans were floating out there, but never yet that I could see compiled and transcribed, so here, for the first time in one place: less famous than Johnny Turbo, the worse comic that was a better fit for the Atari name than Atari Force... I present to you... Atari the Atarian!

That's quite an array of gaming hardware he's balancing on his arm (that can't be proportional!), and I gather those are boxed game cartridges in the centre of the comets? Also, I was moved to investigate: did Atari even have a light gun? Turns out, the answer is: yes. (Also: not that capes confer flying ability, but surely even in a world where they do, they wouldn't work folded like that, paper airplane style? I also like the letters S and B emerging from the Atarian's metallic leg-bands for no discernible reason.) Now that we've seen the character, on with his adventures!

(Is that story credit to David Ahl to David H. Ahl of million-selling BASIC type-in fame, thanks for Wumpus, Hamurabi and Star Trek? And the answer is, again: yes.)

ATARI CORP HAS DEVELOPED THE MOST ADVANCED PRODUCTION LINE IN THE WORLD...
BRINGING TO IT[']S CUSTOMERS THE HIGHEST QUALITY VIDEO GAMES AT THE LOWEST POSSIBLE PRICES.
PRODUCTION LINES ARE PRODUCING...
QUALITY CONTROL CHECKERS ARE CHECKING...
SHOPPERS ARE SHOPPING...
SALE! ATARI GAMES
... AND EVERYONE IS HAPPY. [CENTIPEDE IN BACKGROUND, getting a bit long in the tooth by 1989.]
BUT WHEN A NEW GAME, ZENOASTRA, GOES INTO PRODUCTION, THE LINES INEXPLICABLY SLOW DOWN. [ZENOASTRA: the next Polybius?]
FIRST TO A 1000 PER DAY...
THEN TO 500...
THEN TO 200...
QUALITY CONTROL CHECKER: (THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG HERE!)
ATARI TROUBLESHOOTER MILO MINDER VISITS... [Any relation to Joseph Heller's Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22?]
MILO MENDER: WHAT'S HAPPENING?
MANAGER: I WAS HOPING YOU COULD TELL US. OUR COMPUTERS ARE ACTING AS IF THEY HAVE A MIND OF THEIR OWN!
QCC: I TRIED TO GET A PRINT OUT OF THE PRODUCTION FILE AND THE SYSTEM DUMPED OUT A MILLION RANDOM NUMBERS!
AND THEN WE TRIED TO CUT POWER, THE TERMINAL FLASHED "FORGET IT TURKEY." FOLLOWED BY A STRING OF STUFF THAT LOOKED...JAPANESE.
NOW WE'RE LOCKED OUT.
MM: LET ME TAKE A LOOK AT THE COMPUTER.
MEANWHILE, FAR OVERHEAD, A STRANGE CRAFT HOVERS OVER THE ATARI FACTORY.
COOLIE: OUR COMPU-LASER BEAM HAS TAKEN FULL CONTROL OF THE PRODUCTION COMPUTERS, CAPTAIN-SAN.
CAPTAIN-SAN: AH SO! NOW WE HAVE THEM WHERE WE WANT THEM.
NOW TO INTRODUCE THESE SUBTLE VIRUSES IN THEIR GAMES. JUST ONE OF THESE NASTIES...
WILL RUIN AN ENTIRE GAME LIBRARY AND FORCE THEIR CUSTOMERS TO BUY FROM US.

QCC: HEY, MAYBE IF I TURN THIS KNOB...
M: MILO, THE MEN ARE GRASPING AT STRAWS -- YOU'VE GOT TO HELP!
MM: (THE COMPUTERS SEEM TO BE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF AN OUTSIDE FORCE.. BUT FROM WHERE?)
MAKING A QUICK EXIT, MILO HEADS FOR THE NEAREST PHONE BOOTH..
MM: (THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB..)
... FOR ATARI!
OH NO!
A COMPULASER BEAM, JUST CRAWLING WITH HIDEOUS BUGS!
LET'S SEE WHERE IT LEADS.
C: SIR, STEALTH SCOPE SHOWS AN OBJECT CLOSING FAST!
CS: READY DISINTEGRATOR!
FIRE!
ZAK!!
MM: UGH! SO THAT'S HOW THEY WANT TO PLAY, EH!
WELL, LET'S SEE HOW THEY LIKE A DOSE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE!
USING HIS GREAT POWER, ATARI REFLECTS THE RAY BACK TOWARDS THE CRAFT.
CS: WHA! ABANDON SHIP!!
BOOM
MM: SO IT'S YOU, NINJA-ENDO! WHEN WILL YOU EVER LEARN YOU CAN'T BEAT THE POWER OF ATARI!
CS: I'LL BE BACK ATARI! I'LL BE BACK!!
JOIN US NEXT ISSUE FOR MORE ADVENTURE!

(Clearly it's time for someone to file this under the Yellow Peril in comics section over at TVTropes. Strangely as the series go on and on, Ninja-Endo gets more and more deformed to the point that he no longer resembles an Asiatic stereotype, but some kind of extraterrestrial humanoid. Sadly, the stupid name persists.)

(At once so much more and somehow so much less than the cover artwork, this looks like a teenaged intern used the Photoshop airbrush tool inexpertly to blur all the linework, but I must imagine that actually this is just the result of colouring the art with felt pen markers. Yuck!)

AFTER FOILING THE PLANS OF NINJA-ENDO* ATARI ACE MILO MINDER HEADS HOME.
MM: GEE I WONDER HOW BETH IS DOING.
MM: SHE WAS PLAYING THAT NEW GHOULS N'GREMLINS GAME YESTERDAY.
* SEE LAST ISSUE
MM: SHE'S GONE
MM: AND THAT DOORWAY WASN'T HERE BEFORE!
MILO ENTERS THE DARK DOORWAY AND DESCENDS A LONG STAIRWAY.
MM: WONDER WHERE THIS LEADS?
HE FINDS A TRUNKFUL OF USEFUL TOOLS.
MM: THESE SHOULD COME IN HANDY.
BETH: HELP
MM: BETH'S VOICE! GOT TO MOVE IT!
MM: BUT -- HOW DO I GET PAST THIS ICEWALL?
MM: I KNOW! BY FOCUSING THE LIGHT WITH THIS MIRROR I CAN MELT THE ICE.
MM: HMM... THIS KEY I FOUND OPENED THIS TRAPDOOR.
MM: BUT IT'S A LONG DROP DOWN.
MM: BETTER TIE THE ROPE AND SLIDE DOWN.
UNKNOWN TO MILO HE IS BEING OBSERVED BY THE EVIL NINJAENDO
NINJA-ENDO: HA! HA! HA! THAT MEDDLING BOYFRIEND OF YOURS HAS FALLEN RIGHT INTO MY TRAP!
B: YOU FIEND!
NE: NOW NOW MY DEAR, HE'S ABOUT TO REACH THE SPAWNER!!

MM: LEAPING LASERS! A GHASTLY GROUP OF GHOULISH GREMLINS!
MILO DISPATCHES ONE WITH A DART...
THEN ANOTHER.
BUT THE GHOULS SURROUND MILO.
...LITTLE REALIZING HE HAS AN ALTER EGO...
ATARI!!
MM: LET'S SEE HOW YOU LIKE...
POW
MM: MY DOMINO PUNCH!
MM: MY LASER LIGHT GUN SHOULD TAKE CARE OF THEIR SPAWNER!
MM: NINJAENDO! I SHOULD'VE KNOWN IT WAS YOU!
NE: BAH! NEXT TIME I WIN!
JOIN US NEXT ISSUE!

(The references are all so specific, it must be to a particular Atari game, but which one? Talk of the spawner brings Gauntlet to mind, which was an Atari property, but the rest doesn't jibe.)

AFTER UNTYING BETH, ATARI SETS OFF IN PURSUIT OF THE EVIL NINJA-ENDO.
ATARI: COME ON BETH, STAY CLOSE.
THE LOWER CHAMBERS ARE FLOODED. WE'LL HAVE TO BORROW A BA-1 SUB* TO TRACK HIM DOWN.
* SEE "TOWER TOPPLER." [Not the most substantial reference: "Towers are linked together via a voyage through the sea in your trusty MK.7 submarine."]
TIGHT FIT FOR TWO IN THIS MINI-SUB. [Doesn't look like she especially minds the tight quarters!]
BETH: THESE FISH HAVE ALL MUTATED. WHAT COULD BE CAUSING IT?
ATARI: I DON'T KNOW, BUT OUR TRACKING SONAR HAS PICKED UP --
-- "NINJA-ENDO!"
NINJA-ENDO: THOSE CREEPS FOLLOWED ME -- JUST AS I KNEW THEY WOULD!
NOW TO MARSHALL MY ARMY OF UNDERSEA CREATURES! [I like the one in the baseball cap.]

ATARI: AN ARMY OF MUTANT SEA CREATURES ARE HEADED THIS WAY!
(BUT I CAN'T LEAVE BETH ALONE IN THE SUB.)
BETH: I THINK THAT DOLPHIN IS TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH US!!
ATARI: YES! I CAN ANALYZE HIS SOUND PATTERNS WITH THIS MEGA-ST.
HE SAYS THE USS TRITON* IS ON THE BOTTOM NOT FAR AWAY AND IT'S LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES!
*THE TRITON SANK ON 3/15/43. [David H. Ahl, 2003: "I'm currently the editor-at-large for Classic Military Vehicle magazine"]
ATARI FOCUSES THE BA-1 LASER ON THE TRITON AS THE SEA CREATURES PASS OVER IT.
BOOM!
REGRETTABLE PACIFIC ISLANDER GOLLYWOG CARICATURES: PRAISE NEPTUNE! FRIED BLUEFISH AND SMOKED OYSTERS! [Gollywogs who worship the ancient Greek god of the sea, apparently.]
WILL ATARI CATCH NINJA-ENDO?
TUNE IN NEXT ISSUE AND FIND OUT!! [Is Atari giving a left-handed thumbs-up on his right side? Ouch!]

(There was no next issue. From the same interview: "I published Atari Explorer for five years and started Atarian magazine in 1989 (only three issues) for Atari Corp. until they were buried by Nintendo in 1990." Buried! If you can't compete with a superior product, you can offer racism, but that approach only succeeds sometimes.)

And there you have it: the complete story of an unworthy footnote, but it was a curio regardless and as such I couldn't just leave well enough alone.

loose ends

My blogging is a well-oiled machine, and individual posts get attention weeks, months and sometimes years in advance of actually being published. I have hundreds of unpublished fragmentary missives lined up, but the forest-fire-smokey-heat-wave-newborn-care nexus I've arrived at has resulted in, bizarrely, my taking time off from my full time employment to find I have a steep drop in the workflow of my hobby here. Can't I square aside 15 minutes daily? Not necessarily...

So sorry to fans of my "textmode video game art" series -- it will be resuming at some point, already populated with armies of blocky entries, I just need a bit of time to recover and roll with the bumps, expected and surprise, that life has dealt me. I've looked into taking on a guest poster, the recipient of my redundant video gameing materials, in the interest of his mounting and reporting on a parallel retro game party series in the retro-game-loving town of Portland, OR. We'll see if he can't help bridge some of my extraordinary gaps. In the meantime, my brain continues fixating on games non-stop regardless of whether I'm able to exorcise the urges here or not, so here are two recent ludic reminiscences from recent days.

My toddler daughter had us baffled when she dumped her blocks out on the floor and proudly proclaimed that she'd laid out a new level for Mario to traverse. Uhh, sure. Then the light went on over my head: so as to spare us from the ravages of Pac-Man World 2 (itself saving us the ravages of endless rounds of classic Pac-Man), featuring her first video game protagonist idol, I shuffled her along to Mario and his greater array of options. We landed on Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube, and though this game does primarily feature charming 3-D landscapes in whimsical Mario style, it also boasts pocket-dimension pachinko puzzle levels that look something like this:

Basically, a clear indication that our family play time should perhaps be scaled back a little. (I've been considering shuffling Sunshine aside in favour of Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii as our primary selection for "Daddy, I want to watch you play a video game", but I've got to dig it out of a pile of hundreds of discs. 1st-world problems!)

Then, there were the alphabet set of climbing-wall hand-holds at the playground:

She didn't make any connection, but I immediately suffered an attack of GIRP recollections. GIRP, the typing sea-cliff-climbing game from the man who brought you QWOP, the user-unfriendliest track & field game ever envisioned! Go on, try it, you can thank me later. Is it possible that he came up with the idea for the game without having seen the handholds? (Well, possibly: a mind that perverse must be endlessly creative.)

Anyway... slim grist for a blog post, I'll admit, but it beats my radio silence and besides, these connections would have been too wordy to point out in Tweets. (Did I consider ... not pointing them out at all? Please, we don't have this big wide empty Internet to fill with our subdued restraint.) I'll get back on the wagon eventually, this is just a practice post to remind you all that I'm still alive and my brain persists in being absolutely consumed with endless thoughts about video and computer games. See you soon, hopefully!

Garage Sale Hauls

Garage sale season doesn't really begin until May -- there are always a few stragglers before the wave hits, but typically their iconoclastic hosts will have similarly outlying taste in regards to the materials they're hoping to sell you. And yet and yet... we are having another baby in June. (The first is already a big fan of Pac-Man and Mario, so soon the gamers in the house will hold a majority power bloc!) And so... we will not be making it out to many sales this summer. But we have managed to hit a few thus far, to some good effect.

There are some immutable laws of the historical echo effect with second-hand goods: what you find second-hand of course changes over time -- I remember how back in the day NES carts were plentiful at Value Village, but eventually all the kids went to college, all the attics were emptied and all the plastic cartridges found their way channelled through the thrift shops and into all the collectors' basements, and now they are once again rare and costly. When I came into my own as a regular thrift store patron was during that particular moment in time when mostly you would find Xbox original and PlayStation 2 games up for grabs, with occasional murmurs of the fading echoes of the PS1 and Dreamcast eras, but all earlier gaming history had been recognized in its due course as actually historical, and had emerged from the trough of no value alchemically transmutated from "dated" to "vintage". Basically, if you adhere to my standards of not collecting games for systems you don't own, you always need to be current to within a generation or two to pick up the good deals, or else you're not helping people by picking up their trash but instead competing with collectors for collections. Eww.

Consequently, now that I've inherited a Wii and an Xbox 360 (and just whose PS3 will end up taking residence on my shelf, anyhow?) I'm starting to purchase games for those machines second-hand, just when they're beginning to dominate the field of what I find on offer at sales. (It's an extreme novelty to me to be in ownership of systems for which I could, hypothetically, go to the store and buy new, first-run games. I was very briefly in this situation with our bought-new PlayStation 2, picked up at fire sale prices well after the PS3 had landed (though the PS2 continued to outsell it for quite a while), buying a handful of games new -- so few I can name them: Dance Dance Revolution Supernova 2 (as it was intended as a cheap alternative to Wii Fit), Beyond Good and Evil, Secret Agent Clank, and Shadow of the Colossus. Then the PS2 shelves were redecorated as PS4 shelves and my machine's future prospects became purely second-hand, and the Nintendo DS waved its freak flag high as the only machine in my burgeoning coterie for which new games could be bought in-store. Handheld hardware seems to age at a different pace from home consoles, a phenomenon perhaps worthy of study. Actually it ages both faster and slower than home consoles; most of them are obsolete overnight, unless they're made by Nintendo, the Dorian Gray of the handheld gaming industry. But I digress.)

Clockwise, we have: for the XBOX 360: Super Street Fighter IV, Viva Pinata, and Two Worlds; for the Nintendo Wii: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, No More Heroes, and Mario Party 8; for the Nintendo DS: Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll; and some weird stuff: the official Tetris card game (Uno, reskinned, though I think the winner need announce "Tetroono" when one point away from winning), and issue #1 of DC's bizarre brand cash-in comic book, Atari Force. As the home consoles have gotten more powerful and development budgets to throw your hat in their ring inflated, I think a lot of the small fish were removed from the game development ecosystem and consequently buying random games for this generation of hardware is likely to be less of a complete crapshoot -- while I have no direct experience with any of these games, they are all flagship representatives of beloved brands (Street Fighter, Metroid, Monkey Ball) or at least they're not-unknown and well-reviewed titles. Sadly, I'm not going to find anything truly out of left field (my favourite niche) for these machines, but I can be contended with the assumption of at least a baseline standard of quality and polish. (How bad can a Street Fighter game on 21st-century hardware going to be to a fellow who downloaded and played Stick Fighter 2 under MS-DOS?) Perhaps my favorite part of the photo spread is looking at the original price on the SF4 box and comparing it to the yard sale price next to it on Viva Pinata. Games: probably a worse investment than cars, at least in the medium term.

And as the tide rolls in, bringing new games into my nets, so it also washes out, taking away surplus from my tangled collection:

Just look at this incredible chest of loot that I brought back thru customs today, from the @UnwashedMass collection: pic.twitter.com/nIsXHGIeLn

— Mike Kelley (@mwkelley) May 26, 2015

(Insert supercomputer-smuggling joke here.) The retro gaming lucre flows in and as it does, redundancies begin accumulating very quickly -- second copies of games already owned (I had to start a mobile-device master list of games owned because I could no longer keep track from memory (things grow hazy after the first few hundred) and found I had accidentally duplicated a fifth of my collection), second MACHINES already owned (or streamlined out with back-compatibility -- with the PS2 in effect, there is no compelling argument for keeping a PS1 on life support. Arguably that could apply to any system that can be easily emulated on a PC, but let's not get carried away here) and extra bibs and bobs -- spare joysticks and multitaps, power and A/V cords, etc. etc. You can consider it like a sports car -- for value, you buy two, and keep one around for spare parts -- but really once you have a working system, especially one that may only get used twice a year at retro gaming parties, you can only justify keeping all the extra bits around if you live on a rural ranch with bona fide outbuildings and a back 40. (Related: my working C64 came into my hands after spending 25 years forgotten in a barn. The broken one... was sourced from the flea market. There is a special circle of hell for those who sell broken hardware packed in its original box.)

Here, I have turned my problem -- what am I going to do with all this stuff (Not pictured: a surplus Wii and an original Xbox) with a growing family and a finite homestead -- into a boon for my friend. He took them last Saturday (also helping me test-drive the Tetris card game -- verdict, probably not as much fun as a set of wooden Russian polyominoes -- and introducing me to the saga of The Atariian vs. Ninja-Endo, which I will be filling you in about soon) and already this coming weekend he has plans to have people over to play games on them. That's infinitely better use than I was putting them to (infinite because of a divide by zero error), so I consider it a win/win.

Video game textmode art part 19: Konami's Final Fantasy report

Obligatory post-irrelevant leading image:

Another amazing #retrogaming display made up of Coke and Pepsi cartons... #1 for Retro: http://t.co/jEYt9mKO8n pic.twitter.com/c7J4MfKHA1

— Funstock.co.uk (@FunStockGames) April 29, 2015

Settled! OK, you've now seen bibs and bobs of Final Fantasy-alia represented in this "textmode video game art" blog series, but nothing to really demonstrate what a juggernaut the franchise was in the late '90s. Here Konami (not the beleaguered company but the nickname of an artist who we've seen grandstanding before in an undirected virtuosic fashion) really fills in the blanks nearly singlehandedly. A couple of other artists add some drag factor, but I can't get away with imposing both artist and subject themes on these blog posts, so something's gotta give. We'll begin with a Final Fantasy 8 piece in Big 5 (what I described earlier as "Chinese Unicode"):

Small, but in a sense the triangles help to provide greater detail than an analogous screen of plain 80x25 ANSI would yield. Here are a couple Big 5 takes on menu artwork on a Final Fantasy 11 theme:

(And more, but different! Bump the Roman numeral, make all the letters slightly wider...)

Warmed up, yet? Just helping you to calibrate. here's a Bomb (it's a kind of enemy first appearing in FF2) by Scarecrow of VOR:

All right, you've adjusted your v-hold and buckled yourself down? Now let's switch into overdrive and get this show on the road!

OK, it's an original depiction of Terra Branford (totally notable!) from Final Fantasy VI!

And here's an original group shot of Cloud Strife & Sephiroth from that classic FF VII:

Another original take on a popular subject, it's Cloud Strife again:

Next, a curious original arrangement here, no doubt following one too many late nights playing Final Fantasy IV: "Cecil as both Paladin and Dark Knight":

Here's another original take on Cecil from the same game: the quote is directly sourced from the game.

An original depiction of Kefka from FFVI really putting negative space to good use:

Here we have a group piece, an original staging of Ramza and Agrias from Final Fantasy Tactics:

And while we're visiting that game, another original take on another character from that version of the franchise, one of FF's many, many Cids:

Here we get another original piece, Kururu from FFV.

Those were good pieces of monochrome art, but here in full colour ASCII is Auron from Final Fantasy X -- an image Konami describes as "pretty much taken from his official art". (But with more dollar signs, we can safely assume!)

Now an original presentation of a Jester class Moogle from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance:

And here, we get an original depiction of Rinoa from FF8:

The $ character for "filler" is only medium-intensity; the happy-face covers many more pixels, and makes for a brighter, more high-intensity pic that practically pops right off of the page! Here we get more FF7, now featuring Cait Sith! Everything is awesome!

For the last of these, Cyan (the character Cyan Garamonde, what do you think this is, the CGA fanart hour? No, that's magenta!) from FFVI:

Now we switch gears into full-bore ANSI art! (Funny to think that I really could have still further subdivided this uber-niche specialty post, "Final Fantasy textmode fan art by Konami", into different posts for representation of different styles. But no, I'm powering on through!) In a sense, we start actually losing detail with this less-abstract (or at least differently-abstracted) visual idiom. ASCII is an odd duck format to be sure, but it gives such splendid options for textures! So you don't get thrown too much, here's Cyan again:

This is an original design for Ultima The High Seraph from Final Fantasy Tactics:

And here, Squall from FF8. (Note from the artist: "I kinda hate that ANSI.")

Now there's an original take on Witch Edea, also from FF8 (I'm sensing bias toward certain games in the series... ones that were current when Konami drew these pictures, or ones that lend themselves unusually well to a textmode adaptation? My running theory is: the former.)

Following right up with an original design showing Locke from FFVI:

Here we have two original takes on Terra who you also saw in Konami's first piece in this blog posting:

An original toony group piece here, portraying all the characters in FFVI's final party:

An original design for Relm in FFVI:

Update: here are three that slipped the cracks! Without further ado... Golbez from Final Fantasy IV:

A tableau of some of the character classes from the first Final Fantasy game:

And here, Celes from Final Fantasy VI:

We now return you to your initially scheduled post in progress...

And here again, the stylish man it's impossible to escape in fanart circles, an original presentation of Cloud Strife:

And one MORE time, with a bit more detail:

And... further drilling in the exception that proves the rule (I know, why cap off the "Konami draws characters from Final Fantasy" post with art by different artists? I'm just a contrarian I suppose...), a big joint you can use to compare and contrast with that last one:

Phew, what an epic spree! That's not the last you'll see of Konami (you wouldn't believe just how much textmode video game art he's got up his sleeves!) but that probably is a fond farewell to the Final Fantasy games (especially numbers 6, 7 and 8). See you again soon, blockheads!