He looks like that.

As some may know, Ariga, of the Megaman Megamix, was at Fanexpo 2010 and he was taking questions. Expanding on an earlier question as to what Forte might wear in civilian attire (answer: he wouldn’t wear civilian attire), I asked Ariga to draw out Forte without his helmet. Ariga took a bit to think about it and drew Iceman in the meantime (having already thought of what Ice would look like). Then he drew helmet less Forte. I think this is the closest we’ve ever come to an official art depiction of that … sadly he never said what color his hair would be.

Also, when I asked who was his favorite obscure Robot Master from the non-Capcom games (such as MM PC or Rockman Strategy) he said Konroman (aka Stoveman).

It was a delight to meet the man. He was very friendly and thought me knowledgeable in field of Rockman, which was quite the compliment. He was especially glad to see that I brought in the Rockman Remix manga for him to sign, as that’s his first published complication, and well as my copy of Rockman and Forte (game, box, and manual for the Super Famicom). Evidently it’s quite rare. To think … I was considering tossing the box just a few days ago!

Does it seem a few weeks early? Well, the gathering was a month early, it happened a couple weeks ago. There may be videos of some sort later on, if we ever get something useable out of them. That’s not my department, I just write about it. Don’t forget to check the photo gallery too.

It’s that time of year again.

Meanwhile, I also snuck in that last little AXE walkthrough update I wanted. The boss guide now has full details on each version of each boss.

Coming at you live from the Mech’s Meet where I can apparently make updates even on the road. It helps that I finished these two walkthrough pages before leaving and just needed to uncheck a box over here on the other side of the country. So today is the last two walkthrough pages that were stinking up the index page with their lack of linkage. Maps and Virus Breeder. Now I could probably say the walkthrough is finally complete, but there are a few more tasks to complete in the existing pages before that. At least now the links are all there so it looks complete to the naked eye.

Okay, so what’s been going on the last six months? Well, not much here, evidently! I went back to school for a bit January to March, focused on projects for the Maniacs’ 10th Anniversary April to May, and then kinda pissed away June on video games, only recently getting back to being productive for July.

The primary result tonight is the Walkthrough’s Miscellaneous section, containing lots of tables of boring data on what you can buy at shops, where to find all the power-ups, and stuff like that. There are also some weird obscure things thrown in at the bottom, like an explanation for the above image. That just leaves the Virus Breeding and Maps pages now. Looking back in the archives, it looks like it’s been almost exactly a year since I said I had all this data waiting to be formatted and that it wouldn’t take much longer. So much for that.

Speaking of archives, Gauntlet’s been bugging me to get all the AXE updates reconciled with the main blog (okay, so he asked me one time and I ignored it for a few months), and I finally got around to it just now, so AXE updates are archived in the blog. Does it matter? I dunno. G seems to think so.

Story updates ought to be coming soon as well. And this is “soon” as in a week or two, being wrapped up right now, not “soon” like 2011. Honest.

Yes, it’s that time again. The time where I update the list of cell phone games and the screen shot gallery. And I find myself wondering why they chose to have Megaman shoot directly at Dr. Wily in Megaman: Rush Marine. I mean, just look at that. He’s shooting hot plasma directly at Dr. Wily’s head! How does that not violate the laws of robotics? He does the same in the Megaman PC games, so maybe it’s that Megaman is more violent than Rockman. Yeah, let’s stick with that theory.

But more than just the list being updated is some downloadable Megaman cell phone games. This not only includes Rockman Jump (of course), but also Rocket Christmas, Pinball, Space Rescue, and Megaman 3! Megaman 3 actually has all sizes of the game, which means even the tiny sprites used for the low resolution phones. I can’t extract the sprites to the others, but maybe someone else out there can. You can thank Duke Serkol for these downloads!

It’s … another new epilogue!?

That’s right, another new installment. Or, rather, a reworking of an old installment. This epilogue was actually intended for early Series 6, but was not finished for various reasons. It’s remained on the back burner for all this time … until now! Go on and read Eyeball, the 7th installment of Series 7.

And I promise the next update won’t have to do with epilogues.

Well, it’s finally here. The very last anniversary update! And what an update it is!

Yes, the final updates relate to Maniacs mainstays, the epilogues. Firstly Series 1 and Series 2 have been remastered by Raijin (Snakeman). They now feature less spelling mistakes and more images next to speaking lines! Fans of the epilogues have actually asked about this before, but the project has always been just a bit too big, but now our earliest epilogues are edited.

Next up is another project Snake and I have been working on feverishly all this month. Epilogue Summaries. Yes, now you don’t have to re-read the entire series just to know what any given character is about in the Maniacs’ epilogue series. These summaries. follow, not only members of the team, but villains as well and they also delve into the various prose stories features on the site, such as the Unnamed and Wanted.

Finally, the gallery has been updated with fan art and the rest of the Megaman PC video pictures. I’ve also drawn an entirely new picture for the 10th anniversary which features the mechanical maniacs in their transmetal 2 armor with their greatest villains in the background.

All this and a certain …. hidden page has also been updated.  find it if you can!

So, here’s to another 10 years!

More 10th anniversary stuff! Dr Wily’s Last Stand!? Part 4, the final part of the Megaman 3 retelling is now online! Will Megaman defeat Dr. Wily? Well … yes, obviously. But this is the epilogue version of that!

I’ve also added some more Sinister Six PC related images relating to that music video. Two are Torchman’s hopes and dreams for the future (yeah, X and Zero will totally honor you, Torch … yeah), and the rest are memories of the PC guys.

The 10th anniversary updates continue!

Ah, Mechanical Maniacs Lite. That was a backup site on Geocities made when Planet Megaman, our longtime host, suffered one of it’s frequent outages, taking us along with it. Rather than simply disappear I had that site inform people on when we’d be back. It was simply a front page with the bios, but it served it’s purpose and I rather like the NES styles banner. The old NES and WW based layouts were nice and unique until every single other Megaman team copied them. Because, naturally, everyone needs a similar layout when they already have a similar idea behind their sites.

Dr Wily’s Last Stand!? Part 3 continues the retelling of Megaman 3. But that’s not all! Topman has written an all-new epilogue – No Newbs Is Good Newbs. This one has actually been on hold since very early on in Series 6, but the work has definitely been worth the wait!

And there’s even more art in the galleries. I had missed some of Raijin’s older Mechs art, but no more! Actual pictures of Lennon’s Evil Eight are now in his gallery along with a few other pictures, as seen below. My gallery has been updated with even more S6 pictures as well.

The 10th anniversary coverage continues! The logo up there was created by Nightmare Zero back in the day. It was used for the longest time.   Makes me misty eyed to see it on the main page again after so long.

The epilogues continue with Dr Wily’s Last Stand!? Part 2. Here we see Megaman facing off against the Mechanical Maniacs! But who’s that tagging along with him? And why is he even there?

More sketches this week. First up is one I made when I planned to sing an english version of the Airman song for Auto. Kept procrastinating on that until it died … and all I have to show for it is this unfinished picture. Speaking of unfinished, the nest is an unfinished sketch of an early Mechanical maniacs poster! I think I just never got around to this one. After that is the sketch I made for the Crorq’s Castle sprite, pieces used for the Airman scene in the S6 video, an unused scene I sketched for that video, and the larger image used for Series 7.

10 years. Wow. You know, it seems like only yesterday when I saved all the files on the Geocities site in order to kick off updates after a six month long hiatus (a record down time back then). Our site had background MIDIs, a common team layout shamelessly copied from the Sinister Six (made by Skullman of Cossack’s Creations), and me working vigorously to get all the epilogues I’d written onto the site and the forum cleaned up from the mess it was in thanks to the admins being too busy to really deal with the problems therein.

Now the site is incredibly large. The epilogues have given way in terms of focus to my exploring the more obscure areas of Megaman (which I was always rather interested in). The layout went from a simply frames-based mish-mash of images to using all sorts of PHP and CSS tricks. The forums went from the text-based Senac forum to a modest Invisionfree forum (while stopping by PHPBB, EZboard, Ikonboard, Proboards, and possibly others I’m completely forgetting about). The galleries have went from a simple set of images made by myself and some fan submissions to HUGE archives of screenshots and fan art way beyond what i ever hoped to have when I first started the ‘Maniacs.

And now it’s 10 years. And I’m going to post new things throughout the month. Starting with Issue #1 of Series 7 – Dr Wily’s Last Stand!? I had actually started this story years ago, as a fanfic, but never finished it. When I realized we were hitting our 10th I thought of no better way to celebrate than to finish off a story about the game that started it all (for us, anyway). And, to my knowledge, no other team has ever retold the events of their game. So it pleases me to be the first!

But that’s not all! I’ve also saved up the artwork I’ve done for the MM3 PC music video for a special occasion … and this is it! I’m starting off with the first two pictures shown in the vid.

So keep coming back all month long for more art and more parts to the story!

So, a few months ago I was going through Deviantart and came across some very old art done by Snake and I say to myself, “Geez, I don’t think that’s ever been put into the gallery.” Turns out I was right. But not only about Snake’s work, but a whole slew of others! Well, there’s no time to like the present to post these old pieces of art, so here we go!

Classi’s old Megaman 3 music video. This was only accessible through the old video player I made and I completely forgot about it when I made each video a separate thing in the gallery (there were many more official videos than fan made ones, so this slipped through the cracks). Well, it’s in Classi’s main gallery now and a new Video section in the team galleries. Although there’s still not much there, I suppose this is more organized.

Some older art of Raijin’s featuring Bizarro Shadowman and his own version of Snakeman. Yeah, that picture up there belongs to him as well. The pics of Bizarro is what started me on getting all this long-overlooked artwork onto the main site! Geez, Raj, can’t you do your own uploading?

About three YEARS back, before he disappeared into the abyss, Hardman made his own art thread. And here’s all the images from it FINALLY, not only here on the main page, but in the official Mechs galleries as well as the Business of War gallery (where appropriate). Yeah, you’d think I’d have got through all the War stuff by now, but I seem to keep finding more to add. These pictures also serve as a community snapshot – things would never be quite the same afterwards.

I kinda figured Hard would put these into his own gallery eventually, but … here we are. And some of these guys appear in the fiction, such as Constance, Cassandra, and Gaderham, so it’s really handy to have these pictures in the official galley.

Finally we have some fan art. I love fan art. We have some fanmade ‘Maniacs Moments by Scorch, fanart for Hardian specifically by Bright Babe, some fan-art practice sketches by Erirudo, a drawing Class earned by going into a contest by Kurai-Hato, sprites of me, Lennon (as Strider), and Hadrian by MM19872008 and a Superadventure style Artilleryman by General RADIX.

That’s everything for now! You can see all of these in their native galleries – Hardman’s Gallery, Snakeman’s Gallery, Spark Chan’s Gallery, the Gift Art Gallery, and the Miscellaneous Sprites Gallery.

Wait, there’s a new epilogue? Gotta be an April Fool’s day joke, right?

Well … it is for the fictitious Mechs that star in the epiverse. Behold the first new epilogue in … well, years: Hammar Assault! You’ve got three guesses to pin down who they tangle with in this adventure.

And, no it’s not an error, it’s actually number five in the series. Believe it or not there’s four additional epilogues already completed before this … but it’s not quite time yet to post them. Epilogue fans will have something to look forward to.

Also, as the gigantic “The End” might indicate, it’s the end of the ‘Maniacs Moments. Well, the end to my continuation of it. Hope you all enjoyed the last stretch of this long running sprite comic (with an even longer running hiatus). I’m glad I could add, if not the ending it deserved, AN ending. I also added an old MM Christmas Special Hardy made for it back in 04. I didn’t think it’d fit in the standard page, but … it does. Go figure. I also added them to the Fiction page. I dunno if one page sprite comics really count as “fiction”, but … they have words in them. And you might think to look for them there first in the future. Good thing I did that now that they’re over and done with, eh?

Standard epilogue ending to tie the Moments in with the standard stuff. The ‘Moments actually take place quite a while ago so that’s the Ark, in case you didn’t know. It’s nice to see such an old project get the end it deserves.

In other news, I finally got a hold of the English version of Ariga’s Megamix. For years I’ve had the Rockman Remix and the original Megamixes and I’m very glad to be able to finally read the stories in them. Well, sort of. Read the article I wrote to get my impression of the English Megamix as well as things it’s missing. Now that it’s translated it’s not quite obscure anymore, but in a few more years I’m sure it will be.

You know, I kept asking Hardman to put these guys into the comics, but he never did. Well, here they are. And they finally get a measure of revenge.

So what have we been doing lately? Actually, Magnet came up with a wonderful project idea that has been unfolding all month long. Heaven’s Hammarz aka Aggravated Assault, the Megaman 10 team! That’s right, a MONTH long, before MM10 was even released. This team has been made to poke a little fun at the team scene and is filled with the worst bios, epilogues, and forum one could imagine coming from newbies. It was a brilliant idea and great fun to work on. Check it out!

So, Unicron. He was brought into the eps again as a final twist in the Series 4 finale. A twist which I never got to, and which I’ll never be going back to and which I’ll be happy to forget. Welp, here he is dying again at the hands of the big baddie Iceman Red. Even with Ice’s Star Wars ties to him, I felt he could still use some extra juice, so he gets to kill Unicron too. Isn’t filling old plot holes fun?

Say hello to our new WordPress format! I actually had a WordPress blog briefly before choosing Blogger for the ‘Maniacs, so WordPress was my natural second choice. And, unlike Blogger, WordPress actually uses databases and our very own server, so it’ll never have to be replaced.

Uh … *knocks on wood*.

Either way, Blogs are definitely the way to go when it comes to day-to-day updates like this. I’m hoping to keep it this way forevermore.

I just got an e-mail from Blogger and it seems that they’re shutting down FTP support for their blogs on the 22nd. What does that mean for the Mechs? Well, no more Blogger, that’s what it means! I’m pretty annoyed by it since I had to make a whole new layout that accounted for Blogger’s backwards policy of uploading actual HTML files onto the site (rather than have database support or something). It was tricky and annoying, but it was done. And now it’s over. Ah, well. Look forward to a new blog format in the near future.

In the meantime, this last post from Blogger will feature some more art from the archives of Gauntlet! It seems I missed a couple of gift art things as well (sorry, guys!). Well, here they are, alongside some more ‘Maniacs art.

More MMPC3 Superadventure mugs by discoduderock.

Shadowman VS Shadowman by Glider.

A small sprite of the super computer Crorq featuring custom emoticons made for the MM3 forum. By Snakeman (Raijin).

MM Team girls by Cyros

A bigger version of “Who is holding my hand?” by Spark Chan (Classi).

A few of Topman’s sketches.

The design choices for the shirts worn on the first ‘Maniacs Meet (and every other one too, but mostly the first).

A sketch of the Mesmerman crew. It looks better in full size…

An unused idea for the ‘Maniacs logo.

To view previous gift art submissions see the Miscellaneous Sprite Gallery and for more ‘Maniacs art see the Team Galleries.

Top feels bad that nobody notices he changed back to his TM armor. Y’know, since the 8-bit sprite looks almost exactly the same as his previous look. Once more, using some old gift art submissions to do the comic.

Speaking of which …

I’ve actually been quite remiss in my gift art submissions. I have a couple that I could have posted over the …. well, years. Small stuff, but worth it. So, no more waiting, let’s see them here!

Bizarro Shadowman threatening an injured Megaman, by Ace Spark.

Shadowman in his Transmetal 2 armor. By Cyros.

A Scissor Joe, from the Business of War. By Cyros.

The Mechanical Maniacs in their “Transmetal 8″ armors, obviously inspired by the X series. By Yllisis Zanon.

Needlegal in her Transmetal 2 armor in 8-bits! By Megaman N.

NES-colored MM3 DOS mugshots by MM19872008.

A small ‘Maniacs Moments inspired sprite comic by GaiaX6.

Mesmerman by Cyros.

“Fused Shadowman” by Chaos Wolf.

Thanks for all the submission, guys! Uh …. sorry it took so long to put them up. To view more fan submission see the Miscellaneous Sprite Gallery and the Gift Art Gallery.

Another War refernce, for those who don’t get it. Man, those gift sprites Maxell gave us a while back sure did come in handy!

Happy New Year. I had hoped this update could still make it in for December, but it was considerably more work than I expected. Par for the course as it would seem. The big new page this time is the EXE3 Walkthrough’s Virus Guide. Like the NaviCust and StyleChange guides last month, I put much more research and effort into this page than was really warranted, but it’s complete, and that’s what I was aiming for.

Also check out Crys’ gallery for a New Year’s pic. And speaking of the new year, that means it’s time to archive the old updates again.

]]> /blog.php/?feed=rss2&p=772 0 /blog.php/?p=303 /blog.php/?p=303#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:22:00 +0000 Gauntlet101010 http://shadowman024.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/us-box-continuity-mm-10-bosses-revealed

Yes, there’s a new article on the US Box Continuity. It goes into obsessive detail on the entire story as described by the boxes and manuals of the classic series including Megaman 9.

Speaking of which …

The Megaman 10 boss roundup is:

Blademan, Strikeman, Solarman, Chillman, Commandoman , Sheepman, Nitroman , and Pumpman.

Poor Blademan. Now he’s no better than Waveman.

Well, it’s been a while since I updated the site. I hope you’ve all been enjoying the holidays as much as I have. Mostly it’s been quiet. I’ve been spending this time at home, but this year we’re all watching various DVDs and sitting by the fireplace. Very old fashioned, but very nice. I stuck a bunch of used dental floss and ear cleaners and some old scrap pieces of paper into a toilet paper tube (three of them) and watched it burn. My garbage burns brightly!

We watched Watchmen (Extended version, which my Mom hated. A LOT. The Spirit, which my Dad loved to pieces. District 9 which everyone enjoyed. And Julie and Julia, which was not really my type of movie, but alright nonetheless. All the movies, except for the Julie one were Christmas presents.

So happy 2010, everyone! It’s hard to believe 2009 is just a memory. But it is. Now we have a whole new year to write as we choose. So let’s write something nice.

And we’re back! While the holidays offers a lot of downtime it’s actually a very busy time anyway. But the long wait is not without any good Christmas treats. And so I bring you an overly detailed summation of an extremely obscure Megaman book: The Official Guide to Megaman! They don’t make books like this anymore.

Still no more Inter-Missions yet. Gotta establish more story before we can properly play off of it.

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