Who is Rocket Llama? "The world's oldest webcomic - since 1916." Tongue-in-cheek tales of a high-flying llama, a sword-swinging cat, and a rocket as loyal as a cowboy hero's horse. With time traveling cavedogs, a persnickety penguin, and surprise parodies of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and more. Creators have presented their work at Internation Comic-Con Comicon International in San Diego, California, with Danny Fingeroth (The Amazing Spider-Man, Dazzler, Superman on the Couch, Disguised as Clark Kent), and WonderCon Wonder-Con in San Francisco, California, as part of the Comics Arts Conference a.k.a. Comic Arts Conference; and Wizard World Texas, the Wizard World University Texas academic meetings in Arlington, Texas, near Six Flags Over Texas, with Phil Hester (Green Arrow and Clerks with Kevin Smith), Jason Henderson (The Sword of Dracula, Dracula Wars #1), Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night with Steve Niles, Fell), Jacen Burrows (Crossed with Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis), Ethan Van Sciver (Green Lanter).
Keywords: Webcomic webcomics cartoon cartoons all-ages family entertainment comics comic books comic strips sequential art quirky humor funny furry fun anthropomorphic animals satire comedy science fiction fantasy historical history pseudohistorical pseudohistory.

 


 

Incoming from Comic Con: Silent Hill & Little Big Planet

 

Silent Hill: Homecoming

So Silent Hill is back for another go around. The opening is a clever twist on the normal introductory levels- A first person view where you're being taken to somewhere in an abandoned hospital while you are tied down to a table. Eventually you get into an operating room where the surgeon pushing you into there leaves you to rot. The twist on that guy is that he's actually human. A moment later, some freakish thing stabs him through the chest and really, really kills him. While this is happening, you’re suppose to rapidly tap a button to break yourself out; Apparently this main character is a little more combat savvy than the previous ones.

Immediately I could feel a difference in the controls. There's no longer a run button. You're always moving at top speed and you can ram through doors now. There's even a dodge button. All I got to experience was melee combat, which worked really well. While locked on to a target, the camera moves to a fantastic angle to get a great view of what you're doing and what you're hitting.

Controls aside, there are a lot of blemishes to this thing. For one, the graphics were really not impressive, which is sad for a game that is renowned for its horrific beauty through grime and rust. The people at the booth assured me that the graphics would get some polishing. This better be the truth considering Konami did just create Metal Gear Solid 4, which is so beautiful it should be illegal.

The pause menu was also clunky. They made it so a few button presses could quickly get you to what you needed, like using the right and left triggers to move through it and some items were mapped to certain buttons, but it all just felt strange. A pause menu doesn't need to have a bunch of "shortcut" buttons to move through it. What it needs is an intuitive design that is easy to understand and maneuver through.

By far the biggest problem is that this is just another Silent Hill. Silent Hill 4 had some great concepts but took some weird turns when it came to gameplay. The pacing of this game is SLOW. Very slow. Like, I felt sleepy in between the action. When there was action or good scares it was great, but that was only the experience 1/8 of the time. The rest of the time I was looking for items or watching a cut scene with badly acted dialogue. If they cut all that stuff out, this would be a much better game.

It didn't help that I had played Dead Space the day before. Dead Space completely overshadows this game. Silent Hill has pretty much fallen into the very average category unless they make some serious changes with this game.

 

Little Big Planet

Little Big Planet was a feast of undeniable cuteness. At the beginning of the demo, you get to make your own doll-avatar, also known as a Sackboy. The number of options were nearly overwhelming. The most distinctive feature of my guy was that he was wearing a dragon headdress that had a tail that dragged behind him.

I'll admit that I quickly fell for this little guy. In my mind he's a half-dragon voodoo priest named Edwardo. So I played Edwardo against two other players and a lady that led the demo. Her doll-avatar looked like a fairy, and the other two looked like a samurai and a soldier wearing a gas-mask from Killzone. We were quite the crew.

The lady working the booth kind of rushed everybody through the levels to show off what all features the game had. More than anything, I wanted to stand around and mess with Pike and the other players. Just seeing his flowing dragon-scarf was amazing. It was at least three times longer than he was.

With the D-Pad you could change your doll-avatar's emotions, ranging from sad to mad to scared to happy. There were also two levels to each emotion, so if you wanted a more exaggerated expression you could easily obtain it. Just watching his face was the most fun I had during the entire demo, which makes the game sound weak but I think the problem was just with presentation.

You would collect bubbles that laid upon the ground for points and there was some puzzle solving. There was a bridge that no one managed to jump across properly, a bunch of humpty-dumptys that could get knocked over for more bubbles, and a sign where we needed to place stickers on it to solve the puzzle. We were supposed to make the blank sign look like a man, but there were so many stickers available that it was a bit overwhelming. Once the puzzle was solved, the sign floated over, broke down a wall in our way, and revealed a couple of gophers with very creepy eyes who congratulated us. We were then faced with a boss that we had do use a mine-cart that we could push back and forth to deflect his own ammo back at him. It took awhile because we kept missing.

They tried to show too many concepts too quickly. They should have kept it simpler and encourage players to interact with one another, because were that the presentation style I would have known to bring friends to play the game along with me. I would have probably have had a much better time that way.

Hopefully the game is a little more player-friendly that I perceived it to be and I have no idea what the level editor is like. This game just screams user-created potential. It looks like you can create entire campaigns of levels, and the potential of being able to present a Sackboy epic narrative gives me chills. I'm really looking forward to what players will come up with when Little Big Planet drops this fall.

Nick L. 

© 2008 Rocket Llama World Headquarters, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama[1] is a webcomic starring "a high-flying llama, a sword-swinging cat, and a rocket as loyal as a cowboy hero's horse."[2] Created by Alex Langley while he was a student at Henderson State University, the comic first appeared in a comic book titled The Workday Comic. For the Workday comics anthology, a spin-off of Scott McCloud's 24-Hour Comics, comics creators each wrote and drew their own eight-page stories in eight hours in April, 2007, on Friday the 13th[3], which turned into an ongoing publication.[4]  Co-presenting with comics author and scholar Danny Fingeroth (Dazzler, Spider-Man, Superman on the Couch), the creators described the webcomic's evolution as members of a Comics Arts Conference panel at 2008's Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.[5][6][7]  Contents [hide] 1 Debut  2 Webcomic  3 References  4 External links      [edit] Debut The full title of Rocket Llama's debut story in The Workday Comic #1 (spring, 2007) was "The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama #112: 'Trouble in Paradise'".[8] The story introduced the taciturn hero Rocket Llama and his talkative sidekick, an anthropomorphic cat named Bartholomew Meowsenhausen, who find themselves stranded on an island after a battle with an enemy called Jetpack Dog. Spherical islanders capture them and then challenge them to combat. A villain named Böwser vön Überdog arrives with Jetpack Dog and, in a sudden Star Wars parody, summons a giant robot known as the Super Robot Dog Walker which blasts a volcano to bits. Before it can fire a second blast, Rocket Llama destroys it by getting it to swallow a pot of water and backfire. The story ends with Böwser tied up and the heroes using the giant robot dog head as a boat to get themselves home, with the promise of the next story to be titled, "Yuck! Yukon!"[9][10]  Whether despite the original story's childlike art or because of it, the Rocket Llama story proved to be the most popular in the 2007 anthology collection of the eight-hour comics.[11] After comic artist Stephen R. Bissette, an instructor at the Center for Cartoon Studies and comic book artist best known for his work on Swamp Thing with Alan Moore, read all of the stories in the first volume of The Workday Comic, he remarked, "That llama's gonna stick with me."[12]   [edit] Webcomic Nick Langley redrew the story with a less childlike drawing style in webcomic form for online publication[13] as the flagship title for the website rocketllama.com which grew into an affiliation of websites featuring webcomics, art, entertainment reviews, and scholarly studies of comics.[14] The online story featured a new cover[15] and omitted a one-page gag, a preview for an unrelated Stealth Potato comic, which had appeared as an intermission in the middle of the original story.[16] The original story also appeared online as the comic's "ashcan copy."[17]  The authors present the Rocket Llama stories metafictionally as the world's oldest comic book, established in 1916, which they allegedly rediscovered and are adapting into webcomics. "Deep underground, in an archaic vault we searched until we found the fabled tales. As both the current production team behind The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama and appreciators of such groundbreaking literature, we have taken it upon ourselves to restore these classic issues to a glory more befitting a modern, digital age."[18]  Although every "issue" is presented with panels and screens in the correct order for each story, the issues are presented out of order as if readers were discovering old issues of a classic comic book in a seemingly haphazard order, however they come to find them. After the redrawn number 112's online publication came the serialized time travel story #136-137, "Time Flies When You're on the Run," appearing one page at a time throughout each week.[19][20] Special Rocket Llama Says bonus features appear only in "ashcan" form drawn by the original creator.[21]   [edit] References ^ Rocket Llama World Headquarters  ^ You are here.  ^ Waddles, Joshua. (2007, April 2). Comic book club puts in a full day's work. The Oracle vol. 99 (25), p. 3.  ^ Beard, Sarah. (2008, August 25). Comic Arts Club offers excitment. The Oracle, vol. 101 (1), p. 5.  ^ T. Langley & R. Duncan, panel moderators, with respondent Danny Fingeroth. (2008, July). "Capes and Tights, Caps and Gowns." Panel presented at the Comics Arts Conference, Comic-Con International. San Diego, California.  ^ Recent and Upcoming Research Presentations  ^ Pannell, E. (2008, July 27). Comic communication part of professors' classes. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, T-1, T-4.  ^ Page 1.  ^ The Workday Comic #1. Spring, 2007.[1]  ^ The Workday Comic - online edition.  ^ Sorrell, M. (2008, April 14).Club produces second annual workday comic. The Oracle, vol. 100.  ^ Quoted in "The Workday Comic: Not Just One Third of a 24-Hour Comic." Comics Arts Conference, Comic-Con International. San Diego, California. July 27, 2008.  ^ The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama #112: "Trouble in Paradise." Script: Alex Langley. Art: Nick Langley.  ^ You are here.  ^ #137-Cover.  ^ Sneak Peak at Stealth Potato #75.  ^ Rocket Llama Ashcan Copy.  ^ Who Is Rocket Llama?  ^ "Time Flies When You're on the Run, Part 1." Script: Alex Langley. Art: Nick Langley.  ^ "Time Flies When You're on the Run, Part 2." Script: Alex Langley. Art: Nick Langley.  ^ e.g., "Tanks a Lot." Rocket Llama Says #8. Script and art: Alex Langley.