Weekly Round-Up #2

January 25th, 2009 | Weekly Round-Up

Hurray, we made it through another week! I’m still trying to figure out a good routine for everything, and I’m actually behind the schedule I had hoped to keep to. Still have some other things left to code and some more stuff to set up before I can get this site really going. Mostly been busy with work and exhaustion.

This last week was pretty cool for the site though. A whole bunch of interesting stuff happened and we also took a look at a lot of interesting things. I have lots more ideas in store, so if you like this kind of EarthBound series info, stick around and let your brains feast on my information. You zombie.

BTW, I can’t be everywhere all the time, so if something newsworthy happens or if there’s something cool going on in the EB community, let me know so I can get the word out!

Site News

• My offer for custom avatars will end after this week. See here for details.
• I updated MOTHER 2 to EarthBound and Back Again (M2EB for short). Check it out here!
• Opened a section on the site for Mitch’s EB/EB Central comics here
• Help make some wacky EarthBound-themed banner ads!
• Slowly but surely fans are starting to find this site, and discussions are getting bigger and bigger. That’s cool and exciting 🙂

EarthBound News

• Brownie Brown President says stuff about MOTHER 3, DS, and overseas fans
• I posted a subtitled video of the old “rape” movie that inspired Giygas
• We took a quick look at EarthBound’s 1995 advertising campaign
• EarthBound was on Frasier! – (video here, watch in high quality if you can!)
• We took a look at an old EGM review of EarthBound

Cool Auctions & Merchandise

Here’s just a few things on eBay. Don’t forget you can always check the latest listings in one easy spot here if you’re looking for a good deal on something!

• Mr. Saturn Phone Strap AND a MOTHER 3 Franklin Badge!
• EarthBound Cart at a pretty okay price
• A Super NES system + EarthBound + Final Fantasy III + Secret of Mana + more!
• MOTHER 2 cart for only $9!
• Another MOTHER 2 cart for $9
• MOTHER 1+2 non-Value Selection at a nice price w/ free shipping!
• A nice-priced MOTHER 3 Deluxe Box set – they’ll probably never get any cheaper than this…
• MOTHER 2 cart with box AND with a rare MOTHER 2 guide – free shipping too!
• Rare old manga magazine with a lot of MOTHER series stuff in it 😯
• Rare & limited quantity MOTHER 3 2 1 event doujinshi, free shipping
• More rare & limited quantity MOTHER 3 2 1 event doujinshi, free shipping here too!
• MOTHER 2 guide! Rare, but this is cheap!
• Another rare but cheap MOTHER 2 guide! 😯
• And another rare but cheap MOTHER 2 guide, oh man
• Original MOTHER 1 vocal soundtrack CD, nice price and free shipping!

Here’s some stuff on Yahoo! Auctions Japan:

• Extremely rare MOTHER 2 flier
• MOTHER 1 and MOTHER 2 novels!
• An SF Memory Casette with MOTHER 2 loaded on it – now this is SUPER rare 😯
• MOTHER 1+2 Art Book with Mr. Saturn plushie!

Community News

• Adventures of Birdy and Chimera updated! – I’m in love with this
• Flint posted some new MOTHER 3 clay figurines! – wowow
• NESBound – a bunch more 8-bit EB songs posted!
• Ninten Speaks – I love change
• Sexy Grandpa Porky started – this shows great creativity and promise 😀
• Rufus put together a video of pics from Itoi’s office fish camera. It’s really cool, see it below. His office actually asks for people to send cool fish tank stuff in, so I sent them an e-mail about the video. Maybe they’ll post the video on their site if they like it.

What’s Up With Itoi

• Itoi was visiting Shanghai earlier this week. He noticed all the new really tall buildings, and, after some pondering, he decided he wasn’t too impressed. It seems to him that only newly-developing nations do this race to build really tall buildings nowadays. Countries like Japan, France, America, and other long-established Western-style nations have already moved past that phase. For these countries, this tall building race probably seems kind of lame.
• Itoi talked about how the “era of presentation” is ending, and how he was never any good at presentation stuff himself. So he’s tried to do as little of it as possible during his company’s existence these past 10 years.
• Itoi watched Obama’s inauguration late at night. For the first time, he felt like he was actually watching 21st century news happening. Says he might want to do something about the event on his site soon.
• The very next day, Itoi asked an expert on America over and they had a two-hour live chat on streaming video on his site. He had never met the guy before, but he was really interested by everything the expert had to say, and he was especially glad he decided to do the feature so soon after the actual inauguration. If you’re interested and know Japanese, here you go.
• Itoi noted that whenever people around you are in a bad mood or have a negative vibe, it brings you down too. So whenever that happens to him, he wants to get his notebook (I’ll talk about this some other day) so he can try to think of something happy or nice to write down to get him out of that funk.
• Itoi has a dog named Bouillon, and if you’ve ever visited his photo blog, you know he’s crazy about the dog. He always writes little captions for each picture, from his dog’s point of view. He’s been doing this for years, and saying that it’s from an unpublished book called “Bouillon’s Feelings”. Except now there’s actually going to be a real book. For fun, he decided he’d make a compliation of a bunch of stuff. I’m sure it’ll sell really well, it seems like just the kind of thing his viewership would love. It sounds like the book is actually almost ready to be sold.
• On Friday night, Itoi was in the office until really late, so he and some other people at the office played a bunch of Animal Crossing. Everyone in the office has a character, and they all help participate in an Animal Crossing section on Itoi’s site. No doubt this has helped get a lot of older people and non-gamers into the game. I hear that section is incredibly popular.
• Itoi’s favorite ramen place closed down recently, and he talks about how he generally likes “neighborhood places” for his favorite places to eat, wherever he may live.
• As mentioned previously, Itoi finally got an iPhone. The case he has for it is a bit unusual though.

Upcoming Stuff

I’ll probably do some more stuff for the MOTHER 1 novel summary this week. I want to get it off my plate ASAP. I still have a few hundred pages left to go though. Man is that page gonna be huge when it’s done. And the MOTHER 2 novel is like twice as long 😯

I’ll try to get another update for my crazy EB cart thing this week if I can too. And I think I’d like to take a look at some kind of EB/MOTHER-related event sometime soon too. There’ve been a whole bunch but they’re pretty unknown. The MOTHER 1+2 event is going to need many weeks for me to write up though, that thing was just crazy.

Then of course there’ll be the usual weird discussion and the other stuff that’s quickly becoming a regular staple here. So next week’ll probably have a bunch of fun stuff 😀

End

Oh man these things still take so long to put together. But I think this one’s better than the last one. I’m sure I’ll perfect things before long.

Again, if you find anything interesting, newsworthy, or something cool that’s being done in the community, let me know! Maybe I should make a news submit form or something.