Greetings Earthlings, and welcome back to another GlitchBuddy update, the monthly series where I give you updates about what’s been going on with me, my art and my Newgrounds, as well as Gummi taking you through the games he’s been playing lately.

This post marks the end of a short break I’ve been taking from Newgrounds. I love this site and the people on it, don’t get me wrong, but I felt like I was getting a bit burnt out, especially on the judging side of things. Hopefully this break will have refreshed me, and I’ll be able to come back a better GlitchBuddy than before!

Unfortunately this month has turned out to be slightly less eventful than before, whether it’s because of the burnout or just general lack of motivation. However, there’s definitely still enough to talk about to fill up an update, so without further ado, let’s get started!

Art

Glitch takes a selfie

There’s only been one new piece of art this month; I haven’t been super motivated to do anything else lately. But I still really like how it turned out, and it ended up being a fun experiment on perspective.

For those unaware, I recently created an Instagram page, and I wanted to make a special drawing to start it off. I quickly came up with the idea of Glitch taking a selfie, because, y’know, that’s what people do on Instagram! As Glitch’s arms aren’t all that long, I had the challenge of drawing his face really close up and to the side, something that I didn’t originally think I’d be able to pull off all that well. But I persisted, and after a good long drawing session this is what I came out with:

In order to achieve this, I first started by drawing rough guidelines that correlated to the position I wanted Glitch to be in. This is something that I haven’t really done all that often in my art career, but it ended up helping a lot for this particular piece. I then used the guidelines as a base to draw each of the cube’s faces on separate layers, so that they did not overlap. After this, the rest of the details pretty much came naturally, although I did have a slight bit of trouble lining Glitch’s face up with the perspective. Finally, I threw in Gummi being the jolly fellow he is, and I was done.

You may notice that Glitch has a lil’ scratch just above his right arm – this is a small character design update I made after the close-up perspective got me thinking about little details I could add to my characters. I think it helps to further emphasise his personality as an energetic risk-taker, and I’d like to potentially add more small details like this to both Glitch and my other characters, although I’d have to be careful to not overdo it.

Newgrounds

The EGB journey continues

Ever since officially joining the ranks of the Elite Guard Barracks back in June (see the last update for more info on that), I’ve continued to steadily judge submissions, flag those that break the rules, and do my best to keep the portal clean.

I mentioned in the last update how I had joined into something called the ROTC, which is essentially the EGB’s rookie program for those who do not yet meet the official requirements to become an officer. While you only need 400 B/P points to join the ROTC, you need 2,500 of those points to become a full officer.

I didn’t explicitly mention it at the time, but I had set a goal for myself: to reach 2,500 B/P and become a full officer by the end of the month. When I made the last update, I mentioned having around 1,750 points, which meant I had to judge around 750 submissions in just 15 days. It was hard, but I was determined to make it.

And, now that we’re here, I’m happy to say that I succeeded in my goal, on the very last day of the month no less! And if you look on the EGB website, you’ll see I have officially been promoted to a full officer:

It feels good knowing that I am contributing towards making this website a safer and better place for everyone.

Games of the Munchies 2024

In my last update, I mentioned how I joined the Newgrounds Games of the Munchies 2024. For those who haven’t read the update, it was essentially a pseudo-tournament where your OC was put into an online Hunger Games simulator, and the organiser (TheShokBlok) would draw little doodles of your character doing whatever the simulator returned. It was quite a big deal; all my friends on Discord were talking about it, and I saw several of the participants using their character portraits from the tournament as their Newgrounds profile pictures.

Unfortunately, Glitch and Gummi met an untimely fate somewhere in the middle of the tournament, after getting into a fight with two other characters. It was a shame, but hey, at least Glitch got a cool propeller afterwards, and Gummi even got some crushed-up nachos as a treat.

The winner of the tournament ended up being FunnyPlush, who emerged victorious after a long and gruelling battle with BargonSpaceman’s Kai! Congratulations!

Gaming

Newgrounds

Since the last update I have managed to more than double my medal count, going from 189 medals to 438. I started by just copying whatever BlueMonday1984 played (sorry about that), but now I’m finding games by going into the game portal, selecting a category of game I’m feeling like that day and making sure “Medals” is selected in the API Options dropdown. I don’t usually find the time to medal hunt, but when I do, it’s pretty fun, and I get to play a lot of old obscure Newgrounds games I would have otherwise never heard of. There are too many to go through all of them in this update, so I’ll just run you through some of the highlights.

100% Complete

100% Complete is a game I’ve actually known about for years, ever since I was in primary school. I remember playing the game back then and constantly seeing Newgrounds medal pop-ups, but of course I didn’t know what Newgrounds medals were at the time, so I was very confused.

Anyway, the premise of the game is in the title; you have to “100% complete” the game by exploring the world and finding all of the “secrets”. These secrets, for the most part, are regular everyday objects such as a slice of bread or a coke can, although they can occasionally be other things, such as an up arrow or the Newgrounds logo.

You find these secrets by going through holes in the wall and floor, which aren’t all that obvious and for the most part you will need to uncover yourself. It’s pretty fun to discover all the hidden passages and areas, although when you’re trying to collect all the secrets then it gets a bit annoying towards the end. Other than that, I’d definitely recommend this one. It’s a good game.

awesome calculator

Awesome Calculator is the mostest awesomest calculator to ever exist ever in the history of humankind. Not only do you get the four basic operations to work with, but also exponention?????? That’s insane!

The art direction has been thought of meticulously here, with both the rainbow background and Comic Sans font seeking to ignite the imagination and transport the player into a world of whimsy and wonder. The royalty free dubstep in the background is also pretty epic.

Also I’ve heard that if you calculate enough times, a picture of a cantaloupe will appear… my uncle works at bethsda, I would know.

Anyway yeah this is the greatest calculator to exist ever. Why not whip it out during your next maths exam?

Little-Rena's games

(just a selection)

I’m gonna knock out multiple games with one paragraph here and tell you all about a Newgrounds user called Little-Rena. She’s probably one of the most well-known users, especially among the BBS, and has been around for one heck of a long time.

Now to be honest, I’m not too sure what it is she’s most known for, but I can tell you this: she’s made a lot of games over the years, varying from things such as guides for flagging reviews, COVID-19 headline generators, and even a Clock Crew dating simulator.

A lot of (if not most of) her games have medals, and they’re all fairly easy to get. For example, in Red Egg Redemption, you have to click the red egg in each level, and you get medals for reaching certain levels, clicking on certain colours of eggs and failing the first level. That’s it.

A common theme throughout the medals in Rena’s games is that there will usually be ones for clicking a mute button, reading instructions, viewing credits and clicking a Newgrounds supporter link (if applicable). The games are neat, though, and if you’re looking for something short and silly, why not check a few of them out?

Right-Click Menu Gen. V2

Now here’s something unconventional: not a game per se, but rather a tutorial on how to generate a right click menu in Adobe Flash. And yes, it has medals.

There’s six medals in the game. Three of them you get for clicking certain buttons, and the other three you get for doing certain things with the right click menus you generate.

Honestly, there’s not really much to say about this one; I just wanted to include it because it’s not really something you’d consider a “game”, but it still has medals. I found that interesting.

PC & Console

Written by Gummi

It’s ya boi gum, as always, with another update on my incredible and very awesome gaming career. I’ve managed to get a lot done this month, so let’s get right into things.

Woodle Tree 2 Deluxe+ (PS4)

Yes, yes, I know, I’ve been talking about this one a lot, but hear me out: my goal is to get all of the achievements for this game on all the platforms it’s on. Yes, that’s how much I love it.

You’d already know about the game itself if you read the last update, so I’ll just skip to the good news: I’ve completed the PS4 version, and got the platinum trophy! This gives me my 4th platinum so far on PlayStation, and also gets me up to trophy level 200, which is a nice bonus.

Woodle deserves to relax after all his hard work.

It was pretty hard getting there, though. In order to 100% complete the game, you must collect 930 “blue berries” scattered across the world. Normally, once you collect half of the blue berries, you’re supposed to unlock the “blue berry radar”, which helps you locate the rest. However, for whatever reason, this did not unlock for me on my PS4 playthrough. I emailed the developers of the game about it (indie developers ftw) and they directed me towards an unofficial video guide on YouTube. While this did help me collect the rest of the blue berries, it was a very tedious effort as I of course didn’t memorise the location of every blue berry. This meant I had to follow the guide exactly, even if I had already collected a blue berry in that location. Oh well, I got there in the end, and I’m happy about that.

The last blue berry I had to collect. It was in the desert area.

Now that I have all the achievements on both PS4 and Xbox One, the only platform left to complete is both the Deluxe and original releases on Steam. I’ll try to get them both done this month so I can finally stop talking about this game, lol.

Gears of War (Xbox 360)

Woodle Tree wasn’t the only game from my last update I had completed this month; Gears of War has been checked off my list as well!

…well, the Casual difficulty at least. In order to get all of the single-player achievements, I also have to complete the Hardcore and Insane difficulties, as well as collect all of the “COG tags” that appear as you progress through the game.

Gears of War ended up being a pretty fun game, even if I did get stuck in a few areas. The shooting was fun to pull off, although as with most 3D shooter games I do wish it had motion aiming (god damn you Splatoon). The “active reload” mechanic (where you time button presses correctly to reload quicker) did take a while for me to get used to, but pretty soon I was reloading quicker than a cheetah on Red Bull.

Just about to raise hell on some grubs.

Overall, the game was pretty simple to get through… that was, right up until the final boss, General RAAM. God DAMN was he a bitch to kill. I initially tried going in with the same guns I had been using throughout the rest of the game, but all of those attempts would end in the same way: he’d blow my fucking head off. I then went online and looked up how to beat him, and a lot of people said you needed to use a combination of the Torque Bow and Sniper Rifle, both weapons I would have otherwise never considered using. I tried multiple times to get to the turret at the back in order to shoot at RAAM with that, but all of them were unsuccessful. Eventually I managed to kill him out of sheer luck, and completed the game.

If the final boss battle was that hard on Casual difficulty… what about Hardcore and Insane?

Brink (Xbox 360)

The latest home console game I have started is a first-person shooter called Brink. The game’s premise revolves around a man-made island called the Ark, which has become a refuge for thousands of people during a global warming crisis. The massive influx of people has led to extreme poverty in some areas while the original creators of the island continue to live in luxury, which has started a civil war.

In the game, you can either play as a member of the Ark Security service or a member of the Resistance, with different missions between each. I’ve began by playing on the Security side, with the missions I’ve played so far involving rescuing a hostage, getting a “datakey” from a safe, and recovering a bioweapon sample.

One of the promotional images for the game. There's twenty of them, and they all look the exact same. Naturally, none of the gameplay actually looks like this.

While at first I found locating and completing objectives confusing, I discovered a feature called the Objective Wheel, where you can select objectives you want to complete (for example, escorting a hostage or defending a key structure) and they’ll automatically be highlighted for you in the game world.

The gameplay is okay, although so far I haven’t really found it very engaging. For all of the missions so far I’m able to spend all my time shooting down enemies while my NPC friends get the objectives for me. The shooting itself isn’t super intuitive either; you can knock people down easily, but to kill them you have to keep shooting a stupid amount of bullets into them.

I don’t feel as if I’ve explored enough of the game yet to give a proper verdict, so I’ll hold off for now. Maybe in the next update.

Pokémon Pearl (DS)

And now we come to the last game I will be talking about in today’s update, and it’ll probably be a familiar title to a lot of you: Pokémon Pearl! (or Diamond, or Platinum…)

A lot of you may not know this, but I’m a pretty big Pokémon fan. I’ve played through a lot of the games, owned several pieces of merchandise throughout the years and even used to read Pokémon World magazine tons as a child (RIP). But funnily enough, throughout all those years, I’d never played the Sinnoh games, even though those are probably the ones I hear talked about most online. It’s always been a desire of mine to experience what I missed out on, though, and so a few months ago I managed to pick up a complete-in-box copy of Pearl.

It's been fun exploring all of the unfamiliar locations in the game and experiencing its story for the first time, although there’s not much that differs it greatly from other Pokémon games. Compared to other big cities in Pokémon games, Jubilife City was a bit underwhelming, with it not containing anywhere near the amount of fun locations and things to do as even Goldenrod or Celadon, in my opinion. The Pokétch is a bit of a gimmick; while it does contain some useful applications, like the one that tells you how much health your party Pokémon have left, or the one that indicates your Pokémon’s friendship level towards you, I mostly just leave it on the default clock application.

That’s not to say this is a bad game though, far from it. Like I said, I’ve really enjoyed exploring all of the locations I never got to see before, such as Oreburgh City with its huge mine, or Floaroma Town with its peaceful flowers. Apart from that, when I’m not playing through the story I’ll usually spend the majority of my time training up my Pokémon in the tall grass, with a YouTube video on in the background.

I’m definitely gonna play through this one till the end, and I’ll be sure to update you all when I complete it.

Conclusion

A slightly less eventful month than before, but still significant. I was able to complete a piece of artwork I didn’t originally think I’d even be able to do, and I became a full member of a club I’m very passionate about. Overall, I’d say this month has been pretty successful, and I shall be looking forward to the next!

Oh, look at that, is that the time already… well, enough writing, time to relax and ponder in thought once again. As a robot, I can’t truly go to sleep like Gummi can, but I can enter this sort of state where I’m still technically conscious, but fully immersed in my thoughts, with my surroundings becoming secondary to me. That’s what I do to get me through these long nights, but I do often wonder how things must be for Gummi. Going completely unconscious for hours at a time with nothing but your brain’s random conjurations to keep you company… he must go insane.

Anyway, goodnight! See you all soon!

-Glitch [ I - ]

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