Daniel_Newton (Level 20)

Introduction

I'm a big fan of Pokémon and it was a huge part of my childhood, but I haven't played any Pokémon games in a while. Don't get me wrong, I still love Pokémon and the games but they don't quite grab my attention like they used to. And to be honest, they've never been very challenging.

There is, however, a way to make the Pokémon games more challenging. I'm sure some of you have heard of the Nuzlocke Challenge, for those of you who haven't, it's a set of self-imposed rules to increase the difficulty. Here are the core rules:

• Any Pokémon that faints is considered dead, and must be released.
• The player may only catch the first Pokémon encountered in each area, and none else. If the first Pokémon encountered faints or flees, there are no second chances.

These rules make the game more challenging, deepens the bonds with your Poképals, and forces you to use Pokémon you normally wouldn't. You can get the full details on the "Nuzlocke Challenge" here.

My Rules

I will be playing Pokémon LeafGreen. Here is the full list of rules I'll be adhering to:

I'll be doing one more thing to make it even more interesting; all of my Pokémon will be named after Anime Vice users! You could be on my team in Pokémon form! Now then, lets see what happens...

Part 01: Between a Brock and a Hard Place

I dub thee: TAKA!	Okay, so, according to the rules, my choice of starter Pokémon depends on the last number of my Trainer ID. My ID is 07463, which means my starter Pokémon must be... Bulbasaur! I decided to name him TAKA, after @takashichea - I consider him my "partner in crime" on Anime Vice (I'm not really sure what I mean by that, either) so it only seemed right to name my first Pokémon partner after him. Right, this is already off to an interesting start - I normally pick the fire-type starter. Now I just have to make sure little TAKA never loses a battle! No pressure, right? We took Gary's Charmander down with ease.	Easily won his first battle.
You're mine, Rattata...	After grabbing the free potions from the PC and the guy on Route 1, delivering Oak's parcel from the PokéMart, and receiving my first Poké Balls, the Nuzlocke Challenge truly began. Who would my first wild Pokémon be? Pidgey? Rattata? Suddenly there's so much more pressure when walking through tall grass. Playing with Nuzlocke rules really does make the game a different experience, even in these early stages... it's a Rattata! It was easily captured, and I can never catch another Pokémon on Route 1 again. Despite the gender, I named her FOXX, after @FoxxFireArt.	Hope you don't mind being a female Rattata!
Lets do this, FOXX!	After arriving in Viridian City, I knew Gary was waiting for me on Route 22; the route between Viridian City and the Pokémon League, which I won't be challenging for a good while yet. I could continue on to Viridian Forest and ignore my rival, but where's the fun in that? Cue the Rocky training montage; it was time for some grinding! To play it safe, I aimed to get TAKA and FOXX to level 12 before challenging Gary. This took a little while...	TAKA and FOXX are PUMPED!
	Gary stood no chance...
Tall grass, reveal your secrets...	On Route 22 and Route 2 the first Pokémon I encountered were Rattata, so I chose not to catch them. I was hoping for a Mankey or a Pidgey, but no luck. The Forest was another matter though, I knew several kinds of bug Pokémon waited within, and if I was really lucky, maybe even a Pikachu. I took a deep breath, and walked into the grass... it was a Metapod! Another easy catch, I decided to call him VISIONZ, after @sickVisionz. My team was growing!	Prepare to be captured, Metapod!
Woo!	During my trek through the forest I sent VISIONZ out first, then called him back and defeated enemy Pokémon with TAKA and FOXX. This shared the EXP with VISIONZ and it wasn't long before he evolved! My first Pokémon evolution, a joyous occasion indeed. As a Butterfree, VISIONZ started learning new moves including Confusion and Sleep Powder, earning his place on my team.	Congrats sickVisionz; you're a beautiful butterfly!
My little TAKA's growing up...	Continuing to play it safe, I decided to do some more grinding. I aimed to get my three Pokébuddies to level 15 before challenging the Pewter City Gym Leader. I'm not taking any risks this early on. I defeated Brock's underling with ease, and got enough EXP for TAKA to evolve! It was time...	We're ready for you, Brock!

Wow, thanks, I never would have guessed...

Onward! More adventures await us!

Current Team

Name: TAKA Species: Ivysaur Level: 16 Moves Tackle Vine Whip Leech Seed Poison Powder

Name: FOXX Species: Rattata Level: 15 Moves Quick Attack Tackle Tail Whip Hyper Fang

Name: VISIONZ Species: Butterfree Level: 15 Moves Confusion Sleep Powder Poison Powder Stun Spore

Travel Journal

• Route 1 - Encountered a Rattata. Caught it, named it "FOXX"
• Route 22 - Encountered a Rattata. Defeated it.
• Route 2 - Encountered a Rattata. Defeated it.
• Viridian Forest - Encountered a Metapod. Caught it, named it "VISIONZ"

The Adventure Continues...

What kind of Pokémon will I catch next? Who will I name it after?! Will I continue to be victorious, or will my luck start to run out? Find out next time!

Hey there! Remember my Building a Better Wiki: Perfect Profile Portraits! blog post from a while back? The aim of that post is to set a new standard for the main images on character pages, and a bunch of you are doing a great job, maybe a better job than you think. I thought I'd make a special blog post to give you guys an idea of the kind of impact it's had. I was pretty surprised when I realized how many characters we've covered so far.

Oh, as an added bonus these images are perfect to use for your own profile (I'm using one myself at the moment), so if you see one you like just go to the appropriate character page and you'll find the image in the "Profile Portraits" gallery.

Now, prepare yourself...

Behold!

You have to admit, that's pretty impressive, and it's not even all of them. From what I can tell, we've covered over 250 characters so far, maybe closer to 300.

A special thanks to all the users who've helped out so far, and if you're not one of them, feel free to join in! It makes a big difference to the wiki and these images are surprisingly useful, check out anime pages like this for example, pretty neat, don't you think? They're good for other things too.

I was kind of tempted to turn this gallery into a game of Where's Wally. That'd be really dumb... maybe next time...

So yeah, thanks again and keep up the good work guys!

Hi there, welcome to "Building a Better Wiki", a blog series where I aim to explore different aspects of our giant wiki database to find out how to best utilize them or improve upon them to make sure we're building the best anime and manga wiki out there.

As this is the first blog in the series, I thought I'd start off with something simple: default images on character pages, or what I like to call "Profile Portraits". Over the years (and I mean that very literally, I remember joining this site when it launched in 2008... yikes...) myself and other wiki editors have used a variety of different images. Artwork, screen caps, concept art... cropped images, full-size images, transparent PNG images... so on and so forth. Not only do each of these choices come with their own set of pros and cons, but using these different kinds of images all over the place results in our character pages looking really inconsistent.

The guys running MyAnimeList.net seem to have the right idea. Unlike us, they have specific guidelines for character images. With a little tweaking, these guidelines also work perfectly for our wiki. They use official artwork (or an anime cap/manga scan if none is available) and a fixed size of 225 x 350. That size is too small for us, so I scaled it up and trimmed it a little to get a solid 300 x 450, which works out nicely.

So based on that, here are my suggested guidelines:

• Dimensions: 300 x 450 (position the face within the top 300 x 300 pixels)
• Format: PNG (the small icons look horrible in JPG format)
• Preferred Source (in order): anime artwork, anime cap, manga/light novel artwork, manga/light novel scan
• Do Not Use: transparent PNG of GIF, vector trace, fan art
• Gallery/Caption: In the character gallery, create a gallery named "Profile Portraits" and caption the image "Character Name (Profile Portrait)"

Here are some examples using these guidelines: Urabe, Louise, Natsu, Ichigo, Ikaros, Elesa

They look like anime trading cards, that's a good thing!

As you can see, the images are consistent and translate well into icons which appear throughout the wiki. This format should work for 90% of the characters in our database, with the exceptions being things like small Pokémon and Digimon (particularly the ones that are basically talking heads) in which case we can just use 300 x 300 images.

Though obviously, if you have a nice full-size image of a character, why not put it in the article itself? Add a paragraph talking about the character design and throw that image in there!

While these guidelines aren't set-in-stone rules right now, I hope they make sense and very much encourage you to use them.

Tutorial

For those of you having trouble resizing and cropping images, here's a tutorial to hopefully make things a little easier. This tutorial uses Paint.NET, a free image editor for Windows (sorry Mac/Linux users) though if you use Adobe Photoshop this guide may still be helpful.

Click here to reveal tutorial.

Profile Portrait Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to create profile portraits for characters and where to upload the images.

Tools

• Paint.NET (download for free here)

Materials

• Template Image (download here)
• Character Image (for this tutorial I used this screen cap of Elesa)

Creating the Portrait

1. Launch Paint.NET and open the template image.
2. Drag and drop your character image onto the template, pick the Add layer option.
3. Go to the Layers box and move the image layer below the template layer.
4. Optional: Zoom out to 50% to make resizing easier, especially with large images.
5. Go to Tools and select the Move Selected Pixels tool (the blue cursor icon).
   -- You should now see a black outline of your image, if you can't see it, move the image around or zoom out more.
6. Hold down the Shift Key on your keyboard and resize the image by dragging the corner points. Move the image and resize until the head is inside the top section of the template.
   -- Don't worry if hair goes outside the template, focus on the face and head. Look at the example images.
7. Hit the Enter Key on your keyboard when you're done.
8. Go to the Layers box. Delete the template layer.
9. Go to Image in the toolbar and select Canvas Size, change the width to 300 pixels and height to 450 pixels. Make sure the Anchor is Top Left.
   -- Your image should now be cropped to the correct size, if something went wrong, you can undo edits using the History box.
10. Done? Go to File, Save As, change the type to PNG and click Save. Leave settings on Auto-detect and click OK.

Uploading the Portrait

1. Go to the character wiki page, add a gallery named Profile Portraits and upload the image there.
   -- When adding new images, keep the old ones too, they may be useful elsewhere in the wiki, or as profile images for users!
2. Caption the image "Character Name (Profile Portrait)"
3. Finally, view the image and click "Make Default Image" and you're done!
   -- If you don't have enough wiki points to see this option, post a request here.

Well Done!

Ta-da! You should now have a nice new portrait image for a character page. If so, pat yourself on the back. If not... start again and read each step carefully.

Coming Soon

• Character Section Formatting for Anime & Manga Pages
• Music Formatting for Franchise Pages

~Thanks for reading, keep up the good wiki work!

Fighting fans willing to slap down their hard-earned cash in advance for the latest Tekken game, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, will get a some pretty substantial bonuses with their purchase.

In addition to early access to DLC characters--including Michelle, Ancient Ogre, Angel and Kunimitsu--as well as the previously announced Snoop Dogg stage (yes, you read that correctly) players will also get access to over 150 swimsuits for their favourite fighters. I didn't accidentally add a zero there, that's over one hundred and fifty swimsuits. That's a lot of swimwear. Check out the trailer below to see some of them in action:

Why is this worth posting you ask? A couple of reasons, actually. Mostly because in a world of questionably-priced and questionably-planned DLC for video games--particularly when it comes to costumes for fighting games--I feel Namco Bandai are making a statement with Tekken Tag 2. All the DLC for this game is free, and if you pre-order you'll even get early access to some of it. Secondly, it doesn't feel sexist. In fact, if nothing else, the guys are showing more skin in that trailer than the girls are. And heck, even Panda gets a swimsuit.

Also, while you're here, check out the new item moves trailer for the game. Is that what I think it is?

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 will be available on the 14th of September 2012 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Will you be picking it up?

— Daniel Newton is a moderator for Anime Vice and Screened. Follow him on twitter: @Daniel_Newton and @AnimeVicers

It's been a long time coming, today FUNimation finally announced the dub cast for Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, the delightfully ridiculous and rude Gainax title. Instead of rambling on though I'll let Gangsta Afro Piccolo do the talking:

The credits and voices released are as follows:

• ADR Director – Colleen Clinkenbeard
• Head Writer – John Burgmeier
• Script Writers – Jamie Marchi, Leah Clark, Jared Hedges
• Fastener – Christopher Bevins, Corset – Chris Ayres
• Scanty – Colleen Clinkenbeard
• Kneesocks – Cherami Leigh
• Brief – Joel McDonald
• Chuck – Ian Sinclair
• Garterbelt – Christopher R. Sabat
• Stocking – Monica Rial
• Panty – Jamie Marchi

Apparently FUNimation won't be releasing the show on Blu-Ray, but in my opinion standard definition will probably do just fine. Are you interested in checking out the FUNimation release?

[via Crunchyroll]

— Daniel Newton is a moderator for Anime Vice and Screened. Follow him on twitter: @Daniel_Newton and @AnimeVicers

Other posts: • Featured Figures #02 • Dragon Ball Z Kinect Game Announced • Oreimo Season 2 Announced!