I have been talking about ROM Vol 1 for months, but it’s one thing to talk about it and another thing to actually see it through and see what happens. So since launching the short, things have gone rather well. I can now sigh a huge sigh of relief. *SIIIIIGH*

Since going live Monday night, Vol 1 has been uploaded to several sites and has earned some decent recognition. Over on Newgrounds we were awarding a Daily First (the third time we ever got it. Would you believe that ‘How to Hook Up The NES’ didn’t get the daily first? I thought we had that nailed to be honest). On top of that, they were cool enough to feature us on their front page. We’ve had our content featured there often and it always feels pretty darn good. Over on NG, I consider being in limbo once uploading something to the portal. You either come to life on the front page, or you go to the depths of hell and your short forever becomes buried. I’ve seen both sides happen, so I know how it goes. Other than that, it’s our highest scored short under ‘How to’ and has gathered over 20k views in two days alone. Not too shabby.

Also, on Gametrailers it went on to become a Featured User Video, so that was cool too. Unfortunately, thanks to an absolutely crummy thumbnail that I can’t change, not many people are clicking on it. It hasn’t even hit 800 views, but it’s scoring well and supposedly ranked highly. It’s a slight bummer more people aren’t clicking it, but it still feels nice to see the staff over there took some time to recognize it and feature it.

Thanks in large part to GoNintendo, our other half in these shorts, we continue to find a larger audience through out YouTube channel. There is an increase in viewing amongst all of our work, so it’s good to see our legacy shorts still holding their own.

Welp, finally made it to the moment where Volume 1 of Read Only Memory is complete. It’s hard to believe I’ve been working on ROM for half a year now!

So, Volume 1 is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll get into it one more time. Each month we’ve produced a Nintendo related short for GoNintendo.com, and this month we’re bundling them all together to create “Volume 1″ of the series. Included in this set is Turnips In Love, Simon’s Supper, The Return of Captain N, and Pizza Links.

Oh, you’ve watched the four ROM episodes already? It’s okay, watch them again, and see how I “seamlessly” blended them together! But really, if you’re a long time fan of our work, please let me know if you like this format!

Read Only Memory: Volume 1 is around the corner! So, what’s new for you loyal Shamoozal fans? Well, unfortunately, not much. That doesn’t make this release of ROM any less important though. Actually, it’s the most important one yet!

So here’s the rub. The idea was always to package 4 shorts together and then that would be the one I release around the interwebs outside of uploading it to YouTube and having GoNintendo link it. My original idea was to include some bonus stuff in between the shorts, but unfortunately, time has gotten the best of me and that won’t be happening. Instead I focused my efforts planning just how these shorts are going to interconnect to make it feel like one cohesive piece, which as you’d imagine is pretty tricky!

Today is actually the first day I’ve been able to work on putting them together since the birthday of my kids almost a month ago. I knew they were on the way so I put all my effort into finishing up Pizza Links before they were born. Good thing I did, because the kids came five days after Pizza Links debuted. Talk about timing!

Assuming you don’t hang out on our forums all day, my kids spent the first two weeks of their lives in an incubator since they were born early. As you’d guess, my wife and I spent our nights there while I worked during the day. I basically had to put Shamoozal on hold for a little while. Now I’m on two weeks parental leave from my office so I can figure out just exactly how to raise these little dudes. So with one week behind me and a grasp on their schedule and how to work around it, I’m finding time to fit in work on ROM Vol 1.

I haven’t had a chance to update the site in over a week because the wife and I had our twins last Thursday. Needless to say, I’ve been super busy and whenever I had some down time I spent it relaxing or sleeping. Anyway, things are still a little crazy, but I haven’t forgotten about the site.

We haven’t had a new episode of Shamoozal Radio since June, and we were close to putting together a rather impromptu podcast last Saturday, but with all the baby stuff happening only two days before that we had to cancel it. I really do want to get a podcast up though, I almost thought about just doing one myself with some updates but I figured this blog post would be enough. I can’t tell you exactly when we’ll do another SRP, but we’ll get one to you sooner than later (or so I hope).

Then there is ROM. Hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to put together the compilation episode by the end of the month. My plan here is to string together the first four ROM shorts and spread it around to more sites other than just hosting it on YouTube. For me it’s sort of a “moment of truth” type thing. I’m very curious to see how people outside of GoNintendo and Shamoozal react to these shorts, and at the same time I wonder if bundling them together will hurt them or help them in the long run. I’m hoping my Mr. Show inspired idea to blend the shorts together pays off. I made some boards the other day to plan out how I’m going to bridge them together, and I’m hoping it works out well. I did think about putting Pizza Links up on Newgrounds, but ultimately decided to wait for the compilation.

Speaking of which, Pizza Links has gone on to become the most popular ROM video yet. On YouTube, it’s our second most watched video behind How to Hook Up the NES. Though that isn’t saying a heck of a lot as Pizza Links only has 5,000 views compared to NES’s 87K. But I’m looking at our trends and each month I’m seeing a steady increase in viewers across the board with our videos, so things are looking up. It’s a different beast to tackle when trying to build awareness outside of the normal sites I frequent like Newgrounds.

I recently sat down with Justin from the Radio Free Gamer podcast to talk about Read Only Memory. I’ve included a portion of the interview that goes into how the series came about, what old video game cartoons inspired me from the past and why I sort of still like the Zelda cartoon. If you click on over to the rest of the show, we dive more into how the NES era has affected an entire generation. My interview takes place around the 42 minute mark, but be sure to enjoy all the sweet game music that helps make Radio Free Gamer the show that it is!

Enjoy the interview and be sure to check out the show. I’m in the latest episode titled World 2 Level 20.

I’m a couple days later than I wanted to be, but the latest episode of Read Only Memory, Pizza Links, is here! So watch the above clip, then read the rest.

As many of you guys might know, this was actually the first episode of ROM I started working on before switching to Turnips In Love. I was tinkering around with this idea way back in February but didn’t really start to build all the assets until the middle of March. Once I had the big pieces in place I recorded my script and made the animatic for it. I absolutely hated it. I hated it so much I honestly didn’t think I could salvage it, and because I wanted to get something to Kevin over at GoNintendo, I came up with Turnips In Love. In Love was easy and cute enough that I felt it was a good replacement for what I was currently working on. Plus, it was perfect for nailing the “30″ second run time I was aiming for.

While working on The Return of Captain N, I was trying to figure out exactly which idea I wanted to work on next. I decided that since I already put so much work into this short that maybe I should revisit it. I took a good look at everything I had script and audio wise and decided to throw away half of it. One of the problems with the original version is that it was much too long, going on for probably close to three minutes. You’re not missing anything as I managed to get to the point in a fraction of the time, though I didn’t quite hit my magical 30 second run time. Regardless, once I was able to really narrow down the key points, I felt much happier with what I was shooting for. It’s longer than your average ROM, but it is no where near the bloated beast it once was.

I’ve been pretty good getting each episode of ROM out exactly one month after the next, so it was only a matter of time before I stumbled somewhere. If I had my way, ROM#4, tentatively titled ‘Link’s Pizza Party’ would be available for your viewing pleasure today! Alas, I’m really, really behind on the project.

It’s a combination of being busy, having computer issues, and the usual “I’m in too much pain to sit at the PC tonight” issues. Since I had most of my design work already finished as this was supposed to be the first episode of the series, I gave myself a bit of a break between this and The Return of Captain N. I spent that time trying to get my house in order for the impending appearance of our baby girls (which I’m still behind on!), and also upgrading my PC. The PC upgrade became an issue because it left me without audio for a few days thanks to my original sound card having out of date drivers. Unfortunately, I needed to do audio before moving on with the project, so the delay in getting a new sound card pushed back my work on the short. Before I knew it my self made deadline was in sight but I was hoping I could power through the short over the weekend.

Well, I didn’t power through it. I only finished one complete shot on Saturday, and nearly finished another entire shot on Sunday. I have about 9 shots (some easier than others) and was hoping maybe I could do a shot a day after realizing I couldn’t get it done over the weekend. Turns out I spent two hours last night putting some finishing touches on the shot I worked on the day before, and then spent another 45 minutes roughing another shot.

Just wanted to let you know that clicking on the Episodes tab will magically transport you to our new (and currently updating) episodes page.

So this is like what, the 40th time I’ve redone the episodes page? It was a hard decision to make, but I’ve decided I want to stop hosting the shorts as a swf format here on the site, instead I’ll slowly be uploading all of our shorts to our YouTube channel.

I said it before a few weeks ago, but YouTube’s encoders have gotten much better and I feel like the HD versions of our shorts look really nice through the service. Plus, YouTube also has all sorts of cool little stats I like looking into to see what points in the videos people generally like (and dislike). Never thought I’d see the day where I rely on YouTube to be the main destination to watch Shamoozal videos, but that’s the way it’s going to be for the time being.

Anyway the new page is very simple. The latest cartoon will always be featured at the front of the section while the rest of the shorts lay below it. Not all of our shorts are up on our YouTube account yet, so you still have access to the old layout in case you want to watch something we haven’t covered yet.

This popped up in my inbox this morning and I had a good laugh.

Not exactly sure why and how this happened, but I love it all the same. Thanks to the people that made it! Good stuff.

It’s hard to believe I haven’t come up with a new short for The Zoinks since 2007. The final episode I produced was Fruit Smoothies, and the entire creation process was streamed over UStream and made in about 12 hours total.

The Zoinks shorts were originally intended to be produced on average of once a month (along with everything else, can you believe it?) but that obviously didn’t happen. Seriously though, none of these shorts actually took much time, I just never really bothered to come up with a bunch of worthwhile ideas for the characters. Each of them probably took a solid day worth of work, sometimes spread over the course of a weekend. They’re very simple, and that was always the intention. Thinking back, I think I banged out Finger Paints in about four hours one night.

Carboard Box was actually the first Shamoozal short ever produced. When I originally bought this domain I had nothing but a logo up. Not much later I had a link for the forums, and then about a month later I had put up Carboard Box as a teaser cartoon. It stayed there until I finally assembled a basic site layout and our first “real” short, Candy Corns.