Garfield Minus Garfield

As a kid I was a huge fan of Garfield. I really dug his dry sense of humor, and also loved the whackier physical comedy of the strips. As I got older I kind of outgrew the fat cat a bit, since the strips are a bit repetitive and comics like Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts are much more thought through, deeper and eventually more beautiful. I haven't really read any Garfield in the last couple of years, until a friend of mine asked me last night: ever heard of that website garfieldminusgarfield.net? When I said I had not, he showed it to me and... man it's genius. A guy named Dan Walsh came up with the idea of how the Garfield strips would be like if you would eliminate the main element in it: Garfield. The result is a depressing, sometimes disturbing and always hilarious look at Jon Arbuckle's life, which is in fact so sad, that his talking/thinking cat is the only being that really interacts with him. So what would Jon do without him? Go visit the website to check it out. I'm posting my ten favourite strips right here. Copyright lies with Paws Inc. Jim Davis is the creator and Dan Walsh the man behind the alternated strips.


10.
















This one gives a perfect example of how sad Jon's life really is. You gotta love the innocent, almost boyish smile in the last panel. He is so pleased with himself.


9.








Uhhh, this one is hard. Allowedly, it is way more depressing than it is funny, but hey, the fact that it is a portrait of an isolated, lonely, pathetic man put into a three-panel-strip deserves some kind of price.



8.








I love this one. What happens here? Is Jon too dumb to figure out how the telephone works? Is it ringing for the first time in his life and he just doesn't know how to handle the situation aka. the phone? Glorious.

7.








Ah, and here is the physical comedy. I love, how much better it is delivered without a sarcastic comment by Garfield. This shows the brutal truth. A picture of a man, who has nothing going for him. A man who's day is over before even having a breakfast! Yes!


6.








This is a completely new style of comedy for a Garfield comic that Walsh creates. This one doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. What is Jon thinking in the last panel? Is the content of the bowl his girlfriend? Is he catatonic? Or just crazy?


5.








This one might be the best strip to show how weird Jon really is. There is nobody in the whole house, yet he forces himself to sit in the cat bed. Why on earth would he do that? Also we learn that Jon might be mildly schizophrenic.


4.








Hmmm... Jon seems to talk to his coffee mug in this one. I love how it seems as if in Jon's head the coffee mug knows "what it means." Jon looks pleased.


3.








Dan Walsh managed to create a new joke out of this strip, that fits perfectly with the depiction of Jon in the other strips. In his progressing isolation, Jon even starts talking to salad and enquires about its well being. Awesome!



2.








There are many more like this one, but I like this best. It features Jon talking to nobody in the first panel, a classic grimace in the second one (for no apparent reason too) and an empty third panel. If you don't find this funny, I cannot help you.


1.











Ah, number one. Given, this strip is pretty funny even without cutting Garfield from it. But leaving out the initiator for Jon's egg and bacon face catapults this strip into a whole new level of hilarious. We have to assume that Jon put the eggs and bacon on his own face, and know after reading the whole thing, that behind that newspaper it's there already from the first panel on. For me, this takes the cake. Now go and check out the website.

Who the §X!?*+$% cheats at Mario Kart?

Seriously people. Who is that sad, that (s)he has to cheat at Mario Kart online? I bought this game right when it was published and for the first two months or so, it was hack-free. But disappearing and reappearing players who just vanish when they are right in front of you and then reappear quite a bit further down the road. While i can imagine that player falling in the pits and reappear a second later as if nothing happened are due to time glitches and do not really mean an advantage for anybody, there are now videos at youtube, showing how some morons screw other people over with a hacking tool called ocarina or something like that. And after being tollerant with all those who i clearly pushed into the lava and who then came back in an instant miraculously and stole my well-earned first place, today I just about had enough, when i played a couple of guys, one being called "up is down" beating them fair and square in a tight race on Bowsers Castle N64 only to let the ranking show me that i came in last, for whatever reason. So, what the frick? If you have to cheat, then go hack a bank or something, rob a casino. But down ruin online fun for other Mario Kart users. That's just plain mean. And stupid.

Second Page

Here's the second page of VOTPW. I wish there was a way to increase its size...

Snatcher

Guys, can anybody remember these obscure and violent screenshots of people getting decapitated and evil Terminator-like robots grinning at you in the video game magazines of the early nineties? Well, i can. Little did I know that over ten years later I'd find out, that they belong to one of the finest adventures ever made: SNATCHER - A Cyberpunk Adventure. The guy responsible was nobody else than Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame, only that SNATCHER never really got the attention that it deserved. Now it's 2008 and SNATCHER actually celebrates its 20th birthday. Hard to believe that the game is such an old timer when you pop it in nowadays. Given, the graphics are a bit oldschool, but the music and voice action are top notch, and, man, the story is awesome!

You are playing Gillian Seed, a Police Officer who is responsible for hunting and eliminating the Snatchers in Neo Kobe, Japan. The Snatchers are these really nasty biodroids, which kill people and then steal their identity. Thanks to artificial skin, nobody knows, that under the facade of a human, there might hide a metallic killing machine. Diving deeper into the story would take too long, but it is a great mixture of film noir detective story, action, thriller and romance. Although the game was released on half a dozen different systems, including the Playstation and Sega Saturn, the only available english version is for the Mega-CD, which makes it kinda hard to obtain. You can find copies on ebay from time to time and thanks to emulators, such as Gens, you don't even need a Mega-CD console to play it. But if you give it a try, you might even find it for free on the world wide web. Websites like the-underdogs.info are a good place to start searching.

The game only needs a joypad or a keyboard, although back in the days you were able to use the lightgun when the game switched into action mode. I didn't find aiming or shooting harder using the keys though. It propably is even easier. So if you have some time on your hands and if you love movies like Blade Runner, Terminator or They Live, then you should definitely check out SNATCHER. Once you start playing you don't wanna stop until you found out everything about the menacing snatchers, Gillians mysterious past and the hot dancer in the bar! So stop reading now, and get SNATCHER. You know you want it!

First Page

And here's the first page of "Veteran of the Psychic Wars". I'm not really happy with the result, because the programm I used, "Comic Life", is pretty crap. If anybody knows a better device to insert bubbles and lettering, lemme know.