Black Squirrel
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Black Squirrel | |||
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| Profile | |||
| Aliases: | None | ||
| Real name: | Unknown | ||
| Interests: | Spriting, Game making, collecting retro games etc. | ||
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Black Squirrel, ("BS" for short), joined the MFGG forums on the 16th January 2005, but lurked around many months previously. He is currently an active member of the Site Staff and a Pointless Post Palace Moderator.
History
Before Black Squirrel discovered MFGG, he discovered the once thriving SFGHQ, which was used as a resource for his game-making skills. Downloading practically every TGF library there, he descovered MFGG, doing the same thing, and probably contributing to the bandwidth problems at the time. Having drained the internet of it's libs, BS focused on making games, failed and moved on.
Inexperienced at game-making and tired of failed attempts at making games, Black Squirrel became bored and decided to create his own game making website, BSD. Again, not much luck was found there as the community was incredibly inactive and small. However after registering on MFGG's forums Black Squirrel eventually abandoned his site and took up residence there.
MFGG introduced BS to the greater spriting community, which interested him more than game programming, and he soon became an active member. His first attempts at spriting weren't too great, but they slowly improved and now his work is regarded highly by fellow members. Learning how to sprite also improved BS's art skills, possibly being one of the reasons his artwork at school is also reccomended. Not much of this is shown at MFGG however. He also lacks decent Photoshop skills as he doesn't use the program much which leads to the work looking a lot worse on screen.
A year passed at MFGG and BS was rewarded a Super Happy Heart badge (A badge created not long before he recieved it) for not being warned throughout the year. He was also nominated for best newbie at the MFGG 2005 awards, although he didn't win. Eventually having made his way into the community and recieving many other badges for his sprites/reviews/submissions, he was nominated to become part of the MFGG staff team as part of the quality control team and moderator of the Submit-it forum (Sharing with Parakarry and eventually Ylle (although Trasher, ShadowMan, Retriever II and Thunder Dragon are also part of quality control)). Accepting this role, he remains in that position today.
The 22nd of June 2007 opened the door to new Pointless Post Palace moderators among other forum-only mods. BS was nominated and although declined a role as a full PPP moderator with banning powers took on the smaller role as a "Janitor" which can do everything but ban.
Character
Black Squirrel's 'furry' or character is, as the title suggests, a Black Squirrel. BS was originally a Sonic edit turned into Ray the squirrel, then recoloured (badly) back in the days before BS descovered advanced spriting. The original edit was actually by a member known as 'Blues the Squirrel' from SFGHQ. Black and Blues have no relation to each other and only met once at topic at MFGG.
The character of Black Squirrel has often been regarded as strange due to his eye colour being the same as his fur colour, and the pupils being red. This is the result of bad recolouring, but has been kept anyhow. As well as having black fur, BS has a blue "stripe" along the back of his body and tail, and along the front of his arms and legs. Depending on the perception, this can be one thick line that covers the back, or two lines that are along the bottom left and bottom right of his back. BS also has grey shoes, as supposed to the red ones that Sonic has. The most obvious part of BS is the tail, which replaces Sonic's spikes and allows BS to glide (As well as balance). It has been said that this tail is strong enough to hold the rest of Black Squirrel's weight too.
Stixdude created a version of Black Squirrel with white eyes and black pupils (As well as a coat), which insprited BS to improve upon his character's design. So far no changes have been made however.
Known Work
Black Squirrel's spriting career really started at the introduction to his custom Mario backgrounds/items. Although they were simple, they worked really well with most Mario styles used at time, and were well recieved. Since their creation they have been used in a number of fangames, one of the most recent being Super Mario Epic 3 by Captain Jeff Silvers. BS no longer thinks these sprites are upto his current standards, but are still liked by many people, of which he is thankful for. "Tileset 06", a project started by Black Squirrel, was a major update to his old tileset, demonstrating how his spriting skill has improved. It was even more successful than the last batch, and one of the biggest Super Mario Tilesets available at the time. However, due to this it quickly went into a state of overuse and looked down on due to the creation of open-source which were able to use it easily. This lead to many games that all looked and played the same being created by people with no previous skills, and dragging down MFGG as a whole because of it. To remidy this, Black Squirrel started working on an even bigger tileset, codenamed "Tileset 07". After many months of work the tileset was released on the forums for use, with the emphasized message on recolouring it to give it some more originality. A poorly made palette was provided so as to encourage others to change it, and so far it has been mildly successful (although it has yet to be released on the main site).
An early drawing request topic was also started by BS through boredom. This involved him 'drawing' other people's characters in 'circle' form. They were quickly made and weren't of great quality, but many people liked them for whatever reason. The topic eventually grew out of MFGG and into BS's own forum too. Since then, request topics have been frowned upon for taking over the Arts board, so now BS only draws/sprites people's characters if he owes them (Of which there are still quite a few). These 'cicular drawings' have been dubbed many names; "Blob forms", "Circley characters", "mini versions" and many others. There is no official name for them, but they do appear in many 'tests' that BS does.
He is also mainly responsible for the not-so popular Dopefish fad (A popular enemy from the DOS Commander Keen series), which ran through for a couple of days before eventually dying. BS still keeps a dopefish in his signature.
Super MFGG War, another half-fad based on the game Super Mario War was also compiled by Black Squirrel. However, all he did was compile sprites, music and levels created by other members at MFGG). Members like Lee and Akruru were largely responsible for Super MFGG War's content however. Also, Kitsune Yamato should be credited for the hosting of the first version. Super MFGG war occasionally pops back up to the top of the PPP for various reasons, and version 2.0 is available to download. Annoyingly SMW 1.7 included options to change skins, thus making most of Super MFGG War inferior now.
Black Squirrel has also made many rips from "Obscure" games, submitting many obscure Mario sprite sheets to MFGG and achieving the "Most Positive Contributor" MFGG 2006 Award along with Retriever II. His work is usually useless, yet strangely interesting when compared to 'normal' sprite sheets, ranging from mainstream games like "Wario Land II", to strange, pirate NES games such as "Kart Fighter" and "World Heroes 2", many of which have never been ripped from before. He has also ripped from many other games too, ranging from Sonic the Hedgehog, to Bomberman, and spanning to many platforms that many don't have the patience to tackle (Like for instance, the Virtual Boy). In fact, due to the uselessness of a lot of these sprites, no major spriting sites would accept them, so BS had to create his own site "The Obscure Ripping Project" (a.k.a. tORP). tORP also contains information about a lot of the obscure games he has ripped from, so people actually know what these games are.
He is also responsible for the Player Adventure Trilogy, a series of badly made games made altogether in less than 3 days. He has also made random games like it that attempt to appeal to Waligie fans, although none of them are as successful.
He also seems to be one of the top contributors to this Wiki.
Trivia
- The nickname or abbriveated name for Black Squirrel, "BS" is also the term used to abbrivieate "Bulls***". Unfortunately Black Squirrel was unaware of this when he chose his username, but as it isn't used that often, it doesn't make much of a difference.
- "Black Squirrel" remains as one of the most unimaginative usernames on MFGG, however his character is one of the few Sonic edits that no-longer resembles a hedgehog of some sorts (Other Sonic edits on MFGG have now been improved/changed so that they are completely custom).
- Black Squirrel won the "Best Reviewer" and "Most positive Contributor" (Shared with Retriever II), and was nominated for "Best MFGGer overall" (Which went to Klobber) for the 2006 MFGG Awards. He was also nominated for "Best Reviewer" (Which went to Parakarry), and "Best Newbie" (Which went to NO Body(?)) for the 2005 awards.
- BS is not actually Black in terms of skin colour. He is a white, British, male (human).
