Black Squirrel
|
{{ Black Squirrel | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 Black Squirrel's most accurate reference, also from the FIFAD Fad. | |||
| |||
| |||
| Profile | |||
| Aliases: | BS | ||
| Real name: | Unknown | ||
| Interests: | Spriting, fangaming, collecting retro games, etc. | ||
| |||
Black Squirrel is one of MFGG's current loveable administrators who joined the MFGG forums on January 16th, 2005. He'd lurked around many months previously and has been in and out of the fangaming community since 2002/2003. He heads MFGG's forums along with Jeff Silvers (and to a certain degree, Techokami) under the eyes of Thunder Dragon and Retriever II and is also an admin of MFGG's main site, a beuraucrat of this Wiki and a Super Op in MFGG IRC.
History
Black Squirrel discovered the fangaming community through Sonic Fan Games Headquarters, which was mainly used as a resource for game-making. In the early days BS went on a TGF Library downloading spree, then moved onto MFGG later, possibly playing a large role in the bandwidth issues at the time. As such he practically has a complete backup of every sprite library around in 2004, which has been given to Zelda Fan Game Network several times since in an attempt to revive it.
Inexperienced at game-making and tired of failed attempts at making games, Black Squirrel decided to create his own gaming website titled "Black Squirrel's Domain". 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 spriting community in his first months at MFGG, which interested him more than game programming at the time, and he soon became an active member. His spritework has obviously improved over time until the point where it has been highly regarded by other members.
BS was 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 Site Staff as part of the quality control team, where he remains in that position today.
On June 22nd, 2007, the door was opened 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 (this role was given to Tragic instead), took on the smaller role as a "Janitor" which can do everything but ban (along with Jas (and Hatman who resigned shortly after)). However when the Worthless Post Palace was removed his moderation powers were not often demonstrated. Black Squirrel's PPP Mod powers were carried over to the Casual Conversation Castle when the PPP was closed, and his title changed to "CCC Mod".
Squirrel's attitude has become stupidly relaxed over the years, and although does a stupid amount of work, he doesn't take anything too seriously, as that would be stupid.
On January 26th, 2008, Black Squirrel was upgraded to Global Moderator and by May 28th of the same year he became administrator, with a very long acceptance speech with all sorts of pointless graphs. He hopes to bring MFGG to a new golden age and all that jazz.
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 Flying Squirrel (from SegaSonic Arcade), then recoloured (badly) back in the days before BS knew how to sprite (The first BS dates from around 2003). It has not changed since and therefore looks terrible.
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 for 5 years, practically untouched. 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. 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. The character also has a lot of DragonBall Z-like powers which show further how bad the character design is.
Known Work
Black Squirrel's spriting career really started at the introduction of his custom Mario backgrounds/items. 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 up to 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 and editing 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 not pushed to its limits). If Mario ground is an awful orange colour, chances are it was made by BS.
An early drawing request topic was also started by BS, involving 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. 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 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 fading out of existance. BS still keeps a dopefish in his signature. It has been marqueeing since 2005.
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.Annoyingly SMW 1.7 included options to change skins, thus making most of Super MFGG War inferior now. Like all of Black Squirrel's games, they are only accessable from PMs or Emails, as they are not perminantly hosted online.
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 Awards along with Retriever II. His work is usually useless, 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.
BS's game making skills haven't vastly improved over the years, and because of that his games are vastly inferior compared to the top fangames of today. But he has taken advantage of this, and, being inspired by Waligie, he created the Player Adventure Trilogy, a series of badly made games made altogether in less than 3 days. More recently he has created the SHPDMBGWL4 series, following Mario through a journey of time and space, being captured by Space Koreans and rescued by a seemingly invincible time travelling tank-riding duck named Quackers. SHPDMBGWL4 3 was especially popular due to it's hidden but working Stop 'n' Swop feature from Banjo-Kazooie causing a huge amount of replay value. The series pays tribute to other fangames, especially Lets Go Thingio! by Someguy and Keapora which BS is highly anticipating.
Black Squirrel: The Admin
When Black Squirrel became administrator of the forums he took a very different approach to administrating, taking many of the concepts that Yoshiman had introduced and improving on them, but also attempting to restore order on the then hectic forum userbase. He is the first admin since ShadowMan to have administrative powers on all the official sections of MFGG. He brought the main site and forum staff together by scrapping Forum 27, and has worked with various moderators to create a forum layout that works for them. BS does not want to repeat previous mistakes in which large sections of the mod team were left without a say in how the forum was run. Unfortunately for him, many moderators do not speak up until it is too late, and therefore this plan often backfires.
BS is the secret father of the CCC Concept. Though he did not name it, he originally put forward the idea of needing a Happy Heart and a set amount of posts to enter. He also put forth the concept of the flag system, producing every one of the 160+ flags. He has helped release several skins, mostly those by Jazz and organised several events to keep the blood flowing.
Squirrel has adopted a quirky style of posting news. MFGG Monthly News, an expansion on Yoshiman's weekly news programme, often contains various home made graphs and charts that BS made "to make things more interesting". He has continued ShadowMan's review drives and introduced the Game of the Month system to highlight quality fangames.
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 one of the few MFGGers who still plays and enjoys old DOS games. Many of his stuff is inspired by the works of Apogee and Epic MegaGames, especially the Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Jazz Jackrabbit and Bio Menace series. He is also a big fan of Doctor Who and is responsible for The Doctor (though does not control him).
- BS is not actually Black in terms of skin colour. He is a white, British, male (human).
