Terry the MOO
aka GAMECOW

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I like to write although I find a human keyboard clumsy. My pet human set up a sort of a diary for us to use during the unit - he called it a BLAG or BLUG or BLOG or something sounding like that.

We used it to write stuff about what we did, what we thought about what we did and what we think we learned about what we did. As the only bovine in the group, I think I learned much more than my little human companions because I got to observe humans working in herds with other humans - they called them teams, but us cows can see through that sort of complex terminololology really easily. What social animals year tenners are, they discuss, argue, and share skills really well. They took a young calf and showed her what was what.

Some humans struggle with complicated games like chests - horsey takes castley thing - wake up Vader .... sheesh. Some humans like to put things over their ears and listen to really loud moosic - I like both types of music - country and western. Vader and I played a little chests but I am not sure who won because he kept yelling check and I was not sure what needed checking.

Some computer games are really exciting - maybe if chests had guns or you could drive the bits around at top speed it would be more riveting - it is complicated though and my horsey seemed to jump about a bit but I am still confuzzled as to why I had so many prawns given that I am a vegetarian.

I found I was naturally gifted when it came to twiddling the controlly things on most machines that played games. This time I played agame on a GameCube - put out by the nice people from nintendo. There were 2 controllers with wires coming out from them and another 2 without (yet they still worked ... what a wonderful world we live in).

By twiddling the levery thing you can move your little person in the game and by pressing a button, you get kicks and other things - after a little instruction from me, my human companions were playing like experts. They never did quite get used to the lightning-fast reflexes of a calf in her prime, but I let them win so they didn't feel too inferior. One could get to like this.

I was given a turn on a machine made by a company named after something small and soft. The Z box or something was glowing green (which can't be a good thing). It took me a little while to get used to the controls - there seemed to be more buttons than a normal human has fingers but maybe evolution will help out eventually.

I drove cars really fast and hardly crashed at all (well, a couple of times, into spectators and got really upset until one of the boys explained that the cars were not real and pixels don't feel pain).

Hoof to the metal, I became a petrol-head and must try some of that driving practice out in the ute when I get back home.

I tried a Play station too - um or was that 3, I got confused as there was only one of them but it was a 2...anyway. There was a killing game that i didn't like very much because pulling the trigger with hooves is really tricky, so I tried a racing game and did really well to miss all the other cars - in the race there were 4 players and I came 4th - I win (at least I think the largest number is the winner).

I get confused sometimes with rules that humans make for games and think that they do not understand them sometimes.

Discussing animation is something that us calves seem to be naturally gifted at.

We were asked to create a character for an interactive fighting game animation - Jordan and Ho-Doug had some brill ideas.

Small humans are so creative and they showed this calf a thing or two when it came to using Flash

Getting close and personal, on a break during an animation workshop. We learnt how do do motion and shape tweens, how to make movie clips and other skills that are really the bread and butter of 2d animation in Flash.

Flat out creating a walk cycle, these young humans were concentrating hard on their characters. I was able to offer some advice but these dudes are mastering the skills really well - I am struggling because mice are really hard to use when you have hooves instead of hands.

Jakob and Costay seemed to cope very well - how nice it must be to be bipedal sometimes.

Vader begins his character animation - no prizes for guessing that he chose to animate a little darth - what a cute little Sith it turned out to be.

He used the force and his lightsabre was used for good and not evil.

We had nunjas, monks, sword fighters, potato people (don't ask), surfer dudes, skater bois, aliens and grim reapers - the first task was to create their walk cycle - this was tricky as the character styles had to match.

We then made 2 attacks (one short and low power, the other long and powerful), 2 hits (corresponding to the hits we could take from some one elses hits), a taunt (you want some of this punk?) and a death scene - as we all know, cows are pretty resilient so I resisted the urge for full out bovinicide.

You can see some of the resultant animations below...

I had a friendly pirate as my guide - by mimicking the hoof and hand pisitions, the illusion of still pictures moving was created.

The "idle" state was first, then other animations followed and naturally enough, I built an animated character that looks a lot like my great aunt "Bessie", twice removed on my father's side.

With the application of some action scripting, she moved in a fairly cow-like manner. We then selected sound effects to play at strategic places in the animation and ended up with some fairly hoopy gameplay.

You can run me in my own window also by clicking here [ moooooo ]

Walk Cycle	Taunt	Attack1	Attack2
Hit1	Hit2	Down	Animated GIF