Spark’s Big Announcement

Well, my wife and I have been trying for a few months now. And it’s the best news we’ve heard in a good long while in these lousy times. If it’s a boy, he’ll be Leon Wolfgang. And if it’s a girl, Zia Marie. This is a chapter of our life we’ve been eager to start since Maegan and I got married, so we’re happy that our next adventure starts now.

Retro Rewind: Old stories return! And The Mechs Meet 2018!

The past is present as old stories return! First up is SanityisOverRated’s Darkman’s Robot Warriors series! This was quite the hit right at the beginning of the Team Scene, but hasn’t been seen online in years. Back in the day the Mechs were briefly hosts for these stories while Stoneman switched servers.

These are posted without permission, which gave me pause. But I don’t think he’d be TOO mad about my desire to unearth his old work. So if I’ve misjudged apologies in advance.

If you scroll just a bit down you’ll notice a new banner – one leading to the Sinister Six! That’s right, the Sinister Six is now a part of the Mechanical Maniacs, retaining it’s own layout and all it’s content. It’s stories along with those of the X-Force and Darkman’s Robot Warriors can all be found on the Fiction page. It’s looking … really crowded, actually.

You see, a few weeks ago the Sinister6.com domain has expired and it took me over two weeks to even notice it was gone. After talking about it with Rich and Ben we felt we no longer really needed that domain, especially since the Mechs and the Sinister Six have shared the same site since the Planet Megaman days. So instead of buying it up again the decision was made to let it go and merge the Sinister Six with the Mechs. I’ve also taken the time to reorganize and rename a few folders to, hopefully, make a bit more sense internally.

As for as epilogues go you may think it nearly impossible to make sense of it all, given the sheer amount of content. Well, I’ve got you covered. I’ve created and greatly revised the Epilogue Timeline which contains the adventures of the Mechanical Maniacs, Sinister Six, X-Force, Cossack’s Comrades, AND Wily’s Warriors in a comprehensive, chronological list detailing points of convergence and filters! This list has been and will continue to be updated.

And, last but not least, the real life adventures of the mechanical Maniacs have been posted detailing this year’s photos and log! This has been ready for quite some time, actually, but just hasn’t been posted yet. So have fun reading up on our latest trip to Montreal!

We haven’t had n update this substantial in quite some time, so I hope you enjoy it.

Mechs Meet 2014

Just over a month ago, Gauntlet, Needlegal, Rich, our new Sparkman, and I converged on Topman’s home city of Montreal for our (almost) annual (usually) summer meet-up. As usual, I’ve chronicled our shenanigans with a log and photo gallery. Special thanks to Rich for contributing to the write-up and to Spark for contributing to the pics!

New Sparkman, Genesis End – 15 & 16

That’s right, we have a new member of the team! Please welcome aboard Leon, the new Sparkman! If the name sounds familiar it’s because the new Spark is being based off Elecman of the Sinister Six … who is also Geoff aka Diveman of Cossack’s Comrades. It may be a while before the epilogues reflect this, but until that happens please give a warm welcome for the new Spark.

In addition to this he has a new card for the Shadow Hunters character cards we’ve made and Topman’s created a new background for the cards which we’ll be using.


“Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked.

Needle Gal pushed the last one into Gravity Man’s right wrist and moved on to his left arm. “Mostly practiced on myself,” she said as she pulled another needle from her hair like a seamstress and began lining it up in place along Gravity’s outstretched arm. “It took a long time before I figured out where the right pressure points were. Luckily 15 years is a lot of time to practice.”

“Well it’s a hell of a skill,” I remarked. “You should use it more often.”

 

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AXE – Final Part

This is it! Thank you for joining me for the final Annihilation update. I am officially bringing the project to a close.

Click above for the story epilogues. This is also the final art update, with the three biggest pieces I had to draw for this entire thing. Behold, our final boss, Dark Desertman, in all his abominable glory. Then in this corner, the AXE squad, whose acronym makes slightly less sense than the one it came from. Finally, their arch nemeses, Tenebrosi, the picture that I came close to burning out on and had to call in some help. Much thanks to Crys (FlameChick) for the coloring assist with that last piece.

The Chip Database was also completed in time. It’s still not perfect. It was probably not the best idea to combine the icons into a single image by family (it certainly made it harder to re-arrange the index), but somehow I don’t think having over 700 separate little images loading on the page would have been any better, alignment aside. I’m just accepting it as it is.

My heartfelt thanks to the team members that stuck around all this time and supported me right to the end. Thanks to Letra for the brainstorming sessions and for giving me the name for the dark team in the end. Thanks to Crys for lending her artistry during the final stretch and for providing feedback on the writing for every part I posted ahead in the team forum. Thanks to Nijubu for adding to the story right to the end, his writing is always an inpsiration to mine. Thanks to Blackbelt, Alice Vulcan, SuperKoala, Jake Tan, Fishman, and Akutare for being around to revive the team back in 2008. I did my best to incorporate everyone’s ideas regardless of how long they stuck around, and I don’t blame anyone for dropping off. Thanks to Gauntlet for setting us up with the timeshare on Mechanical Maniacs and letting me basically take over the front page for the past six months. Thanks to Avi for letting me throw her character’s likeness into the story for a purpose that never even saw realization. Thanks to Spark Mandrill for running with a lot of my ideas for how the EXE team universe worked, almost singlehandedly vindicating the entire collaborative aspect of the team community. Thanks to Havoc and Cifnas and all my old teammates for starting the EXE3 team and giving me a further outlet for the obsession I’d developed with Viral Infection, and thanks to Valcion for starting that team right when I was getting fascinated by Mega Man teams and thinking how much I would like to be a part of one.

For me, this really is the culmination of about 13 years of EXE teams. Back then I made some decisions I likely would not if I were a little older and wiser. We jumped into making the first EXE team before BN1 was even out, which was the kind of move I would relentlessly mock a few years later. Plus, the very premise of BN — a shonen/card game/cellphone culture based re-imagining of Mega Man? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I would be into normally. I think it was entirely because I wanted to be on an MM team and that was the first one available to me that I decided I was going to not just be into EXE, I was going to be the EXE expert.

I spent those first few years trying to be such an expert. It didn’t quite work that way. I was never able to keep up with every aspect of the rapidly expanding franchise, but at least with the games I was exceedingly thorough. I’d buy every version of each game and play them beyond 100% completion, making exhaustive notes and analysis to turn into some kind of informative content for the site. I was so eager to become an expert on these games that I taught myself how to read Katakana just so I could play the Japanese versions in the gap between regional releases.

It was the team story that really motivated me though. What began as dumb, fun, little forum RPs that none of us took seriously somehow became a major creative playground. I would start writing my part of the story in my head far ahead of everybody else to the point that by the time Viral Infection ended with one RP completed and two more stalled midway through, I had already written an origin story and plotted out the remainder of the unfinished pieces, and conceived of eight more stories that would have spun out from them. Then we ended up tying that continuity to the new one in Annihilation and I just kept writing further ahead. It was a little ambitious.

The BN series itself ended in 2006, and stepping back, looking at the whole timeframe, it would have made more sense if AXE did as well. VI had folded with more active members present than AXE persevered with 8 years ago. If anyone was in denial, it was me. This is about where it stops being about a team and starts being all about my own hangups. I still didn’t even want to let VI go. I didn’t want to leave anything unfinished. It had become an obsession, like so many other things I get myself wrapped up in. I became more determined to bring the project some kind of closure even as growing up and graduating into the workforce meant I had less free time to accomplish that goal. It started as a team and I still wanted it to be a team, but it had increasingly become just one person trying in vain to corral some uninspired friends who had better sense of when it was time to move onto other interests.

2006 to the present has been a long string of instances where I would consider if it were best to quit, and that may have been the sensible approach, but instead I would just double-down. From finishing the first finale to the recruitment drive for the team’s new iteration to writing the second finale, and several smaller things right up to earlier this week when I earnestly questioned the value of putting the finishing touches on the Chip Database vs. getting rid of the whole mess.

It really didn’t help that the enthusiastic love I had for the Mega Man Battle Network series in the beginning had started to wane at this time. I really didn’t like BN6 at all. It was a sour note to go out on. I was painfully reminded of how much I hated that game when I forced myself to revisit it in order to finish the Navi and Chip pages. So why would I continue to try to be the EXE guy for twice as long as the series’ actually lasted?

Well, even if my original motivation was lost to time, I still liked writing this story. I liked building off all that history. I liked designing new characters and planting the seeds for later reveals. Wrapping it up this way has also been cathartic for me. It’s not like I got to use all of my ideas, but I got to a point where I’m comfortable letting those ideas go or reworking them into something new. Everything on the site now is something I had fun putting together either on my own or collaborating with everyone else. I wish it all could have come together more quickly, like while any of us involved still cared about the BN series, but it came together in the end, so I’m satisfied.

Stay tuned to the Mechanical Maniacs where the team spirit lives on and my own attentions will be less divided in the future. Some leftover AXE stuff may even yet see the light of day as parts of Mechs projects eventually, but we’ve got our own Series 8 to polish off first.

Until then, this is Drillman for the Mega Man Battle Network 3 team, Annihilation.EXE, logging off.

AXE Part 5-6, MM Teams Wiki

A massive attack and an inevitable betrayal mark the end of Chronicle 5 of Annihilation. There’s a whole lot of action from here on out.

In other news, Gauntlet has been adding a lot of new info to the MM Teams Wiki. It’s the surprise culmination of a Mechs casefiles project we started years ago, made a bunch of art for, but then didn’t do anything with until Gauntlet found out he owned this Wiki a few weeks ago. It’s a work in progress, but there’s a lot to read up on already. Check it out.

Mechs Meet 2012


It’s that time of summer again. A few of the Mechs made it out to the Toronto area for FanExpo, a trip to Canada’s Wonderland, and the usual bouts of gaming and nonsense. Check out the log and the gallery.

Mechs Meet 2011


About a month ago, we gathered in Gauntlet’s neck of the woods once again and had some good times seeing FanExpo, driving around the Toronto area, missing turnoffs, doing impressions of comedians doing impressions of celebrities doing impressions of other celebrities, and playing video games. Check out the log and the gallery.

So long, Hardman. And hello, Hardman!

It’s a day of mixed emotions here at the Mechs. We’re excited about moving forward with the team and our stories, but to do so we have to leave behind a part of ourselves that we’re going to miss very much.

The Mechanical Maniacs operate under a different creedo than all of the other teams that have come and gone over the years, one that states that the team is more of a club than a production mill. We pretty much make stories and new content as we please, which can sometimes lead to long droughts of activity, while at other times you may struggle to keep up with everything that’s going on. But the common thread between these times is that the members themselves are actually good friends, and we all hang out, both online and at least once a year in the real world.

Just about the only requirement for staying on the team is that we’re around when we can be. Its a pretty lax set of terms, but its worked out pretty well for us.

In the past few years, the team members have grown older, and with that comes new responsibilities that may not jibe with keeping an active online persona. Hey, its just how these things go, and the more responsibilities we end up with, the less time we have to hang around online. Some of us have more responsibilities than others.

A few years ago, during one of his increasingly rarer appearances on the forum, Hardy stated that his goal was to start a family and basically be a normal guy. Without going into details about his personal life, this was a perfectly acceptable goal of his.

And so, after a year of no communication with our friend, and before that, fewer and fewer visits form the big lug, the team has come to the painful decision to move on without our friend. There’s no ill will from us, and we’re hoping that if Hardy ever does come back, he’ll understand our decision and not feel any ill will towards us.

Wherever you are, Hardy, we’re hoping you’ve made it, safe and sound and happy.

With Hardy gone, that’s leaves some awfully big shoes to fill, and not just because Hardman had reached nearly Godzilla-sized proportions during Hadrian’s time in the Number 020 boots. He was quite the accomplished author, being able to command the attention of all of his audience no matter how much time had passed between then and his last story.

But, luckily, we’re pretty confident in his successor, because he isn’t the type to merely fill shoes- he’s the kind of guy that makes his own foot ware and walk his own path. A legend in the old team community in his own right, and a guy all of us know by name, if not reputation.

So, we introduce our old friend and former Sinister Six alumni, Ben, as our new Hardman!

And with that, no orphanage will be safe from being crushed beneath his maniacal might…