It's The Coolest Game Ever!

But I'm not really finished yet, and now that we've hit the work-week things are gonna slow dramatically.

Uh, new post, new post...

Hold on. Uncle Justin is going to rummage around in his magic steamer chest...

Technically, I Haven't Been Working for 24 Hours

I've sort of been off-and-on the computer this weekend so it doesn't really count as 24 hours yet, right?

Holy shit, I can't even make a crappy shooter in 24 hours. This is literally the easiest genre to make a game for. I have no excuses. I'm just slow. Really, really slow.

Here, take a look at my work-log:

Hours 2 to 4 - Made the input code super complicated. At about 90% completion I deleted it all and wrote better code in under ten lines.

Hours 5 to 6 - Endlessly tweaked the controls.

Hours 7 to 8 - Convinced myself the velocity code was bugged. It wasn't.

Hours 8 to 9 - Put in the entire interface and then removed it all, because it looked hella lame.

Sooo...

Still in the oven. Not done yet.

Master your missiles on February 28th!

24 Hours: 1 Game

I've been working on a pretty large game project for a while now and it's looking really good (If you think 16-bit games look good then yes, it looks good), but I probably bit off more than I can chew and I think I'm well and good in the darker stages of burnout where you can still want to work on something but at the same time you really, really can't--not efficiently, at least.

But I have a solution!

I'm going to make a game, maybe a few games. I'm going to do them fast, too. The only point for doing this will be just so that I can have the satisfaction of actually making a game. I'm pretty confident it'll fix this burnout problem of mine.

Here are the requirements:

•  Planning and content can be done on off-hours, but the coding needs to be completed within 24 hours.
• 8-bit graphics. 320x240 resolution.
• Sound effects produced in as3sfxr-b (not a sexy name, but it's a very sexy program).
• Nothing fancy. Nothing innovative. Just a genre that everyone has played enough to make my project entirely pointless.
• Needs a stupid name. This is non-negotiable.
• Bad code. I'm good at this, but I'm still listing it here.

Check it out! I already did the artwork. Missile Master should be a stupid enough name, right?

Look at all that wasted image space. It's very inefficient, which is exactly what I want.

The SFX are ready, too.


If it's worth playing I'll make it available as soon as I'm finished.

Hobbit Feet

It's really starting to bother me that I've gone all this time without talking about my feet. People even ask me that, sometimes. They're like:

"Justin, what gives? You've got this blog and you talk about all this crap I don't care about when what I really want to know is what's up with your feet."

I guess it's time to clear the air.

I have hobbit feet.

Video Power

(Commentary by Retsupurae)

Video Power was this video game show that existed from 1990 to 1992, and until recently I never knew it existed.

It's bad.

Actually, it's terrible, and I hate to admit this but if we were back in the early nineties and Video Power appeared on the TV then I'm positive I would've watched the show every time it came on until the very last episode.

Because there's video games in it.

Swearing: Just Words or Sinister Biological Remote Control?

For the longest time I always thought that the stigma on swearing was just cultural baggage and nothing else. The only magic put into those words is the value that other people assign them.

They're just words. That's it.

Right?

Missing: My Balls

(I just noticed that 90% of my headers are status updates on my genitals)



I bought Amnesia: The Dark Descent back in December. Since then, every two weeks, I turn the game on and play for about ten minutes (sometimes fifteen). Maybe I'll walk down a hallway. Investigate a room. I never last very long. After ten-sometimes-fifteen minutes my nerves are shot and I have to step away from the computer.

For two weeks.

Because that's how long it takes for me to forget how scared I am of a video game.

The idea is that if I keep playing the game then eventually I'm going to toughen up and last longer than ten-to-fifteen minutes. Eventually, I'll be able to walk through Castle Brennenburg like a man.

But I just played Amnesia and this time I only lasted about three minutes. I barely got past the load screen.

I don't think I'm ever going to beat this game.

Cheetahmen With Bass

Remember that remix from last week? Well, orchestral isn't PrototypeRaptor's only forte. Listen to this:

I hope you like bass. This remix originated from the Cheetahmen 2 soundtrack, a game that, despite never being commercially released, still managed to garner a lot of fame over the years. The game itself is worse than shovelware, but the music is catchy.



(I think I've finally figured out the theme for my blog: I call it a Youtube account!)

Rose and the Doctor

I finally got around to seeing the first episode of Doctor Who (the 2005 reboot), and if you've never heard of Doctor Who, just know that it's the penultimate sci-fi series of Britain, it's been around longer than you've been alive, and its popularity has grown in the states over the past few years.

So here I am, watching for the first time one of the world's most famous fictional philanthropist.

The music is amazing. The plot is fun. The dialogue is incredibly sharp. The special effects are... uh... cost efficient.

And the Doctor is a total asshole.

I Have a Boner Aimed at the Skyrim

Until November 11th I'm going to be standing perilously close to a cliff overlooking the wasteland of my own blog filled with Skyrim fan-gushery (After November 11th it won't matter because you'll never hear from me again), and I don't want to upset anyone with the rantings of a Bethesda fanatic.

But this is awesome.

Harry Partridge is a cultural treasure. If it were up to me I'd have him dipped in molten bronze and put up on display.

I'm Horrible at Hunting Beavers

Are those arms or nipples?

So I've been adventuring in the fictional American West of 1911, playing the hell out of  Red Dead Redemption, and it's a great game, but I've got myself into a bit of a situation:

I've met a man in Mexico who wants beaver pelts. Why does he want beaver pelts? To build a da Vinci flying machine, of course.

And once his beaver glider is finished he's going to take it and leap off of a cliff, most likely to his death, and I want to be there when it happens.

So now I'm up in the mountains, hunting beavers.

And I'm terrible at it.

Freaky, Weird Games

I'm not talking about scary games. No. I'm talking about unsettling, disturbing video game experiences. These are creations that exist in their own alien worlds with their own backwards rules. There's no back-story. No introduction in an instruction booklet. It's all self-contained. You're stepping into the unknown and nobody is there to hold your hand.

I'm not really talking about a genre here. It's more of an environment that follows it's own logic, even if that logic makes no sense on the surface; sort of like Sheep and Wolves, although a video game is a much better medium for this sort of experience.

The first game is called All of Our Friends Are Dead.

Boneshaker

Here's a good setting for a novel: 19th century Seattle, except it's not the Seattle from our history books. In this Seattle, the down-town district at least, is surrounded by an enormous wall erected after a mad scientist punched a hole deep into the earth and released a killer toxin that turned almost everyone into zombies.

The setting is also belonging to that strangest of genres: steam-punk, so there's lots of airships.





Boneshaker's fictional world follows this really strange rule: The cooler your name is, the more of a bad-ass you are.

Jeremiah Swakhammer? Bad-ass. Doctor Minnericht? Bad-ass. Lucy O'Gunning? Bad-ass with a steam-punk, robot arm. Leviticus Blue? Total bad-ass.

And you can't hide bad-assery under a more mundane name, either. Briar Wilkes was trying to fly under the bad-ass radar at the beginning of the book, but since her real name is Briar Blue? Crack shot. Scourge of zombies.

But it doesn't work the other way around. You can't give yourself a more bad-ass name than the one you already have. One character thought he could do that, and then you find out his real name is super lame and dull.

Right after you find out, on the next page, he dies.

Devil's Advocate

How about some crazy music.

Now remember: to appreciate music you need to listen to a song in it's entirety. Listening to only a fraction of a song is like looking at only a fraction of a painting.

Yeah, it's an ass.

Much better, right?

I know some of you aren't impressed by a bit of volume so don't think that the big piano swell at :40 is all this song has going for it. This is a crazy, crazy arrangement that goes a lot of different places, all of them good.

PrototypeRaptor, if you haven't heard his stuff before, usually doesn't work with orchestral samples (actually, this is the only piece of his I know that could be counted as orchestral), but it's very fun.

Devil's Advocate is a remix from Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, a bullet-hell shooter, I believe; with story elements (story elements?). If you've never heard of this game then congratulations, you're just as clueless as everyone else on this planet. The entire bullet-hell genre itself is just a sub-genre of a genre that isn't nearly as popular as it used to be twenty years ago.

Enjoy the sinister music and don't be surprised if you feel an urge to watch Beetlejuice afterwards.

Sosarian Rogue

It's time to wrap up 90's week and I can't think of a better way of doing it than with Ultima Online.

Everyone has their favorite game world. It's a special place, and it isn't special because of the game mechanics or anything you can express in words. Your favorite game world is a place that you know, without a doubt, means more to you than anyone else. You don't enjoy this world. You don't like it. You love it.

And I loved Sosaria.

Video Games in the 90's Sucked

That's right. Video games in the 90's sucked and you don't even know it.

Sure, reminisce about your Mario 64 and your Chrono Trigger and your Tekken 2. What's that? Three games? Just three?

You've got nostalgia, man. You've got it all over your face. It's disgusting.

Don't worry, man. I've got a cure. I can sober you up with just one word...

Pop Quiz, Hot-Shot,

Your hit movie just released. $100 million in the box office. Ready for a sequel. Keanu won't sign on.

What do you do?

What do you do?

Commercial Break

Remember commercials? They used to have the clout of a minor deity, demanding a few minutes of your life as a sacrifice every time you wanted to watch something on TV.

And what choice did you have? You certainly couldn't rely on VHS to skip commercials. The quality was always either bad or terrible, you needed to program the VCR ahead of time or hit record at just the right moment, and then you had to hope that nobody wanted to use the TV or else you'd end up recording something else.

NO! VHS was a false hope. I'll admit, it did give me a thrill to listen to that whirring noise as I fast-forwarded past Ronald McDonald on my way back to X-Men. It was almost like cheating death, if death counted as two to three minutes of your life.
But the price was always too high. Don't talk to me about VHS. VHS was a false prophet.

In this Tomorrowland that we live in, with video-streaming bandwidth and digital recording, if you're watching a series of back-to-back commercials then you're doing something wrong. Television advertisements have lost that terrible power that they used to hold, and while we no longer owe them a small cut of our lives, we must respect what is dead and gone.


Today we pay homage to a dead god: the commercials of the 90's.

(bow your heads)

Do You Miss Dial-Up Internet?

Of course you don't!

But I bet you miss this...