Dead Space 3 Is Kind Of Bad News For Video Games

Warning: Here comes an uninformed opinion about Dead Space 3 based on some reading and Giant Bomb’s Quick Look. I have not played the game. Not even the demo (is there a demo?) Those uninterested feel free to skip this entry. My not-very-unique and unresearched opinion is coming at you!

Continue reading Dead Space 3 Is Kind Of Bad News For Video Games

Black Mage vs Magus (Boy vs Sprite 2.5) by CRC

This is by an intrepid dude internet-named CRC . It fits in between the second and third Boy vs Sprite things taking the Black Mage character from 8-bit Theater into new and exciting situations. It was startlingly flattering to see fan work like this. I don’t remember if I saw this before I was planning BvS3 or not. I’m pretty sure I did see this and then go forward with BvS3. Anyway, enjoy!

Continue reading Black Mage vs Magus (Boy vs Sprite 2.5) by CRC

Five Games, Ten Dollars, One Gnome

I don’t know how long Amazon is doing this deal but my Toy Soldiers Steam port is in there and that would be cool if you wanted to buy it. It’s worth it to get Mark of the Ninja for ten bucks alone, but then you get all those other games too! All the keys are for Steam versions. So act.

Don’t forget that my friend Robert West’s Gnomoria game is almost a year old and contains a ton of new content. It was successfully Greenlit on Steam and he’s working on getting it to a 1.0 state to put it up there. So purchases now, through his site or Desura, will receive a Steam key later on when it’s up there. I hear you can get destroyed by a horde of invading mantis creatures.

Real update later in the day.

You’re Unbelievable

I am trying to avoid writing up negative spiels on here. Browsing through hundreds of old news posts from Teenage Kyle gave me plenty of opportunities to notice it is pretty annoying. However, this experience is something I think we can all learn from and take forward into product design and life in general.

I have “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” on disc from Netflix. Last night, I viewed the whole film and enjoyed it a great deal. After the credits ran, it (without any prompting or input from me) went back to highlight the “Play With Director Commentary” menu option. I thought I’d give that a look the next day and then went to sleep because it was late. Smash cut to today where I plan to put on the commentary while doing some cleaning and work. I go into the same menu and enable the commentary. What greets me is a helpful little dialog box stating that this disc is intended for rentals and I should purchase the full movie on Blu-Ray to complete my movie experience with additional features and content.

Wait. Are you fucking kidding me?

Great. You are greedy and assholes. Way to go. There is no other outcome for a customer looking at this except to think “Wow, fuck you, Universal.” I am especially not going to go buy a product which just pulled a hilarious prankjoke on me. Keep in mind that this is the menu that the disc itself brings you back to after you have watched the movie to suggest “Hey, maybe watch it again with commentary?” You are an asshole, disc. Now I understand that huge movie companies have it pretty rough what with internet piracy and the confounding inevitable march of time and progress. I will fully allow them to have rental-only discs with a limited set of features. But do not, do not put that same menu in there with a “JK HAHA” message attached to it. Take the minuscule effort it takes to burn two different versions of the disc with the extra features removed entirely. You are already burning two versions! This is not a huge cost! The ultra dick move is showing the features and giving the impression of a fully-featured disc but then saying were actually just Joshin’. It’s childish. Be a jerk up front. Don’t be a surprise jerk.

It seems like a tiny thing, but details are important when trying to appear like a smart, competent business.

Unbelievable.

Clarifying For The Internet Ghosts

To anyone listening,

It was never my intention to take down all the videos and never put them back up again. I just get sidetracked by the world outside my own. We are close to them all being up and restored (except for maybe a couple that should remain gone). After that is accomplished, the exclusive Lost Short will be posted. Most likely in an unfinished form, but there is actually more there than I remember. Next will come the tiny game home projects I’ve been working on. Then I will begin to feel less stressed and satisfied with my life and everything will be great. Also there are a lot of just weird forgotten nooks and pieces that may come to the surface. Things that may only be interesting to me. So don’t worry. Just hang in there!

Additionally, you could follow me on Twitter for rare gems in that venue.

Red Mage vs White Mage

I give this one a moderate endorsement. It’s a pretty passable joke with all the stupid dramatic build up. Although, maybe I thought the build up was legitimately cool and awesome at the time. I was unable to sift through my disgusting pile of digital paperwork to locate the date on this one but I’ll come back to it. It’s very likely this was before Kefka 2 or Super Mario Blitz. It features some nice little tweens and toy effects that I enjoyed at the time.

Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED

Mortis vs Dark Age of Camelot

Wow! What craft! After having just looked at the original, this one blows me away with how much it improved. Smooth tweens, interesting music-based pacing, less grating jokes. Truly a child on top of his game. This video was finished and posted on December 18, 2001 at 11:01 am PST. That’s right around when Final Fantasy X and DAoC first released. I spent the majority of my winter vacation playing both simultaneously. It was easy to leave a minstrel on the mana regeneration song and actually playing FFX while everyone else in the group did all the work. Top class.

Also mind-blowing: my old, old, old site actually still exists, preserved at the moment I transitioned to my own domain. I discovered this fact while sifting through digital file folders trying to pinpoint this video’s date. (Also I should try to find the original “air dates” for all these things and add some cataloging info.) Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any record of the single-column-in-HTML version of the original-original site. I would have liked to see what stupid things I had to say about how school totally sucks. Thinking about it now, it was pretty audacious to throw together a stupid website and copy a bunch of other nerds from the internet and actually get a small following. I actually raised enough money as an unemployed slacker to get my own domain name and pay for hosting for a number of years just through donations. What happened to that guy who didn’t know enough to realize things were out of his reach? Who did things just because he found them interesting? We should try to get that guy back.

This got long and not particularly related to Dark Age of Camelot.

Note: I’m leaving the Flash version of this up here too because apparently the YouTube version is too hot for Germany to handle.

Get Adobe Flash player

Original Air Date: 12.18.2001

Mortis vs Asheron’s Call

This one was real harsh to re-watch. I think I’d describe my 15-16 year old self as “difficult to stomach” with some qualifiers about how the kid probably meant well. There used to be this guild in Asheron’s Call on Frostfell (maybe?) that I somehow ran across in my AC-playing days. They were known as Vitae Rising and their website is now some squatted Japanese domain. The guild (monarch, in AC terms) leader, Hearding, had created a few Asheron-related Flash movies and I thought that was simply the coolest. It’s likely that I server-stalked them for quite a while before actually asking to join them. Anyway, I pretty much completely copied a type of video that Hearding made with both this and the DAoC death reel.

Oh man. A wave of remembrances. The other website I was absolutely enamored with was WTFman.com which apparently still exists but has not been updated for quite a while. Looking at those videos was my gateway to two years of Flash obsession. Also WTFman’s current layout is devastatingly similar to the original Mortisland site design. Because I copied it. It’s kind of startling how blatantly it was copied.

Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED

In case you’re curious, the song is Black Bugs by Regurgitator.

In The Year 2013, There Are Still Video Games

2012 had a ton of video games in it. In a vague order, here are handful of games from (or played in) 2013 that really stuck with me. If you haven’t played Journey, Walking Dead, or Hotline Miami, you should! Journey and Hotline Miami are both short little things that won’t take up too much time and deliver strong experiences. Journey at the high end with upliftingness and positivity. HLM showing how dark and grimy and gross a game can be. Taken together, they kind of hit two opposing endpoints of the emotional spectrum.

  • Journey
  • The Walking Dead
  • Hotline Miami
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  • FTL
  • 999
  • Fez
  • Planetside 2

Over my Christmas holiday break, I got more work in on my Dungeon Keeper riff and made a tiny, tiny competitive game prototype called either Ships or Fluid depending on what name I remember to call it. There will be more progress on those. More of the missing Flash animations will go up. I’ll look into adding YouTube versions of those (would anyone find this useful?) to go alongside the Flash versions. Ascend will get finished and someone will get to play it.