So, what have I been up to lately?

Hi there everyone.  I haven't posted as regularly as I'd like, I've been busy and stuff.  Right now I'm just playing Metroid I, which is a huge pain in the ass and I might give up.  I've got high jump, screw attack and the ice beam, but I just get lost too damned much.  And I always think to play the game after I've turned my computer off, and I don't want to boot it up just to get a map.  That game is just too hard.  (I've discovered the italics button- watch out!)

But on another note, I've been doing some basic research on games and gaming.  Mostly Indie Gaming.  After Jack's post about Shadowgate, and his challenge to the indie gaming world, I decided to take a look to see if there were any shadow-gate style indie games.  I remembered the Crimson Room, and the rest of the series:  The Viridian Room and blue room and white room, etc.  But, as I was researching information on these games, I got to thinking about the history of indie games... and then I fell down a rabbit hole.

It turns out there is way more going on in indie gaming than I realized.  There are hundreds of creators out there, just itching to make games.  I can barely even find the time and initiative to talk about making games, but over here, I found a damned list that you can post to and someone might make your game idea!!  Egad! Okay, okay, breathe, breathe.  I'm going to try to post a little map of the rabbit hole so far.  It goes like this:

Google search.  "Hello, what is this?"  DIY gamer dot com?  That sounds awesome.  What am I looking at? Wait a second.  So, what you're telling me is that you had a contest for people to create First Person Shooter games, start to finish, in seven days?  Really?  And they did?  People can just do that?  Okay, I'll play one: First Person Tutor.  Haha, this game is funny.  Kinda fun.  Neato.  There are several other games on this page that look interesting, and you can play them in-browser.  I just got in this damned rabbit hole, and I have at least two hours of exploring to do on this one page.  But I don't feel like stopping just yet, so I keep going.

Oh, here's an interesting new(to me) website called Glorious Train Wrecks.  Isn't that a great title?  It turns out they have a game making contest too.  They just finished up their fifth one.  They also have a list of development tools and hundreds of games submitted to them.  Jeepers H Crackers, what am I supposed to do with all of this?  Can someone please pay me to write about the indie game scene so I can pan for gold in all of these (probably) shitty games?  I would very much like to do that.  But I have no attention span, so off I go!

Oh look, DIYgamer.com has an article about Indie Games and they mention Crowd Funding.  You know, Kickstarter.  And, apparently a new one aimed specifically at games.  Card games or video games, it doesn't matter.  Here we go, 8-Bit Funding!  Okay, so now there's a place to ask for money to develop your games?  And there are a bunch of projects already on it.  048tyhdfs;ovndzkjs.  Too many choices, too many possibilities!  At this point I'm just closing my browser tabs.  I've got more than ten open on this last chain, and it's time for me to focus a little more.  Let's copy down these addresses into a text file and move on.

Oh, hey look, an adorable Mario Spin Off game that "compresses" all the levels into one screen a piece.  Super Mario Summary doesn't truly compress the levels, but it does make one-screen levels inspired by the original Mario.  Not a bad little puzzler.  Kinda tough, best played with JoyToKey.  Oh, wait a sec.  This game was made as part of Another Damned Contest?!  Wow, indie games are seriously thriving.  This contest is like the twenty fourth this site has had.  I had no idea it was so open ended.  My head is popping.  But in a good way, I think.  I certainly know that if I come into a huge cash of free time, I know how I'm spending it!

Okay, so, I think it's time to get the hell out of this Rabbit hole.  Oh, one quick stop by another article on DIYgamer.  They're referencing a 'rouge-like spaceship simulator?'  What is rouge-like?  Oh, I see.  Random dungeon generation, RPG elements.  I've played games like these.  I guess Diablo is like the most advanced/successful rouge-like.  I see, the genre is based on a 1980 game called Rogue. So the popular name for the genre became "Rogue-like."  Right on.

Okay, okay.  I'm getting out of the rabbit hole now.  I hope you've enjoyed your time, sorry if the arrangement of links is little chaotic.  I guess I didn't so much make a map as scribble on some paper by torchlight.  Still, there's a great big marker at DIYgamer.com they are organized and oh so full of new info for the interested.    And then there are at least three links here to game creating contests, which I find very interesting.

So, I guess I'll leave you with a link to a game creator from Cameroon, Africa.  I think the graphical style is great, the music is awesome, the controls not so hot, and the level design can really use some work (I can't beat the first level).  

So, without further ado:  PHL's Air Flying Game.

It's A Sad Thing That Shadowgate Only Had Two Games to it's Name!!

Ahhhh...... Shadowgate.  Or is it supposed to be Shadow Gate?  Nope, it's the name of the castle.

I don't recall the first time I ever played Shadowgate.  I'll just guess that it was over at Dr. Potts' place sometime around 1990.  Anyway, the exact time doesn't really matter.  What matters is that this game was played.  Was it beaten?  Hell, no.  I think I was only able to solve a handful of puzzles the entire time I had it (stupid shark).  I was, on the other hand, able to get myself killed in more ways than I had thought descriptively possible.  

Coming across these types of descriptive deaths was uncommon, if not unheard of in Nintendo games in 1990, and could possibly be rated a high "Teen" in todays market.  This kind of material was golden.  It was as if the game was challenging you to find out how often and in how many ways you could die!  Dying no longer was something to fear, as you had to get over it quickly because it was going to happen very often. 

The music too, dear god man, the music!  This was another early game that I fell in love with the music.  And it didn't help that I couldn't beat the game and find out who the composer was; remember, no access to the internet in 1990.  And even with the internet, it took a while to find out that the composer/programmer was Hirojuki Masuno.  Just give, what I consider to be the quintessential Shadowgate theme a listen, although the track is titled "Entranceway."  Even the music that was played when you were dead was as interesting to listen to as the rest of the music in the game.

So Shadowgate was a point-and-click adventure style game that was very text heavy, as you can tell from the death images above.  Only two other games that I know of, Déjà Vu and Uninvited, used a similar/identical format.  At the age of 10 (and even now really), it was like reading an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure book that came with it's own soundtrack.  I didn't extensively play Univited, and I only dabbled around with  Déjà Vu  when they were out on the NES.  When Shadowgate Classic came out on the Gameboy Color in 1999 (wow, only 9 years after first playing the original, it seemed a lot longer than that), I bought it and made a considered effort to beat the game, which I ended up doing, with some help from the internet to solve some of the harder puzzles, like how to stop dying.

That same year that Shadowgate Classic came out, Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers was released on the N64.  I rented that game from the video rental store I worked at, at the time and had a blast playing it.  It was a similar game, compared to the original, as in a point-and-click type adventure, except that since it was on the N64, the game was in a three dimensional space and played similar to an FPS minus the shotgun and automatic rifles.  Like the original though, you still wandered from room to hallway to room, trying to solve puzzles without killing yourself.  It was a pretty fun game, from what I remember.  The music wasn't as catchy as the original, but listening to the soundtrack on it's own, the music is more atmospheric and more like a film score than a video game soundtrack.

There were also plans to release a sequel to Shadowgate 64 titled Shadowgate: Rising, but the rumors say that it was in development for the N64 as the Gamecube was coming out and production ceased.  There was also an online comic that I followed for a while that was going to lead into Shadowgate: Rising

Now at the end of this article, I have to ask the obligatory question: Why aren't more indie game companies making point-and-click style adventures?  In theory they don't seem too difficult to create as it's mostly just script writing and then a series of images.  Yes, I understand that it's a pretty dated concept, but it falls into the whole nostalgia phase.  So if anyone reading this either knows someone in any form of game company or is in one themselves, you now have a new project on your hands.  I'll be looking forward to the end result.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Awaiting the Masses to Join the Call

Exploring A Different Side

I feel it somewhere...... and it mostly seems to be this "feeling" in my chest.  Somewhere just below the region of the heart, but not the area of the heart itself.  It's like there's this force threatening to take over.

Enough of the vagueness.  I've always considered myself to be a Console Gamer and in all respective purposes, I have been and still am.  Sure, I've enjoyed playing computer games, but they were never "very" current/cutting edge/ AAA rated/level  games.  

And now, some history of my computer gaming-ness:

The first computer game I remember playing was on a color screen in kindergarten (1985-86), which must have been something special, probably something akin to an Apple IIGS.  It was some Disney point and click game, similar to Shadowgate in that it was a "point-and-click" adventure that involved Mickey Mouse and outer space.  Then in the third grade (1988-89) we had an Apple IIe computer, which is where I was introduced to "classics" such as The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Lemonade Stand and Where in the World/USA is Carmen San Diego; these games were all on a monochrome black and green screen.  Sometime around 1991-92 (I don't remember exactly), our family got our first computer, an Apple IIe with a duel floppy drive.  [I believe we received/bought this system (as well as a dot matrix printer) from my aunt and uncle after they upgraded].  The games that came with this computer, from what I remember, were The Hobbit, some kind of Olympic game that may or may not have been Olympic Decathlon from Microsoft, some kind of graphics / drawing program that I was never able to make any sense out of and your basic word processing and spreadsheet program.  Most likely there were some other programs, but I can' remember anything else.

This computer we had until sometime around 1995 when my sister used some of her high school graduation money and bought herself an Apple Macintosh Computer; I believe it was a Macintosh 5215CD running the System 7.5 OS (To add, we had, I think, 8MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive).  The few games that we had for this computer were Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and The Oregon Trail II.  Again, we probably had some other games at that time, but I don't recall what any of theme were.  Since it was primarily my older sister's computer (which was in my parent's room for whatever reason), I was mainly able to use it for homework assignments, and not too often then.  My letters to colleges when I was applying in 1997, I typed them out on one of our families two typewriters.  Don't get me wrong though, I'm not knocking my upbringing or our lack of serious computing power, I'm just trying to tell a story.

It must have been when I was a junior in high school (1996-97) that I was introduced to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, with an online demo (we had a 28/8 modem, recently upgraded from a 14/4).  It was the very definition of awesome computer gaming.  Shortly after playing the demo numerous times, I went out to Target and bought the Warcraft Battle Chest, which contained Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, and Warcraft IIx: Beyond the Dark Portal.  I played the ever-living shit out of these games, although never completing either the Orc or Human campaigns in Warcraft II or IIx.  I spent most of my time using the level editor, trying to perfect how the computer controlled its characters and how to create a compelling story.

In late 1998, I bought a Compaq Presario laptop, partly because I wanted a computer that was separate from the one my sister had bought then taken with her that year to SDSU, or maybe she bought another computer for herself and left the old one with my parents; I think that's what happened.  Either way, I wanted my own computer.  Shortly after I played quite a bit with the Diablo demo although never got around to buying the game.  I did buy the PC port of Final Fantasy VII, being the avid Final Fantasy fan, it seemed only natural. Within a year, my computer began experiencing odd issues when I tried installing a DOS D&D game; it was never the same after that.

Jump ahead to around 2002 when I was introduced to Baldur's Gate from my friend Dylan; this was on a Dell something-or-other.  That's all I'm going to say on that, as anyone whose ever played will know how much it can consume your life.  I also went through the sequel Baldur's Gate II: Shadow's of Amn, although I felt it was too linear and it didn't pull me in like the first game.  Then, in 2003, I purchased Neverwinter Nights, which was about the limit of gaming that my then Dell something-or-other (but better than the previous Dell that I had bought with an ex-girlfriend) could play.  I played this quite a bit as well, purchasing the physical expansion packs and like with Warcraft II, tried making my own games/stories.

This was really it for computer gaming until more recently, as in 2006-7 when I played the Bioshock demo on my roommate's (Vorlynx) computer.  I also got through Doom III on Vorlynx's gaming computer back in 2010 before I moved up to Portland.  With my previous netbook, I mentioned in a previous post, that I'd been playing Diablo, Diablo II, Plants vs. Zombies, and Portal.  I got about halfway (maybe?) through the first Fallout game, although I got to a point where I didn't know where I had to go or what to do.  With all this in mind, I've never really considered myself a PC gamer.

Now I have a newer-ish computer (Lenovo Ideapad Z575), I have a Steam account with over 20 games, some from Dr. Potts while others I bought because they looked awesome and pretty (Dear Esther), with Dear Esther and Portal 2 being the most recently released games.  Most of the purchases have been when Steam has a weekend or daily sale with a game being 50-80% off.  

I now have a computer that can handle newer-ish games unlike my consoles, the newest of which is the Nintendo Gamecube.  I do, however, as previously stated, play the DS and PSP a lot and would count those as my primary source of gaming.  I also just bought a Nintendo 3DS last week and am loving the shit out of it

I don't really consider myself a PC gamer, although I'm starting to feel the pull.  And the pull is quite strong.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Grass Is Just A Different Shade Of Green