Gyrostarr Shagged My Mum
Talking of SHOCK HEADLINE/PRESS RELEASE stuff, the press release about Gyrostarr receiving a release date landed in my inbox this morning. Exciting stuff and an absolutely seamless way to link two articles together in one fell swoop.
Stealing content, taking names.
I don’t know, I’ve had very little to say all week given I’m still recovering from flu. Plus, not a lot has really happened worth noting - bit of tinkering with George’s Squizzy Griffin building some rooms, trying to make some inroads into learning XNA and a bit of fiddling with JSW:O - certainly nothing worth reporting in depth, anyway. I did play a lot of Trials 2 though…
Sunday Linky Sunday
Time to start getting back on track with this here blog methinks, so here’s a (”half a” due to restricted net access) weeks worth of essential reading from other fine places on the ol’ interweb.
Why The Industry Shouldn’t Rely On Metacritic - more timely than ever considering the recent announcement by MS that games will live or die via critics.
The Trouble With Demos - scarily, I’ve never quite got my head around *why* people don’t understand the value of a good demo. You’d almost think they don’t want me to cough up the cash. Interestingly the article uses Timeshift, one of the most colossally cock demos I’ve ever had the misfortune to wade through, as an example of how not to do it. Words of fine wisdom contained herein.
An Interview with The Balrog - Gnome does it again with some Zenobi loving. A fine interview from a fine interviewer and the finest of subjects.
What is the world coming to? - Help me Mrs Medlicott, I don’t know what to do. I’ve only got 3 bullets and there’s 4 in Motley Crue. Seriously. You people are giving Motley Crue money? Are you mad?
Pixeljunk Eden - Where design wankery meets games. And not in a depressing way for a change.
Red Fish, Green Fish, Blue Fish - SHARK! - Handy handheld DIY gaming.
I Miss Color - Having recently made attempt #2 at playing through Gears Of War and finding myself plummeting to new depths of depression as a result (partly through awful game and partly through having never seen quite so many shades of grey in my life) I can’t help but nod in agreement. But then, I’m right behind the Blue Skies In Gaming campaign too…
Difficulty Difficulties - More “make easy easy” shenanigans. “Well I started off with good intentions and ended up cursing and calling people jerks (Sorry Puzzle Quest makers), it happens.” - I know that feeling well…
Inno Vation - Tim reports on a new Omega game. Internet rejoices. Probably.
RPS review Smileys Shooty Adventure so I don’t have to - My short review anyway. Better than Everyday Shooter, not as good as Grid Wars - not quite “out there” to be amongst the gods but definitely worth a punt.
AJAX Comments and Feedburner
Having seen RPS lovely comments system, whereby you can edit your comment for a set amount of time - I’ve added the same functionality here.
You can now edit your comment for 15 minutes after posting - please don’t abuse it or I’ll have to remove it. (The comments system that is - what you do in your own personal time with your genitalia is entirely your own responsibility and I’m certainly not removing that).
I’ve also finally gotten round to burning the RSS feed via Feedburner, so if you fancy updating your feed then here’s the new chap.
This has been a party political broadcast on behalf of the Remakes party.
Sunday Linky Sunday
Back once again with the renegade linkmaster. My pick of this weeks exciting happenings in the world of the interweb. Just six this week as officially the internet took a week off due to GTA. Cock.
Why Game History Matters - “Whether plumbing the depths of The Hobbit on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum or reading Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo a good developer hones her/his craft through immersing her/himself in history.”
Dux Gameplay Video - Holy plastic R-Type Batman. The enemy seem a little lifeless, but so far I love the style.
Smiley’s Shooty Adventure - Llamatron via Geometry Wars via emoticon, pixelripalicious.
Fruitaku - your only source of fruit related video game news. Ahar!
Bruce Everiss vs Pesky Reality - what?
What Gamers Want: Family Gamers - “By the time I look down and figure out which button to press, it’s already too late and I’ve crashed.” “Why do you need so many buttons? All I want to do is steer the car”.
George, a hero in difficult times…
George is a griffin, and a squizzy one at that. About 2 or 3 years ago I was kicking around the house trying to come up with something to do when I hit upon the idea of writing a game involving a Griffin called George. Who was a bit squizzy (the first definition). In his original incarnation, he was entirely green, slightly robotic and built in Cronosoft’s rather nice PGD for the ZX Spectrum. As with a lot of things, I either got bored and wandered off or something more pressing turned up and never went back to it. Sometime later, Scottige of Auld Games and myself were once more musing upon the idea of doing a rather large sprawling platform game together - so I plucked George out of retirement (this time in hi-res-o-vision) and we managed about 4 screens before both of us wandered off. And so for a while, George lay gathering dust in a little chest at the back of my mind.
George, in his original form…
As you may have gathered by this post, George is making a slight return now in low-res but rather colourful Amstrad CPC-o-vision along with a large and varied collection of assorted characters freshly out of Platform Game Bad Guys School where they spent many years learning to move up and down as well as left and right in a menacing manner.
It’s been a funny old few months, well - around ten actually, that have laid the foundations for Georges return. As some of the regular readers (if you haven’t already wandered off due to the lack of updates of late) will be aware, times have been a little different in Chez Bob for a while. This time last year both myself and Mrs Bob were gearing up for what should have been a fresh start - a minor influx of cash that had things worked out would have seen us break out of the difficult funk we’d been in for a while. Needless to say, things didn’t quite work out as planned.
We inherited Chez Bob a number of years ago and as houses go, it wasn’t in the best of states - for around six months we had a large bulge in the hall ceiling after a New Year water leak threatened to flood us out amongst other things, things were falling apart in a very literal sense and so, with the benefits of a few quid behind us we set out to change things that urgently needed attending to so that we could y’know, not live every day thinking “shit, the house is going to cave in on us”. We got some very nice gardeners who came round and turned the hellish shrubbery into a baby safe place and we got some builders in to fix the house up. A two week job, allegedly. Two weeks passed, the gardeners were finished but the building work wasn’t done. Myself, Mrs Bob and C4 were living upstairs in one of the three rooms that weren’t being torn apart. A month passed, the number of builders turning up had dwindled to two… still we lived upstairs. Two months passed… well, you get the picture, just keep adding months on for a bit. It dragged out and out, us stuck upstairs occasionally threatening builders and trying to get them to turn up so that we could actually have more than half a wrecked house with no furniture in it. By the time my cousin was nipping round to help out with some decorating so that there’d be some semblance of a house together, we were down to one builder ambling in every other day doing a bit then fucking off again. It was stressful and not helped by my own onsetting illness and Mrs Bobs long standing illness (I’m her full time carer as well as hubby) going slightly askew.
Finally, shit got finished not long before Xmas - by which point we’d exhausted most of our money just trying to get by on a daily basis (bear in mind for quite a while we had no cooker, no fridge *nothing*) and we scraped things round by the skin of our teeth to have a fucking good Xmas. Unfortunately, Mrs Bobs illness took a turn for the worse just before and things were looking a bit shakey for a while. Luckily, there’s a fucking excellent support team around our area who rushed in to do whatever they could to help out. Help they did, greatly.
Sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it? Well, it was. And for a while it sort of felt like things weren’t going to lift and just getting by was becoming a bit of an uphill struggle. ‘Course, we still had bills to pay, things to do and stuff to run, but with finances tighter than ever before it wasn’t exactly comfortable. It’s not like I live an elaborate lifestyle either, I’m a man of quite humble means - as long as I have a cup of tea and the odd packet of choccy buttons, a couple of cheapo games here and there, I’m a happy bunny. End of January came and a couple of bills landed - we could only afford to punt up for one of them. One, the cable bill - the other RR. So we paid RR, thinking “eck, we can stump up for the cable bill in a bit”. Shit didn’t quite go to plan, and February came - same situation again only now, we’re one month behind on the cable bill. And a choice. No internet or pay RR. RR won.
A small group hug of some of Georges enemies…
Now, I don’t begrudge this, of course. RR is very much a part of me these days and second in line to my family on the priority list but it was a choice you don’t really want to be faced with at the best of times …and when things are already stressed, it all felt a bit shitty. The rest of the admin team were aware of the situation, and we decided to give it a month to see where the land lay and if things would shift up a gear. They sort of did a bit, but not really enough to leave us without having to make the choice again in March. Bollocksed and completely out of options, I found myself making a grim post on RR, breaking my usual rule of “don’t discuss personal things on the interwebs” covering in slightly less detail the story you’ve just read. Something had to give and fast.
And give it did. Thanks to a few very kind folk on the forum, we’ve got enough in the RR coffers to cover a couple of months hosting (with this month paid up) which frees us up to get our bills in order and straight so that things start to level out a bit without the worry of paying for RR hanging over us. See, it’d be easy if RR was shit and full of wankers - you could just hit the off switch and run away into the hills never to be seen again - but it’s not. It may be full of slightly unhinged crazies but they’re *good* unhinged crazies, incredibly talented too and I love them dearly. (Not in a mansex way, obviously). The thing is, that’s no way to run a site. I shouldn’t have to be relying on a few folks throwing money our way to buy us time to keep the place afloat - and what if, god forbid, shit happens again at some other point in time? Can’t keep running back, cap in hand… it’s not on and it’s not fair - not on RR, the inhabitants or me and Mrs Bob. It’s not like this was the first time we’d found the site on shakey ground. We needed a plan. Time to turn RR around and try and get it to balance itself out. It’s been ran at a loss for about 7 years by 3 different owners, 2 1/2 of which under my tenure and it’s not something that can continue. I never want to have to turn around and say “shit, we’re fucked for cash for the site” again. Enough of that already. So we talked. We, the admins, lay the cards down on the table and asked the forum “what the f00k can we do to change this and make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
Now, if you’ve not already slashed your wrists apart at my tale of woe - let’s move on. All this is far too miserable a read and we need stars, spangles and PINK THINGS or something to lighten the mood. Or failing that… a squizzy griffin. Yes, a squizzy griffin. You see, as well as having to take the tough decision to allow advertising on RR, do the whole affiliate link thing etc… and be like every other website in that regard, we’re making a compilation of games. Brand spanking new ones at that. An army of the best (and me) remakers working towards getting an official RR bunch of games to go on sale. But without the second R part, for obvious reasons (we don’t sell remakes, mmmmmk, that’s bad). The initial plan is RRCD1 will be a ten pack of fine entertainment to be sold to raise some cash to help keep the site ticking over. Think of it a bit like Soft Aid, but without the starving kid on the front to taunt you. And the profits going to keep a site online instead of something like actually feeding people or giving them food and water. Ok, don’t think of it like Soft Aid… think of it like a REALLY GOOD CD FILLED WITH FANTASTIC GAMES. Yeah, that’s better. And it’ll have griffins, and cats and spaceships and stuff and fucking amazing games.
Volume 1 is due to drop sometime in August and from what I’ve seen of the contents so far, it’s going to fucking rock. Hard. The downside is, I fear, that my current remakey projects are on hold - so no Mega Arcadian or G-Force updates whilst I get on with some serious doodling, some serious game making and some serious loving for all the folks at RR who haven’t just helped dig the site out of a rut, but stopped me from being a completely miserable defeatist fucker, cheer the fuck up, chin the fuck up and get back to doing what I do best. Pestering the good folk of Indiedom for interviews (my Rodent column makes a return this month), reporting the remakes news, making games and saying “cunt” a lot. Especially saying “cunt” a lot. So I apologise for the slightly depressing post today and epic delay between posts, I’ll make up for it with a return to normal service from this moment in and no more grimness either.
And the chaps at RR? I thank them all, because they’re stars. All of ‘em. You honestly couldn’t ask for a better community nor a better reminder of why, even when things get slightly shat the admin team wanted to keep the place going. Because they’re worth every penny, blood, sweat or tear that the admin and mod team pump into it.
Slow Times
Ich, it would seem time still isn’t on my side at the moment. Managing to cram a couple of hours a day into RR, about half an hour a night into development stuff and fiddling with another site so it’s pretty news free grimness around the ol’ Mersey Remakes parts right now.
To cut a long story short, I’ve got some blood tests on Friday where the only box not ticked on the form is for pregnancy stuff (I know I may be many things, but pregnant? Definitely not!) - so hopefully I’ll be able to get this sorted soon enough and crack back on as normal. Pretty bored of feeling under the weather, to be honest. I don’t do idle well.
Anyway, I’ve been amusing myself with a couple of things when time allows. Taking a short break from G-Force as I need to be in the right mindset to work on it, instead I’ve been toying with a little project called Mega Arcadian.
Way back in the midsts of the eighties, there was a game called Arcadia. There’s lots of remakes of Arcadia around, but I’ve always wanted to have a go myself (see also: Transversion), but I didn’t want to do a like for like remake. Ovine have already covered the Vic20 version perfectly, PeeJay and Dan of Dan’s Remakes have the Speccy corner taken. Time to put my own twist upon it, with a little idea from my compadre Mr Smila - I’ve been fuckmelding it with the Atari2600 game Megamania and a hefty dose of my own dark magicks.
You can see a video of it in action, as it currently stands here. It’s still a bit bare bones and rough around the edges, but I’m happy with how it’s coming together. It’s a pity there’s no GM for the Mac as of yet as I wouldn’t have to be sitting at the computer to tinker. Of course, it also remains to see just how well YYG will port it across and whether there’ll be cross compatibility. For some strange reason, I’m not entirely convinced there will be, but ever the hopeful.
As well as slowly tinkering with MA, I’ve been having a bit of fun. Prompted by Happy Monster/Rich posting an awful video review on the RR forums - we decided to see if we could possibly do worse. For my part in this charade, I adopted the most godawful of scouse accents, made some shit up and reviewed a couple of Speccy games badly. Every video I made is filled with blatant lies, untruths and incompetency. So no different to most video reviews! T’was fun though - and you can see all the results listed over on the RR mainsite.
And finally, I’ve heard rumours that there’s a split EP in the works that I may have contributed too… but I’m saying nowt about that until I’ve finished my third and final contribution to it.
Other than that, I’ve really got to get back to ever versatile and wonderous Gnome with some final answers to a Q&A (sorry mate!) and make sure Gary finishes off his top sekrit project (currently titled Pixxey) that rumour has it after receiving SFX for earlier this afternoon from an employee of a certain UK-centric game firm that may have made games that were brilliant(tm) in the Eighties, Gary found himself being mailed levels from members of their staff towards it. Don’t you people have coding to do?
Oh, and Rez is out on XBLA in the morning. 9am can’t come fast enough…
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News Just In:
A night spent installing Visual Studio and XNA 2.0 is not a fun night spent.
Here's Tom with the weather. -
Retro Remakes
Mersey Remakes is the home of Retro Remakes administrator Oddbob.
Here you can find his rants, freeware retro remakes, development blog and game reviews.
As well as hosting his own games, Mersey Remakes plays host to the works of the ever talented Mr Smila and with a guest appearance from Hoskas. About Me -
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