Welcome to Pages of Fun!

This is the personal Web site of Robert Wm. Gomez. I am an artist, musician and nerd living in Chicago, Illinois who has been maintaining this site (in one form or another) since 1996. Enjoy your visit!

The Crimson Diamond on PC (7/10)

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The Crimson Diamond is a throwback to early Sierra 3-D adventure games like King’s Quest and Space Quest. Unlike their far-more refined contemporaries at LucasArts, the Sierra games still used a text-based parser instead of a pure point-and-click interface. The text input allows for much more detail in the way puzzles are structured, but it also introduces some major annoyances in terms of guessing verbs in hopes of instigating a particular action.

The Crimson Diamond attempts to mitigate some of these known problems by including quite a few quality-of-life improvements like a notebook and shorthand commands for common actions. Overall the game manages overcome most of the limitations of the mechanics. As far as adventure games go, it was not as difficult as any of the original Sierra titles were but there’s a bit of a twist to that assessment that I will discuss a bit further down.

Much like the very first graphical adventure Mystery House, this is a murder mystery. You play as a mineralogist assigned to investigate if diamonds indeed exist in the remote Canadian forest area of Crimson. You find yourself in a lodge filled with suspicious characters and then shenanigans ensue. The setting is mostly limited to the lodge and grounds around it and the game-play is very process oriented: collect fingerprints, identify footprints, and eavesdrop on conversations.

It’s all wonderfully illustrated and written with quite a few memorable characters. The art style mimics that second wave of Sierra games starting with (I think) King’s Quest IV in which the graphics are still pixelated, the palette is limited, but a slightly higher resolution allows for more detail. That three pixel blob is now a seven pixel blob and it kind-of/sort-of looks like what it’s supposed to be.

Aside from some technical problems (which are slowly getting fixed with each release) my biggest problem with the game was its end-game. I was not prepared for the final interrogation in which I was supposed to type in the names and actions of the guilty parties and much more. The idea here is that it will add replay-ability as you realize all the clues you missed, but I do not have the patience to replay most games, especially an adventure game. I would have preferred if the game had a similar, lower stakes version of this interrogation in the first act to prepare me in advance and make me more aware of the importance of note-taking and the thorough investigation of everything.

But, overall it was enjoyable and more detail oriented players will probably like it quite a bit.

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (6/10)

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For whatever reason this Philip Marlowe novel did not click with me. I had long stretches where I put it down and then was completely confused by the plot when I picked it up again a week later. Also, it didn’t quite evoke the film noir vibes as much as his previous books. I was probably just never really in the mood for this one so take this review with a grain of salt.

QBob Progress Report #2

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My goal for the month of October has been to covert the original MIDI based music from QBob into a more sonically robust modern format. I made a passing attempt to do this in the early 2000s when I thought Amiga tracking programs were the future of music. Madtracker was my go to program for creating sample-based techno songs and I managed to convert the track “Erie” but that was about it.

Cut to 2024 and I have actually expanded beyond the scope of shareware music software. My current DAW of choice is FL Studio. It has all the features necessary to directly convert .MID files into FL Studio’s file format. It actually comes bundled with a fairly good sounding general MIDI patch too. I could have just imported the files, used that patch and called it a day. Instead I took the time to hand craft various synths and samples to better match what I imagined these songs sounded like back in 1996 when they squeaked out of my old Soundblaster 16/Waveblaster card.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I also made lo-fi Waveblaster versions of all the songs too for posterity. That said, the new versions are sounding great. I have more-or-less finished the music ahead of schedule. The only thing left is give them a final mastering pass which is always a challenge since my PC speakers aren’t very accurate.

What is now going to follow is probably the most time-consuming part of this whole project. The goal is to completely redo all the game sprites to make them have smoother animation, alpha channels, and a more consistent style.

QBob UFO character animation

My plan would have been to use Adobe Flash to do all the animations, but then Adobe killed Flash in 2016. What I didn’t realize is that Flash was rebranded as Adobe Animate and now has a more video production focus. I have been (re) learning the software and I feel like this will work nicely. If this wasn’t an option I would probably have to buy Toon Boom Studio or some other program I am completely unfamiliar with.

So far I have completed two character make-overs and the game is already looking more slick and colorful.

Hundreds of Beavers (8/10)

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Hundreds of Beavers is essentially a feature length live action Looney Tunes cartoon with a unique lo-fi style. There is little to no dialogue, it’s filmed in black and white, and the “creature effects” are just dudes in mascot uniforms. It is as much an homage to Buster Keaton as it is to Bugs Bunny and despite the After Effects Home Edition cheapness of the visuals, it has an endearing, North Woods charm making it worth a watch.

Challenge of the Masters (7/10)

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Another film from my four movie Lau Kar-Leung blu-ray set has Gordon Liu as a nerd whose biggest wish is to compete in the annual throw-thing-in-the-air competition with the rest of his clan. Unfortunately, he never learned Kung-Fu and since much of the supposedly no-fighting allowed competition is punching people in the face, he ruins everything. Off he goes to train and ends up mastering the art of the Friendship Fatality. It’s all about kicking people in the face with a message of love! Solidly entertaining Shaw Bros. faire.

QBob Progress Report #1

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I have spent the past three weeks or so going through all the MIDI files we used in the original QBob, importing them into FL Studio, and reworking them to use VSTs and all sorts of modern production effects. This process includes converting the MIDI files to use a Waveblaster soundfont—replicating what I would have heard back in 1996 when I wrote these songs. I got the soundfont from a user named deemster on a the Vogons DOS appreciation Web forum. The soundfont file, as detailed as it is, contains tons of errors and poorly cropped samples so I have been modifying it as I find issues. I’d post a link to it here, but all the links that were originally posted are dead.

After making sure I had a mostly accurate Waveblaster version, I moved on to “remastered” versions. In most cases this involves lots of sound design and plenty of new arrangements. The tracks now have a much more meatier sound and more variety. The original arrangements were very repetitive. In the decades since, I have learned that you have to keep inserting small variations in your EDM compositions or else the music risks becoming a Lowrey Organ backing beat. Any moron can paste together a dance song in GarageBand, and I’m not just any moron!

This week I finished the soundtrack and tonight I have moved on to completing the final big piece of the game mechanics: the final boss level. My first goal is to get the end boss’s basic look and feel mechanics down. The eye now follows the player based on his relative x position. I have also added in the boss’s verbal taunts. It’s going to be better than the original because, using Gamemaker sequences, I can better sync the mouth movements to the samples. Next I will tackle the final enemy on my list, the fireball. More to come.

QBob Will Rise Again!

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If you have ever clicked around this here Web site you will know that I helped create a 90s shareware game called QBob. It was basically a project started by my friend John to help him learn C++ object oriented programming. I created the art, much of the music and he and our professional programmer buddy Craig (he actually got paid to do computers!) programed the game. For about half a decade we were HUGE in South America! I dutifully mailed out 3.5″ floppies of the game and we we rollin’ in the green!

In the subsequent years we tried a few other things and never released anything else. We all got jobs and our lives went on, but we still would get a few orders for QBob every now and again. They were enough that we have maintained MoonRock Software Inc. as a company, and occasionally will have “meetings” regarding finances and whatnot. As the lone board member who didn’t have a cool tech job, I would occasionally suggest that we do an updated version of QBob using some of the animation and music skillz I had acquired over the years. Nothing ever got rolling.

Fast forward a decade or two and I discovered Gamemaker Studio. Now, with the power of paid software, I too can be a nerd programmer guy! As an experiment I took it upon myself to recreate QBob in Gamemaker. Turns out, I just might have unleashed my inner nerd. Gamemaker is awesome and makes it possible for a hack like me to program a respectable arcade game.

So, the big news is that QBob: Remastered (title TBD) is in the works. If I had it together, I would have made this an ongoing developer’s log of the project. Instead, I’m here to tell you that I think I will be able to pull this off and John and Craig are along for the ride. At the moment, I have about 70% of the core game-play in place and working. The game is faster and even more fun to play. My goals are to update all the media assets and possibly introduce some new features (and get rid of some crap ones like the paint gun). At the moment I am reworking all the music. If the project fails I will, at a minimum, release the soundtrack on Bandcamp. Let me tell you, some of these new versions are freakin’ cool as hell.

Anyway, stay tuned. More updates to come!

Heroes of the East (6/10)

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This Shaw Bros. classic starts out very promising. It’s basically a romantic comedy about a young entitled Chinese man (played by a jarringly haired Gordon Liu) who has an arranged marriage with a beautiful Japanese bride. All is going well until she is revealed to be a Japanese martial arts master. What follows is a series of mishaps where her “heavy” Karate style ends up trashing the household and embarrassing her husband. Now, here’s where even a hack screenwriter would develop a story where husband and wife must face an external force and learn to understand the other’s culture to defeat the enemy. Instead, the remaining two-thirds of the movie are a Chinese nationalistic power fantasy in which every Japanese fighting style is immediately taken down by the superior Chinese Kung-Fu techniques. There is no hero’s journey to speak of. Gordon Liu just grinds through opponent after opponent without any learning or development. So much lost potential. The only redeeming part of the ending is seeing some early cinematic ninja action.

South Pacific (6/10)

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Another one of the old musicals which, as I watch, I keep saying to myself, “oh, this is where that song is from.” Unfortunately, most of the songs are not that good. I do like the exotica tinged “Bali Ha’i,” especially the instrumental version that closes the overture. But the story structure is odd. The center of the plot is the Frenchman and the nurse and they’re introduced almost as secondary characters. Apparently he killed a man, and that turns out to be a non-issue but the race of his children is? I dunno. I guess tastes have changed since the 50s.