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!

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.

L’Eclisse (7/10)

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Yet another plot-less art film from Antonioni about the tedium of life in early middle age. Wonderfully shot, but that wasn’t enough to keep me engaged. It’s filled with overly long scenes that do nothing to drive the threadbare narrative forward. There’s one showing a stock market crash which is literally twelve minutes of screaming, hand-gesturing Italian floor traders. Maybe he was trying to make a point about the animalistic nature of capitalism, instead he made a point about the need for film editors. Then there’s also a scene involving a character who, on a whim, painted herself up to play like she was a black African. This didn’t bother me for its racial insensitivity as much as it did for the fact that it would take hours to apply, let alone clean off, all that make-up.

L’isola Delle Svedesi (5/10)

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The Island of the Swedes, also known as Twisted Girls, is basically 45 minutes of movie and 45 minutes of montages. It’s the story of a burgeoning love affair between the two female leads against the backdrop of a desolate island mansion. There are a lots of scenes with the two giggling and gallivanting around the island in various stages of undress and that’s about the only thing this movie has going for it.

The Art and Craft of Wood Engraving by Chris Daunt (9/10)

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Chris Daunt is known in wood engraving circles as one of the few remaining block makers out there. Here he has written a beginner-friendly guide to the process with tons of examples of his own work and the work of a handful of other engravers, many of which I know from their social media presences. I was already familiar with most of what is covered here, but, since this is a contemporary book, there are many helpful references to companies and products that are all available right now. There is also quite a bit of inspiring info about the variety subject matter and the mark-making possibilities that the medium offers.