This autobiography was pretty uninformative. Reads more like a compilation of unrelated essays about with a little bit of anecdotal commentary added to personalize it. Not awful, but would have been better as an audio book read by Groucho himself.
Goat laid the ground rules for the Jesus Lizard’s sound and Liar solidified it into a formula. It’s a swell formula indeed, but after Liar, the JLs records start to blend into one and other. This is still a great CD.
Jesus Lizard’s finest record. Crazy bluesy licks on top of a pounding rhythm section and off-the-wall vocals. This could possibly be the best record of the 90s. Seriously.
I’d have to say it’s a toss up between Goat and Head as my favorite Jesus Lizard album. Pure/Head shows a lot more variety than the later records which is both good and bad. It’s good because the songs are never boring, bad because the experimentation doesn’t always work (Happy Bunny Goes Fluff Fluff Along). Because of the drum machine and distorted vocals, this early JL is much more industrial sounding than later efforts too, which I sorta like.
More of Jawbox being Jawbox. The only thing that signing to a major may have changed about the band is that this CD seems to have been mastered louder than previous releases.
As much as I appreciate Dave Crider and his label Estrus Records, I could never get in to his band, Mono Men. They always seemed like the most generic of the already generic garage rock genre. Anyhow, this is a live recording of a show in Bloomington, Illinois. I guess you had to be there to “get” this.
Good 90s post punk music. Much more rockin’ than say, Fugazi, but the songs are not as memorable.
Thought I’d give this series a try after finishing the Aubry/Maturn series. Hornblower is definately a simpler read, and it’s almost as good O’Brian. The characters were not as vivid as O’Brian’s.
A nice, light-hearted version of Zelda for the DS with some interesting stylus controls.
After posting Malfunction, my text adventure game for the Apple ][, I have been spending a whole bunch of time tinkering with my old Apple ][ software creations. Another one of my better creations was a golf game that I titled, Dippy Golf. This game featured nine holes which were loaded in from external graphics files and, even more impressive, was the use of audio samples of my voice! The game worked but still felt somewhat unfinished, so I decided to complete the game and post it here on the Pages of Fun!
One of the first major additions that you will see is the snazzy splash page and loading message:
This was actually the last thing I added to the new version of the game, but I wanted to use my other upgraded piece of software, Lo-Paint 2. More about that later. The game takes several seconds to load the audio samples. Creating samples on the Apple ][ was incredibly difficult. I used a piece of software called The Voice by Muse. This application was developed in part by Silas Warner, the creator of the Castle Wolfenstein series of games.
The process of getting audio into the computer required taping myself on a cassette recorder, than plugging the recorder into the never-really-used tape data jack on the back of the Apple ][. The sound quality is awful, but this was about the best you could do on an Apple ][. You should note, that this is a golf game, so one of the samples is a naughty word. I stole the idea from an early Mac golf game which my neighbor owned.
Anyhow, on to the introduction/instructions screen:
I love that old, uppercase Apple ][ font. One of my improvements here was to center the text on the page and use a nicer prompt for a key press. After this page you proceed to the first hole:
As you can see, the graphics are in Apple 2 lo-res mode graphics. In this mode you are allowed 40×40 pixels, 16 colors and four lines of text. As crude as this image is, I believe it’s actually higher resolution than Atari 2600 golf.
The game mechanics are simple. You point in a direction then specify how hard you want to hit the ball. This was fine as a proof of concept, but didn’t provide much challenge once you memorized the best angles and swing percentages for each hole. The major 2009 update to game play was the addition of the random element of the wind. This makes the ball behavior somewhat unpredictable (like real golf for me) and can push the player into taking riskier shots in hopes of catching that breeze for a few extra pixels of distance. On some holes, like the one pictured next, it really adds to the challenge.
Without the wind, you could reliably hit to the micro-islands off the right of the screen.
All of these holes where drawn using an art tool which I programmed called Lo-Paint. In addition to my Dippy Golf updates, I also updated Lo-Paint and included it on the disk. This was a major upgrade to the tool so I consider this version 2 of the software. The interface has been completely revamped and now you can save and load lo-res images! Check out this screen shot of Lo-Paint 2 in action!
If you want to try out Lo-Paint 2 or Dippy Golf download the disk image which is attached to this post and open it up in AppleWin or your favorite Apple ][ emulator.
