Tag: video games

I play a lot of video games. I also tend to write a lot about said video games. Yes, I am a pathetic nerd.

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!

Replaying Nox, Again

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I have never bothered to create a top-ten list of my all-time favorite video games. Maybe I should since it seems the only way to get people to read your Web site is to organize everything into numbered lists. In any event, were I ever to compile such a list Nox would be somewhere in the top five for me.

After a recent upgrade to Windows 10 (excellent by the way), I was going through and making sure all my treasured old programs still worked. In the process I booted up my GOG.com version of Nox and noticed it had some issues. After much searching and fruitless forum posting I finally found a workaround. In case you are wondering, you need to install a game mod called “Nox SDL.” You can download the patch here. Once I got the game running, it wasn’t long before I was sucked back in to my fourth play through of the game.

This game is so great. I don’t know about you, but I immediately realized that when I could play with my character stripped down to his briefs:

Nox Underwear

Beating the game would be difficult, but you could play the entire game running around like a crazed streaker if you so chose.

The game was marketed as a role playing game in the style of Diablo but that’s not what it really is. Although there are a lot of standard RPG tropes—leveling up, collecting loot, upgrading spells and abilities—Nox has much more in common arcade-style top-down action games like Guantlet and Smash TV. The game play is fast, exciting and there isn’t much thinking and strategy. If it moves, kill it! As simple as this sounds it is sounds, the game is incredibly fun. There’s just enough exploration and level variety to keep you going. The story is paper thin but it’s filled with humor and the main villain Hecubah is terrifically voice acted.

I even bothered to record a bunch of game play footage to post on YouTube and make tons of money off of the idiot millennials who watch other people play video games:

See, what I mean? It’s just awesome! I really wish someone would take up the mantle and reboot Nox. A few modern games like Torchlight look like it but are still firmly RPG games with horrible inventory management and no twitch game play. Magicka comes close, but I felt the mechanics were too complicated and the game seemed overly concerned with co-op play. For now, the GOG.com version will suffice. As soon as I finished this playthrough as a conjurer I immediately felt the itch to start over again as a fighter or wizard.

Nox Patch for Windows 10Download

Haunted House Text Adventure

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Back in the late 80s, I learned much about computer programming from this book: Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer. This is the same book that I used as a guide when creating Malfunction for my Apple IIgs back in 1988.

The book takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a simple text adventure game using Applesoft Basic. The final product is an adventure called “Haunted House.” It’s about as crude and bare bones as a work of interactive fiction can be, but it does what it needs to: there are objects, rooms and key puzzles.

Well, in a recent flurry of Apple retro computing I got side tracked into porting this game into JavaScript. The result is here. Click the screenshot to launch the game in a new browser window (requires JavaScript, duh – View the actual page if you are viewing this in an RSS feed reader). It’s a fully working port of the original, with all its flaws and quirks. The only additions I made were to make the EXITS display more cleanly and added the verb “drop” to the vocabulary.

2010 Best of the Year

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Well it’s the first day of the New Year. This day means different things to different people. For my wife it means washing off the post-New-Year’s-Eve-bash Sharpie moustache that she woke up with this morning. For me it means it’s time to assess what I thought was the best of the media I consumed this past year.

Movies

Like last year, there really wasn’t anything that truly amazed me this year. My best rated films were Moon and The Maltese Falcon. I watched more T.V. than I have in recent years, so I suppose I could add Lost, V or The Walking Dead as honorable mentions.

Books

Towards the second half of the year I started reading a bit more than usual and found several books truly grabbed me in ways that no movie or show did this year. If I had to pick a favorite from this year it would be George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, especially if considered along side the three other books in the series that I also read and loved. At a near-tie for the number one spot is Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, which started my on my current fantasy lit kick. Finally, rounding out the top was Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Honorable mentions would go to Mistborn books 1 & 2, Devil Born Without Horns and Racing the Beam.

Video Games

House of the Dead: Overkill Box Art

I played a ton of games this year. My highest rated game was House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii. It was stupid, crude, violent and hilarious… loved it. My runners-up would be Mass Effect and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Mass Effect further proves that the best science fiction is in video games these days, and Zelda is Zelda… ’nuff said. I am still mid-game in GTA IV and Metroid Prime Trilogy but I suspect those two titles would have made this year’s list too had I completed them in time. I also played a few casual games I liked such as Puzzle Quest and Plants vs. Zombies.

Steam just finished their massive annual game sale and I stocked up so there should be no shortage of gaming for me in the next year and beyond.

Get Lamp DVD

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Get Lamp Box

What you see pictured here is some of the DVD packaging for the independently produced documentary film about text adventure games, Get Lamp. In the digital age, packaging matters and the creators of Get Lamp went above and beyond in creating a DVD package that satisfies collectable object fetishists like myself. The inner gatefold sleeve is covered with a nostalgic fantasy illustration that looks like it came straight off of an Atari 2600 cartridge. The DVD also came with a fancy numbered and editioned coin (mine’s number 1540), which would seem kind of cheesy (alá the tin coin that came Ultima V) but is actually very well crafted and, dare-I-say cool. All this comes together in a well made cardboard DVD case that alone almost justifies the $40+ dollar price tag. Thankfully, the film is very good and, as one might expect, the discs contain the usual DVD extras, featurettes and bonus footage. As an added reward, you also get a nice selection of actual, playable games on the DVD -ROM partition of the disc. If you have any interest in text adventures, video games and computing history, you should check this out! More on the film itself later.

Video Games Are Derivative? No!! Okay, yes.

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Ya know, I love me them video games. I would go so far as to argue that video games are, well… can be, art. However, I have to admit that even the best video games are a bit lacking in the originality department. Take, for example, this screen shot from Yahoo showing three upcoming games:

Derivative Video Games

Stubble-faced muscle men abound in the video game world.

2009 Best of the Year

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It’s the end of another year and I think it would be a good time for me to recap my personal best of lists for 2009. In case you haven’t noticed, much of this site is devoted to keeping track of all the media I digest. I review and rate just about every movie, game or book I finish. I also keep track of the music I listen to, but I don’t really buy much music anymore, so that section doesn’t really give a good overview of the new music I have heard lately. So, anyhow, here it is. The Pages of Fun Best of 2009!

Best Book

  • Flying Colours by C. S. Forester – I’d ran out of Aubry/Maturin Napoleonic era novels so I guess Hornblower had to suffice for this year. This series has its highs and lows, and never quite matches O’Brian, but this book in particular was very good.
  • Honorable Mention: Twisty Little Passages – An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort – This one is probably a bit too nerdy for the average reader, but I really enjoyed this academic analysis of text adventures.

Best Movies

I guess it was a pretty lame film year for me. I have a pretty big back list of films yet-to-see, so hopefully 2010 will fare better.

Best Video Games

  • Braid was my highest ranked game this year.  A wonderfully inventive platform game.
  • I also have a couple of honorable mentions in this category as well: Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge were both incredible games.

All of these games were bought using Valve’s Steam download service, and all were very cheap! PC rules!

The Operative: No One Lives Forever

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This weekend I played through No One Lives Forever again to see if it still holds up. I have long considered this to be one of the best games I have ever played. The graphics haven’t aged very well—they are comparable to what you would see in a Nintendo DS game these days—however, the story, game play, music and humor all are as fresh today as they were back when the game was released, and, despite the their simplicity, the visuals still have their moments such as the Bond-style credit sequence complete with a dancing Cate Archer. Plus, I will never get tired of the incredibly catchy soundtrack music. I would love to see a NOLF 3 one of these days. I may even be up for buying one of those nerdy “who the hell buys these things” collectors’ editions.