BrokenBlog

During Metroid Week at Joystiq-spinoff Wii Fanboy my (very) old game, Megaman vs Metroid, got shown off. That’s pretty darn cool. Thing is, he goes on to dis the controls. The controls are a near-perfect copy of Megaman’s controls, I can’t even begin to wonder what the complaint is. If it’s the locations of the keys you can even change it from the options menu. One guy in the comments thinks the hitboxes are too big, but he’s absolutely right and has a sharp eye too. It’s easily the biggest flaw of the game, I used the sprites themselves as the hitboxes. Oh to be young and foolish again. Then there’s the guy who thinks there’s a bug that doesn’t let you recover health. Those blue flashing things are not health pickups boy-o.

I’m a little miffed I didn’t actually get linked to in this - they linked to a site I submitted it to - but I’d put up with it if even the guy linking to it seemed to like the game. I should be happy I suppose. Meh. Megaman vs Metroid is my baby, sure the code is pretty bad at some points, but I poured everything I had into that. I guess I don’t like hearing people talk bad about it.

Update: Visit the home of Doomed Online here.

So I’ve decided to open-source the Doom port I’ve been working on. It’s really a far larger task then I think I have time for and I’m pretty sure that I’ll have to turn to the actual Doom’s source code at some point. Things like the enemy AI are a complete mystery to me, although the rest I’ve been able to get away with so far. I’m not quite finished doing it myself yet, but once I clean up the code some more I’ll release it for public consumption. Not sure what license to put it under though, the GPL would probably be fine.

This leads to my main problem. What should I name the project? Anybody have a good idea? I’m trying to think of something interesting.

Anyway, I’ve got a new demo ready. It’s set in a different level (E1M5). There’s sprites now although most of them are dummy enemies. I figured out the lighting - at least I think I did - so everything is much more bleak and Doom-like. There’s animated flats, walls, and sprites now, as well as some lighting effects. There’s wall collisions, head-bobbing, texture mapping is much better, no more mysterious walls, sound has been fixed (press the spacebar), and the engine is actually significantly faster too.

Use the arrow keys to move. You can pass through doors and other non-impassable walls. Like before, it’s 1.7MB and there’s no preloader. The game is “after the break”, as they say.

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These videos are amazing. These too. They are custom levels made for Super Mario World that run entirely on their own, making expert use of the physics and mechanics inherent to the game. Truly, these people are gods among men. Embedded below are two of my favorites.

Everyone is foaming at the mouth for Bioshock. There’s more hype surrounding it since the reviews came out than any game I’ve ever seen, and we’re talking about a single-player game in a multiplayer world here. Like any self-respecting gamer I jumped on it the minute I saw the chance, and I was even fortunate enough to find a section of the Internet where it was available and at high speeds too. Thank god my “rig” is powerful enough to play the game.

It’s good. If the rest of the game is like this, and it surely is, then it’s game of the year. Done. It’s over. If anyone wasn’t sure this game could live up to the hype they should be now. The real question is why are you reading this and not downloading the demo? Right now I’m thinking more about how this game will affect the future.

One good thing sure to come from Bioshock is in the video-games-as-art debate. While I think the routinely vilified Roger Ebert is wrong about video games incapable of being art, he’s also sorta right in the sense that video games are not “high art”. Gamers can complain all they want but there is no Mona Lisa game out there, games are just too new and it’s audience just too young to reach something like that. My problem with Ebert is that any young form of media needs only time to mature and then it will reach “high art”, and movies aren’t that far ahead of video games so don’t get cocky. In the end Ebert is just under-informed, not stupid. Despite the fact I disagree with many of his reviews, he’s still the only reviewer I read, at least before his struggle with cancer anyway.

What makes Bioshock relevant is that it reaches new heights in several areas, in graphics, story, atmosphere, style, attention to detail, and just about anything else I can think of. If there was ever anything to win over a guy like Ebert since Ico, this’d be it. More importantly, Bioshock is already setting a new standard. I’m hoping this will lead to more story-driven games and environments that are less about the player and more about the environment itself, like it could work just fine without the player there to interact with it.

The only problem with Bioshock is that it may be too good, in the same way its predecessors (like System Shock) failed, it may also fail. People like multiplayer games these days, how many will be convinced that Bioshock is worth buying before the next big game arrives? I wonder if this game will be famous more for its influence than how many copies were sold. Regardless, I’m in the mood to play the demo some more…