Ah Contra... Just about every time I played Contra it was with friends and we always used the Konami Code. I loved the sci-fi Alien Marine feel and loved blasting everything on screen.
I'm an Engineer and built the video game community Cheerful Ghost and text based mini-MMO Tale of the White Wyvern.
2731 Posts
I respect and enjoy listening to Richard Stallman talk about technology and found his recent TED talk in Geneva worth sharing. This talk slips a bit outside the realm of gaming, but with Steam coming to Linux I think these kinds of discussions are important.
Richard's talk is essentially about the principles of free software and why they are critically important for a free society. I agree with many of his points, but like any philosophy or religion, I don't adhere to every component of it. A few years ago I did, going so far as to run a system that was nearly all free software save a few drivers. Over time, my thoughts changed as I enjoyed running certain non-free programs, like Steam and games. That said, the underlying philosophy of the Free Software movement is important and alive and well even if one doesn't adhere to every element of it.
Lately i've been thinking that while important, free software is just a step in the path to digital freedom. One important part, and possibly more important is that our digital life should be accessible to us in open formats. It seems to me that the digital content we consume and create like pictures, music, documents and video should be available only in completely open formats. Since I use Mac, Linux and Windows depending on what I am doing, keeping my digital stuff open in formats that they can all understand is really important. This is one reason I prefer Steam games that ship on all platforms because if the things we consume can be run anywhere, then we don't need to be tied down to any particular system.
Richard's talk is essentially about the principles of free software and why they are critically important for a free society. I agree with many of his points, but like any philosophy or religion, I don't adhere to every component of it. A few years ago I did, going so far as to run a system that was nearly all free software save a few drivers. Over time, my thoughts changed as I enjoyed running certain non-free programs, like Steam and games. That said, the underlying philosophy of the Free Software movement is important and alive and well even if one doesn't adhere to every element of it.
Lately i've been thinking that while important, free software is just a step in the path to digital freedom. One important part, and possibly more important is that our digital life should be accessible to us in open formats. It seems to me that the digital content we consume and create like pictures, music, documents and video should be available only in completely open formats. Since I use Mac, Linux and Windows depending on what I am doing, keeping my digital stuff open in formats that they can all understand is really important. This is one reason I prefer Steam games that ship on all platforms because if the things we consume can be run anywhere, then we don't need to be tied down to any particular system.
Heading to the PS4, Vita and Steam November 4th The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is everyone's favoriate religious insanity rogue like SNES de-make. Getting a ton of new features including a form of local co-op, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth looks to be an interesting continuation of the original game that doesn't suffer from many of the core issues the original flash game suffered.
Interested in heading back to the basement to confront Mom?
Interested in heading back to the basement to confront Mom?
Recently Gaming on Linux contacted Aspyr about Borderlands 2 coming to Linux after someone detected some Linux builds in Steam.
"Michael Blair, Aspyr Media: Yes! BL2 Linux is absolutely real! We've been working hard on it for months and will talk about a release date as soon as possible."
This is great news as whenever 2K has been asked about this they have been pretty cagy about it. So the question for me isn't "when will Linux get it's gaming chance" I am not curious if it will remain as a viable platform. I guess the answer to that lies in the popularity of SteamOS and other unannounced platforms.
http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/borderlands-2-also-looks-like-its-coming-to-linux-update-confirmed.4235
"Michael Blair, Aspyr Media: Yes! BL2 Linux is absolutely real! We've been working hard on it for months and will talk about a release date as soon as possible."
This is great news as whenever 2K has been asked about this they have been pretty cagy about it. So the question for me isn't "when will Linux get it's gaming chance" I am not curious if it will remain as a viable platform. I guess the answer to that lies in the popularity of SteamOS and other unannounced platforms.
http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/borderlands-2-also-looks-like-its-coming-to-linux-update-confirmed.4235
Aaron of RetroLiberty posted an interesting video called "Earthbound Convinced." The premise is that Aaron reads off the text on the Earthbound box and shows off some of the game art and then asks if that was enough to convince you to buy it. It's not quite fair as Aaron's video is well cut and is more than simply reading off the box art but it does showcase what little information we had to go off to make choices as kids. That said, I had Nintendo Power and they did a great job hyping up whatever video games Nintendo wanted us to buy at the time, Earthbound included.
Earthbound, were you convinced?
Earthbound, were you convinced?
"In the 24th century, humanity is at war with a hostile alien race. Outnumbered a million to one, mankind's only hope of survival is the J.U.M.P. Corps. Its mission is to fight the alien menace hive by hive and planet by planet.
Hive Jump is one part Spelunky, one part XCOM, and all parts alien ass-kicking. You and your friends assume the role of JUMPERS, and blast your way through subterranean alien hives in run-and-gun 2D platforming action. Kill aliens, avoid traps, collect resources, and defeat the hive queen lurking at the bottom of the hive to complete the JUMP."
Hive Jump is a cool Kickstarter that is only a 26 hours away(at the time I wrote this) from completing so if you want in on the action you'd better hop to it. The art style is reminiscent of Altered Beast and worked really well with the score.
Hive Jump will drop when it's ready on PC, Mac, Linux and Wii U.
Hive Jump is one part Spelunky, one part XCOM, and all parts alien ass-kicking. You and your friends assume the role of JUMPERS, and blast your way through subterranean alien hives in run-and-gun 2D platforming action. Kill aliens, avoid traps, collect resources, and defeat the hive queen lurking at the bottom of the hive to complete the JUMP."
Hive Jump is a cool Kickstarter that is only a 26 hours away(at the time I wrote this) from completing so if you want in on the action you'd better hop to it. The art style is reminiscent of Altered Beast and worked really well with the score.
Hive Jump will drop when it's ready on PC, Mac, Linux and Wii U.
The Huffington Post created an interesting video mashup of Video Games in movies. The footage seems to be mostly comprised of 80's and 90's films.
Get psyched!
Get psyched!
I haven't been too interesting in playing a modern Civilization game in some time. I enjoyed playing many hours of the original Civilization on DOS and had a really fun time with Civilization: Revolution but haven't found a love for a modern PC version. I have Civilization V and all the DLC waiting, but I haven't taken the plunge to actually try it out yet. That said, I saw a video for the new incarnation of Civ, Civilization: Beyond Earth that looks really intriguing. Taking a tip from Alpha Centauri, Civilization: Beyond Earth extends the scope of the typical Civilization game up the tech tree to sci-fi and other planets. Something sounds really exciting about a sci-fi Civilization game and Beyond Earth really looks like it delivers.
Civilization: Beyond Earth will drop October 24th on PC and later be ported to Mac and Linux.
Civilization: Beyond Earth will drop October 24th on PC and later be ported to Mac and Linux.
A few months ago I posted that Cheerful Ghost was publishing it’s first game and today I am happy to introduce you to Starship Rubicon!
Starship Rubicon is a space shoot-em up that modernizes the physics and mechanics of Asteroids combined with the ship modification and roguelike elements of FTL.
In Starship Rubicon, Earth has been casually destroyed by a mysterious race of space-faring invertebrates. You are a fighter pilot whose cryopod has been collected by a possibly-insane AI, who has placed you in the unenviable position of being humanity’s savior. Shanghaied and alone, you must gather the remaining human survivors and traverse the surprising biodiversity of deep space to find a new home.
Here are a few in game screenshots to show off some of the gameplay:
http://imgur.com/a/Ggqey
Starship Rubicon is developed by Wick, a local Portland indie game developer. We have been in contact throughout this part of the game’s development cycle and I thought it would be interesting to ask him some questions about the game.
jdodson: Where did the inspiration for Starship Rubicon come from?
Wick: The core mechanics of shooting and moving date back to Asteroids. I looked very closely at FTL, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Spelunky after deciding that the most efficient way for me to create replayable content was to go faux-rougelike. The AI’s sentence structure is ripped straight from Zero Wing. The ship modification system is probably closest to Megaman Battle Network, though I played probably about a dozen other games with vehicle modification (e.g. Mechwarrior, Gratuitous Space Battles, EV Nova) for comparison. There’s only so many mission types you can do with just moving and shooting, and Space Pirates and Zombies does pretty much all of them -- I tried to nab the most interesting ones.
I copied so much of the excellent weapon, ability, and enemy designs in Bastion that I should probably send Supergiant Games some royalties. Luftrausers showed me the ultimate form of juicy 2D flight controls. I pretty much copied the unlocking-content system from Lego Star Wars. I played around with overworld movement a la Nethack / JRPG overworlds and the terrain modification of battles from Age of Wonders, but the design ended up being too uncontrollable and I was forced to scrap it in favor of FTL node-movement.
I think there’s an Oscar Wilde quote that says something along the lines of: “If you steal from one person, you’re a plagiarist. If you steal from a hundred people, you’re well-educated.”
jdodson: Why did you decide to work with us on releasing Starship Rubicon?
Wick: After the 3-month Kickstarter development completed, I put the original Rubicon up for free and released the source code as per my campaign promises. However, turns out that putting up your game on a backwater personal tumblr (wickworks.tumblr.com) and then not doing anything to promote it means that literally (figuratively) nobody is going to see it. I’m pretty sure the only people to play Rubicon 1.0 were the original Kickstarter backers. I had a bunch of cool ideas on how to refine the game, but since the audience wasn’t there I had little motivation to implement them.
When Jon approached me about distributing it via Cheerful Ghost, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I’d met Jon several times before and been left with a strikingly good impression- he seemed happy to get to know me and obviously cared about creating a good online space for games. Promotion is decidedly not my strong suit and selling the game meant that I would be able to afford to add tons of content to the existing engine. The terms Cheerful Ghost is offering is quite developer-friendly, which is delicious icing on the cake.
jdodson: To date, what has been the most challenging part of working on the game?
Wick: Programming challenges can take a lot of time, but they usually all have solutions and it can be fun puzzling them out. Ditto for graphics and sound, plus it’s satisfying to finally see them as animated finished products.
I think that, hands-down, I’m gonna go with design. It’s nebulous and scary. You have this immense freedom to put anything in the world on the screen. Tell any sort of story. You could say anything. Do you even have something worth saying? What is the experience you’re attempting to create? Is this the best possible way to create that experience?
There are constraints, of course, and I try to narrow down my options by being conscious of them. That makes it more mechanical, more solvable. But there’s always this spectre that there’s a better way to structure it, or an easy flourish that would bring the game to life. I feel like it becomes a reflection on yourself, that if you had a more interesting perspective or were a more witty person, then the game would show it.
jdodson: Lots of people want to get into Indie game development. Do you have any advice for people that want to start making games?
Wick: Start small. Wholeheartedly begin ten million different projects and finish none of them. It doesn’t matter that you never finished that 100+ hour RPG with a revolutionary plot, because you ended up learning A* pathfinding while putting together the starting town. Having your projects be in a whole bunch of different genres is useful because it’ll throw a wider array of challenges at you.
After you have at least one or two chops, do a game jam. They force you to finally scale down and design something doable given your skills. Plus it feels really nice to finally get something finished!
jdodson: What are you working on with Starship Rubicon right now?
Wick: I just spent about half the day revamping the first boss battle, which was too easy and boring -- it was just an enemy with an armoured front and a lot of health. There’s now three of them that you have to fight at the same time while in orbit around a black hole. It’s crazy how long something can take, how large an effect it can have locally, but how small it is in terms of the whole to-do list. One thing at a time...
I also finally, finally, finally figured out a use for a cuttlefish graphic I drew a year ago and am in love with.
Rubicon will launch this year for $9.99 on Windows, Mac and Linux. Right now you can pre-order it on Cheerful Ghost using the Humble Store Widget. Currently, the game will be distributed through The Humble Store & Desura. We will be running a Steam Greenlight campaign in the coming months and if we are accepted everyone that pre-orders the game through Cheerful Ghost using the Humble Widget will get a Steam copy.
www.starshiprubicon.com
Starship Rubicon is a space shoot-em up that modernizes the physics and mechanics of Asteroids combined with the ship modification and roguelike elements of FTL.
In Starship Rubicon, Earth has been casually destroyed by a mysterious race of space-faring invertebrates. You are a fighter pilot whose cryopod has been collected by a possibly-insane AI, who has placed you in the unenviable position of being humanity’s savior. Shanghaied and alone, you must gather the remaining human survivors and traverse the surprising biodiversity of deep space to find a new home.
Here are a few in game screenshots to show off some of the gameplay:
http://imgur.com/a/Ggqey
Starship Rubicon is developed by Wick, a local Portland indie game developer. We have been in contact throughout this part of the game’s development cycle and I thought it would be interesting to ask him some questions about the game.
jdodson: Where did the inspiration for Starship Rubicon come from?
Wick: The core mechanics of shooting and moving date back to Asteroids. I looked very closely at FTL, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Spelunky after deciding that the most efficient way for me to create replayable content was to go faux-rougelike. The AI’s sentence structure is ripped straight from Zero Wing. The ship modification system is probably closest to Megaman Battle Network, though I played probably about a dozen other games with vehicle modification (e.g. Mechwarrior, Gratuitous Space Battles, EV Nova) for comparison. There’s only so many mission types you can do with just moving and shooting, and Space Pirates and Zombies does pretty much all of them -- I tried to nab the most interesting ones.
I copied so much of the excellent weapon, ability, and enemy designs in Bastion that I should probably send Supergiant Games some royalties. Luftrausers showed me the ultimate form of juicy 2D flight controls. I pretty much copied the unlocking-content system from Lego Star Wars. I played around with overworld movement a la Nethack / JRPG overworlds and the terrain modification of battles from Age of Wonders, but the design ended up being too uncontrollable and I was forced to scrap it in favor of FTL node-movement.
I think there’s an Oscar Wilde quote that says something along the lines of: “If you steal from one person, you’re a plagiarist. If you steal from a hundred people, you’re well-educated.”
jdodson: Why did you decide to work with us on releasing Starship Rubicon?
Wick: After the 3-month Kickstarter development completed, I put the original Rubicon up for free and released the source code as per my campaign promises. However, turns out that putting up your game on a backwater personal tumblr (wickworks.tumblr.com) and then not doing anything to promote it means that literally (figuratively) nobody is going to see it. I’m pretty sure the only people to play Rubicon 1.0 were the original Kickstarter backers. I had a bunch of cool ideas on how to refine the game, but since the audience wasn’t there I had little motivation to implement them.
When Jon approached me about distributing it via Cheerful Ghost, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I’d met Jon several times before and been left with a strikingly good impression- he seemed happy to get to know me and obviously cared about creating a good online space for games. Promotion is decidedly not my strong suit and selling the game meant that I would be able to afford to add tons of content to the existing engine. The terms Cheerful Ghost is offering is quite developer-friendly, which is delicious icing on the cake.
jdodson: To date, what has been the most challenging part of working on the game?
Wick: Programming challenges can take a lot of time, but they usually all have solutions and it can be fun puzzling them out. Ditto for graphics and sound, plus it’s satisfying to finally see them as animated finished products.
I think that, hands-down, I’m gonna go with design. It’s nebulous and scary. You have this immense freedom to put anything in the world on the screen. Tell any sort of story. You could say anything. Do you even have something worth saying? What is the experience you’re attempting to create? Is this the best possible way to create that experience?
There are constraints, of course, and I try to narrow down my options by being conscious of them. That makes it more mechanical, more solvable. But there’s always this spectre that there’s a better way to structure it, or an easy flourish that would bring the game to life. I feel like it becomes a reflection on yourself, that if you had a more interesting perspective or were a more witty person, then the game would show it.
jdodson: Lots of people want to get into Indie game development. Do you have any advice for people that want to start making games?
Wick: Start small. Wholeheartedly begin ten million different projects and finish none of them. It doesn’t matter that you never finished that 100+ hour RPG with a revolutionary plot, because you ended up learning A* pathfinding while putting together the starting town. Having your projects be in a whole bunch of different genres is useful because it’ll throw a wider array of challenges at you.
After you have at least one or two chops, do a game jam. They force you to finally scale down and design something doable given your skills. Plus it feels really nice to finally get something finished!
jdodson: What are you working on with Starship Rubicon right now?
Wick: I just spent about half the day revamping the first boss battle, which was too easy and boring -- it was just an enemy with an armoured front and a lot of health. There’s now three of them that you have to fight at the same time while in orbit around a black hole. It’s crazy how long something can take, how large an effect it can have locally, but how small it is in terms of the whole to-do list. One thing at a time...
I also finally, finally, finally figured out a use for a cuttlefish graphic I drew a year ago and am in love with.
Rubicon will launch this year for $9.99 on Windows, Mac and Linux. Right now you can pre-order it on Cheerful Ghost using the Humble Store Widget. Currently, the game will be distributed through The Humble Store & Desura. We will be running a Steam Greenlight campaign in the coming months and if we are accepted everyone that pre-orders the game through Cheerful Ghost using the Humble Widget will get a Steam copy.
www.starshiprubicon.com
Good audio fidelity is a really important part of how I enjoy music and video games. So important that this year I bought a new pair of Sennheisers to replace my starter pair. When I buy a pair of headphones they must do a few things.
That all said, each pair i've got as been a bit better than the last and I think my next pair might be a set of sub $200 intro studio quality headphones. All that to say, I enjoy a bit richer sound from music and video games. As someone that has spent a minor amount of times perusing the world of audiophiles I have at least heard that many audio professionals think the Beats by Dre line of equipment is simply not worth the price. I heard a few songs on a pair in store and whereas I didn't prefer the sound to my Sennheisers I didn't think it was as bad as some claim.
Recently I saw a really great video by YouTube tech personality Marques Brownlee called "The Truth About Beats by Dre!" Not only is it interesting but Brownlee paints a really fair picture of what goes into making a good pair of headphones and how things turn out to be as expensive as they are in the store.
- Be over the ear and provide an amount of natural noise cancelation. I don't care for the headphones that contain active noise cancelation frequency technology as it kind of hurts my ears. I prefer a solid pair of over the ear headphones that naturally muffle the outside noise.
- Sound great
- Look pretty good
- Feel comfortable over the ear for prolonged use
- I'd rather not spend a zillion dollars
That all said, each pair i've got as been a bit better than the last and I think my next pair might be a set of sub $200 intro studio quality headphones. All that to say, I enjoy a bit richer sound from music and video games. As someone that has spent a minor amount of times perusing the world of audiophiles I have at least heard that many audio professionals think the Beats by Dre line of equipment is simply not worth the price. I heard a few songs on a pair in store and whereas I didn't prefer the sound to my Sennheisers I didn't think it was as bad as some claim.
Recently I saw a really great video by YouTube tech personality Marques Brownlee called "The Truth About Beats by Dre!" Not only is it interesting but Brownlee paints a really fair picture of what goes into making a good pair of headphones and how things turn out to be as expensive as they are in the store.