I have been eagerly anticipating the Starbound Beta for quite some time and it looks like we got some word on when the beta will drop from Tiy.

"Starbound beta release is looking to be around dec 4th. Assuming arrangements go through with steam."

I created a Cheerful Ghost event for this, so join it if you want to add it to your calendar and chat about it!

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/events/45
https://twitter.com/Tiyuri/status/405292961044234240

If I were to create a list of my top video games of all time, Legend of the Red Dragon would be on the list. Legend of the Red Dragon is a DOS based BBS Door Game that dominated the scene back in the 90's. If you had a BBS and didn't run LORD, it wasn't a BBS worth spending time on. Legend of the Red Dragon was edgy, dark, fantastical and irreverent. Plus it was a hell of a lot of fun. Seth Able Robinson is the creator of Legend of the Red Dragon as well as other BBS classics such as Planets: The Exploration of Space & LORD 2. Not to have his best work end in the 90's, Seth has gone on to create Dink Smallwood, Dungeon Scroll, Funeral Quest, Tanked & Growtopia.

Since I have been a huge fan of Seth since my early gaming days I am very excited he agreed to talk with me. I want to thank Seth for taking the time to do this and wish him well with whatever awesomery comes next!

jdodson: Growtopia came out a little over a year now and has a pretty large following. As the game continues and more users join, how are things progressing? Experienced any pain points as the community has expanded and asked for new stuff?

Seth Able Robinson: It's been an incredible ride, co-creator Mike Hommel and I have been working basically full-time on it since release. I think the biggest adjustment for me personally is the volume of emails we get from players. I've always put myself out there and had a "you got a question about the game I made? just email me! I ain't some big time company suit that will ignore it" attitude and it's really no longer possible to do that because we have over a million user accounts now.

We get emails about everything from suicide threats if we don't give them free stuff to being told when a family pet dies. One person threatened to sue us because the game's addictive qualities were responsible for her chicken's death. We now have help answering emails and I feel like a jerk not responding to everybody personally like I used to, but it's just impossible.

The community is great overall but we do end up banning 100+ creeps a day to keep it as safe and clean as we can. Freemium + multiplayer + full text chat and allowing players to broadcast to 8,000 other online players at will = an incredible challenge. We've developed a lot of tools to keep things under control.

Growtopia has a real economy with player run stock markets that can be manipulated with rumors. You can collaboratively compose music, sneak up on someone sleeping in bed and do surgery on them, build a house with a 99 toilets and get 99 real people to help you flush them all at the same time. There is no other game out there like it and I have no idea how things will end.

jdodson: What was the reason you started making games? Was there any moment with a game where you thought “I need to start making stuff like this.”

Seth Able Robinson: I've loved games more than anything since I first played Donkey Kong with my dad. Pitfall on the Atari 2600 blew me away. I started programming on a Commodore 16 (yeah, 16k of ram) mostly because I only had three games and got bored of them.

If I was born today, I wonder if I would have been a programmer at all... or would I just be content to consume from the bottomless teat of today's gaming world. Thing is, after that initial push, once you've made a few games, it's quite intoxicating and you can't go back. What other hobby lets you create a living universe before lunch?!

jdodson: Did you ever anticipate that Legend of the Red Dragon would turn out to be as big as it was? At what point did you realize LORD was becoming very popular?

Seth Able Robinson: Not really. Truth is, I wrote the original version not intending to sell it at all so the seven copies or whatever I sold the first year were just gravy.

After the PC port things really started to liven up financially and it dawned on me.. I don't have to be a cabinet maker with my dad or get a job at the plant... I can JUST MAKE GAMES AND DO WHAT I LOVE! It's a great thing to know what you want to do with absolute certainty.

jdodson: What was the most memorable time you had building or playing one of you games?

Seth Able Robinson: One memorable moment happened while playing a recently released version of LORD. The (uncensored) words "HEY IT WORKS YA MOTHERF***ER!!" appeared every time I wrote a letter to another player. I owed this "feature" to forgetting to remove some of my debug code. Yeah, got a few emails about that one. Oops.

jdodson: Dink Smallwood is a classic game that came out in 1998, has a pretty large fan following and mod community including the GNU FreeDink project. You can get it on your Android, iPhone and everything else that matters. Since you have kept this classic alive for so many years will we see a new Dink game at some point in the future?

Seth Able Robinson: Despite creating the design doc for a Dink 2 I now sort of doubt it will ever happen. It seems unlikely that Justin Martin (the original artist) or myself will ever be able to commit years to working on a sequel of a game that only received a lukewarm commercial reception in the first place.

Because we stopped charging it was on a lot of magazine discs so there is a considerable nostalgia factor for many but honestly I think I might be better off with a completely new design.

Dink will always live on through the ports and various easter eggs in my other games though - for instance, you can get a framed picture of the dink Duck in Growtopia to put on the wall of your house. And I dare anyone to spell Dink in my word game Dungeon Scroll...

jdodson: I had aspirations to run a BBS but could never get my parents to spring for another phone line. That said, I tried running an after hours BBS with QuickBBS that didn’t quite work out but I did have a sweet ANSI intro I made with The Draw. I remember catching some flak from my friends that ran a reasonably popular local BBS for choosing QuickBBS instead of Wildcat. Did you have a preference as to which BBS Software you liked using and that was a bit easier to make games work with?

Seth Able Robinson: Personally I liked Renegade. It was free and could do multi-node (I think I had four phone lines with it) with some creative use of Desqview, a dos based task-switching app.

Once you started getting serious and wanted a 8+ node system then you had to upgrade to a system designed for that such as Worldgroup or later versions of Wildcat.

The downside was they required custom ports of each door game (they couldn't effectively use the standard drop-file dos fossil driver .exe doors) and those could be quite spendy.

jdodson: Love to hear your thoughts about another popular door game, Tradewars?

Seth Able Robinson: Huge fan. It's where I stole the idea of having NPCs write random quips in the daily log.

I would spend hours playing my 'turns' every day. In those days a single node system could give busy signals all day - it was very possible to miss your turns so you sometimes had to leave the auto-dialer on for hours to sneak in there. The stress of waiting!

I think what really made TWs special was the character imbued in it - little touches like the Stardock having a movie theater with real ansi "movies". (Debbie does Rigel 9 was one of them I believe)

jdodson: What is your process for building a game from the initial spark to launch?

Seth Able Robinson: Think it, see it, do it.

Think it: I write a paragraph that describes the game and some bullet points explaining how it works. If it looks stupid or boring on paper when you show it to someone else, it probably is.

See it: I try to envision the first few minutes of playing it in your mind's eye, where you click, what happens, what it sounds like.

Do it: Develop the mental picture into a real thing. This goes so much faster when you know exactly what you want at the end.

When I reach the point where I've programmed everything I'd previously seen mentally, things slow down and I have to start making lots of little decisions about where to take what I've got.

From there, I start the cycle again for each iteration, getting close and closer to the finished product.

Tons of ideas out there, but I'm rather annoyed that when I google my original ideas I find out someone already stole them and created them - via some sort of time travel machine, obviously.

jdodson: Recently you have started working with Unity 3D. This is a departure from your Proton SDK. Many indie developers as well as large companies such as Blizzard are using Unity 3D. I am curious what the reason for using Unity has been and if there is a possibility one of your future games will use it?

Seth Able Robinson: I think Unity has finally reached the point where you can write an entire game and not hit some horrible stupid limitation that has you throwing up your arms and switching back to C++ native stuff in frustration.

The downer is if Unity doesn't support a platform, you're just screwed. With my Proton SDK, you could just add your own target as the full source is there.

For example, no Unity game could ever run on the HP Touchpad because they (presciently, it turns out) chose not to support it - but I added it as a Proton target in a few days and my tank game (Tanked) still enjoys more downloads there than iOS or Android. (Maybe because freemium real-time multiplayer 3d battle games were so rare on Touchpad?)

I'm a little worried about the power this gives Unity Technologies as more games are developed using it (I think we've already hit a point where new phone platforms are dead in the water without Unity support) - while simultaneously feeling rapturous that I won't have to worry about manually supporting the gotchas of eight platforms and hundreds of chipsets anymore.

I want to work higher level, not lower, despite my work with Proton SDK.

jdodson: When the news that JJ Abrams would direct Star Wars Episode VII hit the internets, many nerds rejoiced including me. After seeing Star Trek Into Darkness in the theater and then watching it again, I have reservations. I love nearly all of JJ’s past work, but I am wondering if Star Wars can ever be as good as the original trilogy? WHAT IF JJ CROSSES EWOKS AND GUNGANS SETH, I DON’T KNOW IF I COULD HANDLE THAT KIND OF DISAPPOINTMENT! Then again, the Gunga-wok might be the only way to finally defeat the Empire once and for all. I am not sure this is a question.

Seth Able Robinson: I think JJ Abrams could probably cough up something better than the prequels so at least things can't get worse.

Never really seriously considered the details of ewok procreation but... ichiwawa. now I can't stop.

jdodson: What games are you playing right now?

Seth Able Robinson: Actual games played today:

• Assassins Creed 4, the only thing I have for the PS4


• Sos's Night Rider Turbo ( http://sos.gd/turbo/ )


• Lego Lord Of The Rings (steam sale!)


• Chris Deleon's Quit smoking - ( http://www.kongregate.com/games/deleongames/quit-smoking )


• Super Mario 3D World on the Wii-U


• Growtopia .. OF COURSE

Adym: When I was in high school, and playing LORD, I met a girl my age. We flirted in the tavern, then exchanged phone calls, and eventually had a date. Have you heard of many relationships started directly because of your games?

Seth Able Robinson: Yes! In fact, it's resulted in a few real-life marriages according to emails I've received.

I can also say it directly led to a few dates for this old bard back in the day as well, as fantastical and lecherous as that sounds!

jdodson:

Legend of Life Choices - Town Square
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Life is full of many choices, but we all must push our way through the mob. What do you do?

(B) uy back the LORD franchise, make new version and retire on a yacht in space
(W) ork on a new game
(C) ontinue working on Dink Smallwood Time Travel Adventures On The Moon
(V) egas baby!
(S) laughter other players
(G) rowtopia 2
(Q) uit to the fields

Seth Able Robinson: Well, I tried B, no answer to my email. Will probably do W, C if the planets align, G is a real possibility if I don't do S on the bad kids, and hopefully I won't Q for a good long while.

and of course..

JENNIE

jdodson: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions Seth, really appreciate it. Anything you want to say before we wrap things up?

Seth Able Robinson: I had fun answering these questions, thanks!

Since Team Meat announced they were working on Mew-Genics many people have wondered what kind of game it will be. Some kind of cat breeding simulator is a good start, but not many details have surfaced. Over the weekend Edmund McMillen has loosed a few more bits of Mew-Genics .. WITH PICTURES!

I seriously recommend you check it out by clicking the link below.

http://mewgenics.com/147/Its_Caturday_again_/#b

"as the weeks inch closer to our release, sometime next year ill be dropping in little tidbits of info, filling in all the rest of the gaps and maybe even posting some gameplay!
all in all mewgenics is currently the biggest project Tommy and I have ever worked on, and we are both going all in on a game genre we aren't even sure exists... "

Can't wait to find out more about Mew-Genics as it is one of the games at the top of my "most anticipated" list. Mew-Genics is planned for a PC/Mac & Tablet release sometime in 2014.

Valve keeps the firehose of rad directly aimed at all our collective faces as they drop even more details about the new Steam in Home Streaming. Serving up the details in a handy Q&A format, the company Gaben built proves that they can keep things accessible yet informative without falling back to using spreadsheets.

"Q: Is this like other game streaming services I've heard about?
A: No, you are in complete control over the hardware on both ends and the network between them. There is no data center, no subscription, and it's completely free!

Q: Can someone use my computer while I’m streaming a game from it?
A: No, your computer is dedicated to running the game and input is coming from both the remote client and the local system. It would be very confusing if someone were trying to use the computer at the same time."

It's too bad Valve hasn't articulated if it's possible to Stream games to the International Space Station, but I imagine the latency issues are being worked on.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#announcements

"Minecraft: The Story of Mojang is a feature-length documentary that follows the young company over the course of its first year as their profile expanded across the world stage and into the homes of millions of gamers. Featuring insights from industry icons (Peter Molyneux, Tim Schafer), journalists (Geoff Keighley, Stephen Totilo), tastemakers (Gabe & Tycho of Penny Arcade), and players profoundly impacted by the game (Yogscast, The Shaft, Minecraft Teacher), the film serves as a time capsule for one of this generation's most unorthodox success stories."

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang is a great documentary that showcases a snapshot of the company and people that made Minecraft. I watched the documentary when it dropped and was impressed with how compelling it was. Recently, the films creators have made it available on YouTube to stream entirely AD free. If you haven't watched it you need to mark out an hour and and hit play. If you love video games you won't be disappointed.

You can still purchase the film on DVD or digital download:

http://minecraftstoryofmojang.com/

Read my original review of the film:

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/903

In a recent sling of bad news, Age of Empires Online will be closing shop in 2014.

"I announced in January of this year that AOEO had entered its support phase, meaning that no new content would be added to the game. Then, last month, we mentioned in the forums that AOEO had an end date. That information should have come clearly from me, with a clear and specific itemization of what that means to you, the players. So let’s fix that.

Age of Empires Online will close on July 1, 2014. On that day, the service will cease to function, and no further games can be played. The servers will be taken offline, and no features of the game or the game service will work without the servers. Until that date, the game will continue to fully function just as it does now. You can quest, raid, chat and trade as much as you like until then."

Age of Empires Online was a freemium MMO-ish RTS I quite liked. Whereas I didn't pay for any of its content, it existed in the void Age of Empires II left when you could no longer play it on modern hardware. As Age of Empires II HD was released on Steam, my time on Age of Empires Online evaporated. That said, the Age of Empires Online experience was quite good and it's a shame it's going away.

The wasn't perfect though as the game UI was often confusing and figuring out what zone to go do to do stuff wasn't intuitive. The game suffered from some lag issues from time to time when I played it and I never really saw the incentive to advance my in game MMO level. It was also tied to Games for Windows Live which required way too many steps to get working in a sane manner.

That said, the actual in game RTS aspect of the game was a love letter to the original Age of Empires and it worked great. What I wish Age of Empires Online was, was the basic Age of Empires gameplay with modern graphics ported to modern systems without the MMO bits. In the end, Age of Empires II HD gave me what I wanted so Age of Empires Online fell between the cracks.

That said, it's sad to see this game go and I hope Microsoft can rip out the core gameplay bits and release it as a standalone product that doesn't require you to be always online.

It's also worth noting that because of it's freemium nature a popular way to unlock more races an in game items was by paying for them. So what do people that love this game have to show for the time and effort they put into it? It's not an awesome prospect to consider.

That said its not all bad news and dead Unicorns as if you already have an Age of Empires Online account, you will get a bit of a bonus for the remaining time the game has left on this earth.

"All purchases have been disabled. This means that you cannot buy more Empire Points, which is the way you pay for additional content, like new civilizations. You can still earn EP through regular gameplay, just like always, and the stores still function normally, to buy civilizations, vanity items, consumables and more. But you cannot spend real money on more EP.

That creates a problem for some of the newest players, however. If you have just started to play AOEO, but not bought any EP, you may be ‘stuck’ in that it will take a long time to build up enough EP to buy a premium civilization. To help all the newest players, as well as give a gift of thanks to our grizzled veterans, on Tuesday, September 17, we will grant 1000 EP to all existing players. This is enough to purchase a full civilization, with a little left over for some fun. That should be a sufficient boost to let new players jump into the game fully and earn more EP over the next several months."

"Are you less of a gamer if you drop the level down to easy? It just might be so. We all know that challenging games can be incredibly frustrating, so why do we put ourselves through this? Well, there is a greater satisfaction, but it goes deeper than this, hard games are makes games a unique experience unlike any other. Games that call for physical dexterity, moral deliberation, and tough problem solving is what separate out the noobs, but it's also what separates games from every previous art forms like books, theater, and the movies. So are hard games better than easy games?"

Game/Show is an awesome web video serial because it explores interesting topics in gaming while bringing their own style to the mix. In this episode Jamin makes the claim that hard games are better than easy ones. Finally beating FTL and getting the last tier of Terraria 1.2 gear? Yeah, both of things were really awesome and also not easy.

Clicky click, watchy watch. His perpetual 5 o'clock shadow is worth the price of admission alone.

A.N.N.E. is a great 2D retro project I backed on Kickstarter. The game seriously reminds me of the magical nature of NES greats such as Blaster Master, Little Nemo The Dream Master and Metroid. Recently Mo, the games creator, posted a pretty awesome update about the games progress.

A few interesting bits of note: the video showcases a pretty bad ass looking boss fight and also talks a bit about how the games score has taken shape.

A.N.N.E. will ship on Mac, PC and Linux.

Read our interview with Mo about A.N.N.E here:

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1272

Our 3rd Cheerful Ghost Terraria server just came to a close and I was a bit sad to see it go. I had a great time spelunking through the new 1.2 content with Travis, WhiteboySlim and jaelte! This server was different in that it went much longer than any we'd had previously as we spent much more time in hardmode and exploring all of the 1.2 content. One thing the 1.2 update did well was make hardmode much more interesting and gave us lots of reasons to keep advancing and work together.

It's no secret one thing I loved in the 1.2 update were the new bee hives & queen bee fight. I also really appreciate the new Crimson and increased usefulness of the Jungle, Dungeon and the new Temple. Each area of the game got a huge overhaul and the game feels huge compared to 1.1.

I can't wait for the December update and when it drops I will bring our server back up for a few days if people want to explore the new content and boss fights together. So let me know if you are interested.

As per tradition you can nab the Terraria world file we ended with right here. Warning, there is a ton of great loot in the treasure chests in our houses and no one is protecting it!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1oRZK7IvLFZWGRMeFVuY19NVUk/edit?usp=sharing

I want to thank everyone again for taking part in making this on of the best times I've had in gaming in a while and look forward to doing it all over again with Starbound!

Now that the Playstation 4 has been released I have been grappling with the fact that my PS3 is no longer current gen. It would be a stretch to say its a retro system, but yeah, the ps3 is a last gen system now. I want to talk a bit about the PS3 and why I think it has been one of the best video game consoles i've ever owned.

Originally I picked up my PS3 to upscale DVD's, play BluRay and occasionally play games. I tried a few upscaling DVD players and nothing looked as good to me as the PS3. I realized at some point I would make the jump to BluRay and that having a system that had the ability to self update would be a good thing with the newness of the BluRay format. I got my PS3 at BestBuy as part of a bundle that contained Guitar Hero 3 and a $50 gift card. Guitar Hero was quite a bit of fun but my first game purchase I was seriously looking forward to was The Orange Box. At the time, I didn't have a great PC but wanted to jump into Half-Life 2 and the episodes. I had heard amazing things about Portal as well and The Orange Box lived up the the hype. The Orange Box on PS3 had a few glitches but overall it was a pleasant experience and a hell of a lot of fun.

Over the lifespan of the PS3 I picked up The Orange Box, Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition, Borderlands, Wolfenstein, Civilization Revolution, RAGE, Unreal Tournament III, Street Fighter IV, Portal 2, FarCry 2, Borderlands 2 and my final PS3 purchase Doom 3: BFG Edition. I never really liked buying digital games on the PS3 as you couldn't share them and the price never seemed right. That said, I picked up Age of Booty, Zuma and Wolfenstein 3D. Whereas the games themselves are fun, one problem I have with digital PS3 game purchases is they don't carry the value over compared to other digital stores like Steam.

The game experiences I had the most fun with on the PS3 were Civilization Revolution, Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, Portal 2 & Borderlands. Civilization Revolution is a seriously under-rated game and made to work very well on consoles. It's funny as none of the games in the rest of my "most beloved PS3 games" list are exclusives or console only. I had a hard time getting games I couldn't later play on PC if I wanted.

The Playstation 3 is a great system and it still works awesomely in the original capacity I bought it, to play media. I don't play too many games with it these days as I find gaming from my Mac or PC to be superior in nearly every way that matters but when friends come over, you can't beat split-screen game play.

As I look forward to Sony's next offering I don't see myself buying one any time soon, but that could change if the Playstation 4 gets more compelling. That said, I would consider the PS3 one of the best systems i've ever owned and I hope it has a very long life under my TV.