Flying Problems
Gonna be heading out tonight to California for Don “Onethumb” Macaskill’s wedding this weekend… god, I hate flying! Last weekend the trip to Arizona was pretty rough. We had to take 2 flights (thanks, Southwest Airlines!) and on the first flight, some woman started having heart problems so there were about 5 people crowded around her with rubber gloves on, white phone, etc. and the plane dove down to a lower altitude just in case we were going to have to land. Well, she seemed to be stable so they continued on to Albequerque, NM about as fast as they could go. The way that plane was doing S turns all the way down to the airport made a lot of people freak out.
Then, the next flight was fun as well as we maneuvered through a storm. Lightning flashing outside the windows, the plane bucking like a wild bronco… I was standing when the turbulence hit and had to brace myself against the floor. The nearest flight attendant told me to “be *very* careful” and run over and strap myself into the nearest seat, which just happened to face backward toward the rear of the plane. Oh, that’s nice. Sitting backward while the plane tosses everything around! Boy, I just love flying.
Arizona Vacay
Been pretty busy this last week at work and we’re just waiting for Eidos QA to approve the Daikatana v1.2 patch for all versions (US, German, French, Italian, Spanish).
Went to Arizona this last weekend with my girlfriend Stevie and we hung out with the family for a couple days. We got lucky when we found out that Hertz had a new Jaguar XJ8 available — sweetmobile! We also took about 400 pictures on the digital camera (Casio QV3000ex with a 340Mb IBM microdrive!), of course most of ‘em were bad, but that’s what the massive microdrive is for! In fact, I hear IBM has developed a 1Gb version of the microdrive (imagine the storage… especially for mp3 players!)
I have to wait until Thursday to get my truck back from the Audio shop… I’ve got a lot of cool stuff going into it: Kenwood MP3 919 player, DVD Video player, GPS system with TFT LCD monitor, passenger TFT LCD monitor, and a couple Focal 12″ subs in a custom case with plenty of 5.25″ speakers and amps and everything. I’m pretty excited! I’ll put up some pics when I get it back — actually I have some pics of the truck completely taken apart that I’ll post after I get the “finished” pics taken.
I’m also heavily into playing Chrono Cross right now. Wow — it’s everything I had hoped for and more. I’ve only been playing it for 8 hours, so it won’t be over anytime soon, which is great. If you want to play an amazing RPG, you must have Chrono Cross. It rules.
Forgot to mention that QuakeCon 2000 was pretty damn nice! Saw lots of people there and was amazed at the awesome Power Mac G4 Cube and the Apple-designed Harmon-Karden Speakers. Time to grab some!
Four Years On…
Four years ago today, I left id Software and eventually formed what would be known as Ion Storm with my longtime friend Tom Hall. Ironically enough, approximately 10 years ago, John Carmack and I began working on our bi-monthly game disk, PCRcade (soon to be renamed Gamer’s Edge), while working at Softdisk. (Each of us was working on our own game for the first issue: I was doing Dangerous Dave and Carmack was doing Catacombs.) Within a month or so, we would be joined by Adrian Carmack in our little 4-person department (Lane Roathe was the editor; the management interface so John and I could concentrate on coding). And soon after our little group was busy working insane hours to meet an almost impossible deadline, Tom Hall began joining us after work so he could help us with all the non-coding tasks, namely, the design of the games — characters, levels, sometimes even graphics.
Today is also the last day of QuakeCon 2000. I wonder if there will be any more, now that the Quake franchise is pretty much wrapped up after four years? That would end up making August 6th quite an anniversary date, for me at least.
QuakeCon 2000
I’m doing a chat tonight at 7PM CST on http://chat.twcny.rr.com. It’s going to go until 7:45PM or so, then I’ll be heading on over to QuakeCon 2000 to hang out with my bud Levelord! Maybe I’ll see some of you out there.
Web-site-wise, I’m reformatting all my pages to be 800×600 friendly. There were a couple complaints that the type was too big and the main content area of the site was using frames, which really reduced the amount of scrolling content if you were in 800×600 mode.
Working On Old Games
I realize that many of you are itching to check out the development info on your favorite games, but right now I’m mainly working on documenting my earliest games and moving forward from there since my recollections come easier when I work with related titles. It’s easier to recall my frame of mind back in 1982 when I’m only dealing with games from that time.
Tonight I finished documenting my 1982 game, Phazzar. In addition, I’ve finished the entries for Crazy Climber (not the arcade version), Dodge ‘Em, Alien Attack, Crazy Dunjun, and Bongo’s Bash. It just takes a while to create the Flash4 titles, scrounge up old hand-drawn advertisements and packaging, recollect my thoughts from back then (“what was I doing??!”
and grab screenshots from the games and the original arcade versions I was copying. Yeah, it’ll take a while but it’s looking pretty good.
DOOM History Site – Saved!
Great news for those of you who have followed DOOM for a while. A year or so ago, Lee Killough took down his DOOM History site and a large chunk of detailed DOOM history was gone. The webmaster at classicgaming.com said Lee took *everything* off the site for good. Well, I’ve been in contact with Lee for a while now and convinced him that it would be a good thing to keep all that information available and that I would like to include it all in my DOOM section here.
Last night, Lee transferred the entire site to me for inclusion in my DOOM section here. The knowledge is not lost! If you’d like to thank Lee, send me an email and I’ll make sure he gets it.
No Fingerserver
Well, found out that NO fingerserver was hitting my site. Got lots of nice remarks about what people would like to see on the site and I’m planning on talking about most of what everyone was asking, except I won’t be talking about my next project. When we’re ready to put it on the market, that’s when you’ll know about it. At least that’s the .plan.
Randomness...
hyperspace delivery boy took only 5 months from start to finish
- @Foggen Hahahaha! That game started out named Objectoids.
- Loading up my original Apple ][+ to take to the office. My first games were made on this computer back in 1981. http://t.co/lblgIeyeUb
- Check out @scottfoe's new game about pickup artists for free on the Apple App Store! Please RT! http://t.co/3Y1uhDDUlv
Strongly Recommended
Waylander (Drenai Tales, Book 4)
David Gemmell
