I embarked on a failed venture recently. One of my favorite sites is Home of the Underdogs. HOTU is a site that, for the most part, houses Abandonware (their “about” page tries to elaborate on what exactly HOTU does, but gets somewhat confusing and insists that it’s not just Abandonware). Abandonware is software that either is no longer sold or manufactured by the publisher for various reasons: it didn’t sell well, the game is dated, or the publisher has gone out of business. Abandonware is illegal, but it’s rarely enforced, since the publisher usually doesn’t care (they state on the site that they will pull down anything offensive to publishers or developers).

They had to pull down all ISDA members works, since that organization tends to enforce the copyright laws no matter what. This got me thinking: I should download all of these games, since this whole site might be gone someday. Great idea: just slap them all on a CD – lots of these games are like 23K (good old CGA).

Well, HOTU is organized such that mass downloading is difficult – you have to go like 3 pages deep to get to a download link. And they have a rather gestapo like set of rules concerning banning of multiple downloads (they don’t allow it, basically), so Net Vampire comes in real handy. Still, it could be done with a bit of work. So I started to download all of them.

Problems arose when I realized it took me a couple of hours to get through the “A”‘s. HOTU has close to 2,000 games to download. Still, with some work it could be done. Then after queuing up through the letter “C” and letting it run overnight, I awoke the next morning to realize that I had downloaded some 800MB of stuff. Ugh – this was gonna take a lot of CD’s. Then I realized that I had no idea what most of these games were called – “a-spid.zip” could mean anything, so I devised a batch file with the help of Excel to generate directories for all of the games, so “a-spid.zip” goes in the Amazing Spiderman, The directory. Great – more work, but at least now I would know what the games were called.

Then the crushing blow hit me. HOTU is a very well organized site. For each game they have reviews and commentary. They have their database searchable by year, developer, publisher, etc. Having all of the games named and downloaded is nice and all, but without all of this information on the HOTU website, I’ll probably never know which games I’m even interested in fiddling with – this isn’t like NES emulation where you can just fire up a ROM image – these are vintage PC games requiring sometimes installation, configuration and tweaking – MoSlo, a system slowing utility, is sometimes required to run them. Merely downloading them en masse is a waste of time, and a big one at that. This is time I could be Quaking!

So I called off my quest (I had gotten through the “E”‘s) and deleted most of what I downloaded, except for the games I know I’m interested in. Oh well, at least I can play Dark Seed again.

Oh, and here’s something interesting. Majesco Sales is a bizarre little company. I’m not sure if they code their own games or just port them for other companies, or both. The Dreamcast versions of Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear are obviously ports, but I’m not sure if the DC versions of Q-Bert or Frogger 2 were done in-house (for Hasbro). I do know that their Game Boy Color versions of Pong and Frogger were done in-house (though technically adaptations of previous games, so Majesco doesn’t exactly do original games).

Anywho, in addition to games, they like to make game systems. What I mean by that is they like to remake old systems. If you walk into a Wal-Mart and see a tiny Sega Genesis in a blueish box for $19.99 with the name “Genesis 3” on it, Majesco made that. They got the rights to it from Sega. They also made Frogger for the Genesis in 1998, officially the last new Genesis game ever made (part of that “Frogger on every console” idea – it was also on the SNES).

I had heard a while back that they were looking to re-introduce the Sega Game Gear and the Sega Saturn. The Saturn would cost around $50, and Majesco would be making new games for it (kinda having a console to itself there). Well, later I heard that both ideas had fallen though. Last week, though, Toys ‘R Us started selling Majesco’s remade Game Gear. You can get it from their web site (handled by amazon.com) as well. Looks like they re-released The Lion King as well. I see several other Game Gear games on amazon, but they’re listed as not available.

I still own a Game Gear –  the special blue one (don’t know why blue was special) that had The Lion King with it. It was cool, but it ate batteries for lunch. Plus, Sega ditched it shortly after for the Sega Nomad, a portable Genesis. That tanked when the Genesis died out (never really took off). Then Sega started to develop for the Neo Geo Pocket Color when Nintendo stated that they would not allow Sega to manufacture cables or code games to interface the GBC with the Dreamcast. As we all know, however, the NGPC also but the dust when the company SNK folded, leaving the lone Sonic game the only Sega entry on a non-Sega console. Now the speculation has always been that Sega would give in and make portable games on the GBC, if they were still interested at all. With the reintroduction of the Game Gear, however, I’m curious if Sega will develop new stuff for it instead. Sure, it has old Sega Master System hardware and will pale in comparison to Game Boy Advance, but at least Sega wouldn’t have to work for Nintendo (unless Nintendo buys Sega, hehe).

At any rate, go pick up a Game Gear for $29.99 and find you some games. Any Toys ‘R Us or Wal-Mart in the country has a bin somewhere with GG games for $5 each. While you’re in Wal-Mart, go to the handheld games section (in the Toy Department) and pick up Mattel’s Classic Football, a remake of the old Football game – right down to the 70’s logo.

I have tried repeatedly to like the Beatles. Usually, when people are so uppity about some old group I can usually buy into what they’re saying to some degree, but I have never been able to like the Beatles. Sure, occasionally I hear an old song of theirs and like it, but on the whole I can’t listen to them. I knew a girl in High School – one of those “art kids” – who was obsessed with the Fab Four. Funny thing is, when I pointed out how shitty songs like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” sound in a modern context she tried to pull me to later Beatles (“Yellow Submarine”, et al) rather than the “skittle” songs of their early days. Hilarious.

In that vein, I am hooked on VH-1’s “Top 100 of Whatever” lists. Gimmie five hours with a long list and I’m happy. For the Top 100 Artists of Hard Rock, I couldn’t agree with Led Zeppelin as #1 more. For the Top 100 Songs of Rock and Roll, I’m all about “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”. The top TV Moments was very enlightening (I hadn’t seen most of them). I couldn’t care less about the top 100 Women (sorry) or Dance Songs, and I knew the top Artist was going to the Beatles, but I truly do have a problem with the Top 100 Albums of Rock and Roll.

SPOILER ALERT! The #1 Rock and Roll album, according to VH-1 is The Beatles’ Revolver. Hwua? I’ve never even heard of that album. I figured Sergeant Pepper’s or White Album or something. More blasphemous: Led Zeppelin’s fourth untitled album isn’t even on the list! Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Physical Grafitti placed, but the album with freaking “Stairway to Heaven” on it isn’t on the list! Worst of all is the number of artists and albums which are not Rock an Roll. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Public Enemy, Aretha Franklin, etc. These are not Rock and Roll artists. I’m not saying they’re bad (well, not PE anyways) but they ain’t no rock and roll. Call it the “Top 100 Albums” or add “Poplar Music” to it, but not Rock and Roll. I don’t know what Rock is, but I know what it isn’t.

Anywho, rant over. I’m working on a columns page.

I used to feel sorry for Raven. They started out in the promising old Amiga days, and they had to move over to PC development and 3D games in the wake of DOOM. They got chummy with id and got some help on their first PC game, Heretic. Heretic was cool – certainly much better than the majority of DOOM clones out there. It was also somewhat refreshing – too often I would download a game demo and within minutes of playing I would form an unfavorable opinion. Heretic‘s demo, however, showed promise (you could glance down for starters). Still, it wasn’t quite DOOM, so ultimately I was disappointed. Then came Hexen. This was a better game than Heretic, to be sure. It was something of a sequel. What of a sequel, I don’t know (more later). So Hexen was decent and all, but by this point I was getting tired of DOOM and its brethren and was looking forward to something called Quake.

Quake came and went and got its engine licensed out to dozens of developers, and Raven unveiled Hexen II – more or less the only game using the original Quake engine’s source code and while Raven no doubt made some modifications, they used little to no Quake II code – most developers postponed their titles to graft Quake II code into their game once that game was released. Hexen II fell victim to “good demo” syndrome. I played the demo and thought it was cool. I bought the game and was disappointed once I got past the demo’s levels. Hexen II never really took off, despite efforts like Hexenworld – a port of Hexen II to the Quakeworld codebase.

Then Raven used the Quake II engine and belted out Heretic II. Odd, since I always thought Hexen II was like Heretic III, so Heretic II should have been Heretic IV. This got them a .plan lambasting from John “foot in mouth” Romero. Heretic II was good, but no Tomb Raider (it was a 3rd person game).

Oh, and somewhere along the line there was a game called Mageslayer which tried to be Gauntlet in 3-D. Did it better than Gauntlet Legends did, too.

So after Heretic II failed to light things up, I hear Raven was going to do a Star Trek game. Remember, there hasn’t been a good Star Trek game in years. To make things worse, the game is for Star Trek: Voyager, which is the least popular Trek to date. Uh-oh. Also, they decided to do a game for mercenary for hire magazine Soldier of Fortune. Bigger uh-oh.

But then I attended Jake Simpson’s talk at QuakeCon ’99. One of the first things he told us in his British accent was that he was miffed that no one on the QC floor was playing a Raven game. Then he told us about Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. Cool shit indeed – listening to a developer talk about his game. Then he showed us the Quake III engine game in action. I was floored. Not only did this look to break the Star Trek game curse, but it might be a Raven game that would sell! Also at QC I saw one of the most violent games ever. I found out it was Soldier of Fortune, running on the Quake II engine. Damn, two winners from Raven.

Both games were released to acclaim and high sales. I don’t feel sorry for Raven anymore

To make a long story short (too late!), my wife bought me Elite Force for my birthday. Not only is it all that and a bag of chips, but it’s one of the few games she is interested in playing. Now if only her system could hack it – holomatch!

Elite Force is interesting – it’s kind of a “niche” game. Whereas a game like Q3A is trying to be the “be-all, end-all” Deathmatch game, Elite Force is more of a console type game – single player with some multiplayer thrown in. The source code and a level editor is available, just like for Q3A. However, while the Quake series of games have always inspired conversions (Star Wars Quake, Aliens Quake, even some Trek ones), trying to convert a “specific” game like Elite Force seems kinda silly. Converting a “generic” game like Q3A makes more sense. Consequently, the only kind of modification that makes sense would be a Trek inspired one. I’ve barely scraped the surface of the Elite Force community, but I’ve already seen some levels that are pretty good representations of starships (irony: Q3A was built to house more “open” levels, rather than the cramped confines of a spaceship).

This all leads me to an interesting question/proposition. Jake Simpson at QC said that, while a lot of the U.S.S. Voyager is mapped out, there is no blueprint for the vessel on file at Paramount. Reason? They don’t want to paint themselves into a corner on the show. If they need a new room, they can just place one instead of being limited to a blueprint (those Trek blueprint books are put together after the ship is not used in the shows anymore and is usually done by studying old episodes). What I want to know is this: how complete is the Voyager ship in the game? I found this mod, which aims to make the ship into a free-wanderable vessel. My question/proposition is: how feasible is it that new missions can be made for this game? I would think it would be more feasible, at least from Raven’s standpoint. I mean, this is a TV show that has been on for seven years – it should lead itself to mission packs, and more than a couple of them. You could reuse the maps that are on the ship – only new characters and planets would have to be created. I know that this sort of thing is possible, I just wonder if the end user can do it.

It would be the revival of a dead art – the single player modification. For that matter, the “map packs” so popular in the Quake and DOOM days could be taken to the next level. Whereas we were satisfied with the “Space Marine runs into more shit” premise of those level arrangements, Elite Force missions would conform themselves to a plot (“The Voyager ship and crew runs into more shit”). Repetitive, sure, but these same notions have fueled this universe for over 30 years. The only hitch I could forsee is the Voyager notion dying away once the show finishes its seven year run soon.

I’m going to grapple with this idea and tinker around with the concept in the coming days (damn, this is gonna crimp my ongoing Q3A plans) but in the meantime I’m gonna keep looking out for an old army Star Trek (original series) mod.

Okay, I’m taping over the Twilight Zone marathon. Damned SciFi Channel. Just when I was starting to like them, too.

Anywho, remember how I said that I don’t do this page for profit? Well, looks like I probably wouldn’t have even had a chance to. Seems that 2001 is the “put up or shut up” year, as the Gamecenter Alliance (which funds many sites through ad banners, like my sentimental favorite Stomped.com) is no more after February 1, 2001. For that matter, UGO is said to be scaling back payments to websites it has to do with, (perhaps including your-favorite-and-mine, Blue’s News).

Yeah, the World Wide Web began for all intents and purposes in earnest around 1995. That was the same year I went to college. I remember browsing it on my roommate Travis Arlitt’s 486/50. My 486/20 (yes, they really did make them that slow) was too underpowered to connect to TAMUNet and run Netscape, so I transplanted my 14.4K modem to Travis’ system (he still has it, btw). I was in an organization at Texas A&M called the Corps of Cadets. Picture a JROTC thingy. Now forget that, because it’s nothing close. More to the point, I was in the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, so I had plenty to do. I constructed a website for my outfit, B-Company, on Travis’ computer using the limited HTML 2.0 and Notepad (it’s probably still on Travis’ hard drive, if his old system still exists), and while I saw the potential of this “Internet Thing”, it still seemed like a pain in the ass to have to do this much to get a little web page up and going. For that matter, the only reason that little web site never saw the light of the Web is that I had no idea how to upload things to the Internet or for that matter that we had any personal space for this sort of thing to be uploaded to.

More importantly, however, was the fact that I wasn’t too good at this “college plus anything else” thing. My grades have never put me in any danger of the Dean’s list, and while part of me thinks my Corps/Band involvement had something to do with this, most of me knows I would be looking for a different scapegoat if I weren’t involved in those aforementioned organizations. Consequently, while college kids around the world seemed to be starting the next Amazon.com or Napster, I sat idly by these last five and a half years and thought “I could be doing this!” I always figured that, if the market was right when I got out of College, I might look into something like this. Granted, I put that notion in the same pile that most of us place the “some day I’ll drive one of those” idea we get when someone with a luxury car speeds past.

The other thing I noticed was the “content page” and its increasing dominance. While Blue’s did do some good – I watch it religiously for game news – other pages merely have stuff to browse. This would be great, except that the race to win sometimes outdoes the race to be any damn good. I like PlanetQuake (one word, not two), but PlanetDaikatana has never provided me with more than a good chuckle (I actually own Daikatana, btw), and I occasionally visit PlanetBlood, PlanetKingpin and PlanetDescent to find out if they still exist, and to be utterly shocked to find out that they still get updates! I mean, Doom still has lots of active websites, but that’s in the wake of the Source Code’s availability, plus it has some retro quality to it.

Imagine what it must feel like to be the first to set up and maintain the ultimate site on a particular computer game (and while I know that all of the previous examples are GameSpy sites, there’s more where they came from), and keep maintaining that site for years before the game is actually released, only to discover that the game sucks ass. Then what do you do? While I’ve actually seen some sites close up shop to say “show’s over, nothing to see here”, others go on to adamantly claim that the game in question is good, and that the critics – all of them – are wrong. Some might actually believe that (and God bless them – some of these games need it), but others are just trying to prolong the magic needlessly. Meanwhile, visits have dried up and the ads aren’t getting served.

So what do you do when you go to a web page and you see an ad banner? You probably do like I do – ignore it. That’s not entirely true – I do notice them, but I will rarely click them (I close pop up windows before they even get a chance to load). I had a buddy at one point who adamantly refused to click any ad banner – even if he wanted to. He would open a new browser and find where that ad was headed and go there the hard way. I guess he thought he was “fighting the man” or that ad banners would go away someday if no one would click on them. While I think he was a little crazy in some regards (he was one of these who believe that if you don’t use Microsoft products/technologies exclusively, you were deluding yourself), he may have his way eventually.

So now I’m out of college and, sure enough, the market is changing and in some ways, drying up. Dot-coms based on moronic notions like shipping dog food UPS have gone belly-up, and most of the “me, too”‘s (of which I would have been one were I not in college) have gone elsewhere. For that matter, the investors in “Free(whatever).com” have had enough of “good ideas” and now want to see these things called “profits”. So now we have the steady demise of the “ad networks”, and with them me might have the demise of the content sites. Hopefully the networks will just wise up – no cheating, no thousand sites on Deer Hunter games, no 2 page articles spread out onto 12 pages with a “next” link at the bottom. Hopefully Penny Arcade will sell enough books and “WANG!” T-shirts to stay afloat. And hopefully the “let’s just put up several pages of bullshit, post some ad banners and watch the money roll in” pages in this world will shrivel up and die.

Anywho, diatribe over. I’m turning 24 tomorrow. Have fun 🙂

I was a bit bummed to learn that the Twilight Zone marathon doesn’t include all of the episodes, just a lot of them. There’s 77 episodes in 42 hours, so some of these episodes are an hour long. I found this page which is extremely obsessive about anything and everything Twilight Zone. Turns out there are 156 episodes, so the 77 being shown in this marathon make up roughly half of them. I had always thought there were 79 episodes – I read that in a magazine somewhere, but perhaps they had it confused with Star Trek. Star Trek had 79 episodes (3 seasons) before NBC pulled the plug. The SciFi Channel plays 80, since they count the unaired (in the 1960’s) pilot “The Cage” as an episode (though they place it last in the rotation).

To make things worse about this marathon, the episodes are played in no particular order and appear to be something of a smattering from the five seasons. Whereas Star Trek was cancelled at the end of its third season, Twilight Zone mainly ran out of steam. After its third season, Rod Sterling began teaching at a University. The fourth season was used as a mid-season replacement (thus it had less episodes) and expanded to an hour-long format. Even after the fifth season reinstatement of the half-hour format, the show had simply lost steam (Sterling’s involvement was still limited). On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter what order the episodes are in – there are no persistent plotlines or characters, so this less important than, say, having all of the Cheers episodes in order – but not having all of the episodes involved and in the proper order means that you can’t look at the evolution of the show and pinpoint the moment of deterioration. In case you haven’t guessed, I have the vast majority of the Cheers episodes on tape and you can pick the point at which, after Sam and Rebecca have decided that they’re not going to “hook up” that the plotlines began to suffer – the series of episodes in which Sam and Rebecca decide to have a child (unmarried) is the lamest sequence in the run. Things perk up, ironically, once it became apparent that Season 11 would be the last.

So, I’m not sure if I want to try and start taping the Twilight Zone episodes I missed – not sure if I’m that ambitious. It would mean that I would have to figure out which episodes I’m missing (which I have already done) and figure out when they are coming on the air and tape them. I would at least like to think I have more important things to do. Perhaps I’ll wait a while and just buy them all on DVD.