Computer games

New Monkey Island game coming soon!

The original Monkey Island, a classic point-and-click adventure game, was released in 1990, but I didn’t play it myself until 1997 when I was 11 or 12 years old. It was part of the LucasArts Archive Volume III, a box set of classic LucasArts games rereleased on CD-ROM. Ah, the good old days when computer games came in oversized boxes and included instruction manuals and registration postcards. Downloading games is surely convenient, but there was some magic to browsing a store shelf full of games, gazing at the latest greatest computer graphics in the screenshots on the back, and being able to carry home something tangible. Our family had just bought our first Windows computer a year or so before (Windows 95), and I can still remember the excitement of that box of adventure games:1

That box included both the original game, The Secret of Monkey Island, and the sequel released a year later, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.

I loved those games. Ridiculous cartoony humor, fun little adventure story, and a bunch of engaging story puzzles.

But the second game ended on a really weird note, teasing yet another game in the series. But before that game was created, the game’s creator, Ron Gilbert, left LucasArts to co-found Humongous Entertainment, which also made point-and-click adventure games for younger children, such as Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo (which my younger sister used to play constantly).

With Gilbert gone, LucasArts went ahead and made another Monkey Island game anyway, The Curse of Monkey Island, released in 1997. I probably bought it in 98 or 99, after I beat the first two games.

This installment introduced a more cartoony look (the first two games featured pixel art) and full-cast voice acting. It was fun, but didn’t really answer the questions left by the previous game or continue its story, instead telling its own story.

This happened again when LucasArts put out a fourth installment, Esape from Monkey Island in 2000, around the time I was heading off to high school. This installment introduced 3D graphics with 2D backgrounds, which look rather primitive by today standards, but at the time it was quite a fancy updgrade.

I remember being so excited for the game that I would dream about it. Unfortunately, I was not so impressed with it. The story was just weird, the puzzles were awful, the interface and controls felt clunky, and the whole thing just didn’t feel very polished. In fact, I never even finished the game. I grew bored and didn’t even bother to look up puzzle solutions.

Nine years later, in 2009, a year after I had graduated from college with a scarred mind and broken dreams, Telltale Games licensed the Monkey Island IP from LucasArts and released Tales of Monkey Island. It was 3D again, with some better graphics but still a very simple and cartoony design, and was released in monthly installments (a model Telltale Games tried to make work, and it seemed to for a while, but they ultimately went out of business2).

While this new installment was definitely more polished than the last, I still thought it grew a bit boring. I confess, I never finished this one either.

Around this time, the original two games were “remastered” and rereleased with better graphics and voice acting.

So, three Monkey Island games released after Monkey Island 2. But without the original creator at the helm, none of them felt quite “official”, and the strange end of that second game remains an unanswered enigma.

Disney bought LucasArts when they bought their parent company, Lucasfilms (primarily so they could ruin Star Wars by making sequels that made no sense), and LucasArts turned into Lucasfilm Games. As far as I can tell, they now mostly just handle licensing IP to other developers.

One of those developers is none other than Ron Gilbert, who is now finally able to finish the Monkey Island story as he intended all those years ago. Return to Monkey Island was just recently announced:

I’m definitely looking forward to it and crossing my fingers that the questions left by the second game might finally be answered. (Though I’ll probably need to replay those first two games to refresh my memory.)

By S P Hannifin, ago

Little Nightmares

Hey, look! I finally updated this blog’s theme! I think I like it better. Might do some more experimenting with the font, but this should work for now.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying streaming on Twitch, and I recently finished playing the PC game Little Nightmares, a small little adventure game with a nice creepy atmosphere. It doesn’t take long to beat. My first time playing through, it took my a bit over 4 hours. Rushing through it a second time, I was able to speed through it in 1.5 hours, which I recorded for my records, because I’m sure I will want to go back and watch myself playing twenty or so years from now:

Isn’t that interesting?!

For now, I’ve moved on to playing the bright cheery anime-ish RPG Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, which is perhaps meant for a younger audience with its super happy cheerfulness and ridiculously simple portrayal of monarchy establishment, but I must admit that I do love the art and style of the game with its amazingly beautiful cel-shading, and Joe Hisaishi’s orchestral score is fantastic, quite on par with his Studio Ghibli work. I wish they’d port the original Ni No Kuni game for PC, as I don’t have a PS3 and probably won’t be buying one anytime soon.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Twitch

Although I can’t even remember when I created a twitch account, I never actually tried streaming from it until this week, streaming a bit of a creepy puzzle / adventure game called Little Nightmares. Here’s my twitch account. And here’s an attempt at embedding the channel:

Watch live video from seanthebest on www.twitch.tv

Probably won’t actually use it much, as I don’t play video games as much as I’d like to, but as I finally have a graphics card capable of streaming, I might as well use it. Maybe I’ll stream some coding sometime as well, because that’s always really exciting.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Unity and games and stuff

Learning Unity!

This week, at the expense of working on my next novel*, I’ve been getting back to studying Unity, the game development platform. My new computer handles it beautifully, nice and fast. And I found some great introductory tutorials to start with from a “gamesplusjames” from Ireland, land of me forefathers:

It’s still a lot to take in; I don’t know if it’s just my aging brain or that I haven’t been programming regularly for a long time now, but I’m definitely slower at learning this sort of stuff than I used to be. Anyway, Unity makes a lot of stuff pretty easy; wish something like this was out when I was in high school.

(* On a side note, my writing blog is down for the moment. It was getting inundated with bots, and just pointing the domain back to the registrar was my lazy way to try to get them to go away. It’ll be back at some point.)

Let’s Plays!

With my powerful new computer, I’ve been able to record some “Let’s Plays” on my new YouTube gaming channel, SirDragonWizardMasterLord, the dorkiest name I could come up with.

Probably won’t make them regularly, but it was fun to try, and I was very impressed with how well my computer could handle them; capturing video didn’t slow the games down at all, even with the games’ graphics settings at their highest. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 is just awesome.

Inside Out’s blatant plagiarism!

I saw Pixar’s latest, Inside Out, earlier this week. It was a great film, but as I mentioned on Twitter:

By S P Hannifin, ago

Hoping to build a computer this year…

Still waiting. You know, for 2016. Because you know what happens in 2016? Presidential election! But, more interestingly, the Oculus Rift will be released! (If everything goes as planned, I guess.)

(Sorry in advance for the materialistic nature of this post. Thinking too much about money and materialistic crap may be harmful to some readers’ souls. Reader discretion is advised.)

I spent some time researching the computer I’ll need to power the Rift, and honestly I’d like to have it ASAP so I can start fooling around with game programming with Unity 5. (As I said before, my current computer runs Unity 4 too slowly, and my OS (Vista) is not even officially supported, so trying to learn Unity on here is a bit torturous.) I’ve used this site as a sort of guide for what I’ll need, so I’m basically looking into building the computer myself, which, for all my interest in computers, will be my first time actually building one from individually purchased parts. Fingers crossed that it’ll go well. Anyway, my plans currently don’t deviate much from the parts listed on the aforementioned site. I’ll probably look into different cases as I’d prefer one with a bit more personality (such as a window), but that’s only if I can find one at a good price with some good space for future upgrades should I want them. Hard drive wise, I’d like to look into perhaps getting both a solid state drive to store the operating system and an old-fashioned mechanical hard drive with 1 or 2 TB’s for some good storage. (Composing music can take up a good amount of space when you’re storing some big audio files, plus games in general can take up some significant chunks themselves.) I’ll have to research how to set that up.

Altogether, my current estimate is that the computer will cost $1,200. Of course, when the time comes, I’ll search around for deals and save every bit I can. I’ll probably also search some nearby stores and see if I can pick up anything in person; having to wait for parts in the mail will be torture for my weak impatient soul (though that will probably be the cheaper option). Anyway, I won’t have to worry about it yet; still gotta save the actual money. (It’s tempting to just use my credit card and buy it all now, but I guess I’ll resist.) With the debts I’m still paying off, my phone bill, and my Netflix addiction, it’ll probably take around three months, give or take. I’m currently about 1/6th of the way there, $200 saved of $1,200. So only $1,000 short.

It’s aggravating having to wait; my mind’s been obsessed with dreaming about VR and a new rig all week. Everything I do feels like something to fill the time while waiting. And while that hasn’t really helped me be more productive in any way, it has actually been a bit cathartic; it’s helped relieve some of my overly-self-conscious “is this a good use of my time?” anxiety that just makes me angry when I feel like I wasted some time, which just makes me waste more time.

I’ve also been looking forward to YouTube’s upcoming game-streaming platform, their answer to Twitch. Maybe I’ll even try streaming some gameplay of my own, though that’ll have to wait until I build that new rig, because I doubt my current Vista-powered computer would stream very well.

I’m also looking forward to the upcoming game for PS4, The Last Guardian, showcased not long ago at E3. I’ve been waiting at least 6 years for this game; it was originally intended as a PS3 game, but it’s been in development for so long that PS4 is now their target console. Check it out:

I don’t have a PS4, but I guess I’ll need to buy one just for this game. Unless I get trapped in my Oculus Rift.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Inklewriter

Some of my earliest games made in good old GW-BASIC were text-based interactive stories; choose-your-own adventures, but a little more complex than the in-print books; not that much more complex, I was only ten years old or so, but being able to use the magic of “variables!!” the story could remember player names and past choices. Unfortunately the games are now lost… so you’ll just have to trust that I was smart enough to do that when I was ten.

The point is, I enjoyed the art of interactive fiction.

So I recently read about an online program called Inklewriter which allows storytellers to quickly and easily write and test interactive fiction. I used it to quickly write a simple dialog story called The Movie Deal.

I’d like to try to write something more serious with it at some point. It looks like they’ve recently announced a contest that I think would be fun to try.

So, go have fun with it. And let me know about your work if you’d like me to check it out!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Quite complex

Greetings and such things.

Animation Mentor starts in about a week! I was going to put the student "badge" on the side there, but the student login is closed for the week for a break before the summer term starts. I’m almost ready, just need to review my basic Maya skills and find a camera to record reference with (I’m also practicing becoming double-jointed so that my reference shots will be more fluid and cartoony). I’m nervously looking forward to it.

complexity Hmmm, what else? I’ve been reading this really interesting book on complexity called Complexity: A Guided Tour. It’s got some fascinating chapters on emergent properties and genetic algorithms. Really makes me want to start doing some programming again. And if you like the classic book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, this book should please you as the author was heavily influenced by the book, seeking out Hofstadter to study under after reading it. (It’s been about 10 years since I read GEB; I need to reread it.) The book is just a wee boring at certain parts, especially in the beginning, but I suppose such chapters can be skipped, as some of them just give an overview of stuff you might already know. The book can also be a bit confusing at times, but overall, since it’s not very mathematically in-depth and only 300 pages, it’s great for more casual (yet fascinating) reading. I’ve still got a few more chapters to go, but it’s a great book.

Oh, I got Mass Effect 2 the other day from Amazon.com. I played through the prologue and it looks like it will be a really fun sequel. Too bad I won’t really have any time to play it.

masseffect

By S P Hannifin, ago

The new year is boring so far

Mostly because I haven’t been up to much. I spent New Year’s day sleeping in as long as I could, and then I spent the day after at work, and I plan on spending Sunday asleep or at work (hopefully not at the same time, of course). And same for Monday.

Actually, I did spend some time playing Super Mario Galaxy on Wii a few hours ago. It’s fun.

I also applied for a couple jobs last night, raising the number of jobs I have applied for this year to 2. Let’s see how high the count gets.

Oh, I’ve also been writing a ton of melodies in my head. But I haven’t been writing them down, so they are getting lost. Nothing to fear, though, since my melodic creativity is infinite. Well, maybe not infinite, but close enough that I don’t notice the difference.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Birthday presents and whatever

We celebrated my birthday on Saturday, and I must say, it was a happp birthday!  I got some hand-made bunny pajamas from my great aunt.  (I didn’t get the BB gun I wanted, though, because apparently I’d shoot my eye out.)  I also got this blu-ray and these books.  So, ’twas good.  And the cake’s already gone.

I also finished playing the game Portal the other day.  It’s a short game; only takes about 6-8 hours (though I’m sure one could get good at getting through the thing in less than an hour with some practice).  It’s a puzzle/action game, and is very addicting.  You basically use a “portal gun” (or whatever it’s called) and create portals in the walls that then connect to each other.  For examples, you could create a portal right in front of you and one right behind you to create an infinite hallway.  Or create one right above you and right below you to create a bottomless pit.  To win the game, however, you must create portals to solve puzzles, getting yourself and boxes and weird energy balls from one place to another, over and around obstacles.  And, at the end, it plays this really catchy song.  I haven’t played the bonus levels yet.

I still haven’t done any more programming for my Android game, but I did compose another short 2-minute piece of music called “Clockwork.”  It’s not really as bombastic as my other pieces; it’s kind of light-hearted background music.

By S P Hannifin, ago