Bad Things on Tuesday
- Still sniffling with a cold
- It's too cold for Florida right now, It was in the 40's this morning when I was walking my dog
- My toes are frozen. Really they are ice cubes now.
- So cold out this morning I didn't want to get out of bed.
- Realizing that I didn't book my hotel room in time for the totally awesome hotel special for our trip to Seattle
Good Things on Tuesday
- Finding out that the Hotel has another totally awesome special that saves me just as much money,
- Finally feeling like my cold is going away.
- Getting my music play list for our Seattle/Portland trip ready
- My dog snuggling with me under the blanket this morning
- Getting up in time to take out the trash, with the holidays there was a lot of trash.
- Work being low key and drama free today - (so far)
- Nick coming home tonight from London at around 6:30pm
In the 80's the PC was known for many computer games. It excelled in bringing cutting edge Role Playing Games such as the Ultima Series. It was also the home for Adventure games. Anyone who wanted to get in some time on Sierra, or Lucas Arts adventuring titles generally headed toward a DOS based PC. But one area of gaming that was utterly barren on the IBM PC compatibles until the late 80's, and early 90's were platformers.
Now I say IBM PC compatibles because back then there were a lot of various computer platforms.
IBM didn't make a closed platform at the time. Where Apple even to this day requires Apple Software (Unless you want to pay even more on top of what you paid for your Mac to install Windows), IBM did not.
Rather than work like a console system (Which is what other computer makers like Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Texas Instruments, and so on did.) where you had to buy software for that specific model machine, IBM instead created hardware, then licensed out the technology to third parties. Because of this many other manufacturers could build a machine pretty much however they wanted, buy DOS (And later Windows) licenses to go with them, and sell the final product. This of course continues to this day.
What does all of this have to do with today's subject?
Well opposite the home computer market existed the console market. Nintendo had pretty much resurrected the industry after it's success with the Nintendo Entertainment System, and it's library featured (Among other genres) dozens upon dozens of platformers. Obviously the most popular of which was Super Mario Bros.
But there were other examples. Other consoles, and even home computer formats would see their own platformers, or ports of popular platformers. But the IBM PC compatibles didn't see many of these.
Nintendo even had some games that successfully bridged platforming with adventuring, and even role playing. Zelda is one of those, but one of the others is the quintessential Metroid series.
Anyway after finding today's topic at a pre Christmas run to Play N' Trade, I did a little online research, and it was originally done by a small studio for the platformer starved IBM PC.
Well, at some point Color Dreams, producer of several unlicensed games for the NES (who later became Wisdom Tree, and made unlicensed games for the NES with religious themes)
picked up the rights to port this game as well.
Folks, this is Captain Comic
Here we have it with a face label on black plastic. One thing that was odd about this particular one is how tight a fit this cartridge is. Seriously. It barely makes it in, and out of my Nintendo without getting stuck.
Anyway here's what we see upon boot:
Anyway here's what you will see upon pressing Start
But it isn't. Suffer with it long enough, and you will see that somehow they tried to do some cross pollination of their own.
They don't have a pattern. They don't disappear after being vanquished. They respawn on a constant basis.
And they attack with the fury of a Bullet Hell game. The difference being there is a life bar. But honestly it depletes so quickly from the birds pecking you, it might as well be a one hit, and you're dead affair.
So we've seen it's emulated Mario. But now it's emulating Contra. Contra. CONTRA.
That my friends, is not a mix you make. One could argue that Contra has some platforming elements, as you do jump on ledges, and such. But that is a much different game than Super Mario Bros, or even Mega Man for that matter.
Oh, and did I mention you can't shoot any of these things yet? Well you can't. As you'll see
the Frankenstein monster isn't done yet.
Gee, I wonder where I've seen that concept before:
And yes before you grill me about how there are hundreds of games about fun, and exploration, the point I'm making is that those games are actually fun to play. Captain Comic not only makes you lose all of your lives in five seconds, (rendering you too pissed off to want to bother) the control is sloppy. If by some miracle you actually DO manage to not be devoured by animals, you will slip off of platforms, or miss them entirely. You will die cheap death after cheap death after cheap death in this game.
But the nail in the coffin is the lack of a great character to latch onto. When someone thinks "Captain Comic" they probably see some sort of spandex laden hero vanquishing aliens, demons, or super villains. It's not even about the quality of the graphics, it's what they represent.
Here we have a NASA reject, running from a castle to find an Arm Cannon so he can kill birds so he can get to other areas of a planet that don't look like anything that seem to belong together.
It's a mash of a Moon, a Medieval forest, a land of tubes, a pier, a giant concrete block.
It's not the worst game you'll ever play but that doesn't mean it's a good time either.
If you actually suffer your way the entire game, collecting every power up, and meeting the goals, you then get to BACKTRACK to the beginning of the game where you are greeted with a poorly written text ending.
Well after Christmas I had a work day, followed by a day of catching up with a few relatives I hadn't seen, so I'm a little late.
Anyway, after a night of lack of sleep, everyone went over to my Sister's house for Christmas. It was actually a pretty good day. I also got a shiny new Camera so I took a few pictures. I'm still learning the ropes of the new one so if a few of these came out terrible I can only request you cut me some slack.
My parents bought My Sister, Brother, and respective spouses a Blu Ray player. They were pretty psyched to say the least.
Megan helped Emma open her Monchichi.
BEAN! (My Brother Steve's Boston Terrier.)
I gave Jen a few Blu Ray movies because I knew my folks had purchased Blu Ray Players. Here she has Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and The Shining. We couldn't help but wonder how she hadn't seen The Shining, but she will see it now. She doesn't have a choice.
I gave Brian a copy of The Dark Knight, and the A Death In The Family Graphic Novel. Later in the evening he set up the Blu Ray player, and put it on for a few minutes just to see how nice the player worked. He seemed pretty impressed with it.
Still, he lit up seeing the Classic Trek T-shirt, and Revamped Trek flick.
On the whole it was a pretty good Christmas. Everyone got along well, we had a huge dinner. I mean huge. There was a Turkey, AND a Ham. A lot of Potatoes, Green Beans, Peas, Olives, Squash, Sweet Potatoes, Two types of Stuffing, and a bunch of stuff I'm probably forgetting. Everything came out wonderfully so if any of you guys who made the food decide to read this, well thank you a lot. Also thank you for not electing me to cook any of it because it would not have been anywhere near that delicious. In fact, I still have an extra Lemon Meringue pie to eat as of this writing because Amy was kind enough to make one for me, and one for everyone else. I say extra because I hadn't realized this, and ate almost an entire one during the Christmas festivities.
I do have to close on some sad news though, Early the following morning my Cousins Kyle, and Chad lost their apartment in an electrical fire, so any prayers or well wishes are appreciated. They made it out perfectly fine, but they did lose a great deal of their belongings. So here's hoping their insurance can reimburse them. Our family is helping in whatever way we can but there are also emotional distresses that one suffers in these cases so again any prayers or well wishes are greatly appreciated.
Merry Christmas everyone.
- More love.
- Less weight.
- More yoga.
- More books.
- More exercise.
- More vacations.
- More fun!
These all seem totally doable.
Bring it, 2010! Bring it!
It's feels like it's been while since I've made a post. Work has been extremely busy. There were more layoffs and now I have more work and more people around checking out what I am doing which means less internet surfing time. This should quite down now that the holidays are in swing and everything should be back to normal after the first of the year.
I have recently decided something though after months, actually a year on vox I have decided I like it and I'm going to stay. I know this place used to be better, more people, the vox team where more active and more helpful back then but it's still a decent place if we the users make it so. I hate to see a post from a neighbor explaining that they are leaving vox and why. There are still plenty of us here though so I have decided to stay.
and with that I am going to reorganize my blog a little bit. It'll be the same but I have added the things on a tuesday group and will be writing some more personal stuff , friends only of course. Some sex talk, bring some sexy back to Fridays. I want to get back to writing what every I feel like without holding anything back. This of course means more friends only post but I will also write about Orlando, and any other topic I find interesting as a public post.
I'll also be posting my New Years Resolutions and the ones I made last year, which ones I accomplished and which ones I didnt. It's something I do every year, last year I didn't post them to hear since I was so new to vox but this year I feel more comfortable.
I really do wish more of my pownce friends would have stayed here, I understand why they didn't. There was a bad taste in their mouth about Six Apart and I understand that, I also understand the nature of the web biz. It's a rough business, anyone that tells you to go into IT, Computer programming, interactive design and digial media entertainment because it is lucrative is fooling themselves. The company I work for has now made layoffs for two years in a row. At any moment we could be told to pack up and leave without much notice. It's just the way things go. No it isn't fair and these are hard working people who do a bang up job but sometimes things just don't work out and you save and salvage what you can. There isn't much else you can do.
So I'll be around and posting more again. I'll leave you with one of my favorite toasts. I believe it's an Irish toast.
"May the roof above us never cave in.
And the friends gathered below never fall out"
Merry Christmas to all. Have a great weekend and have fun.
I didn't do a very good job of maintaining that music vox, did I?
It's okay though. I've built an entirely new site from scratch, and I've ported all the old music posts from this blog as well as the djfstop vox over to it, complete with download links for the music, and new entries too. You should really go check it out.
These are some vintage postcards from my mom's collection. Today I will bake Christmas Tree cakes and make Swedish Roselle cookies. Of course I will wrap presents and get ready for tomorrow. We will go to mom's and see the peeps and then it's off to a Titan's game for Kevin and I.
It's been a busy holiday so far. Very busy at work. But I will try to remember what this day has meant for so many years.
Christmas is my mom's birthday and it hasn't been the same for so many years already. I'll think of her many times today, tomorrow and many more times this week.
Tonight we will watch Meet Me in Saint Louis as we have every Christmas Eve for the last 18 years.
Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
I'll see you after the new year!
Hope this time is joyous and peaceful for you and all you love. Best to everyone in the new year as well...
love and chocolate kisses,
gunderson
