Messages

Thanks Dave! You're a real mensch!

Prick Peckard! Nothing more.

Seconded!   

Thirded. 8)

Wow! So much Barn Runner love. Now I feel even worse (worser?)  for not having chapter three of The Forever Friday finished yet. (Only seven months behind schedule, but who's counting). If I can ever stop working sixty (or more!) hour work weeks, then perhaps I'll be able to get back on track.

There will be demo of the game available on my website on October 1st. Hope that will tide you guys over until the game is finished.

As for my vote: Old school: Larry Vales. New School: Annie Android.

Red Dawn was awesome.

I'm a high school teacher. Not a day goes by that I don't check the window for commies parachuting in.

Vigilance, people. Vigilance!

Time to put Road House into the DVD player. Oh wait, it was already in there. Guess I'll watch Point Break instead.

Swayze delivered several of my favorite bad movies. Red Dawn shaped my childhood and informs my world view to this day.

He will be missed.

Are you planning to review the other early RON games as well? Some of those games are so old (freeware years are measured in dog years, I think), that a lot of new people have probably never heard of them. A few reviews might help raise the profile of RON, now that it seems ready to shamble from the grave again.

I often wonder if moving on in general (as life seems to drive us to) is what we all should eventually do...

I plan to be here until CJ turns the lights out or until I finish the Barn Runner series -- which, at the rate I'm going, will occur just shortly before the heat death of the universe.

Class of '03 sticking together to mock the elders, 03 is the new 00. EZ Sleazy.

Class of '04 shakes it's underclassman fist at you. You guys are old and no longer hip and with the times. '04 is the new hotness.

What does the FAIL option exactly mean, anyway?

If I remember correctly, Fail does the same thing as Abort, but does it more cleanly, without leaving the application unstable. It's been so long, I can't remember exactly how it works, only that when given the choice, you were always supposed to choose fail.

Ah, the halcyon days of DOS. The memories...

Ah, Choose Your Own Arbitrary Death. Man, I loved those things as a kid.

My personal favorite was Space Patrol.
http://www.amazon.com/Space-Patrol-Choose-Your-Adventure/dp/0553233491

In fact, thanks to this thread, I just ordered a copy from Amazon. Will it be as amazing to my 36 year old self as it was to my ten year old self? I guess I'll have to turn to page 54 to find out...

I'm not sure I would have started make (bad) text adventure games and later AGS if these books hadn't shaped my young psyche in the way they did. And since I was Star Wars crazy in the early 80s, this book was the best of the lot. In fact, the (as yet unseen) Master Computer in the Barn Runner series was modeled after the ship's computer H.E.N.R.Y. from this book.

Thanks for bringing back some pleasant memories, ddq.

- Ponch

Just because all the cool kids were doing it, I have now posted from work.

Wow. I feel like I'm part of the "in" crowd now. 

So CJ's plan of world domination is one step closer to fruition then?

Haggis -> Evil-Stuffed Parts

Thanks to you, I shall always think of Haggis that way. Especially the haggis that comes in a can.

- Ponch

SSH,

Boycott Scotland? And give up my precious Scotch whisky?* Madness! (You guys can keep the haggis though. Please.) Plus, one of my play testers is from Scotland -- any my game is already too far behind as it is!

But to answer your questions:

1. No. It's silly to feel anger towards a country. I'm not too happy with your government's decision, but it doesn't make me feel anger towards all the Scots. Besides, without you guys, the Highlander movie wouldn't exist. (Best! Documentary! Ever!)

2. Public opinion doesn't always hold much sway with me. Many of my fellow Americans think that 9/11 was an inside job; that we never landed on the moon; that JFK was killed by the FBI; and that we have an alien spaceship hidden in Nevada. To steal a line from Men in Black, "A person is smart. People are dumb..."

3. Only in the rarest circumstances. Do the crime, do the time. I don't care if your mother has run off to be a pirate or you've got boneitis. The crime you committed that landed you in prison affected people with their own share of problems too -- chief amongst those problems, they were victimized by you.

4.  Maybe. Depends on the crime. I've spent a substantial part of my life living abroad, where my rights as a US citizen don't add up to diddly poop. So, if I wanted to avoid local prisons, I tried my very best to obey the local laws. My girlfriend's favorite show is "Locked Up Abroad." Every third episode seems to be "How can they send me to prison? All I did was smuggle some opium through their airport. I wasn't even stopping in the country, just changing planes! It's not fair." No sympathy for those idiots at all.

5. Sorry, I reject the premise of the question. I don't think letting al-Megrahi go was the right thing to do. But it wasn't my call to make. The government of Scotland made its decision, and it was theirs to make. But nations, cities, and people make choices all the time I don't agree with. What am I going to do? Boycott the whole world? That would be very silly. Boycotts hardly ever work. Mostly, they're a great way get others to hold a grudge against you.

Besides, where do you stop once you've started? Scotland is part of the UK, which is part of the EU, which is part of the other side of planet Earth. Before you know it, I'm boycotting half the globe. And what does that leave me with? Just Texas, and possibly our neighbors to the north, the (rest of the) United States.

Boycotts are for silly people who have far too much time on their hands (and usually they also have audiences to keep lathered up with outrage).

Besides, why be outraged? I trust the Scots to manage their own affairs. They've given us golf, the decimal point, modern economics (sorry we screwed that up, by the way), Dolly the sheep, and that song we sing every year at New Years (but no one seems to know the lyrics).

Thanks, Scotland!

Now put some pants on, for God's sake.

- Ponch
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* Why no "e" in "whisky." You guys over there stick extra vowels in everything, which we dutifully remove over here. But in this case, we're left in the rather uncomfortable position of "vowel-ing" that word up to size.

At what point is there too much governmental action and is it even possible for it to reverse without some type of actual revolt, as opposed to the civilized revolts we have in the form of election?'

Governments can always be overthrown (assuming they don't simply collapse from internal decay at some point). But civilized revolt is always preferable to violent overthrow. Nine times out of ten, when you topple your leadership by force of arms, you wind up with something just as bad, if not worse, than you had before the revolution started.

When do you know the time for revolution has come? When it happens. It's not the sort of thing that happens on schedule. In fact, revolution is always on the horizon. There are always people talking about change: either going back to the ways things were (usually an idealized yesterday that never really existed) or going forward into some sort of "better tomorrow" utopia (which never seems to deliver the unicorns and rainbows as promised).

In either case, these visions of the future always involve killing those who oppose you and then dragging everyone who didn't have an opinion in the first place along for the ride, whether they want to go or not. (In my country, the US, most colonists didn't really want to revolt against the crown. But enough of them did want it, and at just the right time too, so that a revolution happened).

I don't think it's fair to say that the people who didn't want to go along with Henry, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest were happy with the way things were (though some certainly liked it), it's just that most people are uncomfortable with too much change too quickly. And overthrowing the rule of the British Empire at the peak of its run to strike off on our own was clearly a hell of a lot of change.

Authoritarianism is sort of the default setting for human society for as far back as we have history. The concept of freedom (not individual liberty, which came much later) was a hell of a leap forward for our species, but it seems to have been a good one. Since The Enlightenment, freedom of one sort or another has been slowly spreading around the world. But personally, I think lots of people talk about freedom more than they actually want (too much of) it.

It seems to me that, at our core, a great many of us prefer to have somebody else making most of our decisions for us -- that way we have someone to blame should it all go wrong. This is where the mob comes from. If you can harness the power of them (as Mao did), then you can move mountains. But you don't necessarily need them either. If they'll just stay out of the way (like many of the New Englanders did during the American Revolution) then you can deliver change to them after all the heavy lifting is done -- and hopefully it will be a change they want. Otherwise, you've got a new revolution a'brewing.

The truth of it, I suspect, is that most of us just want to live our lives as peacefully as possible. Revolution is an easy thing to talk about until you're older, have a home, a family, a place in society and all those other things that would be jeopardized by overthrowing the status quo (this is why people become more conservative as they age and radical voices usually find acceptance in young crowds). However, get enough people angry about something and let it simmer long enough, and no government can stand against them (though it helps if the government doesn't control all the guns).

What sort of society they make after the smoke clears depends greatly on what sort of people they were going into the revolution and the reasons they had for starting it in the first place.

I teach history for a living and every year I always have students who love to talk about taking on (and often talk of overthrowing) the system. I said the same things when I was their age. I loved punk rock, wore a "No Future" T-Shirt, the whole thing. I always listen to them with a warm sense of bemusement, because talk of revolution is just that: Talk. That's all it ever is. Until the day comes, I suppose, when the revolution finally arrives.

Here in the States, we're probably overdue for one (since there's no frontier to which anti-social types like myself can escape). But personally, as much as I think it's going to happen sooner or later, I hope I'm not around to see it. I'm too old for that sort of nonsense.

Just my two cents. Hope that answered your question.

- Ponch

I always post from work. So I'm going to do something I don't normally do and post from home.

Feels good man.

- Ponch

[The Common Dogfish]

The Common Dogfish


From Schulz's Guide To Undersea Wonders (And The Profitability Thereof):
Found throughout the world, the dogfish is renowned for his friendly smile, fuzzy white body, and ease of marketability. This particular specimen of dogfish seems to have grown rather plump from a steady diet of lucrative licensing and endorsement deals.

Like many of his kind, he is accompanied by a small yellow fish. They form some sort of symbiotic relationship that science is still working to understand. But the most widely accepted theory posits that in traveling together, the pair somehow enhance their brand appeal and thus secure for themselves an ever richer diet of residuals and royalties.

Dogfish live a remarkably long time. Indeed, this particular fellow even makes the rather spurious claim to have been a World War One fighting ace who saw action over France against the Red Baron. Dogfish are apparently prone to tall tales as well.

- Ponch
________________
*Yeah, I know he's not really very dithered. I drew this at work on MS Paint. On the other hand, it gave me the excuse to draw Snoopy. He was the first thing I ever learned to draw as a little kid. Charles Schulz made a lot of money off me.

It's all about Cheryl Blossom, the only woman who could get Betty and Veronica to put their differences (in hair colour?) aside.

And Cheryl was also the first girl to go topless at the Riverdale beach.

But the bigger question remains: When will Jughead come out of the closet?

Someone other than me remembers [Manimal]!
A game for that would be interesting...instead of standard interaction icons, you'd have a ton of animals to change to. And every change would require the pulsating hand cutscene! I still do that sometimes, and people think I'm crazy for that!

Thank God! I'm not alone! For years, I've almost convinced myself that show was some sort of fever dream and that explained why only I remembered it.

Please tell me you remember Voyagers. Two people time traveling thanks to some sort of magic pocket watch.

And to contribute another idea to this thread, how about a sensual and highly erotic AGS game set in the Murder, She Wrote universe? Sort of like Gabriel Knight meets Riana Rouge with some epsom salts and support hosiery thrown in.

It would be HOT!

- Ponch

This 3D Realms thing is turning out to be more fun than the game was probably going to have been. Sometimes, it's better to have the memories than it is to have the sequel.

Case in point: Blood II. Whew, what a stinky sequel to one of the most colorful shooters I had ever played. Makes me glad that Shogo II never arrived.

- Ponch

Knight Rider. Tales of the Gold Monkey. Quantum Leap. And a very dark, sinister take on Manimal.