This blog is getting old. It’s getting very old. I can honestly say I never even imagined it would stay alive for closing in on six years. I’m amazed and happy about it. However, my life has changed in the past five years, so I think it’s time for my blog to change as well.Continue reading

Road Redemption Logo

I really don’t write these type of posts, but I just have to share this with someone. I just saw a link on reddit to a Kickstarter for the game Road Redemption. Apparently, it’s heavily inspired by the Road Rush series, which I barely touched on back in the day, so there really isn’t any nostalgia at play here.

I don’t know why, but watching the video made me giddy, happy, excited, basically everything positive I associate with games. It looks awesome and fun and I want it now.

Road Redemption - Kill

My first thought? “That looks like it’s going to hurt.”. Seconds later? YES! IT DID HURT!

I’m sorry, this really isn’t a meaningful article, but I had to share Road Redemption with someone. The fact that I was never a fan of Road Rash should say something.

My only reservation? It says real time, but it looks staged. If the game can actually create moments like those in the video during gameplay, that’s amazing. If not, then a lot of my interest will go away.

Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Cover, Box Art

My plan was to take my Gothic save with me over the weekend, so I could play it on my laptop. I copied it to my flash drive, but I left my flash drive plugged into my primary PC in Varaždin, so that plan is out of the picture. I thought about my options and then realized I have a challenge that’s sort of in progress, but I haven’t touched it in months – my Legend of Zelda challenge. Because of this, I got a Link’s Awakening rom and loaded up VisualBoyAdvance. Before I get to that, though, let me tell you a story or two.

Challenge Part 3, Link’s Awakening

Link’s Awakening is a Legend of Zelda game I actually played as a kid. As I already wrote on this blog, early gaming in Croatia was nowhere near the level of the West. We were always a generation or more behind the modern world when it comes to consoles and games and even then, we mostly bought pirated software and hardware due to a multitude of reasons.

So with all that in mind, how did I get my hands on an actual GameBoy and an actual game? I didn’t. I had a cousin who did.

Cousin #1, Waterworld and Link’s Awakening

Somehow, my cousin got his hands on an actual GameBoy and owned two games with it – Waterworld and Link’s Awakening. Both were in German and both were a bit advanced for us. At that time, Tetris and simple LED games were about the only thing we experienced as gamers, so an actual adventure game with puzzles, dialogue, equipment and a save option. All of those things confused the hell out of us.

Zelda - Link's Awakening DX - Title

I decided to go with the DX Color version. It’s a straight graphical upgrade with nothing lost.

Because of that, I’m embarrassed to say, I considered Waterworld to be the better game. I considered it, but I still ended up itching to play Link’s Awakening more often. I guess good games are good no matter what you think. In hindsight, I probably annoyed the hell out of my cousin because I kept hanging out at his place. I was the annoying kid obsessed with games, and he was the cool kid who only plays to waste some time every now and then. I guess gaming was my hobby before I even owned a proper console of my own.

I remember an instance where we somehow managed to delete a saved game and then couldn’t understand why Link didn’t have a sword anymore. We actually looked at the manual, not understanding any of it and then tried to create two new save files, named Ganon and Zelda, because we thought that’s what we saw on the screenshots in the booklet, hoping that would somehow give as the sword. Yes, we actually though Zelda was the name of the character we controlled.

I remember how proud I was when I finally figured out where to get the sword on a fresh save. Even then, neither of us understood the concept of saving the game and continuing later. The game we played before that just didn’t have that feature.

Cousin #2 and just Link’s Awakening

I also remember my cousin’s GameBoy somehow just disappeared one day. I never found out where it went, but that was it for Link’s Awakening for a while. My cousin then got an actual Nintendo Entertainment System, with Super Mario, Wild Gunman, Duck Hunt and a few more games, but The Legend of Zelda was gone and we went back to regular, simple games, without dialogue or saved progress.

Zelda - Link's Awakening DX - Intro

The game actually looks really nice, even on the big screen, thanks to a great style and VBA’s smoothing.

About a year later, another cousin, this one some 20 years older than me, also got his hands on a GameBoy and a copy of Link’s Awakening. This time, I managed to figure out you can save your game and continue later and I figured out the concept of equipment. I remember getting to the point where I could jump, lift rocks and even swim, so from what I know now, it’s might be that I was about half done with the game, but I never managed to complete it. My cousin only lent me the GameBoy for a few days and once the third set of batteries was dry, so was my battery fund, so that was it.

In any case, Link’s Awakening was the only Zelda game that I played when it was current and probably the only video game before the PlayStation was out that I played when it was current. Sure, I talked about owning a Genesis, but even that, as ahead of this region as it was, was still nearly a generation behind. It’s a nice memory to have.

Over the last few days, I finally forced myself to start “properly” working on a game of my own.  I say “properly” because I have no idea what that actually means in this context.

In any case, I’m making a game and I’ll try to finish it. It’s not going to be amazing and it certainly isn’t going to be very complex, but it will be mine and I’ll learn a lot by doing it.

Anyway, if you’d like to follow the progress (which will be very slow) and learn as I’m learning, or you just like to point out people’s mistakes, which for me is also learning, feel free to follow my bitbucket repository. There’s almost nothing there now, but things will get better, I promise. I’m writing it in MonoGame, which is the new and amazing open version of the now abandoned XNA framework.

Just in case it isn’t clear, I’m writing this article to give myself the illusion of accountability.

Oh, by the way, here’s what it looks like right now:

Tanked Snapshot 7.2.2013.

Impressive!

Amazing, right!?

As I previously said, I’ve recently started working my very first job. It´s pretty good. The atmosphere is nice, there isn’t much stress, and I’m familiar with the tools and the environment I’m working in, so there’s no anxiety about me not being able to do my part. The money isn’t huge, but my cost of living is extremely low, so most of it will be left for me to spend however I please.

The huge amount of free time I had is now gone, though. I wake up at six in the morning and I’m back home at around 16:00. I’m rarely ready to play anything before five in the afternoon. That´s still quite a lot of time available to play, but there´s also other things I want to do. Basically, pretty soon, money won’t be an issue with my hobby, but time will be.

That being said, my backlog library is huge, and a lot of those games are in it simply because they were bundled with something I actually wanted to play, they were dirt cheap, free, or I just thought they would be more fun to play.

This is why I feel a change in philosophy is in order. From now on, the goal of completing every game in my backlog is put on low priority. First and foremost, I’ll be playing games I know or really hope I’ll enjoy. That means I’ll also be buying new ones if the opportunity comes and I won’t be wasting too much time on games I´m not truly enjoying.

Of course, if I run out of those, I’ll be going back to my backlog, but that won’t happen too often. The blog will keep going, of course. It´s just that the games I’ll be playing will have more in common.

 A Touch of Personal

Since I wrote about how great Sonic Generations is, I should also probably write about how it relates to me. It might even explain why I find it so great.

I already said something about gaming in the Balkans. You see, out here, actual original consoles like the SNES or the Genesis were rare, extremely so. Most people could not afford one, so instead, we were buying last generation clones like the SuperCOM, which looked like an SNES, but actually was an NES clone that used weird, but cheap, yellow cartridges. There was also a version that used the original NES cartridges, but those were 2-3 times more expensive than the yellow ones.

SuperCOM Pirate Console

The console of my childhood. Cheap, sturdy and unknown. It’s an NES, don’t let it fool you.

Anyway, I got lucky and got my hands on an actual Sega Mega Drive II, or Genesis for you US folks. It was way out of my price range, but I wasn’t the one paying for it so I didn’t mind. Compared to a clone of the NES, and let me remind you – an actual SNES was extremely rare, this was future technology. Advanced graphics, advanced gameplay, advanced sound. Suffice to say, even though I only ever had one 6 in 1 cartridge, I was the friend of everyone.

Sega Mega Drive, Genesis - 6 in 1 Cartridge

The only Genesis cartridge I ever owned. Columns, Super Monaco GP, Streets of Rage, Revenge of Shinobi, Sega Soccer and Sonic.

The 6 in 1 cartridge contained Columns, Sega Soccer, Super Monaco GP, Revenge of Shinobi, Streets of Rage and last but not least, Sonic the Hedgehog. So while everyone around me was getting familiar with the first Super Mario game, I was enjoying the company of an extremely fast blue hedgehog. I played this game daily, never got too far with it, but loved every moment.

My experience with Sega was short-lived, though. Pretty soon, the antenna cable broke and I couldn’t get a replacement anywhere. Soldering was out of the question to, because the material was extremely brittle. All in all, I owned the console a bit over a year, but it was one of the most memorable experiences I had. Soon after that, I got my own NES clone, which was great to, and a couple of years later, I god a PlayStation and a PC soon after. I never forgot my SEGA, though. I actually still have it stored somewhere.

Yellow Pirate Cart

These yellow NES pirate carts used to cost me about 5 bucks. I never got any mainstream game such as this one.

Since then, I discovered emulation, so I could return to my childhood through that. I also discovered the sequels to Sonic, which, although most of them were solid, got more and more different to the original. But Sonic Generations changed that. It took the old model, almost unchanged, and gave it a fresh new look. This is why I love the game so much – it gives me my childhood experience, but with modern graphics. The atmosphere is there, and the feel is there, and that’s all that matters.

Where I am in Sonic Generations?

Up to now, I finished all the levels, finished all the challenges and got all the red star rings on the first few levels. I also managed to snag a lot of the achievements, though some of the hard ones are still locked. Sadly, though, it’s time for a forced break from it. My gamepad, which served me well for 6 years, started acting up. It locks up and causes the game to crash often, and when it doesn’t, it makes Sonic strafe to the left almost constantly. Basically, the game is unplayable for me now. I hope to get a replacement soon, but I’m thinking about getting the official X360 gamepad, so I need to save up some money first.

For now, on to other games.

 

Indie Royale seems to be a new project to promote developers and get people hooked on some very nice (and potentially cheap games. Right now, they are selling a bundle of 3 games that I know are very good, and a fourth one that I haven’t herd of yet, but seems like a nice, atmospheric old school point and click adventure. You get both Steam and Desura keys for the games that support the service. Be sure to check them out!

Sanctum is one of the games I’ve been meaning to get because the idea seems very fun to me. It’s a genre mix of a first person shooter and a tower defense game, with pretty nice graphics and, what I’m hoping, some fun game play. This one is Steam only.

A.R.E.S is a 2D metroidvania game who’s graphics slightly remind me of one of the Megaman games that got released on the PC in the last decade. Actually, looking at the videos, it does seem more like Megaman than pure metroidvania. This one is both on Steam and Desura.

Nimbus is a nice physics puzzle game where you control a flying craft in a 2D environment, trying to use various  boosters in order to get enough lift for reaching the goal. Both Steam and Desura for this one.

Gemini Rue seems to be the adventure game that I’m not familiar with. From what I can tell, it looks like it could be very nice. Think one of the old LucasArts games. Desura only.

Also, be sure to check them in a few weeks, or sign up for the newsletter. They plan on releasing more bundles, and if they are half as good as this one, you’re gonna want to check them out.

Indie Royale – The Launch Bundle

Cardinal Quest For Free

Today, you can get a fun little roguelike game called Cardinal Quest for free, if you use the coupon code one of the developers tweeted. You go to the purchase site, type in the code, put in your info and get the download links. The download is a 15MB .zip file with the game in it. It’s a fun deal, right? I mean, every logical atom in my brain says it’s a deal. I got a game for free which I would have to pay a few bucks for otherwise.

Pirate PC

Pictured: Piracy was a cultural thing in Croatia.

Piracy Broke My Brain

My pirate brain disagrees, though. Yeah, it’s free. But it would have been just as free had I pirated it. I wouldn’t officially own it, but what do I really own now? All I got was the executable and the receipt, nothing else. On the other hand, when I bought Avadon the other day, I got the game and the receipt to, but I also got some other stuff. I got the achievements on steam. I got it added to my Steam account so all my friends can see I own and play it. Some of you might find this funny, but as someone who has pirated for most of his life, just owning something on paper doesn’t mean anything. This is why it was easy for me to pirate. I get the same experience as everyone else, with no investment needed.

A pirate needs a reason to pay for a game, and added bonus on top of the stuff he can get for free. This is why even hardcore pirates sometimes buy a game or two. Maybe it has really good multiplayer, or it’s online only, or maybe it has fun account bound achievements which increase the gameplay value. Heck, even a nice box with a detailed manual full of game lore can be motivation enough. Any of those things increase the joy of buying a new game. This “discount”, on the other hand, brought no joy to my pirate brain. I will probably have some fun with the game, and I am very grateful to the developers, but my base “urges” aren’t something I control here. It’s just how it is, because I’m still a pirate at heart.

It’s Hard to Wrap Your Head Around That

So what am I trying to say? I don’t know, really, probably nothing. I’m just trying to explain how an (ex-)pirate like me thinks. Maybe a developer/publisher somewhere will read this and devise a new strategy of influencing people to buy the game. This probably won’t happen, but I can dream, right? Steam is doing a pretty good job, though.

The sense of community and the achievements it brings to games is actually pushing people in my area of the world to pay for something they never even considered paying for before. Notch did a good job with Minecraft to. Yeah, 99% of the game can be experienced without a legit copy, but an online account with instant updates and a promise of extra features in the future has convinced me and plenty of my friends to pay.

So, once again, thanks, Ido Yehieli, for making your game free for today. I will greatly enjoy it. Sorry my pirate brain isn’t grateful, but be assured that my reasonable side is.

Links

Well, kind off. After a lot of consideration, I decided to stop pirating PC games, or at least, to try and do that for a while. My lifelong (and probably unreachable) dream was to have a gamedev career, so this is the main reason I’m making this decision. It will affect this dream in two ways.

First of all, I want to make money from making games. 95% of the things I pirated did not affect anyone’s profit – I would not have bought those games anyway. However, that still leaves those 5 percent. Also, since I can’t afford more than one or two AAA titles a year, most of my purchases will be helping indie developers, which is what I want to be at one point.

Piracy Joke

This is actually true where I live.

Secondly, this means less games and less time spent playing them. This is also a good thing, because most of that time is time wasted. Honestly, very few of the games I play actually are really good. Most of them are timewasters that I play for lack of alternative. From now on, I will try and only stick to really good games that deserve my attention.

I’m not completely going away from piracy, though. I’m just creating a set of rules I will follow:

  1. No pirating PC games, other than some exceptions.
  2. Games I own on other platforms are an exception.
  3. Really old PC games (nineties or older) are an exception, unless I get something special from buying them.
  4. I already bought a DS and a PSP. Had I made this decision earlier, I would not have bought those consoles because I can’t afford the games. This is why I will keep playing those.
  5. Emulating old consoles is an exception.

These rules will easily reduce the amount of pirated content I consume by over 90%. Once I finish college and get a job, I will consider eliminating the remaining 10%, but for now, this is not a reasonable goal. Wish me luck!