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Thursday, October 20, 2005

Short Bits

Just to prove I'm not as Thompson-fixated as the last few posts appear. It's just that the man's insanity has grown to levels where it has it's own gravity. He's like train wreck you simply must watch.

But, I am up to other stuff.

I tried the King Kong Demo last night on the CheapBox. It played at 800x600, but the framerate during Jack's first person portion was pretty choppy. Hard on the eyes choppy. I'm not sure why, there wasn't enough eye candy to justify it. I guess they should have licensed the Unreal engine like every other Joe on the block.

I see what they're trying to do, integrating story and game elements. I think it's a step in the right direction. Sadly, I didn't think it was very fun. Running from a T-Rex seems interesting, but it mostly just came down running from one rock to the other. The Kong section, which is one part platform and one part mindless brawler, simpled bored me. Click click click click click click ..... and so on.

I tried to download the Doom RPG for my phone but was denied. It apparently doesn't run on the Nokia 6230, though I have no idea why not.

Finally, I put in a conversation routine into my AJAX powered text adventure engine last night. Very basic, but should be workable for at least this first game. I think I'm just down to a proper inventory handler. I mean, that's a bit reaching because the parser really sucks right now. For instance, you couldn't use "talk to Maid Hurley" or "speak with the Maid" or natural variants like that. If you don't say "talk maidhurley", you get a blank stare. However, it's flexibe enough that I can smooth out all various potential input once I have some real content down ... and it will be easier to predict those inputs with real content. My hope is to start actually writing the real story this weekend. I think it will be three acts covering about twenty years (not all twenty obviously), which one the player assumes a different character. It's also possible I won't get all of that done for Halloween though.

2 comments:

Brinstar said...

Are you happy with the 6230? I lost my phone on the train the other day, and I'm in the market for a new one. I'm considering the 6230i.

Josh said...

I'm very happy with it. I took me a while to get a new phone, and the 6230 is essentially an updated version of my old Nokia. Good quality, handy design.

I have a problem w/ Cingular accessing the Net on it, but I don't really miss it. Also, it's mysteriously bricked on me a couple of times ... causing a needed reboot via battery removal. But that's been very rare.

The camera is also a bit weak. It only handles pics up close, but I think that's probably true of any small lens phone.

Small cons though. I can safely recommend. To me, the biggest boon is the mp3 player. I shoved a 1GB MMC loaded with music and got an headphone adaptor (you might remember the old "Magic China" post) off of eBay. Works like a dream. Not terribly fancy, but better than a Shuffle.

If you got more specific q's, feel free to catch me on AIM and fire away.