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July, 2007

  1. Video Games : My Shareware Game of the Month is…

    July 17, 2007 by Collin

    Jets’n'Guns Gold : Home Page

    It’s available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

    Jets’n'Guns is a side-scrolling shooter. If you don’t know what that is, watch the video below to get an idea.

    Normally I’m not that big a fan of shooters. With few exceptions, I feel the frustration of playing that kind of game far outweighs the enjoyment it offers. Jets’n'Guns Gold is one of those exceptions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still frustrating as all Hell. In fact, it may be the most frustrating shooter I’ve continued to play after an hour. It’s fun enough that that’s okay.

    What I feel it does right:

    • There aren’t “lives.” You have one ship and it’s “health” is displayed in a gage at the bottom left. When you die it’s “mission failed.” …however. This is where they do it right in my opinion. You can try again with a press of the spacebar, so you aren’t limited to three, five, or 10 lives. Like many other shooters. If you’ve reached a checkpoint you will continue from that checkpoint. If your ship just isn’t configured right for the mission you are on, you’re better off hitting ‘escape,’ which takes me to the next thing they did right.
    • Things you buy for your ship – guns, missiles, bombs, even the ship itself – don’t lose value. That means if you buy an autotrack minigun for 35,000, pay 65,000 to upgrade it two levels and then decide you would rather try something else, you can sell it and get back every dime you spent on it. A lot of other games I’ve played either lock you into your purchase decisions, or they penalize you by only allowing you to sell your equipment back at a fraction of what you paid for it. Many, if not all, RPGs follow that “real economy” model, but I feel it’s stupid for a shooter to, particularly if you are limited in the money that you can earn. More on that soon.
    • The visual style is excellent. I love the look of this game. And it controls well.
    • Smacking into a wall won’t necessarily destroy your ship, although it will damage it.

    What I’m not that keen on:

    • It’s sometimes hard to tell what you can pass through safely and what will mess you up.
    • I’m stuck on the fifth level. I’ve reorganized my equipment six times trying to find a combination that will give me the edge. I’ve learned the patterns of the enemies that I’m facing and they still destroy me. I feel the game could really use the ability to replay earlier missions, even if you only earn 1/10th the amount of money as you did the first time through. I could probably turn down the difficulty, and I probably will end up doing that if I fail 20 more times, but I would like to have an alternative that doesn’t feel so wussied.

    And that’s about it. I really love this game. I also feel it’s a no-brainer to buy the gold version over the original version, even though it’s $10 more. Rather than rewrite all of what you get for that $10, I’ll just copy and paste what they say at the website:

    • Game resolution raised to 800×600! More space! More enemies on the screen! More items on the list in the shops making everything more comfortable.
    • Length of the game is DOUBLED! The campaign contains 21 NEW LEVELS NOW!
    • 7 new customizable ships! You will have at your disposal up to 10 warbirds in total! You will have an opportunity to equip and fly anything from jet pack to captured zeppelin!
    • 17 new weapons! Vast arsenal of the original JnG was widened even more! Try new stuff varying from crazy guns never seen in a shooter game to ultimate devastators, which will turn your screen into hell!
    • 70 new enemies! In GOLD EDITION you will face more than 270 unique enemies, including 16 terrible bosses!
    • Secret levels, items and ships! There’s more to explore in the new version. Try to find some hidden guns or ships!
    • Briefing texts replaced with comics screens!
    • New music from your favorite band! The game soundtrack was expanded with 6 new tracks!
    • Medals and ranks! Get some decoration for your heroic deeds! Make generals to envy your collection of medals!
    • and much more…

    Give it a shot. See what you think.

    —

    Also, it seems that I have trouble accessing Blogger to post these days, so if you find yourself itching to see what I’ll be posting in the evening, check out my Vox blog: http://fizzleandpop.vox.com/It’ll usually update well in advance of this site.

    Category Adrift | Tags: | 3 Comments

  2. Random Observation : Oh that wonderful feeling.

    July 13, 2007 by Collin

    (This may double post because I tried to email post, but I was informed that the email would be delayed until sometime Saturday(

    That feeling you get when you’re finally able to work free a wee piece of something that’s been stuck between your teeth for some time. For me it’s usually that shell/skin thing that you’ll find in popcorn. Like a little razor blade buried in an apple made of popcorn, it hides and waits for the time when it can wedge itself between my teeth and cause me no end of annoyance throughout a movie that I would have paid good money to see if I didn’t have a pass. It wouldn’t be so bad if, at the end of the movie as the credits rolled, they would spontaneously leap free from my teeth so I could spit them out. But no. Those little fuckers have been known to bug me for days. I never seem to have a toothpick handy, so I try my fingernails, but it’s usually too hard to find the spot with a finger. My tongue always seems to know the spot though. So I give up on my fingernail and probe away with my tongue, trying to find that sweet spot that’ll lever that sucker loose. I wedge and wiggle until eventually I’m rewarded with that wonderful feeling. You regular flossers are really missing out.

    A piggy-back pondering: Do they sell popcorn at adult movie theaters? You know, places like where Paul Ruebens met his downfall. I’ve honestly never been in one, but if they do it’s not one of the selling points on the marquee: “Hot Lesbo Action! XXX Threesomes! Popcorn!” It would be great if they did though. That way the patrons could have something to throw at the screen during the boring periods of “plot development,” and it might help absorb “spills” between the aisles.

    Have a great weekend.

    Category Adrift | Tags: | 3 Comments

  3. Illustration Friday : “Geeky”

    July 12, 2007 by Collin

    For now, this is going to be where I post during the day. For some reason I’m having trouble connecting to Blogger. When I can, I’ll repost this at my normal Fizzle and Pop blog.

    So, geeky.

    Here’s my last minute geeky.

    Poorly done, but then this is also the first thing I’ve drawn in over a month. I’ve just been terribly uninspired lately. Anytime I try to draw anything it feels horrible. It was a struggle to even get this done. But there you go. Sometimes it’s just that way.

    Category Projects | Tags: | 2 Comments

  4. Update : I have a better idea where my hits are coming from.

    July 11, 2007 by Collin

    Thanks to “Rule the Web”, I’ve installed a better stat tracker than what I was using. It’s called StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) and you can see it, and my stats, if you scroll down my sidebar until you see its icon. Don’t click on the icon for the stats, however. Click on “view my stats”. Anyhow, this is quite an impressive tracker. With it I’ve been able to determine that 217 of the last 488 visitors stayed for less than 5 seconds. 100 of those visitors hit my December, 2005 archive page. Damn near all of them came by way of a google image search. What image? Near as I can figure, this image:

    It’s the drawing I did of GIR from Invader Zim for Heather ages ago. Those of you unfamiliar with Invader Zim or GIR, I’m sure there’s a Wikipedia entry for it.

    Funny thing; the image was hosted at Flickr, however it was one of the things I purged in order to fix my NIPSA (Not in public search area) status last year. Yet it’s still there if you look at that archive page, as are several others that I cleared out. Some other things are gone. Very strange. Well, now it’s hosted back at SmugMug and it’s not just buried deep in the archive anymore. It’ll be interesting to see if the hits shift.

    Time to eat my lunch. Brick microwave oven pizza. Do I live the high life or what?

    Category Adrift | Tags: | 1 Comment

  5. Update : It’s Windy here in Colorado Springs.

    July 10, 2007 by Collin

    And there are changes in it. The wind, that is. The first of which is changing my site’s feed over to feedburner.com. There’s a button at the top left of the page below my bio that you can use to subscribe. Much like my dad and DVD players, I’ve thought the idea of feeds was nifty but a bit too newfangled for me. On the old blogger I had set up a feed button, but it was just something I put there. I had no solid idea what it did, how it worked or why I’d want to take advantage of feeds myself. I’m older than I thought. Where’s my Metamucil, galdarnit? No. Seriously. I think I might need to start taking it before it’s too fucking late. That and other old people preservatives.

    Yesterday a book I’d ordered arrived from Amazon:

    If you click the cover it’ll take you to the home site of the book where you can get more of an idea what you’ll find inside. Alternatively, here’s a direct link to the Amazon page. When I bought it last week the price was $8.95, down from $14.95. Now I see the price has risen to $10.17. Odd, that. I wonder if it’s slowly rising to full price? It just came out on June 12th, so the discount might be a temporary thing.

    I really cannot recommend getting this book enough. I’m only 45 pages in and I’ve already learned quite a lot. Like about feeds. How they work, why they’re important, how to set them up, a good aggregator to use (if you’re on a Mac, the author recommends Shrook, for Windows users: FeedDemon), etc. I’m positive I now know more about feeds than my dad knows about DVD players. Of course, feeds aren’t all this book is about. You can check out the table of contents if you go to the Amazon link and click “Search inside this book” (top left, under the picture).

    Something else covered in the book in the section about blogs was to write about what you enjoy. Direct quote: “The cardinal rule of blogging is to write about things that fascinate you.” Lately I haven’t been doing that. Heck, I’ve barely been posting at all since 2005. This is partly due to the fact that I have no idea what the people who come by my site are looking for. So, rather than try to figure it out anymore – or even worry about it – I’m just going to post something every day. Something I enjoy. If you enjoy it as well, fantastic! If not, come back tomorrow. Unless it’s Friday or Saturday; I won’t likely be posting then.

    Another change is going to work in conjunction with feeds and writing about what I enjoy. I’m going to develop one-to-two-word categories that each post is going to fall within, and it’s going to lead the title for the post. So, if you’ve subscribed to the feed for my site and you see the post title for that day is “Games : What I’m obsessed with today.” and you have no interest in games, you can skip it. If it’s “Video Tutorial : Vector vs. Raster in Photoshop, why Vectors kick ASS!” and that’s more up your alley, you’ll be able to read/view the entire thing in your feed reader without ever having to stop by the site. But by all means, if you have a comment that you would like to leave after reading any of the posts in your reader, stop by.

    Yet another, more distant goal, is to set up an actual, honest to Cthulhu web site where I can doooooo things. What things? Shiny things. I need to find out if the domain I registered through Yahoo (www.fizzleandpop.com) is tied to Yahoo, or if I can use it at another web hosting service. I’m considering getting an account at laughingsquid.net. I’d possibly be willing to host through Yahoo, however every hosting package I see that they offer requires building the site through their templates and I want my site to be all custom, baby. You see, for my job we’re having to learn web design pretty much on our own. It’s slow going; at least it has been for me. So if I have my own site upon which I could inflict my developing “mad dope skillz”, it might help speed the learning process and maintain my motivation. Having my own site would also mean I could make things available that I currently can’t, like Photoshop Actions, Brushes and Shapes, or working PSDs that I use in video tutorials so that you all can play along. Stuff like that. It’s what I really want to do and I think it’ll be fun. I hope you guys will enjoy it too.

    That’s it for today. See you tomorrow.

    Category Adrift | Tags: | 3 Comments

  6. More Septavo™ stuff

    July 3, 2007 by Collin

    I’ve been gradually working my way through the 1000 tangram puzzles in Septavo. I’m sure if I committed myself I could have been done by now. However until there’s a puzzle editor I’m really not in that big of a hurry. That said, I decided to see how many puzzles I could do in 7 minutes and film myself doing them. Just for the heck of it.

    It was a bit of a gamble, because every once in a while there will be a puzzle that I just don’t suss very quickly, and if I hit one of those I would be screwed. Luckily the one that I was most wrong about on this run was the very last one.

    If you don’t feel like watching the movie, the final tally was 16 complete and one incomplete. If I counted right.

    Here are my stats so far:

    Category Adrift | Tags: | 1 Comment

  7. Drive-by near the drive-thru

    July 3, 2007 by Collin

    I stopped on the way in this morning to get a breakfast burrito at the LaCasita near my work and on the way out of the parking lot I see a woman in an old 80′s Cadillac driving toward me. As we get closer she sticks her head and arm out the window and starts waving to me to get my attention. She’s smiling so I think, “Do I know you?” We stop side-by-side and I roll down my window. She says, “Do you have any money that you can give me?”

    …?

    A drive-by panhandler.

    “No. Sorry,” I shake my head and drive on wondering if that ever works. Who on earth drives around looking for free money? I guess she does. Good luck with that, although you might want to switch to a bicycle so you don’t waste so much gas.

    Have a great 4th of July tomorrow, my American readers. As for my foreign readers, have a great Hump Day.

    Category Adrift | Tags: | 3 Comments

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