Alive since 2004
mbotrell.com has done a great job of seeing who on the rosters of RBI Baseball, Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl are still active and playing professionally.
It’s still amazing to see Rodger Clemens still pitching.
And for those of you who havn’t seen it yet: I present the 10th inning of the 1986 World Series – as recreated in RBI Baseball by a dedicated fan.
It’s a topic that comes up from time to time out there as game development costs contiunue to rise – Why are there no indie video games?.
Good question. With the barrier to entry in the market being so high, the “little guy” has to be all that much better or have deep pockets to be even able to compete! I”ve always been a fan of games made by the small teams, or by just one guy who spent his savings bringing out something of worth. I’ve seen that independant gaming hasn’t died on the PC platform, thanks in no small part to the power of word of mouth on the internet.
Games like Mount and Blade, developed by a couple in Eastern Europe, have built up a small following and brought enough income to the authors to continue to work on and improve their impressive title. Little freeware gems like Cave Story (aka. Doukutsu Monogatari) or Lyle in Cube Sector have also had a small impact in gamers playspace. On a much bigger scale Galactic Civilizations II by independant developer Stardock has seen wide distrobution and mainstream press praise.
On the console side of things, indie developers have had a much harder time until recently. One of the successes from the last generation of consoles was Alien Hominid. A self funded 2D scrolling game that evolved from a simple flash game, and they were able to market it and get it picked up by a publisher to be released on the Playstation 2, Gamecube and Gameboy Advance.
With the “next” generation of consoles on the way, with greater connectivity to the internet, and their own little marketplaces for buying new content the possibility of indie game developers having success has already happened. Take Geometry Wars for the XBOX 360. It’s not in the stores, and can only be downloaded from their XBOX Live Marketplace. For a good many months it was the most played XBOX 360 game. Continued support for small developers by Microsoft and hopefully it’s competition (Nintendo and Sony) could mean that the “little” guy has a chance to have his game seen and make a profit outside the normal retail chain and outside the huge budgets required to make an entry into that world.
Over on goodhodgkins, the writer has collected songs from the blogosphere (stupid word) that have a live version that sounds better than the studio version. One fun bit of data, one of the songs he notes is Radiohead’s Like Spinning Plates, where he finds the live performance much better. The performance he speaks of was the September 11th, 2001 performance in Berlin, where my friend Kevin and I were there for the very emotionaly charged show.
Word of advice though – If it’s a day of a huge national disaster, and it’s also your girlfriends birthday – Call her.
I was looking around the net as usuall, but ended up finding this post on Games and Learning. The author hits his point right on the head. Educational games tend to suck. They beat you over the head with what they are trying to teach you. Math games are some of the worst, but I remember reading and geography games as well.
Thinking back to my childhood and educational games that I’ve played, Oregon Trail stands out as a game that accomplished what it was trying to do. Make learning about how hard it was to cross the country in a wagon train, while having fun.
I think as my son grows I want to make his learning much like this as well. Take things that are normally long lists or excercises in memorization, and create a way that he just knows the answer instead of trying to recall his list in his head. Make his geography and history fun, but also second nature. I think this will be a good challenge for my wife and I as we look to educate him.
I’ve been tracking the information about Tetris DS, the new re-imagining of Tetris for the Nintendo DS, for a while now. I’ve been looking forward to busting out a few lines against the world in the Wi-Fi mode, but was also interested in how the single player modes would work as well. The plethora of Tetris DS screenshots on the British Gaming Blog has answered many of these questions. Can’t wait till the end of March.
Studio Pixel has been working on a new game to follow up the incredible Doukutsu Monogatari, also known as Cave Story.
I’ve waxed poetic on Cave Story before, but 4 Color Rebellion has a great collection of links on Pixel’s new game, which looks to be a top down scrolling shooter. Also linked there is a translation of Pixel’s workblog so you can keep up with his progress on the new game.
Well it looks like just hours after I write about Measure Map they go and get themselves aquired by Google.
I think in the end this will be a good thing for Measure Map, and we’ll see what happens to the feature set as it grows and becomes a more fully featured program. Google seems to be pretty good at picking up properties that have good value if the havn’t already cooked them up in the Google Labs yet.
Cinder Inc. has very little traffic, but I have always liked to keep on top of how many people came by, and how they got here. It’s always interesting to see what search terms brought people by, where they come from, which pages they saw and even the technology they used to visit. I used to use the kludgy stats system of my webhost, 1 and 1. It’s been a great webhosting service, but their stats system left something to be desired, was slow and never really gave me all the information I needed.
Enter Measure Map. It’s in a semi-closed beta right now, as they are still adding features, but you can sign up for an invitation and recieve it in due time. It took me a month or two before I recieved mine, but it was well worth the wait.
In short, Measure Map, sets up in minutes and lets you see your website statistics quickly and easily. It answered all of my needs in terms of how people got to Cinder Inc and what they saw when they got there. It’s fast, easily navigated (thank you!) and been a breeze to work with. I can’t wait to see what else they add.
As pointed out on Insert Credit’s forums, Lyle in Cube Sector is like Super Mario Brothers 2 mixed with Metroid. A fun retro styled game, with lots of block picking up and throwing action mixed with exploring and gaining new block related powers. It plays well, and is worth a looksie… Check out Lyle in Cube Sector.
