Batty Junior - Demo 1

Now that Christmas is over and the new year is nearly upon us, 'tis time to release a non-seasonal demo of Batty Junior.

"What is different from the last version?" I hear you ask. Quite a bit. Most of the power-ups are now in place, in fact only two things are missing from the single-player game - the gun power-up and the gravity distort.



I should be uploading this later on today (once I get home in fact). The Windows (DirectX and OpenGL) and MacOSX versions are ready to go, so I'll just have to get the Linux one ready.

Last shopping day before. . . .

Well, today is the last shopping day before the most important event of the year:

MY BIRTHDAY!

Yes, I'm hitting the big 34 tomorrow, and am going to have to adjust my "that's still young" counter up another notch. This is something that most of us seem to do. Young is what you are, old is your parents, children is everyone more than five years younger than you.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the subject in hand (buy stuff, buy stuff, buy stuff, buy EXPENSIVE stuff). Sorry, don't know where that came from (PayPay accepted). Aaaargh!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to one and all.

With a "ho, ho, ho" and a "jingle all the way" into the bargain!

Star Trek: Of Gods and Men released

After spending time in development hell, episode 1 of Star Trek: Of Gods and Men has been released. Worth your time? Read on to find out.



For a dead series (or at least one on life-support) there has been a lot of new Trek out lately, much of it featuring actors from the original series. I've blogged on Star Trek: New Voyages before now which is the pro-am series that sets the standard, and since the guys at New Voyages have been involved with this new mini-series hopes have been high that it would be just as good, if not better.

A lot of professional actors are involved this time round as well as some guests from New Voyages and all of them give good performances, especially Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig reprising their roles of Uhura and Chekov. James Cawley as Commander Peter Kirk is excellent in his cameo appearance.

The special effect are good, the plot is intriguing, the sound effects (provided by the incomparable Ralph Miller) are excellent and the acting is passable at worst, and excellent at best.

The camera work owes more to modern series such as Battlestar Galactica and Firefly than to Trek, but certainly doesn't detract from the story.

This first episode certainly sets things up nicely for the remainder of the series, which are due "soon". I know I'll be looking forward to it.

Apples and Lyons

So apparently Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons has been targetted by Apple's lawyers, presumably in a vain attempt to get him to shut the heck up.

I know that this is the season of good will to all men, so presumably that should include our Mr Lyons but I've got to say that I'm really not surprised that Apple have had enough of him, only that it took this long. I was sick of the joke after the first couple of weeks.

One thing that has amused me is his surprise that the EFF refused to represent him, allegedly because of some of the critical things he's said about them. Would they be Freetards or Linuxtards Dan?

I've got to admit that I'm still not sure if this is just a publicity stunt by our Dan or if Apple genuinely wants to close his blog. According to Dan they've offered him half a million dollars for it (which he has so far turned down).

Well, it's time to come clean. After my negative posts on the iPhone, Apple have been in touch with me too, and have made an offer based on the amount that I've annoyed them, coupled with my net worth. What I'm going to do with £2.75 and a packet of crisps remains to be seen.

Update: Well, it looks like I was right - Dan L. was living up to the "Fake" part of "Fake Steve" and the whole buyout / legal action thing was a hoax. Can you say Lyons without Lie? I don't think so.

What would be amusing now would be if Apple actually did sue him for slander ;-)

The Return of BBC iPlayer

I blogged earlier on about the problems with BBC's iPlayer software. Apart from trying to sound cool by sticking an i at the start of the softwares name, the main problem with the player was that it was only available for Windows users thanks to their use of Microsofts own DRM solution.

After a farcical display by the BBC in which they claimed that there were hardly any Linux users using their site, then that there were lots of Linux users, Auntie Beeb announced that there would be a flash based player coming out that Linux and Mac users would be able to use to view their programs. Hooray!

Get used to this error - you'll be seeing a lot of it

So now we can all view the BBC's catch up service right? Well, not quite. Yes, you can watch it, but whether you'll actually get to the end of the program in a single viewing is anyones guess.

I've tried this from a couple of locations, using Konqueror, Firefox, and finally IE on Windows from a different location and still get the same errors. This is a shame because if the damn thing was reliable it would be a really good service. As it stands at the moment it's a poor apology for their earlier lack of support.

The Pre-Christmas Lull

Well, here we are less than a week before Christmas, and over a week since the release of the Batty Junior Christmas Demo.

I hadn't been to sure if releasing the demo was a good idea, especially as the game is at a pretty early stage, but thankfully it seems to have been rather well received by the people who have played it.

As I expected the missing power-ups has drawn some comments, but they are being added and will all be there for the next release.

The next couple of powers have been added in (Thrusters and Multi-ball) and just need a little bit of a polish before I'll be happy with them. That only leaves the Extending bat and all the original power-ups will be there.

Updating the code to allow for multiple balls on screen was something that I wasn't looking forward to. Really I should have done that much earlier on in the process (if not from the start) and so having to retrofit the code to allow for this was, shall we say, a fun experience - if your idea of fun is breaking the game entirely, fixing it, followed by an hour or so of bug-fixing.

It has been well worth it though, as even with fifteen or twenty balls on screen the CPU usage is still very low and the collision detection works a treat. Even the ball-grab power-up was a doddle to upgrade to handle multi-ball.

I'm still going to have to go through and do a code-cleanup at some point in the near future, as things are pretty unoptimised thanks to the major changes I'd put in place.

So once that is done then what remains? Well, the gravity warp thingy is something that I've been saving till last, and also I'm going to have to see about adding some variety to the baddies as I've only implemented the UFO so far (the Bird needs to be added).

If you haven't played the demo yet then head over to http://dans-remakes.sytes.net and give it a shot. As it supports Windows (XP and Vista), Linux and MacOS X most people should be able to run it.

Free Game: Batty Junior - Christmas Special Edition

As it's going to be a while before Batty Junior is finished (another couple of months at the current rate of progress I'd guess) but the game is at a reasonable stage I've decided to have a bit of fun with the code so far and release a special Christmas themed mini-game - Batty Christmas!



Downloads for Linux and Windows (OpenGL and DirectX binaries) are available from the front page at http://dans-remakes.sytes.net.

The game will be removed after Christmas, so if you fancy a bit of seasonal fun you'd better get your skates on!

Video of Chaos Caverns and RetroVaders

Thanks to the magic of the freeware CamStudio I've put together some demo footage of my other games, RetroVaders and Chaos Caverns.

First up - Chaos Caverns.



Followed by RetroVaders.



More later.

Batty Junior - Video Preview

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I wonder what a video is worth?



This is a short clip from the first level. The game itself is far from finished, but this gives a general idea of the current state of play.

(Remember kids - games seen on YouTube may appear crapper than they actually are)

A Very Monty Christmas!

Christmas has come early for us UK retro fans with the release of Trevor (Smila) Storey and Scottige's homage to Monty Mole - Monty Christmas!



For those of you unfamiliar with Monty Mole, he was the star of a handful of games in the late 80s (Wanted: Monty Mole, Monty On The Run, Aufwiedersehn Monty and Impossamole).

He also featured in a mini-game on Your Sinclair magazine called Moley Christmas. History has repeated itself with this Retro Gamer magazine instigated game. The plot (if you need one) is that Sam Stoat has stolen the pages of the Christmas issue of Retro Gamer, and you have to get them back.

The game itself is a typical 80s platform game - fast, unforgiving, difficult and fun, with graphics and music that would have been at home on a C64. There are plenty of tricky jumps to be made, items to collect and surreal baddies to avoid.



To make the game easier there are save points every 20 pages (press L on the menu screen to reload the last save point). So far I can only get 30 pages (out of the 100 needed to finish), but I'm working on it and thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

All in all this is a really nice game for us fans of the original Monty games, and will certainly keep me busy over the festive season.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Moley Christmas everybody!