Best Games - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo The time between the creation of Tetris and someone wanting to play Tetris competitively, in head-to-head fashion, is probably nanoseconds. At first, players would have been able to play against each other’s scores. Who got the most lines, or who could reach a certain score in the shortest amount of time, or who could beat Alexey at his own game. When you are working with soviet era computers, I’m sure you took what you could get.

Whenever I start a new story, I open two documents. The first one is the story I’m trying to write, and the second is all the bits that I want to keep, but cut from the story for one reason or another. I usually call this document “cut bits” because I am extremely inventive like that.

Best Games - Lode Runner The first version of Lode Runner I ever played was on the Atari 800. Then I played it on a Commodore 64. And then on an Apple II. And then on a PC. I just played the Arcade version on a Steam Deck. And then again in a browser.

Sometime in the early 90s, I was flipping through channels and stopped on this amazing movie. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know how long it had already been running, and I barely knew what anyone was saying.

We’ve had the Steam Deck here for a while now. It’s a great machine. We have played a handful of modern games with it, but, in all honesty, I mostly play old games on it. Mostly Street Fighter.

Just a short writing update today. I have three short stories in various stages, one in the early edit and rewrite stage, one extremely early with only a concept and outline jotted down, and one that has been reworked so many times I’m not sure if it will ever get finished.

Best Games - Street Fighter Alpha for the Game Boy Color This game has no business playing as well as it does on a Game Boy Color. I bought a Game Boy Color in 2001. The Game Boy Advance had just come out and people were rightly more interested in the new handheld machine than the aging hardware of the Game Boy Color. I think I paid roughly $50 for it, and it came with a multi cart full of games. I remember playing a bit of Pokémon, a lot of Link’s Awakening, and more Street Fighter Alpha than I ever thought I would.

I was going to post up a painting today. That was the plan. I try to sketch or paint a bit every week. You know, just to keep limber or whatever.

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with procedural textures recently. I think that might be the way everything will have to go in the future. 3D graphics have gotten progressively better, more detailed, more reactive and interactive. Light bounces around in realistic ways, or if you like, unrealistic ways. Graphics cards can dynamically increase and decrease the resolution of models. We don’t really use that feature very often, but it exists and works fairly well.

Best Games - Cameltry Sometimes games get lost. Even great ones. A singularly brilliant idea and design, a game that should have spawned endless sequels and copycats, just disappears. Cameltry is one of those. A forgotten gem.

I wrote a story a few years ago that I keep wanting to go back to. It was a short little thing. Maybe 1500 words or so. It felt like a lot at the time. Now, I can’t sum up a single thought in less than 500.

Over the last week I taught my kids some 3D modelling in Blender. The task was to go from zero, downloading and starting Blender for the first time, to making a model and then printing that model on the 3D printer. I thought we might be at it for a week or two. It took them about three days. Four if you count the day of downloading and setting up Blender.

I painted my house today. Anyway, here’s a haiku Rainbow soil scooped clear A maze to garden trap tilt Scored to footstep song ​

Best Games - Dig Dug Pac-Man and Rally X have a lot to answer for. They spawned a genre so pervasive that, at one point, nearly all new arcade games were maze games. Not until fighting games would we see one genre so heavily over-represented in the industry.

Opening lines are easy. That’s a lie. Opening lines are terribly difficult. Unless they are easy. Sometimes they are easy Closing lines are easy. That’s a lie. Closing lines are, by far, the hardest lines to write. Unless they are not. Sometimes they are not difficult at all. They just flow naturally. Sometimes you write the last line first.