Best Games - In Death ​ There is no shortage of VR archery games. I think it’s the controllers. While there are many options that VR controllers present to developers, grasping, waving, punching, pointing, lifting, pushing, pulling, VR controllers usually translate to some sort of gun. Or, if you prefer a different sort of shooting, you can use one hand to aim a bow and the other to draw back a string. The hardware just sort of lends itself to that sort of gameplay.

We are over halfway through the Winter Olympics and, yep, I’ve been watching a lot of them. Just like the summer games, It’s not so much that I want to watch my favorite sports, it’s that I like the variety. Just today I watched some hockey, some speed skating, some figure skating, mogul skiing, and the highlights of a curling match. I’ll only ever watch the highlights of a curling match. Curling is like baseball. I’ve played it, and I can appreciate what people love about it, but it ain’t my thing. It’s just a firehose of sports. I’m starting to hit the point where it’s wearing me out, but I still really love it. By the closing ceremonies I will have worked it out of my system and I can spend several months after virtually sports free. A hockey game and figure skating tomorrow though. Lets Go!

I just finished writing and editing another very short story and I am all out of words. The story writing will be slowing down after next week so I will probably be more interested in writing here again. Until then, I hope you have been enjoying these slightly more burnt out posts.

​ ​ This weekend was the Global Game Jam, and once again, I didn’t participate. I would like to, but I have been doing a writing jam instead. ​ As much as I enjoy getting together with people to bang out a goofy game, I also enjoy spending a bunch of time with myself arguing over what word to put where. The arguments are, again, with myself.

​ Since Christmas or so, I have been messing around with some old games. I say ‘messing around’ because I haven’t really been playing most of them. ​ These are games from the dos and early windows 95 days. The days of the first 3D accelerators. Games where you had to manually configure IRQ assignments. If you know what an IRQ is, you know what era of games I’m talking about. ​ Part of this is research. I like to mine old games for ideas and designs that might have been tried once or twice, but seem to have been abandoned in more recent games. Gameplay strategies, visual development, etc. etc. ​ Part of it is fun. I mean games are fun, and sometimes games that haven’t been played in years are still fun. ​ Another part is gauging nostalgia. Nostalgia is an awful thing. It can bring back good feelings, but it can also trick us into believing that the past was better than the present. I like to test that feeling. ​ I can tell you, most of the time, you can’t go back. ​ There are some amazing games from that era. True stand-outs that are still as fun as ever. They are good because they are good, not because they are of a certain vintage. ​ Most of the time though, these games do not hold up. Things you may have tolerated in the past because there just weren’t that many fast paced dos game, or games rendered in full 3D, just are not tolerable anymore. We have moved past them. ​ Part of me hoped that I would find a whole stack of new Best Games contenders among the early win95 games, but they are fairly thin on the ground in that era. That’s not to say that there are none. There are, and I will likely be writing about them in the future, but the past isn’t a treasure trove, it’s a painstaking excavation. ​ I will still keep playing old, weird games, because that’s the sort of guy I am, but it does make me appreciate the golden era of games we currently find ourselves in.

​ I’ve been working on a very short story all day and I’m mostly out of words. ​ I have been playing some weird old games though, so I might have some things to say about that next week, or soonish.

I finished writing a new flash story a few hours ago. I will probably have to go back over it and do some editing work before it’s ready to send anywhere, but this is one of the rare occasions that I don’t think I will be adding many words.

This is the first post for 2026. So what am I doing. Our oldest is back at university after the holidays, our youngest has been studying and getting ready for wrestling, and we have been wondering what we will do with ourselves when they are both out in the world doing things and we are at home alone.

This will be my last post for 2025. Does that mean I need to make some sort of resolution of the new year? A semi-hollow promise to myself? Nah. I’m more than happy to make plans. Here are some things I plan to do. I will write a few more stories, finish editing a few that I have on the go, and have at least a half dozen out for submission at any given time. I will finish up the gameplay loop of my game and try to get it out to a few people for playtesting. I will work on another game and hopefully that one will be ready to go by fall. I will do some work on yet another game, and attempt to get some very experimental visuals up and running in an engine I don’t have that much experience using. Mostly, I plan to enjoy my work, enjoy my family, and enjoy my life. And I plan to do all of that for as long as I possibly can. Check in with me around 2075 and I’ll let you know how that plan is going.

The saga of the nas is ongoing, but I think I have it pretty well in hand. It’s a bunch of drives that sits and chugs along in my basement, and once in a while I write some files to it. Pretty standard stuff, but it’s one more thing that I don’t have to worry about… until I eventually do have to worry about it. That’s future me’s problem.

VR is a strange beast. If you are into playing video games and you are looking for an immersive experience, you will probably want to try VR. There you will find the most immersive, transporting experiences. Games that will place you inside their world and press your own out to the margins. The best VR games make you feel like you are some place else.

A few weeks ago I had a hard drive fail on me. It was a backup drive and thankfully it didn’t have anything important on it. Still, I did lose some non-essential files. I have lost drives before, but I tend to keep most important things backed up in a couple of places and very important stuff gets the local and cloud backup treatment. That doesn’t mean I was happy about it.

For a very long time I used Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, and After Effects. Probably the better part of two decades. I did more designs for signs, brochures, stickers, and vehicle wraps in illustrator than I care to count. I have used a lot of other art and illustration software over the years, but those are probably the ones I used the most.

I just finished the latest rounds of revision on a couple of my stories. One, I think, is ready to send out now. The other might need another pass, but it’s getting close. These two are relatively short stories, so they are quicker to work on, but I do have a few longer ones that need some love. For those ones I have to work up some nerve before diving back into them. One thing though. I have been writing short stories for a few years now, so I have a backlog of ones that I haven’t finished polishing or sent out anywhere, and every once in a while I discover one that I had written, but completely forgotten about. While that is a strange feeling, it does mean that I won’t be running out of material to shine up and send out any time soon. That is in addition to the small handful of stories that have been rejected several times and I don’t really know what to do with now. They might end up in some sort of collection sometime, or maybe I will just post them up here if they can’t find some place that will publish them.

There is something to envy about the early days of video games. Sure, they were operating with the most limited of resources and just getting graphics drawn to the screen was a herculean task, but they had some pretty wild options available to them. I don’t know if you could even make Kickman today. In 1981, anything could be a game. There were the obvious ideas. Sports, car racing, old west gun fights, but what about a game like Pac-Man. That sort of game comes out of clever tricks that developers came up with while playing with the hardware. No one carefully plans out Pac-Man. They stumble over it. If I had to guess, the designer of Kickman figured out a physics routine for bouncing a balloon around the screen and went from there. No one plots out the idea of a unicycle riding clown popping or stacking balloons using a pin on his head. I mean, there is no way to sell that idea. There is no obvious game there. It sounds crazy. Of course, Kickman is amazing. You play as a clown on a unicycle moving back and forth across the bottom of the screen and balloons fall down from columns at the top of the screen. The first level has you popping them with a pin on your hat? Maybe? I don’t know. The balloons pop, okay. The second level has you catching balloons and stacking them on your head. Once the stack is sufficiently tall, they will all pop one at a time. Of course, you could also catch a Pac-Man that will eat the balloons giving you bonus points. Eventually you catch Pac-Man ghosts as well, and those can only be eaten by a Pac-Man. If you just catch and pop balloons, why is the game called Kickman? Well, because of the kick button of course. If a balloon manages to slip past you, you have one chance to kick it back up and catch it. That can be tricky because running into balloons with your body sends them drifting out of kick range. Of course, that isn’t the only use for the kick. If there is a Pac-Man falling but you haven’t yet gathered enough balloons to make it worthwhile, just kick it back up to the top of the screen. It will fall again soon enough. There is a bonus stage where people throw balloons and explosives at you. Dodge the explosives, catch the balloons. Obviously. Kickman is a very simple game, but then again, so were most of the games from 1981. But Kickman is also a very satisfying game to play. The movement speed, especially using the original arcade trackball, the speed and duration of the kick, the floaty arc of the balloons. It all just feels so satisfying. It is not as well remembered as its cameo character, Pac-Man, but there is no doubt, Kickman is one of the Best Games.