So you might have noticed that this blog lay dormant from about Thanksgiving 2020 through mid-January 2021. That’s typical; I’m too busy at that time of year working for other people’s sites, and then when the holidays come, I want to hibernate, not blog some more.
But now that I’m back to work and reasonably assured that the nation isn’t going to fall…
… I can toddle back to my standard shtick. Over December, I blabbered about a lot of video games, so there’s much to recap!
The Forgotten Classics of the CD-ROM Adventure Games Era
I revisited some DOS-friendly adventure games from the 1990s and lamented how they’re basically a dead genre now. So much lost creativity and imagination, in this era that deconstructed what it means to be a game. My picks run the gamut from the most faithful movie-to-game adaptation (Blade Runner) to oddball games like Bad Mojo where you role-play as a cockroach. And it’s not cute, either, it’s a plunge into gore, filth, and depravity at a helpless bugs-eye view!
Earlier cockroach-related writing I’ve done includes the cult anime-live-action mix Twilight of the Cockroaches. And then that’s it. But anyway, nice games, do check them out on Steam.
My Latest Addiction is Unturned
You might have seen this free game running around Steam that looks like a blatant Minecraft rip-off. Well, it is not anything to do with Minecraft! It’s an open-world zombie survival game that’s pretty damn hard. First I introduced the game Unturned for new players, then followed up with an intermediate Unturned strategy guide. Both are written from the offline, single-player solo lifestyle, with practical advice for how to survive and thrive in the Unturned environment.
Unturned turned out to be my Christmas game – the one game you throw yourself into over the holidays. Because that is what Christmas is all about! If you haven’t checked it out yet (or lately, because it’s recently hit version 3.0), here is my bona-fide endorsement for a fun game that is both free, and runs on even a modest Linux laptop. You don’t find many 3D open world games with those qualifications!
Remember When I Was Really Into Flash?
Well, you can forget that time all to hell, because Flash is (allegedly) dead.
There was a time when I was even a minor Flash developer. We’re talking early World Wide Web here. I had so many commissions to draw a spinning-thing Flash logo that I wrote a big program that could take any logo as input and output a 64-frame spinning 3D version of the logo, with switches for turning it into a globe, or putting it in space, or making it all metal and shiny, whatever.
And then I blogged about open source Flash like SWFTools, and was really the only person on the web at the time to talk about open source Flash development at all, to the point that they were linking to me for documentation. Sorry I couldn’t keep that up, guys! That’s the old Penguin Pete; the world has moved on, and Flash is finally (allegedly) dead. Technically since it’s open source and most of the Flash era is archived, it’s not “DEAD” dead, but to the straight world that goes to bed at a decent hour, it’s dead.
Anyway… Hell was I? I lamented the late, great Flash platform here and paid alms and homage to the great sites of its time, and then came back again to salute the finest that Flash gaming had to offer. Seriously, there were some classics that raised gaming to a high art back there. I do intend to revisit this subject in the future, because that’s some 20 years of our lives that Adobe just chucked. Archivists are squirreling it away for preservation as we speak.
Have I mentioned before that Adobe, Inc., are huge assholes? They could have just released what they had as open source and be done with it. Another company could have taken it over. Flash really needs to belong to the open source world, where it would not have had nearly the security problems that dogged the platform its whole life. Just… assholes.
That’s all the games I got into during December, which I declared “game month.” This January, I have undertaken “animation month,” and that’s a grab bag full of wonders shaping up over at GeekyDomain among other places. Do join me!
Oh Yeah, I Also Covered the “Year in Geek”
Forget Netflix’s toothless 2020 send-off, unless you remember it for the way I did them one better. Previous to that, I kicked the year out proper with my benchmark of the year in geek for 2020. I included events in gaming, anime, TV, film, toys, tabletops, fandom, you name it.
And then to make sure everybody’s chakras were extra-salted, I tossed in an IMGUR dump of hippie New Age moonbattery. It is my gift to you! We will survive, we will thrive, and it turns out that we will make America great again by getting rid of Trump and his Nazi insurrection. We’re lucky it was that easy, you know.
