Bundle in a Box, yesterday

I did a terrible job promoting the Bundle in a Box on my own site, which is unacceptable, because my game Necrotic Drift is part of the Bundle in a Box. I have some incredible excuses as to why I am typing this out with seven hours left to go. Rich, layered excuses. Think of these excuses as unlockable extras. Here we go!

– I went on my first vacation in a couple years, visiting my family in lovely Rochester, NY, right as the Bundle dropped, away from my PC.
– Both this site and my other site at Caltrops managed to go down for extended periods of time.
– I decided to sell my pinball table and needed a day to vacuum the cat hair off it.
– I took a Centipede cabinet as part of the trade for the pin, and it fell on me, almost snapping my leg and arm in half, on its way downstairs. Argh.

… It really is quite painful. Flying to Rochester, I mean! hrewhrwhrwehrwe

But seriously, Benjamin “Pinback” Parrish said that if the Centipede game took my head off, my body should have sprouted another one. Jonathan “Roody Yogurt” Blask said that he would have appreciated the irony if I were maimed by a “crushing” game like Dig Dug. I feel that should I ever get into real trouble and bleed out on my floor, the IRC logs of my death are going to be hilarious. I’ll be entering “9 1 1” into a high score table as I take my last breath to a cackling cacophony of wiseguys, as I get @kicked from life.

All right, so now that the apologies are out of the way, let’s talk about the Bundle. Here is the link that takes you to the page where you can buy it. The price is obscenely low. A lot of websites are obsessed with telling you how great their wares are, and why you should give them money. Since I screwed up, and managed to blog about it with seven hours left, I’ll instead link to this scathing review at Capsule Computing. Mari Shishido hated it! The people who dislike Necrotic Drift tend to dislike it a lot. Top this, Braid:

Necrotic Drift is a chore to play. Between the unbearable characters and the long parts of the game where nothing but awful banter happens, the game is not enjoyable. Having to guess at the exact word the game needs to move forward is boring and frustrating, while the rest of the time it is monotonous in that it will repeatedly allow one simple word to continue. This is a waste of time, even if it was free. Having to pay any money for it at all is unthinkable. It is not even so bad it is good, it is so bad that it is bad. 3/10

I’m glad that there’s a site out there off the 7 through 9 scale, but I have to think that a 1/10 is reserved for games that kill you when they boot. In all seriousness, I want to thank Mari for taking the time to play. Of course I wish that the game was more her thing, but the best thing about the Bundle in the Box is that you can’t beat it for the number of games included. There’s nine other games, and as soon as I have the functioning use of my nervous system again, I will be playing all of them.

Rock Paper Shotgun did a writeup on the Bundle here, so if you don’t trust me, trust them. And here is a review at GamingMomentum, where the reviewer seemed to enjoy it. I hope you get a chance to pick the bundle up. Every cent I get from it will be used towards my next game, which I’ll start blogging about here. Thanks, as always. :)

Sorry it’s been so long, denizens. I realized that I have a backlog. And what really holds a man down besides his backlog?

I purchased a used Canon Digital Rebel XT for use in the game I am making next. I’ve had this backlog for 20 years or more. Games I’ve always wanted to play. Games I’ve always wanted to finish! Did you know that I’ve never finished Knight Orc? There is one last puzzle for me to solve. Knight Orc is my boy, but I have never solved it. Well, it’s time I took care of the backlog.

I have a couple other reasons for doing this. First off, the next game I am creating is going to be a CRPG. A character role-playing game. I am describing it like “A cyberpunk Bard’s Tale.” Or an RPG where Worm can’t murder everyone. I want to learn everything about CRPGs before I make one. (I mean, I have already started, but I can still learn things.) Secondly, this CRPG is going to have CGA four-color graphics. I remember… fairly well what games were like back then. Some days it feels like I don’t remember much else. But by playing through them again I won’t have to rely on just my memory. Lastly, I just love blogs that are about a dude playing a game, uploading pictures and giving his thoughts. So why not make Jolt Country a blog about old video games. Officially, I mean.

Some quick rules to how I am going to play these games: Should I get stuck for a picosecond, I am consulting a walk-through. I won’t read a sentence more of the walk-through than I have to, but I will not sit and get stuck unless things are crazy and I am really, preposterously enjoying things. If I start discovering solutions that I could have come up with on my own, then I will give the game time to breathe. I’ll put the game down, think about it at work and see if I come home with a solution. If I get stuck due to user interface stuff, then fuck it, I am getting help. All of these games have had like two decades for me to solve on my own.

I am going to try to play them on either the Amiga or Atari ST if I can. I grew up with DOS and I love DOS. But I missed out on the awesome alternatives to the PC, and now that I have an Amiga and Atari ST I want to give them both a shot. Lastly, every screenshot will hopefully be a shot of an actual screen. There are dozens of places to get crisp shots in emulation of games, but I want to create a sort of repository of ones on the actual monitor.

If this sounds good to you then please check in to the site. I promised the denizens of my forum that I would only start publishing these if I had 20 updates ready to go. If you’re seeing this, it means that I do. I am going to kick things off with Neuromancer and I’ll discuss the actual game next!