HAPPY BIRTHDAY STEVEN!

Yes, it's my son Steven's 14th birthday today - hooray, you're still alive! That's really an accomplishment for this crazy guy, always getting himself into one situation after another! I better stop now while I'm ahead because this 14 year old monster of a man is AS TALL AS I AM and almost weighs as much as me! Whoa.

To top it off, he's also a great football player, always out to bust open the other team. And he does it! Heh heh. In fact, this guy is so aggressive that he's an amazing Quake 3 player and regularly beats everyone on whichever server he visits. Soon we're gonna have our little Q3A match, aren't we little boy!??? BRING IT!

Hope your birthday goes great Steven and everyone wish him a "good one" in the forums!

I just wanted to maybe turn some of you on to an amazing, talented guy, Dan Rock, and his music. Dan is the guitarist for the prog-metal group Psychotic Waltz and DARKSTAR is the side-project that he and his friend, German keyboardist Siggi Blasey have created.

This music is just awesome, especially if you love great guitar and great melodies together. Check out their website. They only have 2 CDs available but they are both really great. I can't pick one over the other, truthfully.

Click the album cover to the left to visit their website. Lots of samples from their songs so you can see that I'm not full of it!

First I need to say, once again, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICHAEL! My son Michael turned 15 on Valentine's Day and is doing great in school and following in his Dad's footsteps as a gaming maniac. He's about to start busting out the Visual Studio 6.0 and bring on the C++ lovins.

Michael is becoming a Leonardo DaVinci of gaming: he plays every cool game that comes out, beats it, then plays it again.... he's doing some great stuff in Flash 5.0, he does great illustrations in Freehand, makes music in ACID and Cakewalk Pro (using a MIDI keyboard, even)... codes HTML right into Notepad (and is about to start working with Dreamweaver)...is currently designing his own RPG, and finally now he's about to start learning C++ and using Visual Studio. Wow! Pretty impressive for a 15-year-old!

So, Michael sent me his latest MP3 mix using Stevie's "On A Mission" song from Hyperspace Delivery Boy as his "sample", heh. Check it out here:

Have you had a deer popsicle?
I'll cut your blood with my knife-hand!

Oh! I'm A Flamelet!

That's the name of a song from Seiken Denetsu 3, a really great old Super Famicom game with really funny song names. Look up the track listing at Soundtrack Central, heh.

First off, let me just say I'm sorry for taking so long in updating the main page - I've been horrifically busy... but in a really fun way!

Okay, we are going to celebrate the birthdays of both Heretic and Hyperspace Delivery Boy!, two games that start with the letter H and were born on the exact same day! Yes, December 23rd is the birthday of both games!

What I remember: well, with Heretic I created the shareware distribution at my house, late at night, and uploaded it first to a BBS, I think it was called DoomsGate or something. After that, I put it up on some FTP sites, starting off with the University of Wisconsin server where we usually posted our stuff. This was December 23, 1994 at 11:30pm, late at night. Heretic is 8 years old!

Raven Software took a few weeks off then immediately started working on Hexen, the next piece of the trilogy-that-was-supposed-to-be. Hecatomb was supposed to be the 3rd game, but I left id before fulfilling that goal.

Hyperspace Delivery Boy! was also released in the wee hours (4:30am) of December 23rd, although it was just last year (2002), so HDB is a one-year-old-baby! Even the main character, Guy, looks like a baby! Uhm...

Also, as a bizarre coincidence, December 23rd, 1977 was the day Yusuf Islam was born, previously known to the world as Cat Stevens.

In other news, I'm developing a 3D FPS for a new cell phone! Yes, you heard it right: an FPS. It's just starting up but I can tell it's gonna be pretty cool.

Congo Cube is still under development. We decided to do a simultaneous launch on several platforms. The Pocket PC version is looking really great and is pretty much done. The PC version is going through some visual tweaking for that all-important casual gaming audience. The Smartphone version is very close to the Pocket PC version. The Java version is coming along very well thanks to Brian Burleson, one of the very best students in my class at UTD. He runs the Student Game Developer's site and is very active in the gaming scene here: http://www.studentgamedevelopers.com

Congo is about to move over to BREW and J2ME as well so this addictive little substance will probably find its way to your cell phone somehow. You're gonna love it - I'm actually addicted to the game myself... a very good sign.

Tom just finished up two BREW games: Jewels & Jim and Dig It! Man, it's nice to be coding again!