My girlfriend, Stevie Case, shot 15 episodes of a new show called Lock -N- Load in London, England a couple months ago. It's currently being shown on TV in Asia and parts of Europe and will be making its way to the US hopefully soon. She does a great job as a hostess - the series is about a huge European Quake III tournament called SuperCap that took place a while ago. All 15 episodes chronicle the event, sprinkled with lots of fun and interesting commentary and other features.

My next task will be to reopen some of the old links that are right now unavailable, like some of my old Apple // game histories. They aren't converted to the new format yet, but that's what I need to do before reactivating them.

Another cool link for ya:

http://www.vgmix.com

Although hard to get through (it's not as nicely organized as Overclocked), this site has a lot of amazing vidgame remixes!

My friend Milla (Chiq) just cut her hair and she's about to dye it WHITE -- cool. She's located in New Zealand!

She's a great Q3 skinner and her latest work can be seen in Wild Tangent's "Betty Bad" game. You can check out her website here:

http://www.chiq.net

Read her site - lots of good info on there. You'll be able to tell how passionate she is about her art.

Forum Update

Well, that was a quick trial period! The limit on the trial version of the forums expired pretty much after one day's worth of use. So, I just upgraded the forums and now they're up for good. Next, I'll have to work on customizing them to match the site.

So far, I've gotten some really decent comments and suggestions, but no real stumper questions. Having the forums up is definitely making me think more about the site and getting me into updating a bit more often.

In the Dallas Morning news last Friday was an article about Tom Hall and me teaching game classes up at the University of Texas / Dallas this Fall semester. I think it's going to be really fun; Tom and I are really excited to do this. I'm working on some interesting things to show the class besides the main focus of my class which is designing a cross-platform game engine. It's going to be mainly about what makes up a game engine and how to structure it so it's very easy to move from one platform to the next. I'll be showing some code for some different platforms (graphics, input, sound, etc.) and how you get a game designed for one platform to work on several others.

The last ten minutes or so in each class will probably be about game history as I'm an avid game historian and consider game history to be pretty important. You can read the article here.

Oh yeah, it was really great seeing this Black Rat Snake in the garage earlier! Stevie and I got it out and put it back in the woods where it belongs! It wasn't very cool walking into the garage and seeing this giant snake slither behind some bags...not knowing just how big it was and all. By the way, we named this guy Sharky - even though we only knew him for about 20 minutes!

The 4th and The Forums

Jul 06 2002

Most of Monkeystone Games took the DART train to the AT&T Trinityfest (along with the rest of Dallas!) It was a great event and the full hour of amazing fireworks was great to watch and listen to. Then, the eventual leaving at 11pm took us 2 hours to get to our car -- all of downtown Dallas was at a standstill with at least 100,000 people swarming about.

So, I decided to stick some feedback forums on my site to see what y'all have to say about stuff. If it turns out well, then I'll probably upgrade UBB and customize it to match the site design and add some more forum topics! Thanks in advance for your feedback, everyone.

Buckets O News

Well, I finally finished the PC version of Hyperspace Delivery Boy! We shipped the game earlier this month and I've already started on my next project which is a new game for the Game Boy Advance. Hyperspace Delivery Boy! looks very much like the classic Zelda III on the SNES, and the play is similar as well except that the game is more focused on puzzles.

Tom and I were going for the Rescue Rover-style gameplay (a game we did back in 1991), but with lots of NPCs. The PC version has over 1,000 lines of crazy spoken dialogue voiced by yours truly and the rest of the monkey bunch here at Monkeystone Games. The game's humor is pure Tom Hall so if that's what you like, that's what you'll get.

E3 Report: I'll keep it short and sweet. I went around and saw lots of stuff but I didn't get to see everything (too many meetings). What was most interesting to me was Age of Mythology, Legend of Zelda, Mario Sunshine, Mertroid Prime, and DOOM III.

I just randomly came across The Underdogs site the other day and they had a nice write-up on Hyperspace Delivery Boy!... check it out here.

It was Quake's birthday yesterday, but I was too busy to update my site. I'll do something soon!