Birthdays Galore

HAPPY BIRTHDAY...

Dec 10: DOOM - 10 yrs
Dec 14: KEEN 1-3 - 13 yrs
Dec 15: KEEN 4-6 - 12 yrs
Dec 23: HERETIC - 9 yrs
Dec 23: HDB - 2 yrs

Man, December is the golden month of game birthdays! It's been quite a while since I updated - I did a full reinstall on my computer and I'm still not finished yet. For instance, I'm writing this update in FrontPage instead of Dreamweaver MX (I'll get up to speed soon).

That's 9 games in December alone...wow. We worked pretty hard to get Heretic and Hyperspace Delivery Boy out before January, as you can tell by the crazy date. Most publishers wouldn't release a game that late in the month when they're targeting retail... but we weren't.

So Happy Birthday, my little game babies! Well, maybe games should be measured in something like "game years" or something...like, maybe it should be 3 game years for every human year. That would make DOOM 30 years old....hmm. Thanks to numerous source ports it looks better than when it was a baby!

chiQ's Birthday

HAPPY BIRTHDAY chiQ!

Our very own chiQ had a birthday this month - let's wish her an amazing belated birthday wish!! Uuughh. I'm sorry. I will never again miss this darling woman's birthday ever again.

I should be punished for this somehow. Well, maybe I could make it up with a birthday gift or something. chiQ really helped me through my recent breakup - in a really big way.

Thank you so much for being awesome, chiQ.

Quake's Birthday

HAPPY BIRTHDAY QUAKE!

I am pretty blown away today - none of the Quake news sites mentioned this at all. Blue's News, ShackNews, even PlanetQuake -- everyone has forgotten that today was the day that the venerable Quake was born, 7 long years ago.

Currently, I'm in crunch mode on a Beta of my current game, so I don't have the time to open up the Quake section... but when I do, you will all have access to the original Quake 1 .MAP files. Stay tuned!

Steven Romero's Birthday and Klear LLC

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 also wanted to say Congratulations to Dallas' newest game developer, Klear Games LLC, on the recent release of their first game, Samurai.

Let me just say right here that this game is a lot of fun! The game is designed after a German board game created by Reiner Knizia and the PC implementation is excellent. Kudos to the musician who composed the beautiful score, it really suits the game and really raises the quality of the game in the same way that the Outlaws soundtrack rocked that game.

Head on over to Klear Games' website and download the shareware version and try it out. Do the short tutorial and you are finished with the ruleset! Then get on the Internet server and serve yourself a steaming plate of beatings! Muahahaah!

Michael Romero Breaks Out the Bongos

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++ lovin's.

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.

“Have you had a deer popsicle?
I’ll cut your blood with my knife-hand!”
— Michael Romero