I sent the free sample of The Best of Creative Computing: Volume 3 (1980) to the Kindle app on my iPad 2, and I must say, speaking as both a historian and tech enthusiast, there are definitely some historical nuggets of genuine interest in there. The book was originally a 1980 release and collected more than 120 articles from the 1978 run of the legendary magazine. From the tone and content of the articles, you can definitely tell this was written for an unusually intelligent, sophisticated, and yes, geeky audience, which makes sense considering the type of individual who would be interested in computing in the late 1970s, and is a refreshing change from what tech magazines became from basically the late 1980s on as the potential readership expanded and the content had to be simplified accordingly.

Anyway, below you'll find a few select screen captures from the free preview, with a bit of commentary. I'll definitely be making this a purchase, since it's only $9.99 for the Kindle edition, and the original paperback often sells for upwards of $100+! Enjoy (and get the ebook!):

Here's the last installment of my interview with The Fat Man, aka George Sanger. In this section, Fat Man answers your questions concerning game audio, careers in the industry, and even a bit of philosophy. If you think I did a good job on this interview series, please send a few dollars my way!

Download the mp4 here.

Two Player!This has been a rough day for me! I finally got my space duel game working with two players. That is, it worked fine in the EDITOR. However, when I made a build of it, the fire buttons wouldn't work! I spent hours looking into the input functions to no avail. Finally, I discovered the problem had something to do with the update speed of the editor vs. the build. I'm still not exactly sure what the problem was, but it had something to do with the way I instantiated and positioned the bullets. I figured I'd check to see which fire button was pressed, then check to see where the corresponding ship was located. The big complication here is that I need to impart an initial velocity (set by each player) to their bullets. But how to get the right variable to the bullet? I'll spare you the details, which I don't really understand, but the short of it I managed to kludge through it.

At any rate, I think there's enough here for you to finally see my vision for the gameplay. You've got a two-player dog fight, ships orbiting the planets. Each time you fire, there's a cooldown period before you can fire again. You have to hit the enemy ship head-on to blow it up, and, yes, you can blow yourself up if you're not careful.

The keys are below:

This week, I'm back with The Fat Man (George Sanger) to talk about some of his most famous game scores. Yes, that means Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, and The 7th Guest. As always, Fat Man has great behind-the-scenes stories about all this stuff, so you go ahead and kickback with a fine cigar and a horn of Dragon's Milk. I also do a bit of clowning around at the end, giving you a glimpse of what it's really like making these Matt Chat episodes (hint: take after take after take...)

Download the mp4 here.

Smell me!Hi, guys! I'm back with a little podcast here addressing some of the popular threads raised right here at Armchair Arcade. After a special announcement and some talk about my Unity game project, I talk about smelly game environments, three games that made me want to own a system, and backward compatibility. I even briefly kvetch about Tera! Thanks to Mark, Rob D., and Clok for those fun topics!

Download the podcast here.

Que has released the second chapter from our latest book, My Xbox: Xbox 360, Kinect, and Xbox LIVE, as a feature article on their Website. You can go direct to the Que Website to read, Networking Your Xbox, right now. Let us know what you think and be sure to check out the book. As a side note, we've written three new original Xbox 360 articles for Que that should be released in the coming weeks, and are also well underway with our next Que book, details of which we hope to reveal soon. As always, we'll keep you posted.

Sparkles!The ol' dev diary has been quiet lately as I had some very tough times getting over the next hump of my gravity game. By the way, how does "Outlaws of Gravity" strike you as a title? Little play on "Law of Gravity." But, anyway, I've been busy trying to make a system for procedurally generating the solar system, giving you a random distribution of planets and moons. Of course, later on I'll add some different textures for the planets, so that they don't all look the same.

I had a really tough time with the moons. I don't want them to be smashing into planets or each other, so I had to keep spacing out the planet orbits more and more, until finally it just wasn't practical. I went down a dead end of just making them decorative. Didn't like that, so went back to the old way. Finally, decided I just had to limit the number of them. I originally wanted three as the max, but just wasn't feasible unless I really went big with the resolution. I'm still not really happy about the moons. I think they're cool, and make it more realistic, but they don't seem to serve much purpose. I guess one strategy could be trying to put your ship right next to one, so that hopefully it might catch a bullet. Other than that, I don't see a point, so I might end up taking them out. IIRC, they didn't have them in gravity wars anyway.

The C64 port of the game shown here running on a PAL C64G (the German Aldi version with the C128 CPU) playing with two Suzo Arcade Sticks in port 1&2.
I run the program on the 1541UltimateII, the first version is trained and halfway the video I realize that and load up the cartridge version that is unmodified.

Playing a hidden gem on the original Xbox 'Robotron 2084' a port of the original arcade game on microsoft's first venture onto the online gaming market on the original Xbox.

The game has an 'enhanced' background but for the most part remains pretty true to the arcade original. It is controlled by both analog sticks on the xbox controller and the gameplay is fluid and very nice.

The game is very tough though as only 8 way shooting is possible allowing for 45 degree angles of vulnerability and lots of small objects being hurled your way. Loosing a life is easy!

Some more information is found below...