Courne Supremacy

For those of you guys who don’t know, Joost is TV on teh Int0rnetz. I haven’t tried it yet, but now that I gotsa link, I will try it, and so should you!

http://www.joost.com/presents/indycar-series/

Continuing my top 43 favorite games of all time, and here’s #35…

35. Earthbound (SNES).

Okay I have to admit, I played this one on an emulator, but I was in college, I didn’t have my SNES with me, and I had some afternoons to kill, because who wants to do homework on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon? Unfortunately, I never got to finish Earthbound because the emulator crashed and I lost it all. Boo-hoo. It was a funny and entertaining game while I was playing it, and I’m sure even before and after I played it, it is still considered a funny and entertaining game. The combat system was menu-wading so there’s nothing in terms of the gameplay that I found mind blowing and different. I played Earthbound sometime after I played Final Fantasy 7, and I like that Earthbound didn’t take itself so seriously. Now, over the last few years I’ve come to see that most Final Fantasy games as the same thing redone over and over again and it’s boring and that boredom makes a game like Earthbound stand out. It isn’t set in a fantasy world; Earthbound is set in the suburbs and during modern times and has recognizable weapons like a “baseball bat.” You eat hamburgers to regain health. Just a change in motif, taking the mundane of life, adding a mix of sci-fantasy, and it was spades more interesting then Final Fantasy.

34. Sam and Max Hit the Road (PC).

As much as I am a proponent of the “old-skool” adventure gaming genre, I didn’t get to play many adventure games when I was a kid - there was the whole thing of my family being poor. I did get my hands on a few, the Journeyman Project, Leisure Suit Larry 1 (a cousin had it), the 7^th Guest, Myst, and later on Monkey Island - there’s probably a couple of others but I don’t recall them. Sam and Max stood out above the rest for it’s wacky sense of humor and it’s use of a deranged little white rabbit. I honestly should pick up the Telltale episodic Sam and Max games, but like most episodic things, maybe it’s just better to wait for the box set and get the experience all at once.

33. Virtual Fighter 2 (Arcade).

I’m a kung-fu movie fan, although I never watched all the 70’s grindhouse chop-socky flicks. Virtual Fighter used real martial arts as their fighting styles and I enjoyed their emulation of Drunken Boxing. Oh, my favorite martial arts film: Drunken Master 2 (bet you couldn’t see that coming). It’s fun to play, but hard to master, and I never came close, but I had a blast stuffing quarters into the machine and getting my ass handed to me from the computer.

32. Battle Arena Toshinden (PS1).

We played this game to death on the Playstation. I believe this was even the first game we got for the first Playstation. Ellis was my favorite character. You can’t beat a pixie-dust girl that’ll cartwheel into you and then jab you to death with a pair of throwing daggers. Unless, you’re Duke, and you’re a tool and keep mashing buttons to have Duke flail his bastard sword around. I had a friend who played Duke everytime because of the cheap-ass advantage of having a long sword. I ended up being able to play Ellis really well, not that this knowledge led to any kind of arcade fighting greatness on my behalf. I suppose Sophia earns points in the tits-and-ass category of gaming S&M femdom as well. Oh, and am I alone in thinking that Eiji always screamed “Eat Chili!!” whenever he attacked?

31. Doom (PC).

I read all about how John Carmack came up with the revolutionary usage of BSP trees to partition 3D levels for fast rendering, and aside from being a fun game, I liked the game because of the technology. It was around the time of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom that I got into programming C++ and I learned the ins-and-outs of programming mode 13h and doing rudimentary 3D graphics and raycasting. I know the theory, but it took me years later to finally put some of that knowledge into practice - some homework assignments in my masters CS graphics class. I didn’t write a raycasting engine though, but rather a 3D polygonal rasterizer that could do fully texture mapped objects.

“I made a list of my top forty games,” Kiyoshi told Kea and me while we were sitting down for lunch one afternoon. He rattled the games off his list and in response Kea and I named games that we would put in our lists. Kiyoshi later expanded his list to encompass fifty games, and the two of us puzzled over the deep philosophical quandary: what are my top fifty games? Kea did her list and you can see it on her blog. Here’s Kiyoshi’s.

I started out by writing down the games I remembered the most, and if I remembered it, then it must have been (somewhat) fun. The hardest part of building this list was figuring out where each of these games went in the list. I’m not sure how my friends put their lists together, but it made me ask the additional question: what makes a game fun to me?

All the games on my list are “fun.” Because I felt it was fun. And, sure I could just “feel” that one game was more fun than another, but I’m more of a rational guy, and if I’m going to answer a question I need to know as close as I can why I decided such-and-such a game was #34 instead of #33. So I came up with some loose numbers (on a scale of 1-to-5 how much fun was it), and I enumerated a bunch of statements that best describe the types of games I enjoy, and here they are:

• Did the game allow me to be creative and use it like a virtual toy?
• Did the game let me play with my friends?
• Was the game easy to get into?
• Was the gameplay interesting?
• Was the game artistic in that it had a compelling story, interesting atmosphere, or just quirky?
• Was the game put together well? I admit I like some games just for the technology.
• Was the game different and new to me?
• The ever-present nostalgia factor.

Despite all this, in the end, some of the placement still was just from feel. So I think I have a pretty good idea as to what my favorite games were and why, and to that end, I present to you the 43 games that are my most favorite. That’s right, not fifty, not forty, not even a nice round number, just 43 games. For the more obscure games I’ve included some Wikipedia links and of course there are pictures.

43. Milon’s Secret Castle (NES)

Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milon’s_Secret_Castle

I bought this game on a whim when I was a kid. It turned out to be the worst thing I could have ever purchased. I didn’t know about reading reviews or asking friends, I just saw that it was something completely fucking different than what all my friends were playing, and if that were the case, then it was good enough. I hated the game the first time through - I died immediately and nothing made much sense, and I shoved it away. So much for being different, but then every time we brought out the NES from storage I’d plug the game in and play it through and every time I got better at it and it was actually a decent and fun game - if only on the low end of that spectrum of decency and fun. Milon’s Secret Castle is a basic platformer. We actually never knew what the story was, but concluded that you were some dude standing in front of a castle who can shoot magical bubbles, and now you’d better do something about it. Whatever it was, that you were supposed to do.

42. Silent Hill (PS1).

This is one of those games I enjoyed vicariously through my brother. He played it; I watched it. It was a game that came out in the PS1 era in the midst of the survival horror explosion of games, thanks to Resident Evil. I appreciate this game mainly because of my enjoyment of metaphysical or “wacky-as-shit” movies and television series (I was really big into Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain at the time). My favorite part had to be when we entered the hospital in the light world and explored all three floors. My brother stepped back into the elevator to leave and we didn’t know what to do next. “Hey, there’s a fourth floor,” I told him. “No there isn’t,” he retorted, but looking at the elevator panel, he realized there was, and what a trip that was. My favorite ending to Silent Hill is still the worst ending - the one where Harry dies in the jeep. It elevated all of the player’s actions and the demons you fought to a symbolic level.

41. Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore (PS2).

This was the first game I bought with the PS2. I figured it would have some longevity since it was a fighting game that we could just pop in and play over and over. I should say something about the fighting system, but let’s face it the fighting was laughably stupid and insipid. I enjoyed this game because of the tits-and-ass factor, the unlockable titillating costumes, and setting the age to 99 and watching the Euler integrator bounce those water-balloony jubblies up and down like they were free floating in microgravity. Lei-Fang is still my favorite. Too bad the Dead or Alive movie totally fucked her up, but then the Dead or Alive movie was a utter piece of shit. Still, how did you get the ugliest looking Chinese girl to play her? For shame Microsoft. You can’t even do that right?

40. Space War (PC).

Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar

I didn’t play the original one on the oscilloscope. I got this game when I was on a 2400bps modem and using Prodigy. Do you remember Prodigy? I belonged to the programming forums. Some clever guys created a BASIC program to convert binary to hexadecimal, and Space War was one of the executables that they dumped into forum posts as pages of hex gibberish. I copied them all down, hand merged them all together in a DOS BASIC editor and ran a hex2bin decoder and played myself some Space War. I’m a Star Trek nerd so I got a kick out of diverting my auxiliary power to the shields and hyperjumping out of the way of a torpedo blast.

39. Mega Man 3 (NES).

So there’s this nifty cheat code that you could do with this game by using the second controller. I used to use a pair of barbeque tongs and clamped down the necessary button on the second controller so I could cheat my way through the game. I enjoyed doing that a lot, other than that, I remember the great music and that it was a wonderfully put together game.

38. Tradewars 2002 (PC).

Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradewars_2002

This was a BBS ASCII art game. It was like an MMO for me because you played it with other BBS members. I used to cruise around on various local BBSes and played games like Barney Splat, Baron Realms, and Tradewars 2002, my favorite of them all - not that I didn’t get a kick out of decapitating Barney and then horrifically murdering Baby Bob and the rest of the schoolyard gang, but that’s another story for another time. Tradewars put you in the chair of a merchant spaceship and represented the world in all its colorful ASCII art and text-adventure awesomeness. You went from port to port haggling with buyers and sellers to turn a profit and build yourself a small empire. Since these BBSes were short lived it was difficult to ever really become the Don of the Tradewars universe. Plus a faced a great deal of ownage when pitted to the top dogs at the game. Still it never spoiled my fun.

37. Grand Theft Auto 2 (PC).

Download it for free here: http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/

I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I was a huge GTA fan before it became main stream. I didn’t need Jack Thompson to tell me the blatantly obvious, and guess what Jack, I was fucking underage when I played this game. Where were you then to think about the children? Sure there wasn’t hot coffee, but you could take a car and mow down the occasional conga-line of Hare-Krishna’s and Elvises. Kea says this makes me a bad person, but then I also got the award for crushing 50,000 people consecutively with a car; I enjoyed the prolonged high speed police chases; and of course, I had fun piling a shit-ton of cars in front of the L-train and watching the simulation mindlessly ram into the pileup. The electro-gun was great too just to be able to arch it across derelict cars to fry pedestrians who were already attempting to flee your murderous rampage. All the things you can’t do in real life you could do here. Good times. Good times. The 3D GTAs…they’re nice looking alright, the mayhem just as good, but I didn’t put them on my list, because this is the mother of them all. Oh, plus there are no conga-lines of Hare-Krishna’s in the 3D ones. What’s up with that? You’ll put humping in but no conga-lines?

36. Nintendogs (NDS).

Who doesn’t love cute puppies? I saw this game at Iwata-san’s Nintendo keynote address at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. You used a stylus to interact with a virtual puppy. You could train them to run obstacle courses, throw Frisbees, take them out on walks, and treat them as if they were your own pets. I thought it was unique and innovative and I still do. I just wish Nintendo did more with it. I never owned a pet so that was something rather special to have a little cyber-pup. For the first month of owning the game I had my DS to experiment with how far Nintendo went with the simulation. The end result: not that far. I haven’t fed my Welsh Corgi, aptly named Ein, or my Labador Retriever named Bristol in about two years. Luckily, digital dogs don’t die and go to heaven, but there is a way to reset the game, and I hear it’s sad. So I just don’t play it anymore.

That’s #43 to #36. Tomorrow, or whenever #35 to #30. Can you feel the excitement?

You want webspace on teh Intornetz? Don’t use netfirms.com. They’re a huge company and they offer a great deal of webspace and some nice features at a good price — for the time it was webhosting for one year with only a $20 payment for the year — but you’ll soon find that their technical support is lacking, the FTP is slow and doesn’t complete bulk transfers, the mySQL databases are slow to connect and difficult to work with remotely, and the server itself is generally just slow and shuts down from time to time. At least that was the experience when I was trying to build Paradiseworld.net 3.0 on their servers. Maybe they were going through a transition period, but it was enough to disenfranchise me from using them again. HostGator.com is my new webhost. You pay by the month, so there’s no contract, and it’s about $15 (per month). You get all the subdomains, addon domains, and mySQL databases you want. The server is fast and responsive and so is their FTP. By far the best quality of HostGator is that they have live chat technical support. With Netfirms I had to call their long distance number if I wanted help and they’d hold me on the line for ten minutes at a time before telling me that they couldn’t do jack-crap for my situation because they had never, in all their years of business, ever encountered it. Thanks Netfirms. The HostGator live chat response is almost immediate, you can ask them a question and you’ll get an answer right away, they’ll even send you the transcript of the chat. The invisible people on the other end of the live chat seem pretty nice and friendly. I’ve asked them stupid questions and they didn’t treat me like the moron I usually am. That’s not a bad feeling.

If you develop PHP/MySQL code for fun or profit, there are minor things that Netfirms just didn’t offer. Here’s the big one: no CX Panel. Having CX Panel means you get control over everything in your webspace. Here you can configure scripts, email, addon domains, parked domains, create FTP logins, subdomains, and partition your gigabytes of space into chunks and pass them to your friends if you want. If you make a database the Netfirms server will give you some jumble of numbers and letters. Everything is through their custom interface, and although it might be great for new players to the Internet game, it just seems a hassle for an old intorweb guy, like me.

So this is the new home of courne. Why the Courne Supremacy? Ever watch the Bourne Supremacy? Yeah, but it’s nothing like that and this site will have nothing to do with corn. What you’ll mostly see on this site is a combination of video game ramblings and ideas and mainly short stories. I intend to use this blog not as a means to be bitchy or emo, but rather as another creative outlet. I’ve always believed in digital publishing as an alternative to the mainstream — cheaper, easier, and more control, things I like — so that’s what the new Courne Supremacy is about.

Oh, and the sister site, the mother site, if you will, Paradiseworld.net, will still be around. If you’ve never heard of it, which I’m sure most people have never heard of it, it’s my art-site. I used to draw everyday and posted the artwork (scantly clad girls, you know how it goes, come on, if you could draw, wouldn’t you be drawing scantly clad girls?).

New short stories to come…as fast as I can pull them out of my ass.