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

So Busy and Yet More Birthdays

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!

Quake Section Coming Soon!

I'm going to do the same thing with the Quake section that I did with the DOOM section: open it up with a few pieces of downloadable goodies and info. The first nice download I'm going to post will be all the original .MAP files we created so you can all dissect them, pick them apart, or even modify them and fix all those little errors! No ETA on this, but I promise to work on it.

And....finally..... another Melvin has been posted. Heh.

December is the Month of Birthdays

TWO COMMANDER KEEN BIRTHDAYS...IN A ROW!

Man, there's too many birthdays, that's all I gotta say. Heh. Just kidding - no, I don't get tired of blasting this little cake graphic in the news section every single month or so.

The first Keen trilogy, Invasion of the Vorticons, was released into shareware by Apogee Software on December 14, 1990.

The second Keen trilogy was developed during the second half of 1991 in Madison, Wisconsin and released on December 15th. We had a retail agreement with FormGen, so we had to split the trilogy up into one retail release and two games for shareware release. Alas, Scott's magic shareware formula only works with a trilogy and we didn't sell many copies of this duo titled "Goodbye, Galaxy!", even though it remains to this day my favorite set of Keens. Scott told us all this before release, btw.

The retail version of Keen was titled "Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter!". When my Keen section opens, I'll share with you a scan of the original retail box which we discarded. It was designed by someone who designed the Lipton Tea packaging - not the right person for a computer game that's for sure!

DOOM Section Now OPEN!

Yes, you heard right - my DOOM section has finally opened with a ton of content, most of it being Lee Killough's legendary DOOM site, revived for your viewing pleasure. Just check the links on the left and scroll down until you see DOOM. Then click.

Birthday Time!

DOOM IS 9 YEARS OLD TODAY!

What can I say? Not much more than has been said before - Happy Birthday, old guy! Now, in human years that's not really very long but in computer years it's a while. Maybe computer years should be 1 for every 7 years, like a dog. That would make DOOM a healthy 63 years old......in OUR time!

It's so cool to see how many people have been affected by DOOM and what its effect on our culture has been over this (almost) decade. And to think it only took one year to create that game, though other games take several years with nary the impact. (I think I know a game or two like that!)

And with the new DOOM III coming out next year, the whole crazy ride can start all over again! It'll be fun watching the resurgence of DOOM, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for our original baby that was born this day 9 years ago in Mesquite, Texas... in the original black Borg box.

In other news...

We just made an announcement on the Monkeystone Games site about our new game <em>Congo Cube</em> being released very soon. The official Congo Cube site is going to debut in a week or less and the game is going to be featuring an Internet High Scores feature so y'all can compete with yourselves and ME! (Well, really, it would be Stevie since she's the most killer CC player here!) If you're a fan of the 1993 SNES classic Tetris Attack, you'll LOVE Congo Cube.

We're also offering a Holiday Fun Pack that has Hyperspace Delivery Boy! and Congo Cube on one CD, signed by the whole team, for $29.95 -- some copies might make it to your home by Christmas, but most will be delivered after the holidays. Check it out, guys!