AGES UNLOCKED!

Hornet Classic.....bitches.

You need 165 stars in the World Tour to unlock it.  It's very hard but took me a day & a half to do.  Thankfully you don't have to beat the whole game on the hardest difficulty to do it.

The "AGES" default stats (and every other character unlocked).

Hornet FTW!

The AGES' "driver" is a Dreamcast VMU.  Nope, not weird at all.

Very good character indeed...the Hornet's pit chief isn't the same VA as the original Daytona but it's close enough.  For the record, that's what the Hornet says out loud.  If you're passing by the Hornet, you may even hear the pit chief speaking!  The Dreamcast boat is also hilarious--it makes Dreamcast main menu noises ("bbbrrrrring!!!") and even the noise the console emits when loading the CD ("kzzzt-kzzzt").  Genius!  The Afterburner Jet says typical fighter pilot stuff.  Just weird piloting the F-14 Tomcat but not being able to fire missiles & stuff at will :/

I hate Traffic Attack, it's what you're forced to do in Hell.  Anyway, by sheer skill, memorization, and luck I managed to 4-star them all just to exorcise the demons and I never have to play those missions EVER AGAIN.

The game is very tough but there's the chance to go for 232 stars (4-star everything) for a few reasons...achievement points, unlock the last AGES mod for super speed, and bragging rights.  But more on that later.  Happy Thanksgiving!  Thanks to Sumo Digital and Sega on a job well done!  And thanks to the fans who signed the petitions cause now Segata Sanshiro and Ryo Hazuki are sitting cozy at 1800+ votes when the goal was just 1000 signatures per character!  And as always, a special thanks to the Armed Forces, Police Officers, Fire Fighters, and Emergency Personnel!  I'll check you guys out...later.

Making Racing Games & Doin' Schoolwork...

Sorry for not posting sooner.  I'm not dead.  Anyway, Happy Belated Thanksgiving.  Not much else to say that I didn't say last year.  Although there was a fourth life-or-death situation I was in.  In Little League Baseball, I was the pitcher...well, I was the guy standing next to the coach who tossed pitches to the batter.  And I got hit in the chest with a line drive.  There was a kid recently who died from the same incident but I went to the hospital and came out that night uninjured.  So that is good.

But about this Thanksgiving.  I was miles away from my family, I went to a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by one of my students at FIEA.  Most everybody was playing video games (Halo, Marvel vs. Capcom) which is okay.  I got the chance to play NFS: Hot Pursuit which is good but I'll reserve my opinions for later.

Strangely, when I asked everyone what they were thankful for, they had little to say.  Which is a shame since this is a religious holiday...the Pilgrims offered thanks to God that they actually survived for as long as they did (and received help from the Indians).  But I don't know.  People use any occasion as a means to socialize and just let go for a while.  Gamers don't seem respectful of tradition anymore.

So what have I been doing for school?  Well, I've been working on it non-stop.  We're given one assignment for Programmers only and that is to make an OpenGL game mimicking some old-school arcade game such as Pac-Man and Asteroids.  We're paired into teams of two.  I fortunately got to make Super Sprint.  Click here to read more about Super Sprint.

Now this is a super-beta screenshot but I've added more levels (including the ability to drive over and under bridges!!!).  While I'm working a lot on this, it's been "fun" work.  So at least that's good.  I split the track into three layers (the road, the rest of the screen, and any bridges/overpasses/things that obscure the track).  So I use a getPixel system to see if the car leaves the original road layer and have it bounce in the other direction accordingly.  But collision detection is a bitch, I'll tell you that.

I know that I'm being graded on this assignment although it's mostly on how much effort you put into it.  Unlike most people, I'm working hard on this because I personally want the game to be good.  I'm feeling this game, man.  It can have at least three players (everyone gathers around the keyboard) and multiple levels.  Just shoot me 1024x768 .png's of levels and I can insert them into the game.

Seriously, I'm getting friggin sick and tired of working my ass off on projects that get shoved into the file cabinet or thrown away after they are done.  So I want this game to MEAN SOMETHING.  Is that too much to ask?

The thing that's so sad about this is that it's due Wednesday--three days from now.  And by then I really can't work on it anymore.  Well, we're going to port it to the original Xbox (not the Xbox 360, DAMN!!!) but that's not much to add.  I may be able to add more features after the due date, we'll see.

Funny...had my racing game pitch gone through, I would've had to devote more time to that instead of this game.  So even though one door shuts on me, another one opens.  Yeah, because tiny OpenGL games are really worth it!

Plus, I'm also working on another racing game right now for some Rapid Prototype class.  The same class that gave the world 30 Seconds or Less.  A fun tangent--many people worked on game using the Kinect in previous rounds, including I with my How to Train Your Dragon game.  And guess what--all of them had awkward, delayed controls.  Congrats people, if you don't already know the Kinect is a piece of crap, then now you do!  The only good Kinect games are my HoTYD game and a South Park game in which you Kick the Baby.  Not making this stuff up.

But anyway, this fifth and final game in the class is a sequel to my A.R.I. game but with Grand Theft Auto free-roam and Crazy Taxi delivery-system.  The goal is to polish the game rather than create an entirely new one.  But frankly, my teammates aren't really into this project and I'm getting sick and tired of working in Unity.  So right now, I place more stake in my Super Sprint clone.

With this semester nearing the end, I go home for Christmas then head back to FIEA for another semester.  And this is when things get worse.  Most of the semester is dedicated to entering "Programming Boot Camp" and working on things like our own graphic shaders and game engines.  Plus I'll also be working on capstone projects, none of which I'm too enthusiastic about.  So does this semester sound like fun?  No, it doesn't.  It's like Time Crisis...you kill a boss and then you go to Level 2.  So it ain't over yet.

"We're game designers!!  We're the VSSE!!"

"Damn, this game is hard.  I need more quarters."

And thus, once this semester ends, that's the last chance I really get to make racing games.  It's really sad.  All I wanted to do is make great racing games but not now.  Too busy working on other stuff that I'm not really feeling great about.  But that's the breaks.  Gotta do stuff you don't like to get what you do like.  Still, I hate working towards something that presumably adds up to nothing...or a job at Electronic Arts that makes me want to jump off the roof of the building.

Anyway, off to sleep.  Then I'll work on the Super Sprint game even more.  But I'll end on this.  In an Intro to Art class, we worked on texturing a player model in Maya.  I made Matt Damon in a business suit.  Needless to say, this model is so realistic, you couldn't tell the difference between my guy and the actual Matt Damon.

Happy Thanksgiving And Dramatic Life Stuff

Hello everybody.

It is Thanksgiving in America.  When the pilgrims gave thanks and we do too.  Cause giving thanks is good.

I'm thankful for my family.  My friends.  Video games, especially SEGA for making games that give me some sanity.  The guys at the OutRun Online Arcade board.  Our armed forces, police officers, firefighters, and emergency personnel who go through hell to keep society normal.  Our country and the freedoms we have at this time.  The New Orleans Saints winning the Superbowl.  Not having to go to school for a few days.  Oh and Sega games, again, let it be known.

Try reading 1 Chronicles 16 from the Bible for good verses on thankfulness.

I'm tired of seeing all these commercials about Black Friday before Thanksgiving was even here.  Just pissing me off.  Like I don't want to see some little Santa elf dude or a Radio Shack superhero to tell me what to buy.  Now Black Friday sounds like "fun" but I'm broke right now.  Case in point, I hate 95% of the commercials on TV.  Those Geico and Ray Lewis Old Spice commercials are funny though, good times...  So is The Most Interesting Man in the World, what a pimp.

Now we're talking about thankfulness, well one thing we take for granted is our health--our lives.  It infuriates me to no end to hear about how everyone is depressed and that they can't do anything.  Well look, I have opposable thumbs, I can see, hear, walk, and so forth.  That I'm thankful for because I can still drive a car.  But imagine if I didn't have one of the following or worse, I was dead.

Let me tell you a few stories.  This was way back, when I was around six years old (1994).  I was riding my bike without a helmet and fell on the concrete road.  Now this wouldn't be so bad in itself, but there was this groove sticking out to form a ditch that I hit which speared the top of my head.  All I can remember beforehand was crying profusely until I blacked out.

So my parents hauled me to the hospital.  They learned that I had fractured my skull.  OUCH indeed.  So I was unconscious for three days.  The doctors ran some tests on me in the meanwhile.  They told my mom that if I didn't regain consciousness in the next few hours that they'd have to do something drastic to me.  So basically, my mom was crying, watching over me, praying I would wake up.  She prayed "Lord, if you wake this boy up, I'll see to it that he'll do Your will."  She gets up to wash her face then comes back to see me rise from the pillow seemingly normal.  My parents bought me a GameBoy and I left the hospital a day later.  That's how it went down according to my parents.

Now I'm a Christian.  I believe in God, Jesus, Heaven, and so forth.  I just wonder exactly how close I was to death and what it would've been liked if I had actually died.  Wouldn't it have just been better if I died and went to Heaven right away instead of having to put up with all this crap?  Going to school, getting in fights with people who don't like me, complaining about the miserable state of video games, and watching as the world goes through its usual cycle of mutinies.  How would history have changed if I were not here?  Everyone asks that question.  I guess we're alive for a reason so take it, it's a gift from God.

If a skull fracture wasn't bad enough, add in a car collision.  This was about three years ago. (about 2007)  I'm on the highway coming home from school, it's daytime, and I'm driving carefully in my little blue car, not over the speedlimit or anything.  All of a sudden this green sedan in front of me came to a dead stop.  Now I thought this guy was slowing down a little, but then I realized "Oh no, he's really going to stop."  So I slam the brakes assuming I had ABS but no, I didn't.  Assume the position.  WHAM, hit the guy in the back at about 30-something MPH as my car flopped to the left onto the grass median.

So there's this elderly couple across the road who wrecked.  Now at this time, I didn't know how bad the damage was to my car, so I cruised over.  Surprisingly, there was no damage to each car.  Hell, even the music on the CD I was playing didn't skip.  No airbags too.  We just about walked away unhinged.  So I can say I was in a highway wreck, but with no damage whatsoever.  Now that's just weird.  Even if I didn't die, I could've been severely injured someone, even myself.  It's just damn weird.

Now, you think one wreck was bad?  How about a wreck and a near-wreck?  So this is two years ago (one year after the first wreck, about 2008) and it's late.  I just got done taking one of my final exams for the semester, it was late and raining hard on my trip home.  And whaddya know, the person in front of me pulls the "dead stop" trick AGAIN.  No, I'm dead serious, these people think it's appropriate to go from 70 to 0 mph in a highly-congested road.  So I have a cushy space from him, but because of the rain, I didn't realize I was about to hit him right away.  Step on brakes!

Thankfully, I avoid hitting him but once again, lack of ABS bites me in the ass as I slip sideways on the highway.  Oh dear God, I'm going to get in a wreck for sure as I shout "OH BOY!!"  I'm thankful for two things--one, that I spun clockwise (so traffic would've hit from the passenger side on the right and give me a cushion--American car we're talking about) and two, that there were no cars behind me at all.  So I just cruised off like nothing happened.  I just wonder if the guy that slowed down noticed me.  Probably not!  Thanks for nearly getting me killed, jerk.

Let's see, one, two, three life-changing bullets dodged.  Now say what you want--call it divine intervention or dumb luck but I'm alive and I have to be thankful.  There's still much more stuff for me to do.  Hey, I still have this blog and even if you don't agree with me on anything, I hope this has changed SOMEONE for the positive.  That I'm thankful for too.  And REMEMBER TO WEAR YOUR SEATBELT, DRIVE DEFENSIVELY, AND OBEY ALL TRAFFIC LAWS.

Anyway, as an aspiring race car driver, I can safely say that I've been in a hospital for major surgery, a spinout in traffic and a wreck.  All while driving the same car, one that I rubbed on the side of my fence too (it was a rare accident but I got it fixed).  Balls to the wall, I say.  I'm never gonna give up on that blue car so that I'm thankful for too.