I've had it in my desk's cupboard for years.
I bought the game not long after my original Playstation broke, thinking I'd pick up a PSX cheap somewhere..
I never did.
And, I never bought a PS2, or a PSP, or PS3, or anything else that could play it.

Every so often, I like to rant here, for no real reason.
Today, whilst playing Burnout 3 on my Xbox Classic, the whole "Customisable Soundtracks on the X360" issue appeared once again, so I figured I should rant about it.
See, on Burnout XBox, you used the game to pick the soundtrack, and then that played it in the background.
But, it ALSO stopped the music when you crashed, turned down the music when there was information to be told, and other useful things.
But, for some really biz...

I've had a couple of emails about the donate button already, so thought I should clarify why it's there.
I write a game a week.. Sometimes they're good, sometimes their rubbish, and sometimes they're really fun, playable, and can keep you playing for a good few hours.
I can do this, because I have a lot of free time. And by "a lot of free time", I mean A LOT of free time.
The webhost is pretty much minimal cost (GoDaddy), the programming languages range from 0 cost (DS/XN...

A short and sweet game, this week.
Would've been more (extra graphical niceness) but I ran out of time! Aw well..
Here's the basic form.
<img src="https://socoder.net/workshop/dlds/184_go_left.gif">

I'm not sure if you figured it out from the picture I posted the other day, but it seems that the project I'm currently working on in XNA will turn out to be Centipong.
To be honest, I wasn't actually planning to do Centipong!
I was actually just shoving in a basic sprite, and getting it bobbing around on the screen, in order to duplicate my basic "Blitz 2D-in-3D" command set within the XNA environment.
So far that's working out rather well, and I've near enough created...

I've said on other forums that this year will be my Xbox Live year.
That I'd take the time to learn how XNA should work, and eventually build things up so they work nice and happily.
Unfortunately, my coding's stuck in the 80's&90's, and I can't get out of my "horrible" Basic habits.
Well, other folk call them "Horrible" habits, but honestly, I just see most Basic commands as common sense.

A nice, quickly made game, this week.. For obvious reasons. Bah..
Still, a game created in 2 days can be just as much fun as a great big month long project.
..
Occasionally.

Since I currently have no PC in my room, I'm down to the bare essentials.
I can use the downstairs PC to code on (and have a nice half-finished puzzle game ready for tomorrow), but all my music is sat on 2 inaccessable SATA drives.
My TV shows are on there, my codings on there, and a whole lot more.
Luckily, I found that DVDs with DivX content can actually be played on your Xbox.

PC 1 is dead.
However, PC 1 made nightly backups from Drive 1 to Drive 2, so all my data's safe and secure.
Unfortunately, They're both SATA drives, and PC2's a really old Celeron that doesn't have a SATA connector!
So, although all my stuff's safe, I can't actually get to any of it!

And, back to the old routine we go..
This week's AGameAWeek sees our old friends the Space Monkeys, rolling around in balls, through a maze, to get the bananas.. Again!
As with Super Monkey Balls, you needn't get all the bananas, just reach the goal, and try to get through all 8 available levels.
<img src="https://agameaweek.com/completeB/2009/Space_Monkeys_Go_Bananas_20090106B_thumbb.png">

No new game again, this week, but here's my New Year's Resolution.
AGameAWeek
There you go!
I almost managed it for a few months, so I'm going to try and stick to it all year round next year.

After trying, for ages, to formulate a nice game-wide Achievement setup, Moshboy told me off, and made me just plain put the old ones in, lest I spend the next 8 years trying to figure out how to do the game-wide ones.
So the old ones are back.
They'll flag when you hit the following milestones.
<table width="350px"><tr><td width="33%">Kills

*sigh*
I must apologise..
I assumed I was right.

Never assume you're right!

You might have noticed a distinct lack of AGameAWeek, this week..
Since I'm getting little or no work done, this week, and.. what with being Xmas and all, I've decided to be lazy, and take a week off.
Nothing wrong with that!
If you feel you really need something new to play with, nip to yesterday's post, and you can grab the WhoSave thing. That's quite nice.. And you can pretend I posted that today, in time for the Xmas episode in 2 days time. Very festive!!
If yo...

( border="0"><tr><td>Blimey!
What a year, eh!
I decided to round off the year with a nice big, old fashioned list, with everything in it.
Except this doesn't have everything in it, because I've forgotten to add the DS games.. I'll do that later!! (Took me about 3 hours to do this, so I'm not going to tweak it, now!!)

Next up, Countdown..
Or, it's meant to be, but I can't seem to get it started properly..
I've grabbed a batch of Carol's letters and numbers, and I've got the vowel/consonant packs ready, the number solver's working as it should, but so far, those bits haven't come together to make a full game.. It's just bits here and there.
Needs work, but with Xmas literally days away, I'm not sure that it'll get any.
If it doesn't turn up on Tuesday, assume I'm taking the week off, from AGameAWe...

So, I spent a while, last night, playing with the graphics.
Now that the game's out there, and since so many people are complaining about it's lack of fancyness, I decided to make nice with the special weapons..
<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/whooshy.png">
The game's now officially 75% More Whooshy, with the superweapons looking much more fancypants, and the dead baddies giving off a little red "poof!" as they go.
I've also switched the ingame text from...

A sigh of relief, as the game is finally in an upload worthy state.
I'm sure there's plenty of bugs, mounds of forgotten features, and odd little untweaked things that aren't quite right, but what's here is plenty enough to be counted as Release 1.
<a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=37">
Download Alien Deathmatch 2</a> 3Mb!!!

A more accurate title would be "Just like Windows Vista, here's a list of things I told you I'd be putting in, but haven't yet bothered to, so will be missing when I release the game.."
Except I'm one person, and have spent four weeks doing this.. Not 100 people working for 4 years...
...
*sigh* Vista sucks..

Sometimes Copy and Paste works..

Having finally put the nice simple swooshy spawning sound back into the game, and got a couple of nice test levels up and running, and inside the scoreboard, and then got the whole "Nth position on the online scoreboard" display going, I decided to move onto more pressing matters.
I already copy and pasted most of the control scheme stuff early on in the project, so to help give the game a little consistency, and so as not to have to recode the whole th...

In the old game you could create levels simply by making little 64x64 pixel .png images. The game would load them as it found them, and convert them to levels on the fly.
This was handy, but it didn't let you control all the possibilities of spawning, weapon types, and things like that..
This new one does!
But what if you really liked your old levels?
It's an extremely complicated procedure, so I've put together this step by step guide to help folk import their old level...

Now I remember why the original Alien Deathmatch did this, too!
If I check a directory for files (level directory!) to compile my list of levels, and then add a level in there (Downloaded) and then recheck the directory to make a new list of levels, Blitz has managed to keep a cache of the directory, and so refuses to show up any new ones.
The only option is to close the game, and reload.
*sigh*

<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/onlinegets.png">
That there's the first official online highscore!
o/ YEAY! o/
But, boo that I had to manually copy and paste bits of text to get the level into the database in the first place!!

I'm not ignoring it!!!
I woke up late, today, and time seemed to slip away fairly rapidly.. I spent about an hour browsing online shops, buying a cheap copy of Sonic Unleashed for only £20 (Gamestation) and an el'cheapo Digital Photoframe (£30 Aria.co.uk), and then surprisingly it was time to settle down, eat, and then go to work.
Where my time went, I don't know!!
Still, I did post the demo yesterday, so that's ok.
Meanwhile I think I've figured out ...