Mike Laurence's Internet Playground » Nerdy Nostalgia http://blog.mikelaurence.com Mental Meanderings for the Masses Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:31:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Celebrating Twelve Years of Rather Poor Surfing http://blog.mikelaurence.com/posts/2008/01/celebrating-twelve-years-of-rather-poor-surfing/ http://blog.mikelaurence.com/posts/2008/01/celebrating-twelve-years-of-rather-poor-surfing/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:38:02 +0000 Mike Laurence http://mikelaurence.com/?p=16
But thanks to the Interweb, these self-portraits are merging into the online world. Today’s social-networking-hungry teens, what with their obsessive personal blogging and drunken Facebook photography, are the most obvious benefactors, but you might be surprised at what dirt you can dig up on the 9600 baud geek crowd – like me, for instance.

Because when you’re thirteen years old and building up your fluency in QBasic, you might just want to make a game about… surfing. And jumping. And doing stunts. And sharks. I give you "Stunt Surfer":



The graphics are clearly way ahead of their time – these days you’d need a next-gen 1024 MB nVidia just to keep up. And you wouldn’t believe the gameplay, not to mention the veritable cornucopia of secret moves available for discovery. And check this out – you even get to choose the color of your surfer shorts:



Why on earth Midway didn’t pick this up back in 1996 we’ll never understand, but what we do know is that some people just can’t see the sublime beauty in surfing/blackflip combos, decrying it as:
A rather poor surfing game featuring minimalistic graphics and highly doubtful and awkward gameplay. It’s a well packed game, featuring nice menus and very good documentation.
Well, there you have it. Personally, I’d call the gameplay something like "dubious" or "convoluted" rather than ganging up on it with two such sinister, ugly adjectives, and I’d certainly place "well packed" before "rather poor" in the name of good paragraph design, but who am I? I’m just a man who used to be a boy who wanted to do some tricked-out backflips over some killer waves.

In any event, I guess this means that my digital self-portrait has neon purple swim trunks. Beat that.

PS: Yes, you can actually download the game from games.qbasic.com, and yes, I called myself "Michael Ziphrus" online back in those days, because the Internet was still a shady place. It’s completely un-shady now, of course.]]> http://blog.mikelaurence.com/posts/2008/01/celebrating-twelve-years-of-rather-poor-surfing/feed/ 0