It’s funny how time flies when you’re a hermit cranking out code 10 hours a day, attempting to make something concrete but all the while watching your once rising Internet star (ha!) plummet like the Dow circa September ‘08. And now you’re just starting blog posts with vastly overused metaphors. Ah well.
But hey, I made an iPhone app! It’s called iPose, and it features, amongst other things, scantily-clad ladies.
I’m also nearly done with my next app, Leap Quest! It is seventeen times more complex than iPose (*actual ratio of complexity more complex than 17 : 1), and is quite entertaining, if I may say so myself. It also has cutesy graphics that would be suitable for an 8-year-old (and no, I didn’t have to go door-to-door, Walter).
Based on my developmental progression, you might assume that my grand plan is to have 8-year-olds innocently obtain Leap Quest and then become interested in my brand, Punkbot, and then via the app store or my website accidentally stumble across aforementioned iPose scantily-cladness, thus prematurely exposing them to toxic American adult values earlier than they might have had they depended on discovering a hint of nipple through static on their friend’s satellite TV (wait, that was my generation. Today you can just google image search any two random words and visually feast on fetishes you’ve never even dreamed of!) But I don’t have grand plans. Only grandiose ones.
You know what? I rather like ranting. I wrote some “rants” as a sort of online humor column back in college, before there were “blogs”, which makes me kind of cool and iconoclastic, except it was also before “anyone cared”, so I wasn’t able to capitalize on that coolness. I should really return to my ranting roots. Maybe I will.
Anywho, I just thought you may have been wondering if there was An App For Cute Yellow Jumping Sun-Flower-Germ-Looking Dudes. There will be soon, so stay tuned. And check out this youtube trailer:
Celebrating Twelve Years of Rather Poor Surfing
Nearly everyone has a collection of photos, scribblings, crafts, and innocent/incoherent writings that form a sort of quirky, historical self-portrait. More often than not, parents are the gatekeepers of these items, hoarding them at their parent-ish domiciles – which is fine in my book (do you really want your colleagues to see naked little you in a bathtub?)
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:
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.
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:
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.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.
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.
