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Episode 37: Full Quiet

A Homebrew Draws Near! A blog series by @Scrobins Episode 37: Full Quiet Introduction: I’ve frequently praised new homebrew for both giving us new gems in beloved genres, and for pushing the limits of homebrew closer to the heights of the console’s licensed era. But for all the achievements developers have collectively reached, one peak remained to be summited: scale. While myriad games have proven so addictive, fans will pour hours into them, we have not yet received t

Scrobins

Scrobins in A Homebrew Draws Near!

X vs. O October

I decided to spruce up the game I had so far. Instead of turning the grid a color for wins, I decided to put in a message saying who won whenever they did. The X in "X WON" is sprite 0. Since I didn't have much room to work with, I decided to just make a sprite mimic a character. It certainly made things a lot easier. I was having trouble trying to make the game decipher two separate key presses. I had to give up, and instead to start the main game (the tic-tac-toe thing is a minigame

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Odyssey 2

Pet Sematary / Tales from the Darkside / Jacob's Ladder

Pet Sematary (1989) After tragedy strikes, a grieving father discovers an ancient burial ground behind his home with the power to raise the dead. King superfan, remember? To be clear, I think there's room for improvement with cinematic Pet Sematary adaptations.  This movie is pretty damn good, but it can't hold a candle to the novel, arguably one of King's best novels (if not singular best), which is commonly cited as one of the scariest books ever written.  That's a tough a

Pandemonium!

I have this game for N-Gage and Saturn. I felt like playing my Sega Saturn. After I played Bug! which is too hard and I can't beat even the first level of, I tried Pandemonium. I thought I'd do better since there was a password system. Again, I couldn't beat the first level. I almost got to the end though, which I learned. I went to GameFaqs to see what info I could find. I found some cheats. Infinite energy sounded good. So I tried it. And it worked. I got past the first level. Just for re

Killer Klowns From Outer Space / Waxwork / Society

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) Aliens who look like clowns come from outer space and terrorize a small town. When I was a kid, we had cable, but none of the premium channels.  None that is, until the occasional free trial came around.  And every time we had a free trial for HBO, this movie would be on repeat.  And I would watch it every time. For those who haven't seen it, it's exactly what it says it is.  Killer aliens, that look like clowns, and kill people with pop

Dolls / Evil Dead II / The Lost Boys

Dolls (1987) A dysfunctional family of three stop by a mansion during a storm -- father, stepmother, and child. The child discovers that the elderly owners are magical toy makers and have a haunted collection of dolls. Stuart Gordon's second appearance on this list. If there's one thing I like almost as much as killer kid flicks, it's killer doll flicks.  Again, I don't know what that says about me, it's just the way it is.  I guess they're just inherently creepy, which taps

The Fly / Hellraiser/ Street Trash

The Fly (1986) A brilliant but eccentric scientist begins to transform into a giant man/fly hybrid after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong. David Cronenberg's third and final selection on this list. The greatest horror remake of all time?  That would be The Thing.  But The Fly is a not-too-distant second.  I love the original movie, but this one runs circles around it.  Jeff Goldblum is spectacular as the "Brundlefly", subverting the nature of the accident in the or

My history teacher in living color (part 2)

So I was trying to make two palettes for the sprites in Super Game Boy. I discovered that isn't possible and I needed to scale back the number of colors of the sprite down to 3. This is what it looks like in Super Game Boy or Game Boy Color now: And this is for a regular Game Boy: Because I wanted to keep the Game Boy colors like that, I had to make the lemon on the title screen black. although it is yellow on Super Game Boy and Game Boy Color. I only h

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Game Boy

Re-Animator / Aliens / Night of the Creeps

Re-Animator (1985) After an odd new medical student arrives on campus, a dedicated local and his girlfriend become involved in bizarre experiments centering around the re-animation of dead tissue. Or as they put it in American Beauty... that movie where "the body is waIking around... carrying its own head, and then the head goes down on that babe." I mean, that's all you really need to know.  I don't even need to say anything else to justify this placement. Aliens (198

A Nightmare on Elm Street / Gremlins / Phenomena

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1985) Teenager Nancy Thompson must uncover the dark truth concealed by her parents after she and her friends become targets of the spirit of a serial killer with a bladed glove in their dreams, in which if they die, it kills them in real life. Take away the pop culture infamy, and millions of sequels, and what do you have?  Just Wes Craven's greatest movie, with one of the 1980's greatest horror villains. I mean, what an ingenious concept.  A horri

My history teacher in living color

So I worked on that Game Boy game I was working on earlier but quit working on to focus on my Virtual Boy game. I decided to play around a little bit to see if I could use more than just four colors. After a visit to the documentation, I was able to get this: In case you're wondering, I figured the best bet would be to have the guy wear a Sesame-Street-Ernie type shirt. Why? Because of the shoe color for the black and white original Game Boy. It only supports four colors instead of th

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Game Boy

Something Wicked This Way Comes / The Thing / Body Double

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) In a small American town, a diabolical circus and its demonic proprietor prey on the townsfolk. The scariest Disney kids movie ever made?  Maybe.  It's this or Return to Oz, and that's some damn good company to keep.  Where else would the house of the mouse dare to show the main kid lead seeing visions of his own bloody decapitated head?  Nowhere, that's where... Also, it has Jason Robards AND Jonathon Pryce, at their best.  Can't beat

Island Issues

Work resumes on Minigame Mayhem. I didn't feel like doing anything else, so I figured I might as well work on this. It's a clone of the Game and Watch game Manhole, which I discovered in the Game and Watch Gallery for GB. The plan is to make 12 minigames. Six minigames to start with. Each minigame has another minigame to unlock when a certain score is reached. I finished the six minigames, and am working on making the unlockable minigames. This will be minigame #8 and it's almost done

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Virtual Boy

An American Werewolf in London / Poltergeist / Creepshow

An American Werewolf in London (1981) Two American college students on a walking tour of Britain are attacked by a werewolf that none of the locals will admit exists. The first appearance of John Landis on this list. This movie is fucking hilarious.  Don't get me wrong, it's a horror movie, and not a comedy that just happens to have horror elements in it (ie Ghostbusters, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, etc.).  But for a horror movies, it's fucking hilarious. I don't wan

The Shining / Scanners / The Burning

The Shining (1980) A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future. Stephen King superfan, remember?  And even though King himself wasn't the biggest fan of this adaptation (probably because he had already entered his booze and coke phase), I think the rest of the world is in agreement that it's sublime. This is yet another movie that I

Halloween / Dawn of the Dead / The Brood / Alien

Halloween (1978) Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again. John Carpenter's first appearance, and let me tell you, it was extremely hard not to populate this list with like 15 of his movies.  Even the lesser ones are so fun, and endlessly enjoyable, that I'm constantly watching them.  Hell, I bought an entire set of his films on DVD, and then

Rework

While I'm trying to think of some new ideas, I thought I'd look back on Minigame Mayhem's first couple of games and see if I can change them and make them better. Today I took "Cartful Dodger" and made it better. I made it go faster every ten points until it gets its fastest at 90. I also changed the peoples' graphics a little. It now looks like this: I also changed the menu a little to show that you have the ability to unlock some. If you try to open a locked game, a buzz

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Virtual Boy

The Omen / Carrie / Suspiria / Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The Omen (1976) Mysterious deaths surround an American ambassador. Could the child that he is raising actually be the Antichrist? The Devil's own son? Make no mistake, The Omen is clearly a movie that was designed to one-up The Exorcist, with the campiness factor unintentionally ramped up to 11. But you know what?  I don't consider that a bad thing.  I'm down with camp.  And I'm down with this silly tale of Damien, the devil's son, and everyone around him dying in the gories

Upmonster for Virtual Boy

So awhile back, I made an Intellivision game called "Upmonsters" about a group of monsters who keep jumping up on clouds that keep popping up while it scrolls up. I ran out of ideas for my Minigame Mayhem. So someone suggested some stuff and so I looked back on all the games I created, and decided to attempt a port of the game for it. This is the result. I made it so the game autoscrolls up. And the goal has been changed so that the point of the game is to see how far up you can go. Bu

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Virtual Boy

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Black Christmas / Deep Red / Jaws

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) Five friends head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover something sinister within. Something armed with a chainsaw. It feels a bit lazy to have a bunch of the horror heavy hitters like this on the list.  I mean, everyone and their sister likes this movie.  It's why they remake it every three or four years, while always keeping the plot exactly

Save states

So I learned how to make save states. This can be useful. For example, I can now make an "unlockable" game. If a player scores a certain score, a game can be then unlocked and then it can save that it's been unlocked so you can go back to it even when you power the VB off and then turn it back on again. In order for this to work, the Virtual Boy cartridge would require a battery. I don't know how plentiful that would be or how feasible it would be to get cartridges made if they need batteri

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Virtual Boy

Sisters / The Wicker Man / Don't Look Now / The Exorcist

Sisters (1972) A small-time reporter tries to convince the police she saw a murder in the apartment across from hers. Mr. De Palma's first appearance on this list, with one of my favorite films of his.  One thing that will trend more and more as I get into the 1980s and 1990s, are certain beloved filmmakers showing up multiple times here.  You can probably guess what some of those films will be. This is a movie that I spent ten plus years waiting for an HD release.  It (and

Minigame Mayhem - October 2, 2023

I have finished the Mouth game in my VB minigame collection: I also went back and worked some more on Fruit Fly Fun, making the bees bigger: Next I will work on a Doodle Jump clone. All I need to do on my Odyssey game is go to the post office and mail them. I don't know how since I'm asleep all day and awake all night. If only the post office was open at 2 a.m. My mouth I designed when closed looks like a clam. I guess it would since it is basically a clam.

Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Virtual Boy

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