Gamegearguy

So I was looking through my old files on my computer and I saw Bert. I've decided to add another game to Bert's Pigeons. So now it's called Bert's Games. I watched Sesame Street as a kid. But I was too young to have the Sesame Street games for the Atari 2600. Later on in life, I got them all now and a Kid's Controller. And I became smart enough (barely) to attempt to make a Sesame Street game for the Atari 2600. I learned how to program for the Kid's Controller by making a simple Count's Castle (the unreleased but planned Sesame Street game) experiment where it shows a number of bats and you have to press the corresponding number of bats on the screen. But I doubt many people like Bert more than the Count, so I began making it a few years ago. When I started, it was just Bert's face. But then I learned how to write text on the screen with the playfield, so I added the title of the game to it. So there's two games, one involving pigeons (completed), and the other involving paper clips (which I just started work on). I will post more about this game as I program it. You'd think the original Sesame Street games would put the character on the title screen, but no. Plus, the B looks really odd, so I made my own B and I think mine looks better. I know I will probably never get this released due to the copyright of the muppets, but oh well. It's fun making it, so I'll continue.

So recently, I found out that Firefox isn't allowing people to download .bin files because it thinks they're malware or viruses. Since I have ablsoultely no knowledge of how to put malware or viruses into my games, you can safely download my games without worrying about that. I think you have to use Edge to do that however, since Firefox is being stubborn about it. Which is really dumb because I don't know how long it had been for me to download .bin files without Firefox warning me and refusing to download them. Just a heads-up.

No, I didn't choose it to get views. The problem is I just didn't know how offensive it was. I apologize now, even if it does seem too late or insincere, but it really is sincere. I'm also sorry that I'm stupid and didn't study in history class. I'm just an idiot, that's all.

The reason I asked to delete my account was because I feared I lost all my likeability with the previous blog entry and didn't want to be a burden on this forum any more. I'm not a racist, but I guess I should not make puns of that stuff. So here is an edited version of my Atari 2600 game. I spent an hour changing it to something more acceptible to everyone. This is Bob. He's a bird. I need to make a better bird sprite.

I can't find any info anywhere about this.

So I finished my Game Gear game about the burgers. Big surprise no one cares enough to want to publish it. So now I'm on to my next game. I've decided to make a better Soccer Odyssey 2 game. I did 1 on 1 Basketball before. So I worked and worked and worked some more. And I'll probably work more on this unless the game craps out on me and decides to break (which it has done a few times on just this ROM. I had to erase what I had and restart from the past save point a lot.) I have way too much free time on my hands, so I like to spend it on little projects so I don't get bored. I get bored really easily if I'm not working on something. I don't like to watch TV very much now except for the news. Apparently the world forgot "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Everything works okay for now. I began this project then abandoned it so when I come back to it, I found a lot of spaghetti code. Which was needed because when I tried to change it, 9 times out of 10 it broke something in the game. But now I have it stable. It works on a real Odyssey 2, I just tested it a few minutes ago. So what's next is to add the goals. I think adding some walls would do nicely as well. I could check to see if the ball hits the walls. And for the players I could put in a little extra code restricting movement to inside the field only. Something like this: And then the score can go on the bottom, perhaps a timer as well. Or I could make it the first to 10 goals wins the game. Or would that be too Pong-like? I have 2 spare sprites I can use for something else. Perhaps I'll use them and put in a white-colored net for each goal. But I don't know what happens when one soccer team scores a goal. It's not very likely I'll work on this tomorrow (it's 7:19 p.m. here) since I'm burned out on this already.

update: the game has been finished. You can download a demo version of the game in the link the post above this one.

Decided that since I had power and I was bored to continue work on my Game Gear game I was making. I made some changes to level 10. It now looks like this: Since I decided on wooden walls, it cheered up the hall a lot. Not that I wanted it to be cheery. I also put in some chandeliers in the hall. The portrait of the milkshake used to be a portrait of an old man. But then I decided "Who is that?" and people may read into the game more than I intended, I changed it to a portrait of a milkshake. Couldn't quite get the cherry on top since I'm only limited to 16 colors for the background and all other options looked blurry or dumb. Level 9 is a snow level. No, it's not a picture I took of outside (although it would look a lot similar!) I also figured out sprite priority, so the burger now falls behind the score instead of in front of it. So here's what's left to do before the game is finished is: compose level 9 music make ending screen compose ending music test it all on a real Game Gear and make color changes as needed. In case you're wondering why I didn't make this a Master System game instead is because I decided few people had a Master System and more people had a Game Gear. Although I could test the game on a Master System since I have its Everdrive, that would require FINDING IT. And finding it would require cleaning my room. But I'm extremely lazy. So I won't. And besides, the Game Gear needs more homebrew.

It's been three days now where the temperature has been below freezing. I don't think once it got above 30 all weekend. And with .1"-.25" freezing rain coming this afternoon, the power may go out. So if I go missing for a week or so, that's where I am. Tomorrow it's supposed to finally get above freezing. So if the electricity goes out, we'll have no power and it'll be 50 degrees as opposed to 20 degrees. I understand that most of the country right now is below freezing, but it's really rare where I am that it is so cold for so long. It should be in the 40s and raining, not 24 and freezing rain. I have good reason to be paranoid since the 6 day power outage two winters ago. At least we have a fireplace to keep us warm.

Ahead of the half-inch of ice we're supposed to get tomorrow here, I have been working on Pokemon Mini stuff. Why? I don't know. I looked at some other Pokemon Mini titles, most notably Psychic Seeds, and I redesigned my game to look more like that. I am attempting to make a Fast Food Atari 2600-type game for the Pokemon Mini, where the object is to move the mouth around to eat the candy and avoid the pickle. which will decrease your life by 1 if you eat one. The pickle is not in the game yet. It's too bad I don't live up about just 50 miles north where they're going to get mostly snow. I got some grocery shopping done yesterday in case the power goes out. And I hope to play some more Pokemon Mini in case it does go out, along with some Game Boy stuff as well. Also, we just got our fireplace serviced a few days ago. So we're all set. So yeah, it's not looking good weatherwise here. Usually we get saved from the bad weather that happens all across the rest of the country. But I guess not this time.

How did almost a whole week pass between my previous blog update? Anyway, after reading about that kid who beat Tetris, I decided to play it myself. Here's how far I got. Apparently it doesn't take very much to be a Tetris master. I crap out at level 19 because it gets way too fast and I can't control the pieces any more. I don't understand how tapping the underside of the controller is supposed to help ("rolling"). I wonder what the highest speed is. I remember playing Tetris DX and I could seemingly play forever. I once got over 700 lines in it. After 300 or so lines, the background goes black and quits changing. But I'll never know because this version of Tetris goes way too fast. Here I actually got one line cleared on level 19. Whoopee. What I don't understand why it's the tenth palette yet it's only on level 19. Shouldn't it be the eighth palette (white, orange, blue)? You know what would have made this a great game? Battery saving high scores. But if even Super Mario Bros. 3 didn't get one, then, oh well.

Today I played NES. I wondered if it was possible to score over a million points and finish the game. Yes, but you must "cheat" in order to do so. In 3-2 you can build up your score to a million without losing very many lives and then proceed to beat the game. I watched some YouTuber get a million points. I was wondering why he kept dying, but I soon figured out why. So all that talk about SMB made me want to play it. All I did was use infinite lives, nothing else. And I beat it a second time. I pressed B to select a world and I started at 8 and went through the game until 8-4 and won again. So hey, I figured if you can cheat in order to get to a million points, you can cheat to beat the game. I have a tip. In 8-2 you can easily time it just right and find a hiding space here for a few seconds. The Green Koopa Paratroopa won't land on the spot Mario is at, and after he passes then you can proceed. I never did get a million points legitimately: But since I suck at just about everything, I consider this an accomplishment because I didn't warp at all. I went through all 32 levels. Yay. And it's my first NES game beaten this year. Perhaps I should see how many I can beat this year...

2024 begins with more Odyssey 2 work. I decided to try to put in a fourth game. To see if it's worth it. Is it fun? In this game, the x will rescue other x's while avoiding those pesky o's. I made a game before called Oranges for the Odyssey 2, but it was never made into a game for sale. So I think it's okay to steal ideas from myself. Oranges was sort of like this except there was no one to save and there were 5 oranges. The o's and x's travel from right to left. The green x which you control can move where he wants within the white lines. I plan to make the o's get faster as the game progresses. I had a very hard time getting to sleep last night. It took at least 2 hours of just laying there really sleepy until I finally fell asleep. As a result, I woke up at 4 p.m. It was awful. It went from waking up at around 11 a.m. or 12 p.m. to waking up at 4 p.m. and attempting to go to sleep at around midnight or so. I guess I'll be up later now.

What has happened since my last blog entry? I designed a few new levels for the hamburger game. Level 6 is the city. There are lots of skyscrapers in it. I don't know whether or not to make the score black or white on this level. Right now it's white, but I could easily change it to black if I want to. I don't know if I want to. Level 7 is the beach. I put a couple of palm trees on it. I also need to compose some music for it. I've been looking at samples for the tracker I use for Game Gear programming, but I don't know what else to do to make the music sound different. What's also hindering me is the fact that I only have two channels to work with. I'm using the third is for sfx and the "white noise" channel for sfx of the enemy shooting. I jus tnow have an idea for music for the final level, I need to go track it before I forget.

I am making a Game Gear game and I'd like some feedback on how I'm doing. The game is called Flying Hamburgers and the game play is you control a flying hamburger which has the ability to shoot French fries at other flying junk food. The chocolate milkshakes can shoot onion rings, the pizza slice can shoot pepperoni slices at you, and the taco can shoot nachos at you. The pepperoni and nachos follow your vertical movement, so you may need to dodge their shots. At the end of each level is a giant milkshake that you need to shoot at while avoiding the four onion rings he shoots at you continuously. I've attached a link to the ROM of the game so far. It starts at level 6, so it's kind of harder than the earlier levels. After you beat level 6, it just goes back to the title screen, but my plan is to have 10 levels. Starting on level 7, the enemy food can move up and down in addition to just straight at you. But I haven't gotten that far yet. Also, the music on level 6 is level 5's music since I haven't composed a song for level 6 yet. Any suggestions? http://www.atari2600land.com/gamegear/flyinghamburgers.html Forgot to mention that the chicken nuggets are extra lives. Bump into them to get an extra life.

So I played my Game Gear for the first time in a while. Man, orange is hard to see on a blue background. I tried to make it more visible by darkening the screen and it worked a little. I think the problem is the shape of the onion ring: It is hard to make an 8x8 O-shaped sprite visible like that. The nacho that the taco shoots is visible. I think putting a black border around the sprites like I did in the Virtual Boy game would not look as good if you actually have a color other than red. I have been working on this more than I should have after I realized there were still some things to do in the "engine" mainly having to do with going up into the boss level. But I think I figured that stuff out, along with the amount of shots needed to defeat the boss, which magically broke for no good reason. If this is my last blog entry before Christmas, have a merry one. And let's hope 2024 will bring this game having actual physical copies somehow.

With all this work on Mean Santa for the Game Boy... I thought I'd take a little time to work on Flying Hamburgers for the Game Gear as well. Today I added in the ability for the enemies to move up and down instead of just straight on. I am planning this out. levels 1-3: head on, regular speed levels 4-6: head on, regular or faster speed levels 7-9: up and down movement or head on level 10: a mixture of any of these. I have also decided to put in an ending for the game. This came because it would take some more programming time to put in level intros for levels 11 onward. Plus, I want the player to sense a feeling of accomplishment knowing he made it to the end. "I beat 'Flying Hamburgers'!" Like that time I was playing X-box 360 because I never got a chance to get a Wii and I was playing Tetris and the game stopped and said I had beaten it. Granted, I didn't know you could beat Tetris, but I felt a sense of accomplishment. So what I need to do right now is compose some music for level 5, the purply mountain and then think up of 4 more and then do level 10: the castle. I also took a little time to name the levels as well. Cloud Nine (and others) Caving In Deserted Reef Madness I only have two empty banks and only 5 levels. I don't know if I'll be able to fit in 5 more levels. But I'll try.

So I went to sleep at around 6 a.m. yesterday. And then I woke up at around midnight. So basically I spent most of Saturday asleep. I don't know why. But I figure if I didn't need to then I wouldn't have. So since midnight I have been working most of the time. All my work today was on Mean Santa. I could have worked less had I remembered I could make the background palette and the sprite palette different. I think that was the most troublesome part of my work. I am trying to make an endless runner-type minigame except that it ends. And it's not very long. Soon I will put Santa in here and his job here is to jump over a few snowmen before going to loot more houses. I could have made it scroll, but that would involve more work, so I just decided to create the illusion that it's scrolling. So I put some little grass blades. At first I had the grass green here. Because it normally is green where I am. The last time snow was on the ground on Christmas was when I was 1 year old. But then I decided to make it have snow. I wish it would snow on Christmas. But it looks like another sunny day a little above freezing (around 40F). I had to get rid of the Super Game Boy palette since I'm only allowed 1. If you count the number of different colors here, it's more than 4. So that's why. Each palette contains 4 colors. I get 16 palettes, 8 for the background and 8 for the sprites. What's odd about this is that's exactly how the Game Gear works and it was released 9 years prior to the GBC. Somehow I find it easier to work with palettes in the Game Gear rather than the GBC though.

I woke up at 2 p.m. Not because I wanted to, but because of the leafblower people going around with their stupid leafblowers on. I thought perhaps they'll stop, but no, they kept going, 20 minutes later. So I decided to get out of bed. I worked a lot on Mean Santa again today. I got really angry because I was having horrible trouble with making the game easier to program. A few hours passed, and I finally got everything straightened out. I was trying to make it easier to add new levels in the game, like this one. So now it will be (relatively) easy to just add new levels. I think I have the main engine mostly done for the most part. A few things need to be decided, like whether or not to add lives, or points, or both. Or just have Santa have an infinite attempt at stealing the presents in each level. And now my left wrist hurts so I'm done with typing code for today. It's 2 a.m., so I've been awake for almost 12 hours. Perhaps it's just time for me to go to sleep. The leafblower people usually come on Wednesdays so hopefully nothing will wake me up when I go to sleep today.

Tim Duarte and I are working on bringing his game Mean Santa to the Game Boy. I have been programing it and he has been giving me feedback about it. Not that I'd get it completed by Christmas, but perhaps we'll do a Christmas in July and release it then or something. I have been making it work for Game Boy Color and Super Game Boy, as well as just regular Game Boy, all in one cartridge. These screenshots are from the Game Boy Color mode. The Super Game Boy mode has its own border and color palette. The premise of the game is Santa has turned grinch-like and wants to steal presents instead of giving them out to the kids. Trying to stop him is the Ghost of Christmas Presents, who wants the kids to get their presents. You control Santa as he's trying to steal the presents in each room. Basically it's sort of like my Game Boy game Ugly Uppity Umpire. So how this works is if you put the game in a GBC, it will be in color, if you put it into a Super Game Boy it will be in color only a different palette and border, and if you put it in a regular Game Boy it will be black and white. Got it?

I fixed it.

Last month I said that on the third of each month I would post a new YouTube poop. Well, it's December 3, and I kept my word. Here is my second creation. I am particularly proud of the first part. Not just because I found it, and found it sort of suggestive, but what I did to it. All this stuff was a commercial break of As the World Turns somewhere around 1993. I have quite a few episodes of the soap as my mom and grandma were big fans of it. Grandma said she watched the first episode. Too bad she wasn't around for the last episode. So January 3, (if I remember), I'll post yet another one. Because I'm bored, that's why.

Added the whack-an-o minigame. Whack the Os but not the Xs. Link to the game is in post #1 of this thread.

So I think I finally got the Whack-an-O game done now. I had to get rid of the high score thing because there's more than one game now and I can't display the high score for both of them. Also appearing in the Whack-an-O game are Xs. If you whack an X the game is over. You only are supposed to whack Os. So I centered the score on the screen since there's only one score and not the high score as well. Not to worry, the tic-tac-toe game still has a win counter for both x and o. I had a hard time trying to get the X to appear in all 8 spaces. It refused to go in the top one for no apparent reason. But after a few hours of attempting, I think I finally got it to work without repeating a certain pattern over and over, which was another problem I was having. And yet another problem I was having was when, say, o pressed left and then an x appeared in the same spot the game ended and you were left wondering why. The solution to this was make the letters not repeat the spaces they were in in the previous appearance. So after you whack an O, you can't whack an X because it won't appear in that same spot. You also may be wondering why there's no center spot. Originally I was going to have ACTION button whack the O in the middle but then I thought that would be 9 spaces. 8 is a better round number computerwise (2^3) and therefore would be easier to get a random number for. In learning how to code for all these different retro consoles, they all have one thing in common: They like numbers that are powers of 2. I also began work on this this morning and now I think I have completed it, which is pretty quick even for me. It's only about 2 p.m. I woke up at about 5 a.m. or so. In order to get my (apparently needed) 14 hours or so of sleep, I will probably get sleepy and will be headed to bed here pretty soon.

I forgot to put back in access to the first driving level. I put it back in and it should work now.