Gamegearguy

No, there's no baseball. Umpire is a word beginning with U and I needed one more to go along with Ugly and Uppity.

It is a sort of like Monopoly where players move their squares around the board (an overlay) to claim spaces and move to them without touching the other player. It's kind of complicated.

For sale here is a set of things needed to play a game I designed for the Magnavox Odyssey console. For those who don't know what that is, it's a different setup than buying a traditional game since the game uses cartridges in a different sense than each cartridge that has a game on it. Multiple cartridges control different things (the players, the missile, a net for the volleyball cartridge), so a cartridge can have more than one game to it. For more on the Odyssey console itself, here is a link to Wikipedia's page on it.

I am one of the few people on the entire planet that owns a working Magnavox Odyssey from 1972. I guess when they built these things, they were built to last! About 50 years later and the thing still works like a champ! I have been making off and on for the past year or so, a new Magnavox Odyssey homebrew game. I was planning it for the 50th anniversary, but I kept holding it off and putting it on the back burner so to speak. Well, today I finally got my rump in gear and bought the tubes to mail these things in. And as such, I started a preorder thread here on the marketplace section on Video Game Sage. I don't know, I have some feedback on the names: Buy! and Sell! Well, if you have something to sell, would you put it in the sell section since you're selling it? So does that mean Buy! is a WTB thread? It all confuses me. Anyway, next year I will make an ambitious project: Three games in one. I need to work on that some more since I only have one game ready.

Hello. I am going to have 17 copies of Six², a homebrew Odyssey game. NOT the Odyssey 2 or VideoPac, the original Odyssey made in 1972. This is an interest check/preorder thread. When the game is ready to ship, I will PM and/or email you telling you to pay. I'd like to sell all 17 of these, so let's make that happen! The game will cost $20. I bought the mailing tubes, so I'm pretty close to finishing this thing up. You'll recieve in your tube a fantastic overlay and all the stuff needed to play the game except cart #4. (And if you have an Odyssey, you'll probably have cart #4). Let me know if you want one of these and I'll add you to this list of preorders. I'm new to selling stuff on VGS, so if there's something I forgot to do, please tell me. 1. VGCollectaholic 2. Odysseus 3. Stupus (via AtariAge) 4. RPGCollector 5. RetroGMR 6. ianoid (via AtariAge) 7. Grondorr 8. retrogamer 9. Blazing Lazers (via AtariAge) 10. PsychedelicShaman (via AtariAge) 11. ianoid (via AtariAge) 12. NarrowEscape 13. svlovinist 14. 15. 16. 17.

I guess I just liked the homespun feel of the thing. It was being run by a guy who loves Atari. But now that it's being run by a company instead of a person, it lost that uniqueness, which was, in my opinion, a main reason of its existance. It rebelled Atari, and for Al to just do a 180 and embrace the company? That just seems kind of odd to me,

This whole AtariAge selling out thing stinks to high heaven. And I don't want to be a part of it one bit. Not one reply to the question "What if the iteration of Atari folds or goes bankrupt?" I really hate drama. I go out of my way to create or be a part of drama. So I have decided to excuse myself out of the AtariAge forums. I guess Al is a business man, and sure, it gets him a lot of money, but if I was in the same situation, I would have turned any offer from Atari down, even if they offered me millions of dollars. You just need to think about other people before yourself first. That's a lesson a lot of people, I guess including Al, need to learn: DON'T BE SELFISH. Or greedy. Greed is never good. So I guess I'll remain here unless Gloves decides to sell out as well. I think I don't see that happening, seeing as how there's no company called "Video Games", but you can never be too sure about anything these days, I guess. If you don't know about my posting history, I'll be short: I posted a lot over there. I almost reached 20,000 posts in the 17 years I'd been there. It was my main internet home, and I'm sad to see it go. But I don't want to be a part of any forum that is part of a company. I guess it just says you are a fanboy. I don't want to be seen as a fanboy for a company that may fold at any minute. I guess forums in general are a dying breed, and I guess we all need to go to Discord now, which is sad. Discord killed forums, just like Amazon killed Wal-Mart, malls, and bookstores, and Nextlix and Hulu killed cable TV. The world goes on. Why can't things ever stay the same forever? All changes that companies think are good turn out to be bad. Or I guess I suppose, as I'm about to turn 41, I'm just plain too old.

Ugly Uppity Umpire is complete (unless I find any more bugs.) Worked on the ending today and spent most of my waking hours discovering and fixing bugs I had come across. And now since it's after midnight, and I had played all the levels (except for 13. I hate the snails, and this level is full of them!) I think I may be done. So what's next? Testing it on a real Game Boy. I tested this on my Super Game Boy. I'll do that when I get up. It's after midnight and I need to go to sleep soon. Here is a Labor Day comic I drew just for Labor Day. Happy Labor Day to the U.S. people!

Hello, For the past year or so, I've been working on a game for the Game Boy called "Ugly Uppity Umpire." The game is now finished and I would like to see it published somewhere by someone. I won't go the same route asking incube8 games as they rudely ignored me the last game I finished (Frank the Fruit Fly) The game has 50 levels and is, IMHO lovely. It's 128 KB, and does not use a battery, instead relying on passwords, in an attempt to make it publisher-friendly. If you have the means of publishing Game Boy games, let me know and I'll send you the ROM.

So I designed a Super Game Boy border before I went to bed last night. Today I woke up at about 12p.m. and thought I was too sleepy to get up, so I went back to sleep. While I was sleeping, I had an odd dream that a frog had got into the house, so I adopted him as a pet. I loved that frog. It was sad that I had to get up and realize it was nothing but a dream. When I got up finally, I went to work making the garbage when the Super Game Boy border comes on disappear. Now all I have to do is put in an ending. And then a few hours later, there were thunderstorms. Not very big ones and they seemed far away and it didn't last for very long. The rain came down in sheets for a couple of minutes. I told you I couldn't draw at all.

Well, man anyway. (Although I'm fat enough to be considered two men.) I did it. I designed the final level of Ugly Uppity Umpire for Game Boy. Now it has 50 levels. I started last October, so it took about a year of off and on work to design them. Like about one level per week. Although I made the last two levels today. Now what I need to do is make some sort of ending and I'd like to put in a Super Game Boy border. I have room enough to do both since I have two unused banks left. It's been a lot of work, but I accomplished my dream: Programming a game on a console I grew up playing. After a crappy NES game, I think I have the hang of making GB games with C. Too bad Frank the Fruit Fly never got published. Hopefully my choice of not using a battery for Ugly Uppity Umpire will pay off and I can get it published somewhere.

I didn't get time to work on the Wasp Woman today. That's because I spent a few hours getting really angry at programming a golf game for the 2600. Sometimes when I get angry, my right eye hurts and that's what happened this time. It feels like it's going to explode. Here is an official site with ROM to try: Golf 2600. I'm not going to work on anything else today since my eye began hurting. And I'll probably go to sleep in an hour or so because it's 8 p.m. right now and sleep cures my eyeaches.

So I'm about a half an hour into the movie now and nobody has been attacked violently yet. It seems like there's little plot among the bee/waspkeeping footage and the business company part where people smoke a whole bunch. I can't believe there was a time where people smoked at work. The plot so far is this: There's this old guy who is working with wasps, and he creates a serum that, if injected, makes people look younger. He writes a letter to an (apparent) CEO of a cosmetics company, and she invites him up. He shows her his experiments and she is so impressed, she hires him on. I'm shortly after the part where the serum gets perfected and she gets injected a couple of times. I'm curious on the scientific side of this. How can wasp jelly actually make people look younger? I guess it's one of those "watching the movie when thinking about it makes it nonsensical so just forget about it" movies. This is really a dorky movie, and seeing the name Roger Corman (director of several movies riffed on MST3k) didn't exactly get me really enthused to see it. I'm surprised Tom, Crow, and Joel/Mike/Jonah haven't done this one yet. Work continues on syncing my comments to the onscreen action continues. It's really hard to do because my computer plays the footage back slowly on the software I'm using. I guess it's because my computer is 7 years old and I should probably get a new one but I'll wait until it dies completely before I do. Or maybe it's because there's too much of it (the whole thing is 72 minutes long). If I watch a movie, I need to do it like a soap opera because my attention span can't handle a movie and I'll get real fidgety and want to do something else. So I'll continue work on this tomorrow.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp" this isn't (although this one is probably better.) I was curious. Whether or not I could rip movies from those DVDs various cheapo companies sell with dumb movies on them. It took a little over two hours to rip a 70 minute long movie with Handbreak. It's for my latest project: "Chris Makes Fun of Movies." This is like MST3k, only with audio commentary instead of shadow-rama. It takes a fair bit of work. I'm doing this in 10-minute or so long intervals. I record myself watching the movie for the very first time. I don't know anything about the movie. The test here is to test my ad-lib and thinking of funny things to say on the spot. Then comes the hard part: Syncing my ten-minute or so long commentary with what I was seeing on the screen. I'm about ten minutes into a film from 1960. Roll that beautiful bee footage! I've yet to see the title character. I may or may not put this on YouTube. I don't know about copyright, but I think if these old stupid movies are being released by these companies, they had better be in the public domain, or else all these studios would come after these small companies putting out these cheapo boxed sets. I got a couple of boxes of these, one says "100 Sci-Fi movies" with the intent of doing this, but never did until now. If I don't put them on YouTube, I guess I'll mail them free of charge for anyone who wants them. The thing is, I can only do the short ones, about 70 minutes long or so. I'm working with Pinnacle Studio so I can design the DVD menus as well. So we'll see how this goes.

On July 21, I submitted a game for review for publishing. It's been more than a month later and I got no response. None. It would be nice to get a rejection letter instead of just completely ignoring me if you don't like the game.

So I was going to put three flies in the game. But that was impossible since I couldn't make the third fly swattable even though the code I wrote should have made it do. So I decided to attempt two flies in the game. That worked. So I have an idea for the game. It seems pretty simple, but I don't know if it will work. I spent all morning and part of the afternoon on it. I got it working, but I don't know if it will be fun enough. I sent my idea ROM to the publisher of the game and we'll see if he likes the idea. It involves characters. It kept erasing the characters on the screen. I was angry and working on it for about a few hours, until I looked at the code and realized I had put "clearchar" in the code at some point. Why did I do that for? So I removed that and it began working good. Oh, I remember why I did that! It was to erase the light blue letter K that showed up at the top left of the screen. It must have been char0 since I now am using that in the game. I have decided to use the Voice module for the game. Unfortunately I can't test whether I did the Voice code correctly on my real Odyssey 2. But it works okay in the emulator. I went to sleep at about 4 p.m. and woke up around 8 a.m. I slept 16 hours.

but Carl's Jr. will make you fatter quicker.

UPDATE: I ordered a bunch of D batteries. They came in the mail. There were 4 D batteries in the compartment, but their expiration dates were in 2001. So I put in nice fresh batteries. Nothing. I finally figured out and learned the thing would only operate when the screen was in its most upright position. So it works!

Yesterday I decided to make a new Odyssey 2 game. I attempted to put three sprites on the screen moving randomly. In the end, I could only put one. So I decided to make it like my Atari 2600 game Fruit Fly Fun. This is what it looks like so far. I decided on white as the background color so the black fly would be easily visible. That and I can't think of another Odyssey 2 game with a white background. I've always wanted to make a game with a white background.

Well, I hadn't played it in a long time. Like a few years. So I was rusty. I unlocked the special cup and mirror modes.

I worked on my Game Gear game a little bit more. I made the following changes. moved the text in the title screen outside the cookie. made it so it's okay if you don't eat the burger. But eating it gives you an extra life, so it's good if you do. The burger will only appear if you have less than 2 lives remaining. made it so the burger appears less frequently. The way it was set up before it was really showing up a lot, even though it only appeared if a certain variable returned a value of >252. I changed it so it only comes if the value was 255. made it so the mouth doesn't flash when the game comes back. made a pause between life losing and starting up again. (I might have mentioned this here before.) made it so you can open and close the mouth during the life losing pause. You can play what I have at the game's official site. I checked out version 25 on my real Game Gear and it worked okay. But I doubt that many people care since there were only 5 people who viewed my last blog entry. I bet it'd be 0 if I had made this a Master System game! I have room for a couple more backgrounds so I may put some in. I don't know whether I should. And if I do, where should the action take place?

You were correct. After unscrewing it and a nasty screw that took extra time to unscrew, I found the battery compartment. Now I just need two more D batteries!

So I bought an R-Zone Super Screen. It says it needs either the AC adapter (which I don't have) or 4 D batteries. I bought it because it can use batteries, but I don't know where to put them.

Today's work is on the Game Gear. Trying to spice up and make the cookie on the title screen of Yum to look better. This is what it was like before: And after a few hours' work, what it looks like now: I misplaced the cookie so my name is lower since they're both in the same picture. I'm going to leave it as is because I don't want to work on the title screen any more. I'll test this later on a real Game Gear when the mood strikes. I need to play my Game Gear more often. You'd think with over 154 games for it I'd play it more. But the same was true back when as well: The Game Boy had better games. I guess it didn't really matter that the Game Gear games were in color if they weren't all that good. We're in the middle of a heat wave here. Today will be day 3 of temperatures above 100 degrees. We're just not that used to it here.

So today it was 105 degrees outside. I wanted to take a 10-minute walk every day. So I had to wait until 9 p.m. for it to cool down enough to do that. And I also worked a whole bunch on the lemons game. Here is what the picture of the place in yesterday's blog entry looks like now: The cacti are a little skinnier now, but I think it's good since now the cacti's offshoots are the same width as the stem. I think I have a little trouble digesting salad. I don't know why. I had to speed things up. Most of today's work involved deleting and changing code so it wouldn't slow down if Fred moved diagonally. I had a salad. I learned I don't like Italian dressing. I love ranch though. I would usually not eat a salad, but I guess I'll be eating more of them. Going for a 10-minute walk and eating healthier aren't really helping with my weight so far though.