I’m not sure why I’d forgotten to post this on here, but apparently, I did. This is a short I did for my multimedia class during the Fall 2009 semester. The assignment was simply “create a short that tells a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end”. Well, being the over-achiever that I am, I set to work, and ‘The Contract‘ is the result. It’s a very simple piece, although it doesn’t necessarily look it. I’m a strong believer in showing the audience only what they need to see, but having them hear everything. With that in mind, sound design was priority one for this project, and all of the feedback I’ve gotten indicates that it paid off. My instructor told me at the end of the semester that he’d used this animation as an example for other classes, and every single person that saw it was blown away by it, especially after they looked at the original fla file. I’m proud of it, because at the very least, this represents only the beginning of the empowerment that Flash provides me as an artist.

Click the box art above to jump to the game

I’ve become quite smitten with Flash this semester, which isn’t terribly surprising considering it represents the culmination of many of my skills. I first tried my hand at making something years ago, but quickly realized that I didn’t have the chops for it. The program fascinated me though, and the sheer number of possibilities with it was endless.

Fast forward to this year. Coming off of being totally burned out on the idea of programming after my previous two semesters, I was eager to get started on my web design degree. I’d signed up for a class labeled “Concept in Multimedia” and saw in the curriculum that Flash was a large part of the subjects covered. I figured that I’d try my hand at it again. This time at least, I would have a leg up with a better understanding of programming in general (Python, Javascript and a brief stint in a Java class), and I’d heard that Actionscript was pretty close in syntax to Javascript. I figured what the hell…

So far, I’m loving it. I get to use just about every skill I’ve honed over the years; sound design, graphic creation, interface design, programming, film editing, writing… all of it. Everything and anything I want, I can make happen (well, eventually I’ll be able to at least).

As I said, this is the second thing I’ve made in Flash. The assignment was to create an interactive piece that told a story, and had at least 2 decision points and 4 possible endings. Well obviously, the first thing that popped into my head was to pay homage to the role-playing games I grew up with. I set to work on it, and 36 non-consecutive hours later, Dragon Fighter II Turbo was the result:

I’m really excited with the possibilities presented in this program. I’ve signed up for one of the more advanced Flash courses next semester. I’m sure once I get to a break from school, I’ll be churning out my fair share of Flash spam. But hey, Lennon and McCartney wrote a ton of really bad songs before they got to their first good one. I figure it’ll be the same thing with this.

Option+Click on the volume icon gives you instant access to changing your input and output devices. Pretty spiffy, and saves you a trip to the System Preferences. Maybe I should do a full write-up review of Snow Leopard… when the NDA lifts (tomorrow, finally).

Option+Click on Airport. Only a few more days, gang. It’s worth it.

And now we know. A new shirt design from Nerduo. The initial run has sold out, so if you didn’t get it, then you missed your chance.

If you grew up in the 80s, there’s a pretty good chance you remember Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. The Landmark Entertainment / Mattel produced show was essentially designed to move piles of action figures off of the store shelves. And move them they did. Every single week, kids were invited to use their XT-7 jet to fire at the army of the vicious Lord Dread while watching the show. And the mind blowing part (when I was younger anyway) was that the show fired back! Sigh. Technology innocence, how I miss you. Even though the few Captain Power toys I had are now in the giant landfill in the sky, I still have a VHS tape of one of the Training Videos that was available. Maybe I’ll have to do an entire post on the totally radicalness (yes, I just made that word up) of the entire Captain Power concept. I never had the jets when I was younger (my friends had them, but they were too expensive for me), but I did have more than a few of the action figures. Even though I was starting to outgrow toys at that point, the cool colored bits of chrome on each figure were pretty cool. Couple that with the fact that the whole thing centered around the video game idea of shooting at the TV, and I was sold. Chrome and violence, that’s my weakness…

Anyway, for your Wednesday Awesome, enjoy this gag reel from the set of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.

Don't let that little blue hedgehog nickle-and-dime your wallet. Play smart!

Sega has a very interesting history. 20 years ago, they ushered in the era of 16-bit gaming. 15 years ago, they were one of the biggest video game companies in the world, constantly trading the top spot with Nintendo. 10 years ago, they launched the Dreamcast, which would be their last video game console. 5 years ago… well, let’s just say they weren’t doing so hot.

Don't trash those games! Reuse them instead.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article showing the difference in power usage between older game systems and modern ones. It seemed to really resonate with a lot of people, and generated a tremendous amount of positive feedback. After spending some more time thinking about the concept of being a ‘green gamer’, I realized that reducing energy usage isn’t the only thing you can do to introduce a little ‘green living’ into your gaming. There’s another, even more basic, way that just about every classic gamer actively does already, and might not even know it; recycling.

Click here to read the rest of this article on Examiner.com

Only a sample of James' Jaguar Collection

James Griffith is the perfect example of a true classic gaming collector. I first met James a few years ago, and quickly struck up a friendship with him based on our mutual obssession with old video games. I quickly realized two things; he is extremely knowledgable about his retro gaming, and also hoplessly addicted to everything related to the Atari Jaguar. Speaking with James last week, we setup a time for me to visit him at his home in St. Louis Park to take photos of his constantly expanding collection of Atari Jaguar systems, games and memoriablia for my ongoing photographic record of classic video games. After the photoshoot was finished, I asked James if he would be willing to sit down and talk about how he got started with being an Atari Jaguar collector, and a bit of the history of the system itself.

Click here to read the rest of this article on Examiner.com

Behold; a true side-scrolling shooter masterpiece.

During a recent interview segment on the Digital Cowboys podcast, I was asked what three games I would take with me if I were stranded on a desert island. Feeling the pressure of the question, I quickly rattled off Capcom vs. SNK, GigaWing and Super Mario Bros. I was fairly content with my answers; a fighting game that has wonderful replay value and bled style, an overhead shooter that took the concept of ‘bullet hell’ to a whole other level, and the grandfather of side-scrolling platform action. I felt I had successfully represented the full gamut of great games. Later that evening, as I was sending an email to Alex at Digital Cowboys, a terrible cold sweat crept across my brow. What a fool I was! In my haste to provide a thought provoking answer to their question, I’d completely overlooked a shooter that has deep personal meaning to me; a video game that defined large portions of my teenage years, and to this day, still engages me in a way that no other game can. That game is Gate of Thunder.

Click here to read the rest of this article on Examiner.com

LIFE Magazine's greatest gamers alive - Ottumwa, Iowa circa 1982

A few weeks ago on the GameHounds podcast, I was involved in a rather heated (re: NSFW) discussion with Gamer Edie about Ottumwa, Iowa wanting to establish the Video Game Hall of Fame in their town. My stance was that anyone who knows the true history of the gaming culture should know that Ottumwa is the home base of Walter Day and Twin Galaxies, the first and only official score keepers in the video game world. Edie’s viewpoint was simple: something as significant as the video game hall of fame should be in a more prestigious, and more easily accessible by plane, area than Iowa. Now, rather than simply posting a play-by-play of the discussion (or the profanity riddled Chewbacca Defense) from that episode of GameHounds (number 64 if you’re interested), I instead want to focus on something that we only briefly touched upon in the show. A topic that I feel is even more important than the location of a hall of fame; how to properly create one. As you can see from the title, this is going to be an ongoing look into various ideas and concepts that I have regarding the idea of the creation of a Video Game Hall of Fame. However, and I hope you agree, I feel this truly is a topic that is worth exploring quite deeply. After all, if there really is to be a hall of fame for this medium that we all love so dearly, shouldn’t we as gamers do our best to make sure it’s done correctly? Let’s get started…

Click here to read the rest of this article on Examiner.com

I always look so angry in my drawings.

Last Saturday, I officially launched the new GameHounds website. After the failed first attempt at a redesign, I went back and started from scratch. After settling on the open-source Compositio theme, I decided to go for a very clean look with minimal graphics usage. It’s a style I’ve worked hard to grow over the last few months, and I feel I’m finally at the point where I’m able to really convey solid messaging through only a few well-placed pieces of imagery. The site is very fun and light, but loaded with useful and dynamic content. The “Latest Tweet” widget (as seen on this site), that I have been perfecting over the last month, has yet again found its way onto another site. And most importantly of all, my old pal Edgey has once again outdone himself with his amazing illustration skills. All-in-all, I’m very proud of what was accomplished in a very short period of time.

Since debuting the new theme, the reaction from my co-hosts and the fans has been fantastic! Everyone loves the little dog graphics and the new easy-on-the-eyes look. In a thread about the new theme on the Platform Nation Forums, a listener made a comment that they loved the new site, and praised me on the new design. They also mentioned that they didn’t know if Hawkes had anything to do with the development process, but if he did, they extended the praise to him as well. I clicked the reply button to write a ‘thank you’, and say that although Hawkes didn’t directly work on the new GameHounds site, he did act as my personal cheerleader during the development. I stopped and said “Boy, I bet that sure would be funny if I literally drew Hawkes as a cheerleader….”

Twenty minutes later, this was the result. I lol’d, and so did everyone else.

However, in all seriousness, I did want to take this moment to give a big ‘thank you‘ to Edie and Hawkes. They were both incredibly supportive of me during the entire development process, and in addition, they are easily two of the most professional podcasters that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I hope this site is only the first step into a new era of awesome for the GameHounds podcast, and its wonderful fans. Thank you to everyone.

The hard-ridin', hard-drivin', gaming heroes.

For anyone out there that enjoys hearing my dulcet tones radiating out of your computer’s speakers as often as possible, have I got a treat for you! I was recently honored with an invitation to be the guest on the latest episode of the Digital Cowboys podcast. For anyone not familiar, it’s a UK based video game/technology show hosted by a couple of guys named Alex and Tony. The episode was all about the history of the Sega Dreamcast, and they asked me to come on and bring my encyclopedic knowledge of all things Sega with me. I had a blast being on the show, and heartily recommend everyone to give them a listen. Their show is drop-dead hilarious, and their passion for creating quality entertainment oozes out of every second of audio. As far as I’m concerned, these guys are the best kept secret in podcasting.

Zombie blasting action has never been so good.

If you’re like me, Left 4 Dead intrigued you. Its visceral game play, and truly frightening moments of terror in the game really sold me on the concept of it. However, the most horrific part of it for me was the price: $60 for 4 maps and a weak single-player game. Well, now I have no reason to complain. Until Monday, Valve has put Left 4 Dead on sale for $23 when purchased over Steam. This also includes the recently released Survival Pack that adds more missions, game modes, and most importantly, an SDK. Yes folks, expect to be buried (’natch) in user created content shortly.

I just plunked down my money for it. It’s definitely worth $23 for the sheer amount of shrieking zombie terror it provides. However, if you’re still on the fence, Valve has also announced that the full game is available to play for free on Friday. Yes, you have until the stroke of midnight on Friday evening to sample the entire game for the relatively low cost of nothing. No excuses now. Give it a whirl.

Oh, and if you would like to join me for a game, my Steam handle is, you guessed it, CommanderTim.

Now my neighbors officially think I'm crazy.

This Earth Day, we’ve all been asked to consider how we can be more energy efficient in our lives. Some people decided to not drive their car to work. Others have unplugged all their electronic devices and turned the lights off. How did I spend my Earth Day? I got an oil change on my car, but that’s neither here nor there. While I was sitting there at my car dealership, I started thinking (as I often do) about videogames. More specifically, how much electricity gets used by your average gamer on a weekly basis? I started to do some preliminary math in my head, and quickly realized that modern consoles are burning through a ton of energy to bring us those fantastic high-definition moments of adrenaline fueled fun. But what’s a gamer to do? How can a gamer get just as much play time in and still reduce their ‘carbon footprint’? How can a gamer truly ‘go green’? It’s simple; go retro.

How much energy does that little green light use?

Let’s start at the easiest to quantify comparison. How much power does your average modern game console use? If you guessed more than ‘a little’, you’re absolutely correct! Now, seeing that I used all the space in my brain that you would normally keep math lessons to store all the Fatalities for the first three Mortal Kombat games, I had to turn to the interwebs for help on finding out how much juice a game console uses.

According to Google, the way to find out the energy usage of a device is to multiply the outlet voltage by the amperage listed on the device itself. In the case of devices that convert AC (alternating current) power to DC (direct current), simply use the voltage listed on the device. Armed with this knowledge, I reached for two systems; my XBox 360 and my Sega Genesis Model 2.

The Sega Genesis, if you’re not me and don’t bother committing this kind of stuff to memory, is the 16-bit video game console released by Sega in 1989. The Genesis is considered by many to be the defining system of the 16-bit era, and Sega made a fortune selling millions of them the world over. Now that we’re all caught up, let’s check the tale of the tape:

According to the handy label attached to the bottom of the Sega Genesis, this is a model MK-1631 and has a power rating of 10v DC and 0.85 Amps:

Sega Genesis = 10v x .85a = 8.5w

That looks pretty good. Now it’s time for an example of the current generation video game hardware, the Microsoft XBox 360.

Thankfully, I’d just gotten my shiny replacement unit from Microsoft yesterday, after dealing with my second bout of the dreaded Red Ring of Death. I had to squint to read it, but according to the very tiny print on the rear of the XBox 360, it uses 12v DC and 16.5 Amps. Let’s do the math on that one real quick:

XBox 360 = 12v x 16.5a = 198w

Egad. That’s quite a difference. Granted, being 16 years newer and infinitely more powerful in every way, those kinds of numbers were to be expected. But consider something for a moment; quite a few people download and play emulated versions of games like Ecco the Dolphin and Sonic the Hedgehog, both of which were originally released on the Sega Genesis. If we take it a step further and give an estimated time of completion to a game like Sonic, we can begin to quantify how much energy is burned playing what is essentially the same exact video game. For example:

Let’s say that you play Sonic the Hedgehog and complete the game in 3 hours. Now, let’s figure out how much energy it used being played on a Sega Genesis. To do this, we will need to find the Kilowatts per hour of the device, and then multiply that by the time spent using the system. To do this, we take the amount of watts from earlier, divide them by 1000, and then multiply that by 3 to get our total play time.

Sega Genesis = .0085 kilowatt-hour x 3 hours to complete = .0255kw

Now, lets use the same technique to find how much the XBox 360 used:

XBox 360 = .198 kilowatt-hour x 3 hours to complete = .594kw

Wow. That’s an almost absurd 2575% increase in energy usage just to play a little Sonic. Now, let’s break it down into numbers that really matter: cash money. According to UCAN.org, you multiply the kilowatt-hour figures of our two systems by 17.5¢ (the current market value of Kilowatts per hour) to determine how much it costs you to run that system for a period of time. Let’s take a look:

Sega Genesis = .0255kw x .175 = $0.004 (or four-tenths of a cent)
XBox 360 = .594kw = $0.103 (or ten and three tenths of a cent)

That certainly puts things into perspective a bit. I guess this whole time I’ve been obsessing over and playing old video games, I’ve actually been doing my part to save the planet, and my wallet. Go figure.

After being floored a bit by these numbers, I started looking around at other systems in the house to see if I just happened to randomly pick two systems with such a wide gamut between them. Nope. Check out the list below to get an idea. I’ve included the year the console was released to help put things in perspective:

• Colecovision (1982): 4.5w
• Super Nintendo (1991): 8.5w
• Atari Jaguar (1993): 10.8w
• Sega Saturn (1995): 25w
• Nintendo 64 (1996): 19w
• Sega Dreamcast (1999): 27w
• Nintendo Gamecube (2001): 39w

It’s pretty safe to say that as game systems get more powerful, they’re using a tremendous amount more energy to power their 1080p high-definition graphics and 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Also of note, based on the extremely rough example provided here, we can develop a clear picture that the jump to optical (CD and DVD) media increased the power requirements of game consoles as well, versus the old method of storing games on cartridges.

It seems that the lesson here is that the older the console, the less energy it is likely to use. So remember gamers; if you want to do your part in helping to conserve energy, turn off the Playstation 3 and fire up your NES. And honestly, isn’t Pitfall actually more fun than Gears of War?

Yeah, I think so too.

I’m not sure how many of you have been following this title as rabidly as I have, but Arcade Heroes has delivered their hands-on impressions of the spiritual successor to Hydro Thunder; H2Overdrive!

The game was developed by the team at Raw Thrills, which was founded by Eugene Jarvis and staffed by a healthy portion of the, now defunct, Midway arcade team. That alone gives the game some serious street-cred out the door, because most of people who worked on this title were the folks that created the original Hydro Thunder. According to the gang at Arcade Heroes, the game is utterly fantastic, and should impress fans of the original, and maybe even create a few new ones. Hopefully, this hits an arcade nearby. I see a potential trip to D&B for some crazy multiplayer action.

via Arcade Heroes

I do believe somebody called ’shens’ on my statement saying that there was a modem for the Atari VCS that allowed you to download games to your system. Well, just to silence the haters, here it is. They also make mention of this little knowledge-bomb that was in doubt:

Even though the GameLine died, the investors and founding members of CVC went on to start a new company that would continue to use the technological infastructure they had built. The company, called Quantum Computer Services was created by Steve Case, among others. This company created a service called Quantum Link which linked together Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 users offering many of the expanded services originally envisioned for GameLine. Quantum Computer Services eventually changed its name to America Online in October of 1991. Though the company still (technically) exists, support for the Gameline does not.

It’s an interesting read, and the earliest example of trying to create an online gaming experience for console users. Just think, if it wasn’t for this, the X-Band modems, or The Sega Channel, we might not have the online connectivity we enjoy with modern consoles.

So, what’s the lesson here? Simple;

Commander Tim don’t shiv.

In case any of you missed this after Pink Ninja Studios closed…

Until my schedule gets a little fluffier (and I rekindle my desire to do so), The Commander Tim Cast is on hiatus. I’m thinking possibly summer for a fresh new start, with a return to what the show was at the start; a 20 minute audio mind-dump on whatever I fancy that day. Well, until I get the gumption to get that rocking again, you can find me on the big Saturday show over at Gamehounds. For anyone not familiar, it’s an adult perspective video-game news and opinion show created by Gamer Edie Sellers and Cooper Hawkes. The show is a blast to do, and it’s a very quality production. Thanks to Edie taking on all the heavy lifting, podcasting is once again fun for me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had that feeling. Anyway, just an FYI about that. Also, you’ll notice the general state of half-finishedness on this site. That will be changing soon as well. Like a good car mechanic; the guy who fixes ‘em all day usually has the worst running one.

Quite possibly the greatest accomplishment you’ll see all day.

This makes me very nostalgic for some reason. Perhaps it’s because I’m reminded of when I used to wander into Electronics Boutique or Babbages Software, and marvel at the colorful artwork of all the games on the shelves. Or maybe, it’s because it reminds me of when video games still carried that hint of innocence… before the dark times… before the empire… I dunno.  But what I do know is that this 1991 Nintendo Customer Service Training Video is an amazing time capsule of days gone by. Check out those sweaters! And that totally swank 9″ television the customer service rep has behind the counter! Ah, memories. Check it out, enjoy, and above all, remember: the training kit is there to help you.

via [GoNintendo]