This month marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Secret of Monkey Island. This game, of course, means a lot to me, as it was solely responsible for starting my lifelong obsession with LucasArts adventure games… actually, no, that was Full Throttle. But what the heck, it STILL means a lot to me.

I didn’t play Monkey Island until 1997, seven years after its release. I got it as part of a LucasArts Archives boxed set. The Secret of Monkey Island and its sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge were bundled together on one CD, along with a demo of the all-new Curse of Monkey Island (which I, of course, ended up buying later). I remember falling completely and utterly in love with these games, especially with the first one. I remember spending ages trying to figure out how to get the storekeeper to take you to the Swordmaster of Melée Island, and then realising that “oh, I’m actually supposed to FOLLOW him”. Ah, good times, good times.

I also remember going to Disneyland a couple of years later and riding Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride that inspired the Monkey Island series. I remember thinking that someday I wanted to make a movie based on Monkey Island, because that was around the time I wanted to be a filmmaker. Mind you, this was WAY before the actual Pirates of the Caribbean movie was even made…

By now, everyone knows that there are no longer any ads in the Opera web browser. I took this as an opportunity to try it out, and was impressed enough to start using it as my primary browser.

As you probably already know, I’ve been a happy Firefox user for a while now. Up until now, Firefox essentially had everything Opera had, except for ads, and I absolutely despise ads. However, with those ads gone, I’m going to say that the playing field is somewhat leveled. I’m not going to take a stance on whether one browser is universally better than the other. (I can, however, honestly say that both are universally better than Internet Explorer. I mean, who actually USES Internet Explorer anymore? Oh, right… all those people who make poorly-designed websites that only work in Explorer…)

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First things first: in case anyone cares, I wrote a new poem. It’s called “Past, Present, Future” and it proves once again how much I like to group my poems into three stanzas.

Now, to take on a completely different turn, I’d like to share my thoughts on Telltale Games‘ newest offering: Out from Boneville[1] . Now, everyone and their dog has been telling me that it’s an extremely short game, probably not worth the $20 (US) they’re charging for it. I, of course, don’t mind short games at all; in fact, I welcome them, given the fact that I’m a busy student AND I’m using up a large portion of my free time making my OWN game. And besides, if you think about it, $20 really isn’t that much to pay for a new game these days. I’m pretty sure I spent at least twice that much on Psychonauts, after all…

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So, I’ve just added footnotes to my blog. This means I can now sound like Terry Pratchett[1] as I write. Oh, the joys of silly Wordpress[2] plugins. Will the madness ever end?

I also just installed a new plugin that lets you customize your comment text. I can see myself having a lot of fun with this…

You know what’s weird? I had a dream last night telling me to update this blog to use Wordpress instead of sphpblog. And if you’re here, you may have already noticed that this blog, lo and behold, is using Wordpress instead of sphpblog.

What can I say? Dreams really are inspiring. After all, I once had a dream tell me I should rewrite Cubert Badbone, so I did, and the game turned out rather nicely, don’t you think?

Anyway, I somewhat recently discovered that my web host can automagically install scripts for me, and Wordpress happened to be one of them. Now Wordpress, for the uninformed, is a really good open-source blogging script that’s way better and way more customizable than the one I was using before. Alas, I didn’t want to go through all the trouble of installing a new blogging script. Until the dream told me to, that is.

Now, everything’s a lot cleaner and nicer than it was before. Even the old entries are here. Unfortunately, all the comments are gone, but that’s okay; we didn’t really like them anyway.

The interactive story is gone too, because alas, someone had hacked into it. Ah well, it’s not like anyone actually contributed to it in the last little while.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I need to write more game music. Considering that I haven’t done so for about a year, I also decided that it was about time I got some new software on which to compose said music.

My previous setup, of course, was to use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (from, like, 2001 or so) to write the music, and use a lovely little software synth called SurReal to select the actual sounds of the instruments, then convert the MIDI files to WAV (and drop the WAV files into OggDrop to make OGG’s, etc.) Now, this posed a problem of sorts when I got a new computer circa August 2004, namely, that SurReal only works in Windows 98.

But wait, there's more! »

I just finished playing Nick Bounty: The Goat in the Grey Fedora. I loved it. It was short and sweet and therefore quite appealing for a busy person such as myself who really doesn’t have time to play games these days. (I still haven’t finished Psychonauts yet…) It also reminded me quite a bit of my very own Cubert Badbone, P.I., except for the fact that it had better graphics and less aliens.

My only criticism, of course, is that the game sure could’ve used some proofreading. However, the feminist jokes at the end more than made up for it. I was in stitches.

All in all, it’s always quite a pleasant surprise to play other people’s games and find them thoroughly impressive. I don’t believe I’ve felt this way since playing Out of Order… but that’s more of an indicator of how little I play amateur adventure games than the quality of the games themselves.

Oh, and by the way, I’d like to now draw your attention to the new buttons in the sidebar of this website. Specifically, the PayPal one. Yes, as you see, I have now enabled you all to send me donations. Donations are very good, because they encourage yours truly to keep on making silly games that everyone loves. It might even make TGTTPOACS’s development go faster. *wink wink nudge nudge*