Since I was sick with a cold this weekend, I decided to sit on my butt all weekend and start playing StarTropics. It has always been one of my favorite NES games, ever since I first played it as a child. I didn’t remember actually completing it though, so I set out to do so.
It certainly took a while to complete. Some parts were far more difficult than I remember (I hope I’m not just getting old. Eek!)
However the most difficult section of the game (and rightfully so) was the final boss fight, against Zoda. Man, if he even touched you? Instant death for you. That’s badass.
After a bit of frustration (I only used savestates a couple of times, honest! 
) I finally defeated Zoda and went on to experience the game’s ending. Though I found the end story to be a little hokey (some of those Argonians look like elves!), I was particularly impressed by the awesome ‘zooming-out’ effect at the very end of the game. Very cool and not something I expected to see in an oldschool NES game. (I made a quick animation of it. Click here to see it, as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.)
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone who likes action/adventure games. I mean, who wouldn’t want to kill stuff with a Yo-yo! 
Some cool Startropics-related links:
Today, in the middle of an otherwise normal IRC conversation, I had the amazing idea of mixing Star Wars character names with programming languages! I could only the imagine the possibilities.
I first enlisted the help of Wikipedia’s Alphabetical List of Programming Languages and Wikipedia’s List of Star Wars Characters and then got to work. I’ve tried to stick to the more well known languages and characters, but there are a few obscurities.
A friend, thinko, also contributed some of these.
Here are my results:
Here are some more additions, thanks to some of my readers!
If you have any more/better suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
So, I dug out my old backups and found some of the really old stop-motion animations that I did when I was quite a few years younger. Here is one in particular that I still find quite funny:
That comedic timing? Pure gold.
As you can tell by some of my recent entries, I’ve been busy with 30-minute drawing competitions. They’re a lot of fun. 
And as for bigger news, I’ve entered the Ludum Dare game development competition warm-up (Ludum Dare 8.5) where entrants are required to create a full fledged game within 24 hours over this past weekend. The competition is very similar to Pyweek, with the exception (of course) that you don’t get a whole week.
The themes to choose from were ‘anti-textmode’ and ‘the moon’, so I created a moon buggy game where you must travel across the treacherous moon landscape in safety. It was the first time working by myself in a game development competition, so I’ve learned quite a bit about the process, and I’m very happy with the resulting game that came out of it.
I’ve still got some bugs to work out and some polish to add to my entry, after which I’ll be releasing it to the general public here.
Another Ludum Dare entrant created a web application, called Imageboard.net. I just wanted to mention it here, as it is absolutely hilarious and fun to use. Basically it’s an anonymous messageboard that deals not with text, but with small pixelated images. There’s even an option to play back an animation from the contents of a forum thread! 
NOTE: I should warn that since the board is anonymous, some not-so-mature people post offensive things. So, please be careful when visiting.
Here’s an example of a thread I started that someone else responded to:
. . . 
Have a great day, interweb people.
You may notice the website has now got a seasonal new look. Happy Halloween!
I’ve been very busy with work and various other projects, so I haven’t had much time to update my website as of late.
For my readers who happen to be interested in Python (and/or game development) I have posted a cool new snake game here on my website, so go take a look. Though not nearly as exciting, I have also added a small utility for creating/merging spritesheets as well.
The title of this post translated into kitten language is ‘meow meow meow’.
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