After some reflection I’ve removed the descriptions of Rob’s hypothetical books from yesterday’s entry. They’re his projects, not mine, so I’ll let him spill the beans in his own way when he’s ready. I’m leaving my hypo-book up there because that damn thing dates to 1996 and I’ve never put pen to paper on it, so it’s sort of a stray dog I feed sometimes and not my flesh and blood.
My second developer’s diary for the Delta Green computer game project is online now at this web site:
Tonight I played through Serious Sam 2, a first-person shooter game, with three friends in cooperative mode. We blew through the game in about four hours and it was great. We actually played the first Serious Sam through twice in the space of a week because the damn thing is so good. These two games were made by a bunch of guys in Croatia. They’re in the style of stuff like Quake and Unreal. But they have two features that are amazing. First, the levels you’re playing in are huge. I mean huge like I’ve never seen any continuous space this big in a first-person computer game before huge. Entire valleys filled with temples and dungeons and on and on. Second, they throw dozens of enemies at you simultaneously. 30, 40 bad guys on screen at once: flying harpies, hopping frog-beasts, raging were-bulls the size of city buses, six-story battlemechs, and–no kidding–four-armed fire-breathing demons as big as Godzilla. As big as Godzilla. I’ve never seen characters this big in a computer game. If you run up to engage them close in, all you see are their toes. The scale of the game is just stunning. And on top of that, it’s beautiful to look at and it plays like a dream. These are minor classics that are just plain fun to play, very impressive stuff. The guys that make them are online at:
so check out their screenshots to see what I’m talking about.
I came home just before 2am and found that Glancy had rented Scorcese’s Casino, which I haven’t seen since it was in theatres. It’s better than I remembered, and sure enough it’s now 5:30am because we watched it straight through. There’s nothing like the sight of Don Rickles with a shotgun. Nothing.
Scotland, PA proved to be clever but not great. This is the comedic version of Macbeth set in white-trash Pennsylvania in 1975, and instead of a kingdom they’re fighting over a fast-food restaurant–first “Duncan’s” and then, of course, “McBeth’s”. Worth seeing if you’re a Shakespeare buff, since you’ll get all the gags I didn’t. I could tell they were gags, but I didn’t get them. The ones I did get were great. But the best part might have been the press kit, which was a booklet done in the style of Cliff’s Notes, complete with a character-relationship diagram, essay questions, a glossary (“A Mullet is . . .”) and more. Like I said, the whole thing had a lot of clever bits to it.
Today I did some more work on UA2 and got much of the layout done for Denied to the Enemy, which is a new Delta Green novel by the ever-coiffed Dennis Detwiller. It’s a cool story set during World War II, and Pagan plans to publish it sooner or later.
Somewhere around here I have an actual copy of Dennis and Greg’s new WWII superhero roleplaying game Godlike, which Dennis gave me a couple weeks ago. It’s going to stores next week I think. It came out well. I spent far too much of last spring and summer laying out that horse-choker of a book, but I’m pleased with the results. Dennis really busted his ass on the project and I hope it does well. The game’s web site is at: