I think I'm definitely going to have a weekly "Blog Bits" post, as a way of posting about things that I want to write about, but can't write enough about to make a full blog post about.

1. Auckland Game Works Meeting on Sunday

The final AGW meetup for the year is tomorrow (Sunday), 12pm at the RvB bar on K'Road. It's also one of the last chances for the Kiwi's tale collaborators to meet before the competition deadline, so I'm hoping to get a fair bit of feedback about what needs to be done before we finalise the competition build. I'll also be posting a second beta version just after this.

Speaking of feedback, I don't think we've got a single feedback form back yet. Please guys, it'd really help if you downloaded the game, played it for awhile and then emailed the form to the enclosed address well before the competition deadline, the links for both are just underneath the button bar above. If you happen to be in Auckland at the moment and are interested in game development, why not come along? More details are here

2. Enter the Matrix

Back at Armageddon, I picked up a copy of Enter the Matrix for Gamecube for five bucks. I figured it might be pretty good; Since it's a hybrid third person shooter/beat-em-up, set in an anime inspired cyberpunk universe, and received mixed reviews from critics, I thought it sounded just like Oni, one of my favourite games ever. But no, so far the game is really awful. The first half an hour of the game involves running shooting up security guards in a Post Office. But not just any Post Office, the most dull and drab post office imaginable.

Fighting seems to revolve around button mashing to pull off completely random karate moves, which looks kind of cinematic but not only does it make fighting Guards really easy, if my avatar doesn't do exactly what I expect in response to the buttons I'm pressing, it kills my suspension of disbelief. Oh, and it has one other feature I hate to see in any game, you automatically heal when you're not being hurt.

3. Competition Update

The Retro Remakes competition is rapidly nearing it's end, as evidenced by the above countdown timer I shamelessly stole from Ovine by Design. Some entries have been trickling in already, the one that surprised me the most was a remake of SEUCK, which was a basic shoot-em-up creation engine for C64.

Should be great fun and I'm tempted to see if I can do a Commando remake with it, but don't be surprised if the Internet becomes flooded with generic shmup's made with the tool. Probably the competition entry I'm most looking forward to is Ovine's remake of Bruce Lee, which was a brilliant platformer for the C64. The graphics are very slick, and I'm hoping the remake keeps the most notable feature of the original: Having a second player control one of the henchmen (which can be used to aid or hinder Bruce on his quest).