For those who are interested, I am just filling you all in on why things seemed to have gone dead here. I don't wan't to get into details, but in a nutshell my whole life is going thru alot of turmoil. All the problems around me right now…financial, family, emotional from everything else (that I tried to stop in the first place)…. Basically it looks like I am loosing everything I ever worked towards. If I were smart I should make a movie or write a book about it all… but some of the stuff I have been thru in the past few years…I wonder if people would believe it. LOL! It's frustraiting because I tried to "prevent" ALL of the major problems I am going thru now. (Predicted the outcome of other peoples decisions accurately over and over). But when nobody else listens and they do what they want every time… well, problems arise….especialy when thier decisions wind up bringing me down for the ride. In short, all my game making stuff has been on hold because there is just WAY to much going on that I have to face on a daily basis.

For what little I have been tinkering with, I did a quick experiment (about a day) of making an engine for rolling a ball around. Basicaly you have a ball (gee, alot of my games have balls for some reason). Moving the mouse around simulates tilting the playfield (although you don't see it tilt it reacts as if you did.) Kind of a start on a game in the style of those maze toys where you move the knobs to roll your ball from start to finish avoiding holes…in this case, just keeping your ball from going over the edge. I was thinking of doing it semi-pinball maybe if I go on with it… like have a time limit where if you do certain things you earn more time. Maybe rollovers, drop targets, holes to drop in…

Other ideas floating around… I am thinking about trying to do a Gorf "clone". For those not familiar it was an arcade game from the very early 80's that had 5 different missions/levels. It was one of the first speech games as well that would taunt you and rip on you when you messed up. Why would I try doing this game? To sum it up, this was the ONE game that led to my total videogame addiction to this day. I probably dumped over $100 into various Gorf machines in my area (actually they shuffeled one machine around in my area rather quickly as I got quite good at it. It would disapear at a bowling aley and my friends would say "It's at this pizza place" or "It's at this sub sandwich place, etc…") I followed it around anywhere they moved it. It was a "Program 1" machine (the original) and my best game on 3 ships was reaching level 318 (levels roll over after stage 99) with a score of 509,640. Store owners hated me as they don't make much profit when you can play a game for a couple hours. =) The second version of Gorf I only played in a Showbiz Pizza place once….and it was a really MEAN NASTY game! A average player may not notice the difference with early stages but in later stages you wanted to take an axe to the machine. To bad I never saw a perfected version of the Program 1 Gorf in MAME. It's close in some aspects, but still major bugs they never solved from what I see.

Also thinking of doing a more simple game for my buddy at work. He has two young girls and my games seem "too hard" for them. So I may revert to something much more simple in concept so they can play it. Not saying "easy" but the controls and concept would be far less complex. I see some people doing "Pac-Man" and "Snake" games. I have a hard time deciding which route to go…. I would rather try and do the forgoten maze games like Nibbler (would be far more fun than snake with the maze added), Mouse Trap (player can change the position of red, yellow and blue doors with buttons to change the maze or trap enemy cats). Pepper II (Zipping up rooms rather than eating dots, that and having 4 mazes you can travel to at any point in the game with the right exit), Lady Bug (with turnstyle walls that change the maze as well as trying to spell Special…free game (or veggie hunt in Colecovision), extra…Extra (extra life) or blue hearts to increase to X2, X3 etc… The color of the letters and hearts change so you need to pick them up when the color is right).

Sorry things are going slow here. Just wanted you all to know where "things are at". I wish life had a reset button! =P Puck bowler…yeah, yet another thing on hold…. I bounce around all the time in situations like this. Well, I'll have to see if I can "focus" on ONE project and actually finish it. Take care all.