Look at Me, I Made and Art Book

So yeah, this is a weird thing I've been sitting on for a while. :D To cut a boring story short (it's like, 1 AM on Christmas Eve here), I ended up with this voucher to make a book on Blurb, for free back in late 2011. Immediately I knew that I wanted to make a dumb art book with it, just for myself. So, the following summer I got to work, pulling together just the oddest collection of stuff, from cartoons I'd drawn in primary school to desktop wallpapers to college projects and weird digital art from more recent times. Midway through making it though, happy with how it was turning out and with the eclectic selection of work I had going, I started thinking 'hey, maybe other people would buy this'. Well, maybe as one dollar ebook, anyway.

Unfortunately those hopes were quickly dashed when I looked over the ebook Blurb spat out. It's wasn't that bad, it was just that the level of compression on the images was more than I'd be happy with charging money for. It was very noticeable on a few images especially; kind of a killer blow for a digital art book. I had been thinking, for a while, about modifying the Blurb-created PDF file, swapping the compressed images with my own non-compressed versions and selling that. It seems doable, but I was worried that that would land me into hot water with Blurb (at least in a hypothetical world where anyone bought it in the first place :D). No, instead I decided that, screw it, I'm going to give it away for free. It's a Festivus miracle!

Download from MediaFire | 11.4 MB, PDF

The actual, psychical book though, I think turned out really well.



Some Junior Cert art business. I'm surprised a border didn't end up around this page somehow, but no, this is freaking cool.



In case you were wondering: Yes, I have always been the best at naming things. :D



Had to get a little creative here. With only the two images of it I captured for DeviantArt back in the day, I filled up the rest of the (left) page with the source code for this (very bad) penalty shoot-out game I made back in college. It did have a cool look though (I should really get that up here someday).

And hey, if anyone's interested in picking up that physical version, it's still available to order on Blurb. Just saying. :D

As advertised, a fifteen year spanning collection of arty odds and ends, taking in everything from subversive primary school posters to striking desktop wallpapers; from lo-fi computer doodling to Flash animations and even a batik.

Arty Stuff by John Keane | Make Your Own Book

But wait! There's more. So, when I decided that I might want to sell this book, I cut some stuff out that might have been problematic copyright-wise, but it can't do any harm to put that up here. Right?

View post on imgur.com

Yep, whenever you're ready, imgur. This is all I'm seeing at the moment. :D

Free Stuff: Freeware DOS Games Part 3

SkyRoads

A neat little game where you pilot a spacecaft on a series of gap-filled, obstacle-ridden space roads by moving from left to right, jumping and adjusting your acceleration as necessary. This is one of the few games here that I actually put some decent time into and I'd definitely recommend it. Not a huge fan of the music though - sounds like they re-purposed some tunes from a scrapped adventure game or something.



SkyRoads Xmas Special

A holiday-themed version of SkyRoads. The levels seem to be completely different here and you get an added dose of festive cheer.



Kosmonaut

The original SkyRoads game. It's looks quite a bit more dated than the others, having been released in 1990, but it plays identically and it's just as fun.



Snarf

This is sort of like Pac-Man, if Pac-Man could shoot at ghosts and had about thirty hits before he bit it. You'd think that'd make this way easier, but the plentiful, aggressive enemies, clunky controls and the pitiful rate at which you haul your ass across the maze make this pretty frustrating to play (at least from the little I've played of it anyway).



Squarez Deluxe!

A sort-of upside down Tetris where you move shapes from a box at the bottom of the screen and try to from 3x3 squares with them. Playing it now, I screwed myself within minutes, blocking the box off and preventing myself from moving any shapes onto the play area. Seems alright though.



Stargunner

A horizontal shooter that straight-up starts up with a Star Wars opening crawl. It looks like you might need to tinker with the DosBox configuration file to get this one running properly as everything's running way too fast under my usual settings. From what I played though, this seems hard as balls.



Supaplex

A puzzle game quite similar to Heartlight PC from Part 2 of this feature, except that you now play as a red Pac-Man, chewing through circuit boards. This seems quite a bit more polished than Heartlight, with a more manageable difficulty level too.



Supernova

An Apogee text adventure set on a mining colony on a planet called Barre-An, where you mine barre-an. I guess the message they're trying to get across is that the planet you're on is a lush, green paradise or something.



Taking Care of Business

A puzzle-platformer that seems to mainly revolve around moving boxes (Soul Reaver fans should love it then). The controls seem a bit wonky and even from the first level, I can tell that this'll get insanely difficult later on. Thankfully you can choose to play any level you want right from the start.



Troll's Tale

A text adventure for kids by Al Lowe. It's very similar to several Leisuresoft games they had at my primary school in the mid 90's. I actually started to do a Let's Play of this a few years ago. It's embarrassingly bad, but knowing me I'm sure it'll find it's way on here eventually. :D (Edit: And it has)



Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport

A 2D fighter from Apogee. Graphics look great, but not sure there's a whole lot of depth to the fighting.

And with that, I can finally put my free-game-downloading, title-screen-capturing follies to rest and if it steered some of you guys in the direction of some neat DOS games in the process, all the better. :D

If you've missed out on the first two parts from back in August, you can check them out here and here.

Free Stuff: Freeware DOS Games Part 2

We covered ten of the freeware DOS games languishing on my hard drive last week, how about we cover another ten now?



The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian

A text adventure with graphics and a movable character on screen. Seems pretty promising from what I've played and it's definitely got a decent sense of humour. I guess sticky keys weren't around when they decided to map attack to the shift key though. :D



Electro Man

Another platformer starring a guy with a gun, a gun you can only fire while it has enough juice from the batteries you pick up. The graphics look really nice, but this doesn't look like the easiest of games to get through.



God of Thunder

A really enjoyable action/puzzle game from what I've played of it. As you might have guessed from the title, you play as Thor as he attempts to thwart Loki's naughty schemes by er, collecting gems and tossing hammers at small animals. Seems to be influenced quite a bit by the overhead Zelda games.



Heartlight PC

A puzzle platformer with some similarities to Dig Dug. Here you need to burrow through levels, collecting all the hearts while clearing spaces in such a way that you don't get crushed by falling rocks or block your own path with them. I love the sort of dark electronic soundtrack, even though it seems completely out of place here. :D



Heros I: The Sanguine Seven

A pretty rough-looking platformer with quite a grating soundtrack. The ability to choose from a set of seven different playable characters seems kind of neat, though I've never spent any serious time playing this and I don't think I really want to either.



Jetpack

A fun single-screen platformer that has you navigating ladders and flying around with a jetpack as you attempt to collect every gem in each level while avoiding being eviscerated by nasty robots.



Major Stryker

A vertically scrolling shooter from Apogee. Some pretty nice graphics, especially in the intro and I quite like the framing device they have going, even though it seems to be disguising the game's inability to run in fullscreen. I'm not terribly good at shooters, but the short distance you can see ahead of you here makes this extra hard, despite the fairly slow pace.



One Must Fall 2097

The game that alerted me to the existence of freeware DOS games in the first place. I've hardly even played this, but it seems like a fairly decent fighter. The music's certainly good though and I really like the anime-influenced presentation.



Overkill

Another vertically scrolling shooter, this time from Epic. Looks promising and it's certainly more playable than Major Stryker thanks to it's longer play field.

And that wraps it up for this instalment. More to come soon.

Free Stuff: Freeware DOS Games Part 1

One day back in 2007, when I should have been doing something far more important, I made the discovery that there were a bunch of DOS games legally available on the internet, games that had been officially declared as freeware by their owners. Not one to turn down the chance of some gaming on the cheap, I spent several hours tracking down and downloading many of them. Throughout 2007 and 2008 I continued to stay on the lookout for more freebies and by May 2008, goodness knows how many hours I'd put into finding, installing and troubleshooting these games. I'd even gone to the trouble of capturing each game's title screen so I could set it as the preview image for the game's folder.

The problem was, of course, that I barley put any time into actually playing these games. I can't have spent more than an hour playing most of them; Some of them I never even touched and I'm not likely to at this stage.

Having wasted all that time and effort though, I might as well put it to some positive use. The other day I was thinking that I should put the screencaps I took up here, give a little synopsis of each game (or at least what I've played of it) and point everyone in the direction of some pretty interesting games of yore. Well, I've got nothing better to do right now, so let's get started.

(Click on the screenshots to go to the full-sized ones on Picasa.)



Adventures of Robbo

I haven't even taken the time to figure out how to get past the first level of this one. It's seems to be a puzzle game in a similar vein to Adventures of Lolo, where you control a robot who must "collect all bolts" as the charmingly amateurish voice work tells you at the start of the level.



Alien Carnage

A 2D platformer/shooter from Apogee where you start off equipped with a jetpack and a flamethrower. How can you go wrong there? Some really nice looking graphics for the time, though the controls feel a bit sluggish.



Antix

A Qix-type game developed by Dmitry Pavlovsky, one of the original tetris developers. Simple, but fun.

Loading it up now, I see that the hight scores are dominated by one A2M. Stay classy, JiliK.



Bio Menace

I actually played this a decent amount in 2007. It's a fun, but tough shooter/platformer from Apogee. Gotta love those EGA graphics.



Caves of Thor

A top down ASCII game where you collect treasure and shoot guys or at least it seems to be from the thirty seconds I've played of it. :D




Chex Quest

A Doom mod for kids that came free with Chex breakfast cereal at one point. From what I played of Chex Quest 1, this is a really solid, fun shooter with an impressive amount of work put into it. The link above is for Chex Quest 3, a 2008 continuation of the series by one of the original devs. It includes both Chex Quest 1 & 2 and runs independently of DOSBox.



Clyde's Revenge

I've barley touched this, but it seems like an okay platformer. It's certainly more playable than Clyde's Adventure, the previous entry in the series that had you loosing health every time you walked or jumped. In a platformer?! Who thought that was a good idea? :D



Cybersphere

This would probably be a pretty enjoyable Arkanoid clone if the ball didn't move so damn slowly. Even cranking the CPU cycles way up in DOSBox doesn't entirely fix the problem. Pity.




Cybersphere Plus

The sequel to Cybersphere. Sadly, the ball's still moving in slow motion here.



The Elder Scrolls: Arena

I haven't played a whole lot of this, but I did manage to make my way out of the initial dungeon and into the first town, leaving a trail or rats in my wake. It seems playable enough, but the thought of navigating randomly generated dungeons throughout the game makes this a far more daunting prospect than Morrowind ever was.

Although it wasn't freeware when I took these screenshots, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall has also been released gratis by Bethesda. You can grab it from the official site here.

Well, that's it for today. More to come soon.

Free Stuff: Download.com Music

The other night I was listening to some Joy Zipper and I started wondering if they had any free tracks on the net. So, off I went off to Google.The band's site was gone, seemingly replaced by their MySpace page (Ugh, why does every band's MySpace page look like shit?). I didn't manage to find anything there, but in my search, I came across one on Download.com Music. Now, I've used that site to get hold of freeware and such before but I never knew this section even existed.

There's actually quite a nice selection of artists up there, with most having at least one DRM-free MP3 to download. Some of them are alternate versions or remixes but there's also plenty of proper album tracks available. By searching around, I was able to grab free and legal tracks from the likes of Rilo Kiley, Antony and the Johnsons, Patrick Wolf, Crystal Castles, Jenny Lewis, Klaxons, Super Furry Animals, We are Scientists, You Say Party! We Say Die! and more.

I think it's fair to say that the downloads available do veer a little more towards indie and alternative music, rather than chart stuff. But if that's what you're into, hypothetical reader, it's well worth a look.