Started 2003-11-01 (we elect Kerry tomorrow, right?)

Cube - it's a 2-D/3-D game engine similar to Doom or Quake. I played with it some and the cooperative editing feature is totally kick-4$$. It's by the same guy that made Panquake, which I used for a while to play Quake until I realized I didn't like that game. He also worked on the engine for a little game called Far Cry. This guy is so cool. If you read some of his pages you'll see why. They tend to go something like this:

<some-project> is a little project I started for <some-reason>. It does <about-6000-totally-awesome-things> in only <small-amount> of Amiga assembly. Go to <link> if you'd like to check it out.

I am very much looking forward to BratSquish   SourShaumberg   Cube 2.

Having mentioned Far Cry, I now would like to say that I just downloaded the 500 MB demo for it in 5 minutes. How's that for a schweet dormroom connection? :D

This image probably deserves some explaination. You see, instead of wandering around the island like I'm probably supposed to, I stole a patrol boat and started driving around. Just because driving the boat is so much fun (hint: they go fast!). It turns out that if you go too far to either side, or out into the ocean, this helicopter appears and comes after you. Sideways. It's pretty scary. But you can just bearly outrun him if you have a nice boat (the inflatable one you start with isn't fast enough). Not that it does you any good, as he'll kill you as soon as you try to go back to the island.

If you haven't seen this game (but your video card would allow you to), you should check it out. It is dream come true. Quite literally. The general atmosphere of Far Cry (the demo, at least) bares an uncanny resemblance to that of a dream I had when I was about 10. It was certainly one of the most interesting dreams I've ever had, and I don't think I've written about it, yet. So I will now.

(Now being 4:00 Monday morning, since I'm too excited about Cube, etc to sleep.)

So at the beginning of this dream, I was playing some old nintendo game. It was apparently a pretty fancy game, as the ship my character was on was rocking back and forth in a storm and boxes and things were sliding around. A pretty tricky thing to do on NES hardware, though I think the SNES might be able to handle it. The ship was approaching an island, and it seemed that it wasn't going to last much longer.

As we got closer to the island, it stopped being very nintendo-like. Though I still was under the impression that this was a video game, I was looking at the world through my own eyes and it seemed much more important that I do whatever it was I was here to do. Which I don't know what it was. The storm went away and it got light and sunny out.

We piloted the ship up and down the western coast of this island. It was mostly cliffy and rocky, so we were fairly limited as to where we could land. We found a place and I got out and started exploring the island. It was a very nice island. Covered with jungle. But for my convenience the jungle had a maze of roads and paths leading through it. I spent a long time wandering along the roads and up and down hills and trying to map the place out and find something interesting. Of course it won't seem like a long time to you readers (all 3 of you; I don't know how to find friends on LiveJournal), as I only spent about 2 sentences on it, but in the dream, it seemed like I was doing this for weeks.

At one point I ventured way up to the north end of the island. I had an idea of what I would see when I got there since I could see it on the map I had:

            _____________________________
           / a volcano or something      \
          |                               |
          |   Don's base     cool stuff   |
 _________ \_____________________________/
|         |
|         |
|         |
|         |
| some big|
|  thing  |
| that was|         Tar Pit
|  in our |
|   way   |
|         |
|         |             lookout point
|         |                _
|_________| ____      ____/ \
           /    \____/     . \___         ____
          |     /           .    \_______/    \
          |    |             .
          |    |              . .
           \__/                  .
             |                   .
             |                    .
              \                  .
               \                 .
                |                .
               /                 .
              /                   .
             |
             |
             |              cool place with a
             |              stop sign and a bridge
            /               (somewhere around here)
           |
           |
           |
            \
where we      \
parked         |

If you're wondering who 'Don' is, he was a villan from TaleSpin. Not so bad a show, as I recall, but then I also recall thinking that the Disney channel was a good idea. *shrug*

I stood at that lookout point and looked across the tar pit to the island on the other side. It was getting dark out and the scene was rather depressing. It made me feel like I had such a long journey ahead of me that I might not ever get out of this place. This is another 'common theme' through several of my more memorable dreams.

One day I got an idea.

We had taken our ship up and down the west coast of the island a few times. There was always this stupid metal bar that came out from the island and went really close to the 'big thing that was in our way'. There was a little diagonal passageway between the corners of the two obstructions, but it was only about a centimeter wide and deep. Hardly enough to move a ship through. But here is yet another dream theme: large things magically fitting through small holes.

The ship couldn't go through that little passageway, but we ran it right into the corner, anyway, and that ended up launching the ship way up into the air, across the tar pit, and to the eastern end of Don's island. I guess that was where we wanted to be, because I was pretty happy that I wasn't stuck on that jungle island any more.

We never ran into Don, but we did find magic paper airplanes that we could ride around on. We could fly now and weren't restricted to walking or slow ship sailing anymore. We could go anywhere. A lot like finding the airship in a final fantasy game. We flew north, back home. One of the folks I was with wanted to go to their house to invite their little sister to come with us or something, so we stopped by their house.

Of course when we tried to fly off, again, we found that our planes no longer worked. Trying to get them back, I started doing crazy things like digging up sod from my backyard in the shape of a plane while my Mom told me that I needed to stop doing that. Then I realized that digging up dirt wouldn't make a magic plane, and I got very sad.

But then it went back to the game. It was like that had been the second-to-last level, and I was now in the last level. It looked like the bonus areas from Sonic 2 except there were no hills and the half-pipes were all white and they joined in places in order to make a maze. I bet you can guess what I did with this maze. And if your guess was 'wandered around in it', you'd win a biscut. If I had biscuts and could e-mail them to people. Maybe if you come to my room I can present you with an 'air biscut'.

After that half-pipe stuff I ended up in this red, rocky place and somebody was talking about Captain Kirk. There was also stuff about an infinite, randomly-generated forest maze, but I made that up later, when I was thinking about how to make this dream into a video game. I never did manage to do that, but Far Cry comes pretty close to the jungle-island part. And that makes me happy.

Everyone likes deuteronomy, because it's a funny word.