On Halloween

     Halloween was my second favorite holiday when I was growing up.  Halloween meant being able to dress up as your favorite hero (or villain) and not having to worry about people thinking you were nuts.  It meant eating as much candy as you could cram into your gullet.  It meant being able to walk around at night, in the dark. 

     A Halloween night in New Jersey was generally quite chilly.  Breezes caused the fallen leaves to rustle and fly around.  Wood smoke from fireplaces lent a certain taste in the air.

     It was a magical night.

     It also occurred two days before my birthday.  By the time I was over being sick on candy it was time to be sick on cake and ice cream.  But that was all right, because I’d have plenty of new stuff to be sick playing with.

     Back then, having a costume that was made was bette

r than a

store-bought costume.  It showed ingenuity, intelligence, craftiness, and creativity.  To buy a costume was a cop-out.  Of course, most purchased kids costumes consisted of a mask of some characters face and a plastic smock that announced who you were supposed to be, as if Casper the Friendly Ghost actually had his name printed on his chest.

     And it didn’t matter if the costume wasn’t an exact replica of whoever you were supposed to be.  Imagination filled in the gaps.  That Boba Fett rocket pack was a shoe box and a red “L’eggs” top, but to everyone that knew who Boba Fett was, it was a rocket pack.  Kids who had

parents that were really good had a problem.  While their costumes were wonders to behold, and everyone would admit that the costume was awesome, there would still be a hint of resentment in there.  It could be too good. 

     Why did it matter?  Because in the 1980’s and before, you were allowed to go to school in a costume.  You were expected to show up in costume.  Complete with mask, if necessary.  And everyone had fun, and there would be a parade so that the parents could see how cute everyone looked (God knows why, though; those same kids would be knocking on your door in a few hours anyway).

     Now, it seems that if you don’t buy a costume then you suck.

If you try and make one then you’re too poor to buy one.  And if your pre-teen daughter doesn’t look like a prostitute then you’ve got problems. 

     Does it matter, though?  To me, it looks like less and less kids go trick-or-treating every year.  Even in neighborhoods where kids are abundant, nobody seems to walk around that much.  Even to me, an adult who does nothing but pass out candy, Halloween has turned into a disappointment.

     So, what happened?  I would say fear got the better of everyone.  Schools don’t want costumes or masks in school in case someone goes nuts and shoots the place up.  We’ve all lived with the Halloween candy scares: apples filled with razor blades, candy corn and other candies injected with drugs.  Don’t eat anything home made, like popcorn balls or candied apples because you never know what’s inside of it.  Trust only candy that’s still in a big company wrapper.  And even then, inspect it for tampering. 

     But now we’ve reached a whole new level of fear.  Kids being abducted, kids shooting other kids, and other horrors that we’re inundated with throughout the years that just builds, and builds, and builds.  Maybe our communities aren’t as close knit as they used to be.  Do you know your neighbors?  Do you see them often?  Is the limit of your interaction a half-hearted wave while you’re mowing the lawn?

     It’s another piece of Americana that has slowly eroded.  Or maybe it never really was that way in the first place.  The problem with history is that the more you know, the less different everything seems to be.

How I Spent My Time

     It looks like I’ve been a bad boy this month.  I’ve hardly done any blogging at all.  I’ve done even less writing.  So, you’re probably wondering, “What’s he been up to, anyway?”  At least, I hope that’s what you’ve been wondering.  So, let’s go down and see what I’ve been doing.

     First, if you’ve ever read my blog before you know that I’m stuck in some melancholy loop that revolves around the 1980’s and the computers of yesteryear.  Well, I dusted off the old Atari 8-bit emulator and thought I could finish some games that I never finished before.  Then I remembered just how many games that I started that I never did finish.  And that’s a lot of them.

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Dunzhin – By Screenplay

     I am one of the few people I know that bought Dunzhin.  All right, I’m the only person I know that bought it.  I loved role playing games and the idea of running around a dark dungeon with a sword.  The graphics are, um, functional.  Even for the Atari 8-bit, they were a bit lacking.  But that’s not the important part when it comes to RPG’s.

     The premise of Dunzhin is that you’re sent into the Dunzhin to find an object and then bring it back.  An awful lot like the games Nethack, Moria, Rogue, and a few dozen others.  While searching different rooms for your quest object, which I must add was a randomly chosen thing with ridiculous names like “The Screaming Hand of Obyxx,” you could run into a variety of trouble.  Pits could open beneath your feet, you could fall flat on your face tripping on a trip wire, noxious gas could fill the room, or you could be attacked by enemies.

     Ten minutes after starting Dunzhin I remembered why I never finished it.  It’s insanely hard.  Your character is very weak when you start and, unlike many games, you have different body parts that can be attacked and each part has its own health.  While, overall, you may have 35 hit points, your right arm may only have two.  So, if you were unlucky enough to get scratched on your right arm, well, then it’s game over.  And that happens a lot.  If that weren’t bad enough you frequently get teleported all over the place.  Some disembodied women decides she doesn’t like you and bam!, you’re off somewhere else.  Usually deeper in the

dungeon where you don’t stand a chance of surviving.  And just when you think you’re getting a handle on all of it, bopping dwarves on the head, lopping off zombie arms, and whatever, you wade into battle and have your sword bust on you.  And that happens a lot, too.

     Don’t get me wrong, though.  Dunzhin really is a good game.  In battle you can target different body parts of the enemy, and some enemies have some nasty weak spots.  For instance, a zombie won’t have any armor on his right arm, so if you start fighting one that’s where you want to aim.  But if it wasn’t for the “Save State” feature of Atari800win Plus or Atari800 I think I would have given up a long time ago.  Again.

     Perfect example.  I just started it up so I could get a screen shot.  I walked about ten steps before being attacked by four zombies.  My first attack missed.  A zombie’s first attack hit my neck.  Whoops!  Game over.  Total time spent in game before dying?  One minute.

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Kaiv – By Screenplay

     Dunzhin was the first game in the “Warrior of RAS” series.  Kaiv was the second.  Since I actually did like Dunzhin, despite keeling over dead the moment I walked into it, I picked up Kaiv as well. 

     Kaiv is similar to Dunzhin in that the game play is nearly identical.  Some differences are that instead of walking through a dark dungeon, you’re walking through a dark cave.  The graphics for the walls are different, too.

     But it does have some interesting points that make it an evolution over Dunzhin.  For one, you can buy more than one sword.  So, when your sword breaks you can switch to a back up.  You also have to buy your own armor.  And, unlike Dunzhin, you need to buy torches.  You can probably guess that your torches have a tendency to be blown out frequently.

     There were two other games in the “Warrior of RAS” series: Wylde and Ziggurat.  I’ve never seen them for sale, though, or else I would have bought them also. 

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     There are a couple of other games, but I’ll get to them later because they’re much bigger and grander.

     Joost.com has a bunch of episodes of the television show, “Have Gun – Will Travel” starring Richard Boone.  I’ve been watching a lot of these and, despite the fact that I don’t care for Westerns all that much, I have to say that I consider this one of the best shows ever written.  The character of Paladin is just amazing: part scoundrel, part nobleman, part Robin Hood.  Some people may be surprised to know that Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) was one of the writers for this show.

     The stories aren’t just “gun slinger kills guy” stories, either.  There’s a lot of subtlety in how he goes about his business.  They’re old, from the 1950’s, but I highly recommend them.

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     So, there you go.  A minor update into what I’ve been doing lately.

 

Just the BASICS

** Nerd Alert **

    Yes, this post is quite nerdy.  Feel free to skip it or read it as you see fit.  We’ll be going back in time again, so if you can’t handle that you may want to move along peacefully.

     Turn off your computer, disconnect the hard drives and floppy drive (if you still have one), remove any bootable USB keys you may have.  Now, turn on your computer again.  What did you get?  Nothing, right?  Maybe a bunch of errors?  But you certainly didn’t get anything even vaguely useful.

     You may as well hook all that stuff back up.  Now, back in the old days the majority of home computers were still useful, even if they didn’t have any devices (except for the TV or, if you were rich, a monitor) attached.  Most home computers had some kind of BASIC programming language built in so turning on the computer brought you to some kind of prompt.  While this may not be quite as useful as being able to check your email or listen to an MP3, it’s a lot better than nothing.

     On every computer I have, I have an Atari 8-bit computer emulator.  Every one of them.  You wonder why I do this, right?  You think, “Geez, the guy has a 64-bit, 2.2GHz processor what the devil does he need an emulator for an 8-bit, 1Mhz, 48K of memory computer for?”

     And the answer is simple: BASIC.  See, sometimes I just need to write a quick program that doesn’t do much.  It may be a one-off thing that I need to do.  Simple, short, ready to go.  Modern computers, for all their speed, complexity, and bullshit lack in this area.  I mean, really lack. 

     If I need a quick program to calculate something, I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a developer kit.  I don’t need it to run in its own window with menus and crap.  I don’t want to have to write headers and compile the stupid thing.  I just want to type it in, type ‘RUN’ and press the Enter key.  But, while my computer can run Oblivion in all it’s 3D hardware accelerated goodness, it can’t do the simple task of running a BASIC program.

     The irony is that there are many computers from the “Golden Age” that have BASIC built in and their BASIC was written by a guy named Bill Gates and is copyrighted to Microsoft (sometimes Micro Soft) in 1982 or earlier. 

     It would be lovely if Microsoft could include a Microsoft BASIC with Windows.  Even if it’s the same version from 1982.  Just something simple that can be quickly typed in and run.  No sheet designers, no labels, just good old line numbers and GOTO’s and GOSUB’s and stuff. 

     Until that advanced day reaches me, I’ll keep my emulators for the sole purpose of having a simple BASIC around in case I need it.

     I guess I’m the only person who feels this way, though.