I just remember seeing a room where there was a tall box with a shelf in the middle, and there was a zombieman standing on the shelf, with another zombieman below the shelf. I don't recall playing any Doom maps with a similar room.

Urg... there's some nasty weather coming my way right now and I still have work to do on this week's ADG episode. Depending on how things go it may end up a little late. I'll still be getting it out Saturday, but instead of being out around midnight EDT it might not be ready until closer to sunrise. Just letting you guys know. ;)

UPDATE: Weather is continuing to be unpredictable. I'm in the middle of editing the next episode and the rain just started coming down hard AGAIN... no thunder so far though which is good, but that could change. These storms are expected to go off and on until the afternoon so if this week's ADG episode ends up much later than usual, blame the weather. :P

The storms subsided long enough for me to finally get this all done, so Ancient DOS Games Episode 123 - Kiloblaster is finally online! :D

...and the game itself is TERRIBLE. x_x;

Actually, let me clarify that. If the game was originally freeware, it would've been a below-average but valiant attempt, especially considering it's one of the first major projects Allen Pilgrim ever worked on. But as a game that cost $30 when it was brand new, it's unacceptably bad. :(

That said, I took the opportunity during the video to bring up a couple points about bad games I don't think a lot of people really think about it. It's also good that Allen Pilgrim learned a bit from his mistakes with this game and then went on to make Xargon, which while still just an average game, is a heck of a lot better.

I used to bring up this game as an example of what happens when you judge a game by its tech specs. Having "256 color VGA graphics!!!!1" was a huge selling point back then, yet Kiloblaster managed to look lazy, tacky and ugly just fine. Overkill (the other Epic shooter from around the same time) wasn't only the better game, it looked a whole lot better too - despite using only 16 fixed colors.

Also, when you said the player's ship in the story was "attacked by some aliens", I first parsed it as "attacked by Somalians"... I guess it probably isn't pronounced the same way in English, but the premise of Indian Ocean pirates developing a space program could be fun. :)

I noticed that the very first melody you hear in Kiloblaster is the main music from Dschump. I wonder who ripped who?

Didn't Tyrian have fruit too? What is it with sci-fi shooters and fruit?

BTW: Tyrian and Stargunner are free on GOG: http://www.gog.com/games##price=free

133MHz wrote:

I noticed that the very first melody you hear in Kiloblaster is the main music from Dschump. I wonder who ripped who?

Given the fact that Kiloblaster ripped a scene from Star Trek III...

...actually, Dschump was released the following year, so it probably ripped the music from Kiloblaster. :P

At 8:30, what is that background? It doesn't look like anything you would encounter in space.

Did nobody guess Kiloblaster?

Lots of re-use of assets back in those early days of Epic. You mentioned Xargon, and nearly all the sound effects I heard during this video can be heard in Jill of the Jungle, not to mention the widget toolkit used for their menus and in-game info panels.

My favorite reuse is the "YEAAAAHHH" 1up sample for Jill - which is heard constantly in the Blood Money title music 😀

I always swore that Xargon used the same engine as Jill of the Jungle, but apparently it's just that they had the same artist and shared some basic platforming gameplay elements.

The font in Kiloblaster looks like it was taken directly from Jill of the Jungle. After viewing the episode, I would definitely say that this game was hardly one of Epic's eponymous moments.

YouTube is continuing to act weird. For the three videos I have which are presently not monetized due to YouTube wanting "proof of commercial use rights", I'm getting the message, "This video is unavailable until the review process is complete" from within my video manager, yet the videos are still up on my channel and play back fine...

...yet I also noticed the "Watched" overlay which shows up over thumbnails of videos you've recently watched has changed too, so speaking as a programmer, I get the impression they're pushing through new changes which will prevent newly uploaded videos from being watchable until YouTube arbitrarily decides whether to allow one to monetize or not... and considering two of my videos uploaded over a freaking month ago are STILL under review, that's NOT a good sign for things to come... >_<;

I could be wrong about that and maybe videos will still be watchable at first. I'll find out as I upload more stuff in the coming days. The YouTube system itself is REALLY high stress to work with, it really is. x_x

On the flip side, I encountered a playback bug with Blip a few days ago when I updated Flash. I reported it, they said they would look into it, and I got a message just this morning from them saying the problem was solved and indeed it was. THAT'S what you call good customer service! :)

Ironic that the user experience is reversed, with Blip being a pain to watch videos on (makes me wait twice as long before showing a video when the advertisement video fails to load, doesn't make htpc or phone/tablet viewing easy) while YouTube is generally a breeze on all platforms (except that they love to make it hard to find your subscriptions).

I still find it odd how I'm one of the few people who have less playback issues with Blip over YouTube. I started having problems with YouTube playback long before Blip playback when I was still stuck on my Windows 98 machine. Even after switching over to an XP machine, Blip continued to provide better playback performance.

I think part of the problem is that the YouTube coding team pushes changes through that aren't fully tested, expecting the YouTube community to raise a stink and then they deal with it following. Within the course of a week once upon a time I saw no less than THREE different YouTube players, some of which showed up on the same video, only one of which worked properly. I've had YouTube play back ads and videos simultaneously, I've had YouTube tell me a video is not available after 10 seconds of playback, only for it to work after reloading the page... one problem I STILL have with YouTube is that a handful of the banner ads they have (thankfully only a minority of them) which show up on the page itself will appear at a higher draw layer than the video, which is fine when you're watching it in the browser window, but when you go full-screen, you end up with a banner add smack-dab in the middle of the screen that you can't remove no matter what you do. What's worse is you can't screenshot this for bug reporting because ads are hacked out when you do so for whatever reason.

Which isn't to say Blip has never had playback issues, but THEY have real tech support who don't immediately presume the person contacting them is an idiot and is just doing something wrong or doesn't have their browser configured properly. OK, so does YouTube, but they only provide it to content producers who have a watch rate of over 90,000 hours in a 30-day period. IE: The people YouTube are making the most money off of through ad revenue and likely the people with the FEWEST problems with the system. >_>;

TBH: Blip has some of the best tech support I've ever encountered. I think the only other company who could compare has been Creative Labs, who instantly recognized the problem I was having as being related to a piece of software I didn't even mention I had! Mind you, that was 13 years ago. :P

Gemini000 wrote:

YouTube is continuing to act weird. For the three videos I have which are presently not monetized due to YouTube wanting "proof of commercial use rights", I'm getting the message, "This video is unavailable until the review process is complete" from within my video manager, yet the videos are still up on my channel and play back fine...

What's really ironic is all the people who have full length movies and television episodes on their accounts that they obviously don't own the broadcast rights to that Youtube never says anything about but you as a legitimate creator and owner of original content have to prove that you own the rights to everything in your own videos.

*trying to check the state of everything on YouTube today and I keep getting 502 Server Errors* :P

sliderider wrote:

What's really ironic is all the people who have full length movies and television episodes on their accounts that they obviously don't own the broadcast rights to that Youtube never says anything about but you as a legitimate creator and owner of original content have to prove that you own the rights to everything in your own videos.

Actually, in all honesty, the process for uploading a video changes quite a bit when you engage monetization. You have to agree to more policies, you have to set up an AdSense account, and everything you upload becomes subject to a more stringent review process. If you don't engage monetization, you never have to prove commercial use rights to anything.

And that's really where it gets tricky. YouTube wants "commercial" use rights on 100% of your material, which is not the same as "fair" use rights. My reasoning for having commercial use rights for the gameplay I show is that because I had recorded and performed the gameplay footage myself, it cannot be reproduced exactly the same way by another person. Live action and voice recordings should be obvious, since they're my voice and my body so I get to decide what I do with them. Music in the background either belongs to the game being shown or is music I created on my own accord.

From what I understand though, it's different if you're partnered with another company, as they will now be the ones deciding if your videos can be monetized or not, instead of YouTube. The YouTube Content-ID system is still a factor, but that's something else entirely that affects videos regardless of if the uploader monetizes them or not.

This is why it would be really good to get in with a group like Retroware TV or such. To that end, Clint and I have been trying to find some time to do another video together, probably an LGR Plays sort of deal, but other things just keep coming up and we keep having to push it back. Hopefully soon though. :)

sliderider wrote:

What's really ironic is all the people who have full length movies and television episodes on their accounts that they obviously don't own the broadcast rights to that Youtube never says anything about but you as a legitimate creator and owner of original content have to prove that you own the rights to everything in your own videos.

Those videos don't last for long once they've been flagged.

If they're around long enough to get flag, then they probably haven't been monetised. 😒

Ancient DOS Games Episode 124 - Another World / Out of This World is online! :)

Fun Fact: All three of the games I've covered so far on ADG that start with the letter "O" have been reviewed in October. I didn't even realize this until I was editing the alphabetical episode list on my website just now! :D

Also, this was a very challenging episode to make, since it's such a short game and relies heavily on its story and visual presentation to drive it, so I had to make sure not to spoil too much. At the same time, I also had to be careful about the blood effects, since most of them are minor, but there's a couple instances where they're pretty graphic, one of which DID make it into the video, but is hidden behind the game stats and is easy to miss, let alone realize IS blood in the first place. ;)

Funny thing going on with YouTube too... One of my recent uploads to YouTube as I catch up my videos there was Filler #7 - DOSBox Sound Support. YouTube wants me to prove commercial use rights for the video, so I submitted my proof, and it entered the "Monitoring for Possible Review" state. Today, it was "Under Review" for most of the day. Now, it's BACK to "Monitoring for Possible Review". I find that somewhat odd... also I tried to do a time-code link to one of Clint's videos on my website and while it links to the video properly, the time-code synchronization doesn't, even though I pulled the link straight from YouTube's link sharing capabilities. Really feels like they've been pushing through new updates these past couple days.

Since I've said a lot of negative things about YouTube lately, let me say something positive: It's not constantly bothering me about setting up a Google+ page anymore. I've gone about a week now since the last time it asked. :)