Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage as Freeware!

In collaboration with 3DRealms we've released Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage as freeware today!



Halloween Harry, the tough as nails marine from Alien Carnage, is 22 years old this year. He was the star of a game I wrote on the Australian Microbee computer system and released commercially in 1985. I was still in high school at the time and was super excited to have sold my second computer game (the first was called "Chilly Willy", a clone of the classic arcade game, Pengo).



I left school, studied computer science at university, and then got a "real job" as a programmer at a telecommunications company. That lasted just over two years before the computer game bug bit again. Now I was developing for the Amiga computer and had started work on a re-make of the Halloween Harry game I made as a kid - the game that would eventually become Alien Carnage!

With the help of a local comic artist we cooked up a demo that had great graphics and the core of a cool game. Through sheer luck I then hooked up with two other programmers who were making PC games. They were "coding demon" Robert Crane, and "graphics wizard" Tony Ball. We joined forces and Robert took over as lead programmer while I took the reigns on design. In no time we had a very addictive game on our hands.




Then, through sheer luck, we hooked up with Scott Miller and George Broussard from Apogee and before we knew it, the hottest shareware publisher on Earth was publishing us. Back in 1993 when Alien Carnage was first released, we had the honor of being one of the best selling shareware games of the year - an honor that we held on to until a little old game called "Doom" was released a few months later!

I want to say a big thank you to the DOSBox Development Team and Joe Siegler for putting this all together. Nice work guys!

Casual Game Activity

There's been a bit of activity between the traditional console world and the casual games space this last week.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, joined the board of NeoEdge - a company that uses an ad-supported business model.

UbiSoft has announced their My Life Coach line of casual games for the Wii and DS. Their first entry is My Word Coach which looks like a collection of word puzzle games.

Outside of the traditional console space, Kyoto is introducing DS English Training to classrooms. This Nintendo DS brain training style game will be part of junior high second year English classes. How cool is that?

And finally Puzzle Quest on the PSP got an excellent score from IGN!

Gold in them thar hills!

I've prepared a gold master candidate for Brainiversity ready for the final round of testing. If all goes well the game should be released very soon.

Fingers crossed!

Back in Black

Well, I have some good news and bad news this week.

The bad news is that my beloved Nintendo DS Lite broke. I sent it to Nintendo Australia and was quoted a $95 repair bill (!) and a promise that it might not be as good as it used to be when I get it back (!!).

The good news is that my amazingly wonderful wife went out and bought me a brand new shiny black Nintendo DS Lite yesterday and personally delivered it to me after lunch. Sigh. She's the best.

So now I can continue my quest for more Pokemon and solve criminal cases with Phoenix Wright (as well as continue to enjoy all the other cool games on the DS). Hallelujah!

Brainiversity Sneak Peek 4

This is probably the last sneak peek I do before the game is released.

So this week I've included a screen shot from the "Sort It!" activity.




I got a great response to my survey with the beta testers and "Sort It!" was rated as one of the most popular activities.

I'm almost finished making changes to the game based on the feedback - there were some great suggestions. Again, thanks to all those who participated.