For those of you who long for the good ol’ days when com­puter games were com­prised of mostly point-and-click adven­ture games will be excited to know that some­one out there is fill­ing that void.

The cre­ator of this Flash adven­ture game has cre­ated some­thing that sim­ply can­not be cat­e­go­rized. Instead, while it may have it’s roots dug deep in adven­ture gam­ing ‘Samorost’ is some­thing of an abstract masterpiece.

For instance the lev­els are made up of forest-like land­scapes that imme­di­at­edly spark imag­i­na­tion. The char­ac­ter you guide along in this short jour­ney is a space alien and your job is to lead him along by solv­ing sim­ple puz­zle games.

It reminds me of Myst some­what with it’s con­trap­tions and guessing-game puz­zles but again it’s a won­der­ful lit­tle Flash piece. Of note, the shad­ows in this game pro­vide for a great visual treat.

Play Samorost here.

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Alright, I’ve man­aged to set up the site again. How­ever, I need to re-tweak the template(s) and the CSS style sheet to match the pre­vi­ous design.

Oh man, mov­ing can be a pain. I’m glad I’m all set up now, however.

Just give me some time to re-import the pre­vi­ous entries and get this site back in the shape it was before.

Thanks for your patience! 

Over the next cou­ple of days I’m mov­ing over the server. This will more than likely mean that this site will be down for a few days until the change has been suc­cess­fully made.

Thank you for your patience.

See you in a few days.

Erik 

Mr. Enter­tain­ment, the ‘King of Com­edy’ Bob Hope has passed away at the age of 100. This is indeed a sad day in the Enter­tain­ment world as Bob Hope was one of the icons of the Golden Age of Hol­ly­wood, a true per­former and comedian.

Good­bye Bob and thanks again for the memories.

America’s fun­ny­man, Bob Hope, turned 100 today. Hope accord­ing to his daugh­ter Linda was a kid more than a par­ent and to all those who know him, he’s an ad-libbing, wise-cracking man who has enter­tained mil­lions through­out his life time. His ear­li­est of begin­nings were in Vaude­ville in the 1920s which even­tu­ally led to his own radio show and var­i­ous tele­vi­sion appear­ances. To Hope, tele­vi­sion was “vaude­ville in a box” and gar­nered him guest spots on The Tonight Show and the Golden Girls.

Hope knew that in order to have comedic effec­tive­ness he needed a crew of writ­ers with top-notch jokes. Among the orig­i­nal 8 writ­ers was Sher­wood Shwartz, cre­ator of Gilli­gans Island and The Brady Bunch. In ‘Amer­ica explained by Bob Hope’ Shwartz explains that he orig­i­nally was pur­su­ing to be a doc­tor and instead answered the call of Bob Hope. On a typ­i­cal evening, Bob Hope and his writ­ing team would meet at his home (rented by Woody Wood­pecker cre­ator’ Wal­ter Lantz) and brain­storm ideas. In order to remain fresh and cutting-edge Hope would pool together the best of the worst and use them on his radio show. Unlike an appear­ance at a Com­edy Club, being on the radio meant hav­ing a great col­lec­tion of jokes and mak­ing sure every­one of them was a win­ner con­sid­er­ing you can’t hear the lis­tener laugh.

His great­est tri­umph how­ever lies within his com­mit­ment to enter­tain­ing and sup­port­ing the troops dur­ing world con­flicts (namely World War 2). Var­i­ous pho­tographs and doc­u­men­taries show Hope on stage with an audi­ence of thou­sands atten­tive and laugh­ing their hearts out. To Hope, this was his great­est plea­sure because he was never sure who would be around in the com­ing days dur­ing the war.

For a man to have lived 100 years and live to tell about his adven­tures you have to applaud his per­for­mance. How­ever, for a man to make mil­lions laugh in his life­time deserves a stand­ing ovation.

CNN’s Trib­ute and Memo­r­ial to Bob Hope 

The story below is part 2 of Work­ing for the County Part One, if you haven’t already done so — read the first part, trust me. Oth­er­wise, you’ll be so con­fused that you’ll be screaming.

The Kids

A cou­ple weeks ago I started the first part of the ‘Work­ing for the County’ story. It was an intro­duc­tion and left off at the kids who I would reg­u­larly (on sched­ule, on time) pick up from schools, homes, etc. These kids ranged from ages 13–20 years old because accord­ing to the pro­vi­sions by law a 20-year-old was con­sid­ered “respon­si­ble” enough to han­dle them­selves. This always per­plexed me con­sid­er­ing most of these 20-year-old adults were already mov­ing ahead in life (i.e. mar­riage and kids) and for the most part stayed within the ILSP pro­gram for the handouts.

Yet, I digress because I’m sure they were also there for the com­fort and for some­one to lis­ten to them. After all, they each had their own sto­ries to tell and I was to act as not only their dri­ver but their coun­selor as well. Most days this meant lend­ing an ear and casu­ally lis­ten to their stories.

For exam­ple, a girl who I’ll call Lisa who orig­i­nated from Mex­ico came to the United States with her mother. Not too long after the 14-year-old girl winds up preg­nant with her 25-year-old boyfriend’s baby. Through some per­sonal strug­gle of which Lisa would never fully reveal to me she winds up in a fos­ter pro­gram with her baby and her boyfriend upon hear­ing that she’s preg­nant flees the scene. Yes, it’s all and always will be very soap-opera.

Every Thurs­day I would pick up Lisa from her fos­ter care home (with baby of course) and I’d trans­port her to the class site, which in this case was in Hemet, Cal­i­for­nia. The drive usu­ally took any­where from 45 min­utes to an hour depend­ing on traf­fic which meant there was room for dis­cus­sion and a bit of language-gap edu­ca­tion. You see, Lisa only spoke very lit­tle Eng­lish (she did speak bet­ter Span­ish than I do so as I fig­ured we were even).

As you can imag­ine this would lead to inter­est­ing top­ics; world events, col­lege preper­a­tion, etc. I took this oppor­tu­nity to also learn some Span­ish and she always looked for­ward to it as well. As we would drive I would come up with the cra­zi­est state­ment I could think of and she would trans­late into her native tongue and then I would repeat. One day I came up with, “Her shoes are made of red candy and the sky is pur­ple and green.”, Lisa thought this was funny and I would of course fub­ble the trans­la­tion where it would sound more like “Pizza is made of thumbtacks.”

Lisa even­tu­ally relo­cated some­where else with Leslie, but I’ll always remem­ber her smile and her out­look on life. On her last day I asked her what she was plan­ning and she men­tioned that col­lege was in the hori­zon. She wanted to be a case worker and teach fos­ter chil­dren about her expe­ri­ences. This was a good thing con­sid­er­ing with Lisa I always men­tioned her goals should be high and that col­lege was impor­tant. I’m hop­ing that she’s study­ing hard at some Ivy League college.

Another stu­dent I would pick up who I’ll call Troy lived in a trailer park. His out­look on life (unlike Lisa) was more along the lines of what I thought was an alien instead of a 17-year-old boy. In class when I would set up the good­ies (which were com­prised of soda, chips, and some­times candy — yeah, we feed them healthy) he would approach me when I was pour­ing a drink and stick his fin­ger in the car­bon­ated fizz. He would then tell me that the oils in a “human’s skin melt the fizzzcha”… yeah, he would say ‘fizzzzcha’. After this, the Bill Nye lab assis­tant would share this bit of infor­ma­tion with the rest of the class. Inbe­tween teach­ing me about fizz and human skin oil, Troy would read his gamers guides in hopes of learn­ing how to evade the Dark Lord or learn how to col­lect the most coins.

Troy was an extra ter­res­trial — I’m for cer­tain of it. 

Duck Hunt for the Nin­tendo Enter­tain­ment Sys­tem (NES) was the gold­mine of games for my brother and I when were were younger. Of course to play the game you had to have the Nin­tendo Light Gun but once all the gear was set you were in for an awe­some game.

The object of the game was sim­ple. Gun. Dog. Aim. Shoot.

The hunt­ing dog who accom­pa­nied you in the game would slowly sniff his way along the screen and jump into the bushes to scare the ducks. At which point with care­ful aim and focus you’d pro­ceed to shoot as many ducks as pos­si­ble. There were a cou­ple modes of play offered; ducks and clay shoot­ing. In the clay shoot­ing mode, clay disks would blast across the screen and your job was to shoot them out of oblivion.

If you want to check it out for your­self, play this excel­lent Flash con­ver­sion. Although it doesn’t fea­ture the Clay Shoot­ing mode every­thing is per­fectly emulated.

While you’re at it, you might want to try Midway’s (flash-powered) arcade emu­la­tions. They include such clas­sics as Spy Hunter, Ram­page and Tapper. 

‘Jan­u­ary 27^th, 1875, was the date that Dominica saw the birth of its most illus­tri­ous daugh­ter, Eliz­a­beth Israel. Accord­ing to offi­cial records of The Roman Catholic Church (Roseau Dio­cese), Magde­line Israel, mother and an undoc­u­mented father gave birth to baby Eliz­a­beth. Although Elizabeth’s mother resided on The Col­i­haut Estate sit­u­ated on the west coast of Dominica, she while in an advance state of her preg­nancy with Eliz­a­beth; migrated (by foot) to an area of The Picard Estate called Tibay. It was in Tibay that Pam­powas born and being the first of her mother’s six chil­dren, she enjoyed the lux­ury of their trash cov­ered, mud-paved house.’

So begins the story of the World’s Old­est Liv­ing per­son, Eliz­a­beth Israel; 128 years young.

Read here. 

Now, this is freaky.

Puts a whole new per­spec­tive on, “Good night. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

If only you had lis­tened to your parents.

*cue hell­ish soundtrack* 

The Mys­tery of Time and Space, oth­er­wise known as MOTAS for short is an extremely enter­tain­ing adven­ture puz­zle game cre­ated entirely in Flash. How­ever, the basic clock­work of the game is recy­cled but that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing.

In fact, for MOTAS it makes for an amus­ing mix­ture of puz­zles, an assort­ment of brain teasers that require posters, rats and odd con­trap­tions. In one instance, you have to con­fig­ure floor tiles to lead a rat to another rat hole. It sounds weird, but in fact it’s highly addic­tive once you get started.

Like Roberta Williams, the cre­ator of the King’s Quest series would say, ‘Remem­ber, check every­thing.” Any­thing that is high­lighted by the cur­sor with a descrip­tion or effect is usu­ally click­able and some­times you can even com­bine items (like lock and key) for instance.

Alas, if you’re per­sis­tent you’ll usu­ally find the right sequence of items to unlock the door and make your way into the rest of the adventure.

Try: The Mys­tery of Time and Space

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