kartooner.com

The year was 1993. My brother and I were browsing the software section at CompUSA, thumbing through various CD’s, seeing if any of them caught our eye. Off in the corner of the store I can remember a kid playing Prince of Persia 2 and my brother and I standing behind him in utter amazement. As an observer, the game looked extremely difficult and completely different than your standard Mario adventure.

We decided that while it looked cool enough, we needed something with less action and more humor and gameplay. Since we were fans of the King’s Quest series, we opted to search for an adventure game in the same vein as the Roberta William’s classics and yet something with spunk. Several minutes of searching finally yielded something of interest. The game, entitled Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle stood out like a sore thumb.

On a side note I should mention that most of the time I purchase a product based entirely on the packaging, which is both a good and bad thing. In this instance, the packaging for Day of the Tentacle had a great color scheme (deep purple contrasted by “slime” green) with what appeared to be a purple tentacle, ray gun in hand, chasing a nerd off the bottom right corner of the box. It was packaging genius in the purest sense of the word and after scanning the box we realized it was the sequel to one of our favorite Lucasarts adventure games, Maniac Mansion. At that point I think we both turned to one another and realized we were holding something special and how right we were.

Day of the Tentacle, also known as DOTT, was the brainchild of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, better known as the duo responsible for the original Maniac Mansion released in 1988. Maniac Mansion was powered by the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, SCUMM for short, developed by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder. In later years, SCUMM would serve as the foundation for several popular Lucasarts titles including the Monkey Island series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig and another Schafer creation, Full Throttle.

In recent times, thanks to the rectification and persistency of fans, a group of developers have created ScummVM, a virtual machine for classic Lucasarts adventures. In a nutshell, it allows you to run older Lucasarts adventure games on modern rigs (PC and OS X), emulating to the ‘T’ the SCUMM engine without so much as a sputter. Due to the fact ScummVM is released under a GPL license, the software has been ported over to run on the Dreamcast console, not to mention other gaming machines, handhelds and cell phones even.

As I coasted off the highway and came to a halt at the light, there was a hitchhiker holding a cardboard sign with his dog chained to a signpost. The man, who looked to be in his mid-30s looked worn out and tired, his expression reminded me of a propaganda poster for hunger deprevation. The sign’s message, painted with shoe polish or a variant of, read:

“On the road. Need food, help or transportation.”

The man walked the sidelines, inching closer to the line of cars waiting for the light to turn green. As he approached my car my first instict was to look away, ignore his presence and forget about the issue at hand. Immediatedly I started forming my own thoughts of his situation, coming to the conclusion that he was either a traveler with a lot of hardship or a con artist scamming money from those willing to donate to his cause.

I glanced over at his companion, chained to the signpost, itching his feet and wringling in the grass. The dog, a yellow labrador, looked clean and happily wagged its tail and jumped up and down excitedly as cars passed by a few feet away.

As I pulled way from the scene I felt bad for the man and his dog and wondered what their story was. What led them to the point where a makeshift sign was their last resort, and who, if anyone, would be willing to help?

Looking back before I can remember when, the thought of a guardian protecting me has always surfaced in my mind. Whether it was from the forces of evil, or from the monsters in my closet, I have always seemed to need some protection in my life. Throughout most of your life, you have many protectors willing to flex their muscles to help those who are in need of it, but I believe the two most protectors in my life have been my father and my brother Erik.

Now hold up, up until now I’m sure you thought it was Erik writing this entry, but I think you were a bit mistaken. This is Erik’s little brother Matt writting, why you may be asking? Well, I wanted to let everyone know that it was my brother’s birthday on the 11th (yesterday) and even though I was planning on writing about it without him knowing I totally vegged and thought his birthday was on the 13th.. Do’h!

So, I made a story up that I needed his password to change some settings and here we are! Let me tell you, Erik is one hell of a brother, always willing to be there when times get tough and has always been the best brother I’ll ever have or known. He’s one of those guys you aspire to be, with a loving wife and a beautiful child, at times I’m semi jealous. (But, I’ll be damned if I’d admit it! hah). I just wanted ALL his readers to wish him a belated Happy Birthday. He deserves it, he’s one hell of a guy, a best friend and best of all, a big brother.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERIK!

To the person that feels it’s funny to constantly reset my administrative password, you are being watched. Honestly, I really don’t see the humor behind it and if you’re trying to log into my account, good luck, considering the password that you reset is sent to my secure email account I don’t see any benefit in doing this other than for your own amusement. An odd sort of amusement if you ask me.

I suppose you know you’ve reached a certain status, of which I believe is currently “psuedo known”, when people lift or steal your work and/or fiddle with your admin backend to retreive pertinent information. My advice for you is to please divert your attention and time to something else, you’ll find that focusing on something worthwhile might incur more interesting results.

Update: The mystery has been solved. It was my “up to no good and in the Navy” brother Matt who reset my administrative password and broke into the MySQL database that runs this site.