I don't like putting "under construction" signs on my website because of reasons, but here is some stuff I'm currently working on, as well as some older ideas I've abandoned.
Working On It
How to Cheat at the 15 Essential Games. Cheating at games is fun, as long as you're playing alone. The Game Genie, GameShark, and Pro Action Replay could make games do stuff that even the developers never considered by just transposing a couple bytes here and there; speaking personally, I would never have been able to progress beyond Statue in GoldenEye 007 without my GameShark. There's not much for the Atari VCS, unfortunately, but I have the NES, Mega Drive, and N64 pages done; and I'm currently working on the Super NES and GameCube pages offsite. Well, I say I have the "Mega Drive" page finished; it's actually the Genesis page. In general, there tend to be more codes available for the North American releases of games than the other regions, and there's no regional lockout on an emulator, so all the pages have data on the North American releases, with links to the GameHacking.org pages for the other regions (if any). As it will say on the project's index page, all the codes came from GameHacking.org; mostly because it provides a locus from which no additional credits need to be provided. Sometimes, I have to search on other websites for the codes I need, in which case I'll give an acknowledgement, but it's more helpful for me to just say "Courtesy: GameHacking.org", because you can go there and see who contributed that code.
Guides on how to mod The Sims 1. This would sort of go along with the How to Use a Computer guide. If you can not only get The Sims 1 to run on your computer in 2024, but you can get to a point where your own custom content appears in the game, you've mastered computer use. Plus, it's rewarding, too—you can really connect with your games on a level not otherwise possible if you can mod them. It really takes a lot of the mystery out of game development if you can see how something works and is the first step in discovering how to change it. Plus, I always wanted to have a Sims fansite since I installed the game for the first time back in 2001; and, since Neocities has given me an obscene amount of storage space (relative to Tripod where I had only 25 MB), I can do that now.
Sims 1 custom content website. At the same time, I want to see how feasible it would be to make a completely new website just for The Sims. I've been making CC for that game since 2001, so I have quite the back catalogue of stuff that I've made myself. Recolours, certainly; but also entirely new objects and skins. No meshes, though—I've never been very good with 3D.
A Shadow of the Beast tribute album. Easily the best Amiga 500 game series, I love Beast's soundtrack. I was looking at all the soundfonts I've found lately and I discovered that I have sounds from the Kawai K1, Korg M1, E-MU Emulator II, and Roland MT-32... all the necessary sounds to make a Beast tribute album! Well, or Jazz Jackrabbit, I guess. Maybe I'll do that one next.
Also, I know it's hard, not being able to preview my music before you buy it. Itch is less likely to sell commercial rights to my music without my knowledge or ability to stop it, but it's just... not suited for music sales. Like, at all. I appreciated how you could preview my stuff on Bandcamp; a sort of "try before you buy"-type thing; and, if you're following me on Tumblr, I post music there, too. It's not exactly what I put into the records, but you can get an idea of what my studio equipment and writing style sounds like. Anyway, I'm sure it's just a skill issue on my part—I'm sure there must be some way I can code an HTML MIDI player; I just need to find it.
Abandoned
15 Essential Games for Sony PlayStation. I just don't know enough about this system to come up with any recommendations for it. I'm not opposed to the idea, and if someone wanted to write the recommendations for me, I'd make that up all nice in HTML2 and put it into the list (with proper credits, of course; I saw Hbomberguy's JS video too, after all). But, as it stands, I've been working on the list for nearly 6 months at this stage, and I've made no progress.
15 Essentials for Wii. Actually, I never worked on this. I had no plans to. But, since I'm only a few months away from cracking a Wii U, and Wii is one of those systems with 1000+ games, a 15 Essentials list would seem important. Even though I had a Wii and played the games as they came out, it had the misfortune of intersecting a really bad time in my life, so I have no particular desire to parse through lists of games for that system. Again, if you want to write the recommendations yourself, I'll put it up, but I'm not going to do this list myself.
The Sims 3 Starter Kit. Maybe it's a feeble excuse, but the EA Desktop app wants to connect to the internet, probably for anti-piracy verification and analytics, so I'm never going to run The Sims 3 or 4 again. Like I said, the next time I update an EA product will be 5 years after my death, and I'm still alive. I guess I could just make the list, sight unseen, but I would like to make sure some of the older stuff still works with the current software revision; that would seem to be a necessary step in any recommendation process. Since I can't launch The Sims 3, I can't do that. But, I can say that if you're looking for a starter kit, of sorts, because you picked up a copy of The Sims 3 Starter Pack, the Sims Store has been completely decrapified and put up on the Internet Archive. So, there's that.
--30 January 2024--