The wonder of vegetable firearms

One of the main features of SPUDZOOKA is a way to upgrade and customize your potato cannon as you work your way through the game. Since I have limited personal experience with potato cannons, the need exists to do a little research. After all, how many varieties of potato cannon can there really be?

I have spent some time scouring the endless depths of the internet to find the best of the world's spud cannon engineers, and I'm happy to report that their ingenuity truly is astounding. From $20 designs fashioned with a few pieces of PVC piping to semi-automatic models and, yes, silencers, I found quite a bit more variety than expected.

To illustrate the point, I offer you here a small nibble of the loaded baked potato that is spud cannon design.

• This site has three basic designs and very detailed instructions for building them.
• Spud Gun Extreme is a remarkable site with some nice designs and demo videos. Sure, they're selling something (their cannons), but this site must be like gold for all the male cheerleaders out there looking to pick up a t-shirt gun.
• John W. Cornwell offers some nice pics of his large design and a frightening disclaimer about the dangers of exploding PVC pipe.

All these cannons give me lots of ideas for the game, and I hope it will be fun for folks to build a custom virtual cannon. There are limits, though. As much as I would like to, I'm not sure I'll be able to offer anything quite so imposing and ... manly ... as this guy's toy:

Back in the saddle

Well, I'm finally finished with all my January traveling, so I can get back to a regular schedule for blogging and working on SPUDZOOKA. The only problem is my Xbox 360... I'm worried it will find a way to eat into my productivity. The best way to handle it is probably to limit my gaming time and only play once I have made progress on my own game. It will be tough, but I think I can pull it off.

So what do I think of the Xbox so far? I love it. 2007 saw a great batch of games released, and while I can't afford them all at once, I feel like I've finally stepped back into the main flow of the gaming world. I've been so consumed with creating games, I haven't played very many of them. That's good in a way, since being creative seems a more worthwhile pursuit; however, it's vital to stay current on the best games so I know where the game industry is heading.

Ok, I can't call myself current yet. Here are the games I've got for the 360 at the moment (aside from the giveaway games that came with it):

• The Orange Box
• Halo 3
• Oblivion

Yeah, that's it. The Orange Box has been fantastic so far. Portal, as I mentioned before, blew me away. I'm loving Half Life 2. The setting is wonderfully rich and detailed, the story is brilliantly told, the levels are well designed, and (this is the main thing), the sense of immersion is never broken. There are no cut-scenes that take away control. The people you meet will talk to you, but you don't have to listen. Even loading screens maintain your point of view.

Sure, there are some things that aren't very realistic, like the age-old shooter convention of carrying around an arsenal of weapons and ammo. Where exactly does Gordon Freeman store the gravity gun when he's not using it? Maybe I don't want to know.

The one-man arsenal problem is actually one of the cooler aspects of Halo. Specifically, they avoid it. You can't carry more than two weapons at a time. Sure, you're seven feet tall, have a five foot vertical leap, and are essentially immortal, but at least you can't carry around too many weapons. Still, it adds a nice variety to the gameplay, since you don't always have the option to choose the best weapon for a specific situation.

Oblivion is quite fun as well. I've never much gotten into extremely open-ended RPGs (since story has always been my primary interest), but I find that the more I play, the more I enjoy the freedom the game gives me to explore. The leveling system has some nice elements to it, but I also think it has some problems. I'll save my thoughts on that for another post.

So there's a quick update on my Xbox playing so far. As you can see I have quite enough to keep me busy for a few months. There's quite a list of other games I want to play. Maybe someday I'll actually be caught up with the rest of the gaming world. On second thought, nah.

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On an unrelated note, I want to congratulate one of my life-long friends and his wife, who have just had their first child. I know they are very proud. Now I just need to find a time to meet the little guy.

Back from Argentina -- an update

Well, my wife and I made it back from Argentina safely. We had an amazing trip. The highlight was probably glacier watching and ice-trekking near El Calafate.

On a video game front, I finally entered 2005 on Christmas day and got an Xbox 360. After returning from the southern hemisphere, I started a Halo 3 co-op campaign with my brother. It's quite fun, though he seems to quadruple my score on every level. Maybe it's because the last console shooter I played was GoldenEye (yes, that means I haven't played Halo or Halo 2 -- yet).

I also picked up a copy of the The Orange Box. Again, I'm late to the game on this, but I have never played Half Life 2. Mainly I bought it because of Portal, though. I had read a lot about it and was really looking forward to playing it. Yes, Portal is a short game, but I think it's the perfect length for exploring the possibilities of a single game mechanic.

I played through the whole thing in one day (with some healthy Halo 3 time in the middle) and loved every minute of it. The best thing is that it got even more fun as I went along. The more I think about it, the more I think that makes Portal one of the best games I've ever played. Seriously. Most games hope to keep a pretty steady entertainment level. But this one just seemed to get better and better without introducing any new gameplay mechanics. It's a great concept with great level design and great writing. If SPUDZOOKA is half as fun, I'll be quite pleased with myself.

Speaking of SPUDZOOKA (sorry for the stream-of-consciousness post), it may be another week or so before I can resume regular work on it. I am traveling to the UK for work next week and will be gone for five days (busy month).

Anyway, I'm back, and I hope to get my posts back on some sort of normal schedule in the next few weeks. Thanks to everyone who has kept coming back in my absence. I know it doesn't take long for a blog to peter out.

El fin del mundo

Greetings from Argentina! My wife and I arrived the day before in a city called Ushuaia. It is the world´s southern-most city and, for the benefit of tourists like us, contains countless signs and t-shirts declaring it to be el fin del mundo, the end of the world.

We've had internet access in all of our hotels so far, but we've had an all-day excursion almost every day. Upon arriving in Ushuaia, we were surprised to discover that there's a PC in our hotel room with free internet access.

It's currently 11:39 and not quite dark outside. Today we went riding in a 4x4 down to a remote lake where we had a traditional Argentine asado (basically a cookout). Then we went canoeing on another lake. It was great fun.

We have an early start tomorrow, so I can't write much (and all the keys on the keyboard are different). We're thinking about creating a web site to chronicle our trip, so I'll let you know if we end up doing that.

Seven days now until we fly home. It's been a great trip so far. I'll try to post more details later, if I can find time between touring, eating, and sleeping.