Author: Michael Noland

MB v.2

My good friend Jeff Frohwein has started production of his MultiBoot Version 2 cable, which allows you to download up to 256 kbytes of code to your Gameboy Advance and test your programs on the actual hardware. I have one and I must say it is a wonderful development tool.

Update: The first batch of 50 cables sold out rapidly, but there are more batches on the horizon, check www.devrs.com/gba periodically for more information.

Absolute Terror

Absolute Terror is a 3D PC game published by Crystal Interactive in 2001 and developed by SymbioSys Software (now Neko Technologies).

From the manual (i.e. from Ben’s twisted sense of humor):

In Absolute Terror, you venture into space, the last best hope for Earth in their war against rebelling colonies on distant worlds.  Or maybe they’re aliens; hideous space-monsters who threaten all mankind. No, no, actually, they’re definitely rebelling colonies – not that it really matters.  What really matters, of course, is that you get a state-of-the-art spacecraft (with big guns), a sarcastic co-pilot (with big… uhhh, nevermind!) and a license to blow things up in a spectacular and over-the-top fashion!

I wrote the scripting engine and many of the special effects used in the game while working for SymbioSys.

Munchies game and editor

Game

Munchies is an implementation of the classic nibbles game with a built in level editor. The concept is dead simple, you play a snake that has to eat all of the apples in the level while avoiding your own tail and the barriers. After you eat all of the apples, your snake will proceed to the next level, and the cycle begins anew.

Gameplay

Editor

The level editor behaves like an image editor, allowing the designer to lay down barriers and indicate the start positions for each player. In addition, there is a sequencer which can be used to re-order the levels and indicate which background music is played on each level.

Editor

Summary

It’s not going to win any awards, but it is a polished little game with music, selectable controls, an integrated level editor, and it keeps track of your high scores.