SIMPSONS NEWS

EDIT: (Okay, I’m keep the original post up but we are no longer accepting suggestions.  Thank you all who participated. Hopefully some of your suggestions will be used when the show airs.) 

Are you a Simpsons fan? You want to help out the show and be part of Simpsons history? Well now you can. We need a little bit of help. The show I’m working on is going to have a quick montage of scenes, from previous shows, of Homer getting hurt. Problem is, there are about seven artists on the show plus a Director and an Assistant Director and we haven’t got the time to be looking through, over a hundred shows, to find these scenes. We have to get the show’s new scenes done. That’s where you can help. I’ve been asked by my Director Lance (with permission from one of our producers) to ask you to help us out. If you love the Simpsons and are watching the shows all the time or you just happen see or remember a scene where Homer gets hurt, let us know. Leave a comment on this blog post.

If you choose to help us out, then ideally we need two (or three) things from you:

• A short one line description of the scene where Homer gets hurt (no one else, just Homer) AND…

• The show’s number (which, if you own the DVDs, should be in the booklet that comes in the box or use the handy database in this site: Simpsons Episode Archives) OR at the very least…

• The show’s title OR both…

For example: Homer falls down Springfield Gorge (Show 7F06, Bart the Daredevil.) or Homer chops his thumb off (Trilogy of Error, Show CABF14) Please provide at least either the title or the the show number, if you cannot find any of that info, it’s not likely we would be able to use your suggestion (because without that info we can’t search the archives).

This is the perfect opportunity for you to be able to influence a part of the show. Some day you can be watching the show and say to your grandkids, “I told them to put that in there.”

So are you interested? We need the help. Come on, you know it will be fun to look that stuff up!

VIDEO GAMES

And now for something completely unrelated…

I’ve been writing long winded e-mails back and forth with one of my best friends for the last two weeks about games. It started at first with board games but it has now gone into video games. One of the subjects we’ve written about is a game I really love called Nethack. Now, this game is actually based on a game called Rogue, and Rogue has spawned many variants. So many that it has become it’s own genre. What the Rogue genre tends to have in common is as follows:

1. They are typically fantasy based Roleplaying games.
2. The player only gets one life. When you die, the game is over, you start from the beginning again and often times with a new character.
3. They typically are about exploring a very deep dungeon or group of dungeons.
4. The dungeons are randomly generated. In other words, it’s never the same game twice.
5. They are very difficult.
6. They give the player, many options for actions to take in a given situation.
7. They often times have very, very, primitive graphics, or even no graphics at all.
8. They are often freeware, so you can play them for free.
9. They’re very addictive.

So since we’ve been talking about these Rogue type games, I’ve gotten the urge to play them again.

I first got into playing these games years ago in high school when, this same friend, gave me a copy of a game to play on my computer. This particular game was called Moria. You basically created a character from scratch and the object of the game is to enter “Moria” go down 100 randomly generated levels and kill the Balrog. At the time, I hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings, so the name Moria and Balrog meant nothing to me. When I first played the game, I was confused. I thought at first it was a text based game. But then I realized that the “@”symbol on my screen was supposed to be my character and that when I pressed the arrow keys, he moved around a map that was slowly being revealed. Also, I discovered that the letter “s” that was moving toward my “@” symbol was a snake. It reached my character and began to attack him. I knew this because a line of description appeared at the top of the screen telling me so. I didn’t know what to do. I think that character died. It turns out all I had to do was move toward the snake and the character automatically would have attacked it. In any case, the game caught my attention. Little by little, I learned to play the game with some help from my friend who told me to press “?” to look up the commands. It was the deepest game I’d ever played. I still think that some of these games are deeper than many of the newer fancier games out now. I later discovered that the game Diablo from Blizzard Entertainment was inspired by this game (or possibly Nethack which is a sister game). To give an idea of what this game looks like, I’ve provided a picture below:

Yes, that’s what the game looks like but don’t let it’s look fool you. There is depth in that game greater than in most newer games.

Personally I like Nethack (pictured above) a bit more than Moria. It’s harder, a little more unpredictable and you have far more options than on Moria. I can’t say enough good things about Moria, Nethack and their sibling games. They are sooo much fun and best of all, just about everyone of them is free to play. But don’t take my word for it, Gamespy inducted Nethack into it’s video game hall of fame. Here’s an except from the article:

Progress from version to version is fairly slow (sometimes a couple of years will elapse in silence between releases), but every change in the game is debugged extensively and thought out to its fullest extent. The result? A fascinating exploration of possibilities.

Some examples: Eat a floating eye corpse and you’ll get ESP, which will allow you to see enemies anywhere on the map, but only while blinded. To take advantage of it, you may want to drink a potion of blindness, or preferably, find and wear a blindfold. Of course, while blindfolded, even with ESP you won’t be able to see inanimate objects on the floor — when you find piles of items, your character will have to “feel” for them. Oh, and you won’t be able to read scrolls. Whoops! In that pile of items you just felt is a cockatrice corpse — fortunately you were wearing gloves, otherwise you would’ve been turned to stone just by touching it. But now, blind and protected, you can pick up the cockatrice corpse and use it to attack monsters — now your enemies will turn to stone when you strike them! Unfortunately, their inventory turns to stone as well. Hey, no problem — you’ve got a pick-axe, so you can chisel open their statues to yield a pile of rocks and any of their old possessions. Sadly, thanks to the blindfold, you can’t see a nearby pit and tumble inside. Too bad you were holding the cockatrice corpse — it landed on top of you and turned you to stone. Yet Another Stupid Death, and another reason to cry out in anguish because they think of everything!

NetHack’s legacy is very real. Blizzard admits that Diablo’s gameplay owes a little something to the Rogue-ish dungeon crawl that NetHack inspires. Of course, even Diablo II doesn’t have the depth and complexity of NetHack’s items and interactions… but to be fair it looks a little bit sharper. 😉

If after reading this you feel like trying out one of the games, below is a list of links to sites you can download the games that interest you the most.

Nethack – My favorite one of the these games so far.
Moria – The first game I ever played of these. Almost as tough as Nethack. Not as many commands to learn compared to Nethack.
Angband – Similar to Moria but a lot easier. Chances are, you won’t die early in the game unless you do something really dumb. In this game, instead of going down the dungeon to fight and kill a Balrog, you go down to fight and kill Morgoth.
Rogue – The original game all the other games are based off of.
PRogue – It’s a really fancy full color game with a world map and many dungeons.

If you own a Gameboy DS, and would rather spend some money and play a Rogue type game with better graphics, you can try: Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. It’s the one I own and I love it.

I’ve heard decent things about these other games.

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