Just heading to bed (yes, at 6am). I've fired up The Graveyard Shift's live audio stream if you want to give it a listen - hit up:
 
http://www.graveyardshift.tk/
or
http://blazemp3.sepwich.com/graveyard/
 
Got 27 hours of Halloween music and stuff queued up, should be a good time. Remember: You can also listen on your PS3 or your Wii! If you're hearing a weird bumper about SAGE or whatever, that should be going away soon. I'm also trying to post some public-domain horror movies to the video stream but that's very slow going.  I've been so busy this Halloween!
 
Tell your friends!

 
  
So yeah. Here's that thing I mentioned in my last blog post. Sort of a minigame-fangame thing that's kind of like Pac-man and kind of not. If you want to download it, hit up this link right here.  Everything about this game is pretty simple - if you've ever played Pac-Man, that's more or less what's going on here, though there are a few key twists. It'll probably be more fun if you figure those out for yourself, though, as I've made them obvious enough in the game itself that they should not need explanation. If you need controls, they too, are pretty simple. There's a readme if you want more info, but you probably don't need it.
 
As I said in my last blog - I may come back to this later and add a few more ideas, depending on how well its received. But for now, I have to move on to another (higher profile) project. I should also get around to writing that M&S review...

Remember that Halloween game I mentioned in my last blog post? Well, finally, here's a screenshot of it. What was initially going to be a very quick, very simple "weekend project" has had a number of setbacks. Most of the kinks have been finally worked out so expect this little guy to be done by Monday at the latest, I hope. 
 
But don't expect much. I know some of you out there in internet-land know me from some of my larger fangame projects, but this isn't one of them. Infact, I'm kind of having second thoughts about releasing this, but I've already come too far to stop now. Writing this blog post is only making it worse for me, because once I hit submit, I totally can't back out anymore!
 
...
 
But yeah. Basically, it's sort of a high-score arcade-based game that is more or less Pac-man with a few twists. I had wanted to put in some extra modes and bonuses and stuff, but something else came up recently that demands my creativity (more on that later), so I've got to chill out on this. Maybe I'll revisit this project again later (as I tend to do) but that would probably depend on how enthusastic people are about it.
 
Jeeze! I'm writing like the game's already out. I'll shut my yap.

So Halloween's here. If you've been following me long enough, you know that it's close to my favorite holiday. For the last two years I've done The Graveyard Shift, an internet... thingy. The first year it started out strictly as an audio-based webcast, live, all day on October 31st. The first year was a rousing success - I averaged a good 60 listeners or so. The second year, last year, is when I added a video component via Livestream.com. I spent a good two months adding a ton of old hard-to-find Halloween TV specials to it - most of which aren't even on DVD. In addition to that, I also did the audio webcast. Unfortunately, compared to the first year, it was a total failure - I was lucky to get 10 listeners at any one time, which was probably limited to just my friends. This year, I'm going to do The Graveyard Shift one last time - and if it fails again, I'm gonna give up. 
 
All told, things haven't been going to well this Halloween. The Graveyard Shift's Livestream.com account had all of its content deleted - a good 30 hours or so. As I said, it was primarily full of public domain content or out of print TV specials, but I guess Livestream didn't care. The stream was also technically set to be private; Livestream allows you to put whatever you want on your stream, it just won't show up publicly on the channel listing. This, in theory, allows you to create streams of pretty much anything that are only accessible by you and your friends, in a shady "don't ask, don't tell" sort of way. Why all my stuff got deleted is anybody's guess - I could have been pulling too much bandwidth, some self-righteous crusader could have taken a "better safe than sorry" route and reported it, or it could have been a server glitch. The channel itself wasn't shut down (which is typically the case if it gets reported), so who actually knows. I have most of it all backed up on DVD, but I don't think I'll re-upload it.  Maybe I'll just go exclusively public domain as to avoid the gray-area stuff. You'd be surprised what's public domain these days.
 
But I'm still trying to keep my chin up. I've got a new Halloween-themed game in the works, which would have been made and completed in a single weekend, but I hit a snag and it's taken longer than I expected. No, it's not Sonic-related. I've also started uploading Halloween-themed game videos to my Youtube channel, most notably clips of a Half-Life 1 mod called " Afraid of Monsters". Check it out:
 
    
And, as always, there's the requisite viewing of certain movies. I've already gotten " The Monster Squad" and " Monster House" out of the way, but I've also been branching out a little bit - I just got done watching a movie called " Trick 'r Treat". 
 
I'm not too big in to horror movies. A few years ago, gore and gratuitous violence really began to bother me - you can say that I wussed out if you want, and maybe I'll even agree with you. But it's for this very reason I approached "Trick 'r Treat" with a bit of trepidation. Though the movie opens with a disgusting bit of shock schlock, the rest of the movie is a delightfully twisted (and mostly non-gruesome) look at a number of different interconnected stories, all featuring a single overarching theme: If you do not respect Halloween or its legends and traditions, you will pay. The movie is remarkably good at building tension, and as it progresses, it only gets better and better until its thrilling and frightening conclusion.

If you're like me and don't have much tolerance for blood and vomit, it's worth stomaching the first 20-30 minutes of this movie for what is to follow. Happy Halloween, indeed. Maybe next, I'll move on to movies like "John Carpenter's Halloween" - never seen that. I don't think I'm ready for "Friday the 13th" or "Nightmare on Elmstreet" just yet. At this point, though, I think I might be done with "scary" stuff for this season - between "Afraid of Monsters" and now "Trick 'r Treat", the warm fuzzy glow of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" sure looks inviting. 
 
So that's it, I guess. Stay tuned or whenever I get that game done, and please, tune in to the Graveyard Shift's audio webcast on October 31st - it'll be chocked full of your usual blend of Halloween-themed music with the occasional ghost story inbetween songs. You can even listen to it on your PS3 or Wii!

So I'm hot off trying the demo for Need for Speed: Shift. I came away a little more impressed with the "you feel like you are driving" stuff than I figured I would. GRiD does a great job of that already, with smart camera movement that really gives you the feeling of bouncing around a vehicle as you take turns at 50mph - but Shift takes the next step. 
 
Unfortunately, that's about all that impressed me with the game. Need for Speed just is not a franchise about "serious" racing, so when you get games like ProStreet and Shift I just sort of shake my head and sigh. At the same time, though, I understand EA's plight - the "Fast & The Furious" direction of Need for Speed Underground and Most Wanted was most definitely tapped out. So where do you go from there? 
 
I say go back to the beginning. I'm talking the original Need for Speed games. No nitrous, no chrome rims, no spoilers and no glowing lights underneath the car. When I want a Need for Speed game to play, I go back to one game, each and every time:
 

 
Nobody makes racing games like Hot Pursuit 2 anymore. Not EA, no one - and frankly, it's starting to make me a little bit bored of racing games in general. I'm so tired of Forza, Gran Turismo, Project Gotham Racing, and GRiD. I'm also tired of Fast-and-the-furious Underground Street Races. 
 
Hot Pursuit 2, on the other hand, doesn't bog us down with a storyline or an open world or sponsored events. You do not race in tracks that feel like they were set up specifically for racing. There aren't any retaining walls, bleachers or spectators. You aren't even really racing in cities, for the most part. You're just some stupidly rich thrill-seeker with an expensive sports car racing across long, winding interstate roads. Locations are just as exotic as the cars - with forests, countrysides and even the coasts of Hawaii.  There aren't many racing games today that offer up such a wide variety of vistas.
 
That's largely because Hot Pursuit 2 doesn't bog itself down with realism. Take Need for Speed: Most Wanted, for instance. In Most Wanted, you're limited to one city, which eliminates a lot of the more exciting and varied options for race locales. Since Most Wanted is also an open-world game, you have to construct racing circuits out of city street layouts. Worst of all, Most Wanted rides the "Fast & The Furious" fad for all its worth, dating the game considerably. 
 
What I want is a Need for Speed game that takes all of the "you really are driving" concepts from Shift and applies them to a game like Hot Pursuit 2. As I fly through a sawmill in the forests of upstate California at 110mph in a Lotus Elise, I want to feel it. I don't want to drive through another city I'm going to forget in ten minutes - and I don't want to drive through locales that were inspired by famous street racing movies, either. Hot Pursuit 2 has you ramp over lava floes from a recently-erupted volcano in Hawaii, for crying out loud. Has any Need for Speed game done anything that cool since then? I'd argue it has not. 
 
C'mon, EA and the Need for Speed Team ! Show some creativity again! Or at least put Beetle Adventure Racing on Xbox Live, or something.