Just wondering if anyone was still interested in making our own LD games or anything like that. I have a ton of stuff in VCD format (all high-res mpegs) and on DVD, that would be great for Laser Disk games. Here's an incomplete list...

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Seasons 1-7 (Every last episode, note some are DVD some are VCD) Make a great live action game!!

The Sopranos - Got seasons 1-3 and soon to have 4, all on DVD but I could easily rip em. This would make another great live action game, but like Buffy it might be a bit difficult to organize what everyone is wearing so it doesn't look really weird. This one would be super violent. Kinda cool.

Spider-Man (The original 70's cartoon) I have every last episode of that in VCD format. Some eps look way better than others. Some look like they were drug across asphalt just prior to encoding...

Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends - I have the entire series on VCD, but in all fairness, they look like BUTT!!

The Amazing Spider-Man (The 90's cartoon) Are you sensing a theme here? These look awesome! I encoded them all myself from tapes that I both recorded and that friends sent me. Occationally they have the station logo in the bottom corners but it's not that big a deal.

Spider-Man : Unlimited - Only 13 episodes of this ever came out but it was a great looking show that I thought had a lot of potential... To bad it didn't last. Still, it might make a cool game. Lots of action as only Spidey can bring you.

Invader Zim - Man, if you haven't seen this cartoon, you are totally missing out. It has to be one of the funniest things I have ever laid eyes on. I got every episode and they all look brilliant. Lots of good scenes of Zim and others getting smashed and hurt and junk, and they almost always wear the same clothes! Totally interchangeable. I think this one would be super super fun, and crazy and funny. There aren't as many episodes of this as there are of any of my Spider-mans but what they lack in proclivity they more than make up for in attitude.


Anyway... That's that. That's what I have... Make of it what you will. I think we should really start talking about this again!


--=UPDATE=--

I was bored tonight so I sat down at the ol' 'puter and ripped out a couple sections from an episode of The Amazing Spider-Man. There is a whole lot of stuff in there that would make a great game, and that's just the first episode. I think this weekend I'm going to try to watch the entire run again and take notes. I see great potential. I made up a quickie attract mode of the opening, and am going to try that out in place of Dragon's Lair's attract tomorrow. Not real sure how to do so, but I'll figure it out. In the meantime, I'm super psyched.

--=You may continue with your regularly schedualed post=--

8-19-03 --=UPDATE=--

Got home today and spliced a bunch of pieces together. Came up with a workable little 2 minute "movie". I threw some death scenes on the end and played it through. All in all they look like they are all from the same cartoon. The story obviously contains animation from several different episodes, but it seems to go together well. I think to give myself a little bit more flexability I may dump the audio track and just plan to re-dub it later, that way I can have my own script, not to mention the fact that right now the music is all scrambly.. One moment it's playing the opening theme, the next something totally different with no transition. Yeah, gonna have to re-dub.... That means I'll have to find voice actors.. Prolly tap some of my friends, maybe get my wife to play MJ. Heh.. What a bizzare hobby to have stepped into the middle of.

--=End of Update=--

--=UPDATE 8/20/03=--

Got about 10 minutes of footage, all from the first and second episodes. Some great stuff. You wouldn't believe how much here coudl be a laser disk game. The only trouble I'm having is not just pulling out every little story bit. I keep forgetting that what made Space Ace, and Dragon's Lair fun, is that they weren't encumbered with a ton of story. They were strictly action. Sure they had their story at the beginning, but then the game was all action. Because of that, I can't grab stuff like Peter talking to his Aunt May, (Who the hell wants to play a game about an old lady??) or people just standing around talking about the story. Instead I have concentrated on dynamic closeups of key characters, and sweeping action shots (Spidey swinging, crawling, punching, kicking), and shots of Spidey getting hurt, or letting others get hurt. In Space Ace and Dragon's Lair you just had to worry about the main character (though in SPace Ace you did have to grab Kimmy a few times... Mmmmm Grabbing Kimmy...Oh.. Sorry). I think that because Spidey is a Super Hero, it would be cool to have him save others too, and to let them die or get injured he looses a "Life". I've got a great scene already where he's saving a guy in a run-away van, and a corresponding death scene that goes with it, where the van goes off an embankment and into the Hudson River! Then a quick scene of Jonah Jameson bitching about Spider-Man, and a quick shot of the front page of the Daily Bugle, proclaiming: "Spider-Man, MENACE!"

This is fun. Wish anyone else cared. I'm going to keep updating this one post, and if anyone wants to they can reply. Is anyone interested in helping? I can do this mpeg junk all day, but when it comes to the coding of the roms I'm gonna be lost. Course, if I have to I suppose I can learn it.

Oh well...

--=END OF UPDATE=--

---=UPDATE 8/21/03=--

Not that anyone gives a tin rip, but I was sitting around at work today trying to come up with an interesting way to do as little as possible, when it struck me that I don't really need death scenes persay.. In other words, I don't necessarily need to show Spider-Man getting the bejezus whalloped out of him, I just need to show sort of a YOU BLEW IT screen like in Cliff Hanger! I mean, sure, some of the footage I have shows Spidey getting his bell rung, but not nearly enough for some of the action sequences. If you look at Cliff Hanger you will notice that the Death scenes are mostly very similar, and only show for a split second before the Hanging Lupin (Cliff) scene shows up. I could do something similar with Spidey. If he gets caught in an explosion, I could just show a split second of explosion and then off to a scene of him being knocked out.... or something. Well, I think you get the idea. Anyway. Just a thought.

--=End of UPdate=--

--=UPDATE 8/26/03=--

I give up... No one cares..



p

hey i think your idea is really intresting , i have some ideas for you , because some of the action is fast paced in spider man , and there would be multiple fast moves right ? couldnt you just do an over lapping mpeg image of the button you need to push at that time ? kinda like in cliff hanger ?

and also , for your death scenes , you could always just find one really generic one of spider man being hit down , like shaking his head or something , and then the rom could display the image like you fail ?
that would probably work out pretty well , you just have to make sure the video footage goes good together.

also if you know how to do any of this stuff email me at bryanteeuwen@hotmail.com cause i have various ideas like this i just need to learn how to make the roms , and how to launch them , frame files is pretty straight forward , i was thinking i could take a rom from a previous game that suits my game best , maybe like the cliff hanger rom , and fix it up so it goes well with my game.

you get what im saying , i think your spider man idea is great , just think we could start making our own games we could be like the rom market for daphne , if they made the program able to use different roms and such

Hey Bryan_t! Do I know you from the RGR forums? I think so!

Glad someone is interested in this... I might have to start working on it again. I have about 2 hours of clips so far that I've cut from various episodes. Obviously I won't end up using all of them in the end product but this will give me a lot of data to work with. I have plenty of good scenes of Spidey getting his ass handed to him so the death scenes should all be different and exciting. Anyway, I'll let you know more when I have a little more time and some kind of a script of the game itself.

Till then

p

Hey Pariah,

The "make your own laser game" idea is a really cool one that's been floating around for a while. I still hope to someday make my own lasergame. While I'm really glad to see you so enthusiastic, one thing has me worried that I thought I should bring up before you get too deep into your project.

First, unless there are some Spider-Man cartoon DVDs that I don't know about (and I apologize for this post if there are) then the only way your spider man laser game is conceivable is if the mpegs are distributed as well.

Now, keep in mind that if this project turns into a discussion about mpeg trading/sharing/downloading it will have to be removed from the board.

I don't want to see that happen, so I would suggest you try to stick to a readily-available form of media for your project. Perhaps the Spider-Man movie or the Spider-Man/daredevil animated dvd would be good choices. Ultimately the choice of what to do is up to you, but be conscious of this forum's rules and you'll be all set.

PS - remember, legality discussions will also have to be deleted. I can see how this post could easily snowball into one, so please be conscious of this. Read the rules linked above if you don't understand. I would suggest everyone who plans on replying to this (my) post read them again before posting. This is a warning only. As of now, this discussion is allowed to continue.

The great thing about daphne is that the source is freely available. So, instead of having to disassemble, modify, and recompile an existing rom, you can simply code a new game driver.

Grab the source and take a look a seektest. Seektest is basically a separate "game" that daphne launches. There are no romfiles needed, as the driver runs natively in daphne.

Hmmmm.. Crap.. I hadn't thought of that, Chip.

Well...

Anyone interested in a Buffy or X-Files Laser Disk Game? Least they are on DVD...


p

X-Files! not a bad idea, my family has pretty much every DVD that has been released thus far

I'd be interested in *any* new laser-style games.