Speaking of quizzes.

Adventure Construction Creation System Sets

Back in the day I played a ton of games on my Commodore 64 computer. I've mentioned before that Ultima IV remains my alltime favorite computer game. Anybody else remember the Adventure Construction Set? Designed by Stuart Smith and put out by Electronic Arts back before EA turned White Dwarf into an all-Warhammer magazine, it was basically designed to allow you to build your own Ultima-style adventures. I messed around with ACS a lot as a kid, though I finished very few or no adventures without resorting to the 'finish adventure' button, which simply filled out the rest of the adventure with randomly generated crap.

The graphics were even more crude than Ultima IV, with fewer colors and no animation. The tiny little animations of the waves on the water tiles and the moving people really brought the world of Ultima to life. I understand the Amiga version of ACS had somewhat more sophisticated graphics.

Recently I encountered a newer program directly inspired by ACS. Written in 1995, it's called the Adventure Creation Kit. Unlike ACS, it's easy to find for free download and no emulation or other fiddling is needed to make it run on a more modern machine. I have no reports on running it under Vista, but last night I was messing around with ACK on a Windows set-up. No sound is available unless you use DOSBox, an emulator designed to make old games run more smoothly on newer machines.

One thing I have yet to figure out is whether this new toy makes executables, like the old ACS did. A game made in ACS comes out as a single .exe file that can be shared with people who don't have to own a copy of the game creation software. Ken St. Andre of Tunnels & Trolls fame used to maintain a fan club of people who swapped and bought/sold disks of completed games. Personally, I'd love to be able to create a little Encounter Critical themed adventure I could share with the folks on the EC mailing list. Last night I made a Theskian Dagger item and a rough draft map of Blacksteel Isle. That's a start.

In fact, it was Encounter Critical that got me thinking about digging up Adventure Construction Set. An ACS adventure just struck me as the kind of obsessive EC-related fanboy activity that I would enjoy, the same way I tried to learn to make online quizzes so I could whip up the Which EC Character Are You? thing-a-ma-jig.

It's Halloween

a poem by Jack Prelutsky

It's Halloween! It's Halloween!
The moon is full and bright
And we shall see what can't be seen
On any other night:

Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls,
Grinning goblins fighting duels,
Werewolves rising from their tombs,
Witches on their magic brooms.

In masks and gowns
we haunt the street
And knock on doors
for trick or treat.

Tonight we are
the king and queen,
For oh tonight
it's Halloween!

Top Ten Halloween Cartoons

10) The Case of the Stuttering Pig - Not technically a Halloween cartoon, but a horror movie spoof, this 30's era black-&-white Porky Pig short featured a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character stalking Porky and his siblings. The Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes bunch did a lot of good spookified material over the decades, but this one is probably my favorite of the lot.

9) "Pink Eye" - The South Park episode where Worchestershire Sauce-induced zombification is misdiagnosed as pink eye. Chef as Evil Kneivel killing zombies with chainsaws was rad.

8) SpongeBob SquarePants Halloween - This is a multi-episode compilation tape. The Halloween-themed "Scaredy Pants" has some great moments, particularly SpongeBob and Patricks's attempt to prank the Halloween party at the Krusty Krab. But "Frankendoodle", the tale of a pencil drawing come to life, is both funnier ("Finland!") and creepier.

7) Billy & Mandy's Jacked-Up Halloween - Not the best of the longer Billy & Mandy cartoons, but I'm a sucker for a villain with a pumpkin for a head. Add in an army of undead jack o'lanterns and I'm a fan for life.

6) The Trouble with Miss Switch - The two Miss Switch afternoon specials had a genuine sense of magic and mystery to them. And Miss Switch is probably one of the cutest witches in all of animation. Either this show or the sequel also featured a computer that was a witch. That concept still blows my mind.

5) "The Headless Horseman of Halloween" - A huge quantity of Scooby-Doo cartoons make for good Halloween viewing, but this one has the advantage of being set at a Halloween party at the Crane family home. That's "Crane" as in "Ichabod Crane", the most famous victim of the Headless Horseman. The presence of Scooby Dum will grate on some nerves, but the inexplicable airplane sequence at the end more than makes up for it. While I'm going on about Headless Horseman, I should really mention the 1980 made-for-TV movie version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow starring Jeff Goldblum as Crane. It's really not bad for what it is.

4) Disney's Halloween Treat - An old clip show from 1980 that featured a lot of creepy Disneyana mooshed together. My favorite segments are the climax of the animated Legend of Sleepy Hallow and the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia. Nearly impossible to get these days, as this show hasn't seen a video release since like 1984.

3) Ed, Edd, & Eddy's Boo-Haw-Haw - Most days I can take or leave Ed, Edd, & Eddy but their Halloween special is fan-frickin-tastic. Cartoon Network has run it several times this month and I always try to catch it. Set on Halloween night, the big deal is that Ed, the stupid one, is having a total mental breakdown. He spent the days leading up to tricking or treating watching grainy old monster movies nonstop. And now when he sees someone in costume he freaks out, thinking they're the real deal. Truly, one of the creepiest things I've seen in a Halloween special.

2) Garfield's Halloween Adventure - I'm not a fan of the original comic strip, I've not seen the films, and, apart from the U.S. Acres back-ups, I didn't really like the series. But this Halloween special rocks on toast. Lou Rawls sings some of the songs, for crying out loud! And the ghost pirates that appear in the third act scared the bejesus out of me as a kid. I don't think I've seen creepier ghost pirates anywhere, and not for lack of looking, either.

1) It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown - Where do I even begin? You've got Linus waiting for the great Pumpkin, Lucy reading the issue of TV guide that features herself on the cover, Charlie Brown's humiliation both trick-or-treating and at Violet's party, the Red Baron, and the classic music. Everyone recognizes that piano tune, but for my money the best music in this show is the eerie jazz flute piece that plays as everyone abandons Linus for the final time.

Boo!

Last night was Trick-or-Treat night at the local shopping mall. Don't worry, I'm taking Elizabeth on a for-reals street haunting tomorrow night. We just did the mall thing as an additional fun Halloweeny activity. The mall had a pretty good gig going, with lots of candy and carnival games and some circus performers from the currently touring Cirque de Soleil troupe. Elizabeth liked the juggler dude.

I always like to see what all the kids are wearing for Halloween. At night on the streets its not easy to identify all the costumes, but the conditions here were ideal for ghost-watching.

Superheroes looked to be the favorite choice for the boys. Spider-Man, in both traditional red-and-blue and edgy black variants, seemed to be most popular, but Batman was also well respresented. Power Rangers of various stripes also appeared in numbers. Only three or so kids had Superman costumes, which underlines the weakness of the recent movie I think. I also saw a single Robin and a lone Wolverine (yellow and blue version).

The girls seemed about evenly split between princesses (including my daughter) and witches, at least if you lump the various nebulously defined scary and/or gothy girl's outfits in with the witches. Some of them might have been intended as vampiresses and at least one otherwise witchy costume had fairy wings.

Wolfmen, mummies, and white-sheet ghosts were pretty thin this year, but skeletons and grim reapers could be found in solid numbers. Plenty of Draculas, too. My wife got sick of me calling out "Look, another Dracula!" but I just couldn't help myself. Something about kids dressing up as Dracula just warms my heart. I only saw a single Frankenstein, a teeny little toddler in facepaint with his shirt stuffed for 'muscles'. Too cute.

I could spot only a couple knife/axe/etc wielding maniacs, unless you count the Scream costume. How many kids got that costume because it was a ghost outfit rather than a serial killer from a movie franchise? I dunno. One dude was dressed up exactly like Jason Voorhees Michael Myers from Halloween. He was big enough to be a small adult or an adolescent, was not in the company of anyone, and had no bag for candy. He just wandered around the mall, creeping me the hell out.

Only saw one Darth Vader this year and two Clone Troopers. Just a couple years ago at another such event there were several Vaders and a Yoda or two. At least two kids went as Optimus Prime, one of whom had switched out the cheap mask for the cool voice changer helmet toy. Ninjas remain popular, as all good children know that ninjas are awesome. I saw at least four kids in army guy camo outfits, which made me kinda sad as my first thought was to wonder how many of those four kids had a parent on deployment.

One of the coolest things in kids' costumes this year? The pirates. Not only were there a lot of swashbucklers on the loose, but they were pretty evenly split between boys and girls.

3 unrelated items

Today is my sister's birthday. Happy birfday, Jenn!

This here blog is getting attacked by robo-spam, so I had to turn on the verification thingy. Email me at jrients at the gmail to the dot of the com if you have trouble leaving a legit comment.

The original Halloween was on the TV yesterday. I'm not a fan of slasher flicks, but that one is a classic.

Don't fear the goblin

My alltime favorite children's book is It's Halloween, a collection of fun little rhymes written by noted children's poet Jack Prelutsky and delightfully illustrated by Marilyn Hafner. You can check out a few pages for yourself thanks to Google books.

Every October I read the book aloud at least once, I usually post the title poem to my blog on the 31st, and this year my daughter has gotten into it as well. When I tried to read it to her last year she resisted, but this year when she saw me flipping through my copy she demanded that I read it aloud to her. That made me more happy than I can tell you.

Here's one of the poems from It's Halloween.

THE GOBLIN

There's a goblin as green
As a goblin can be
Who is sitting outside
And is waiting for me.
When he knocked on my door
And said softly, "Come play!"
I answered, "No thank you,
Now please, go away."
But the goblin as green
As a goblin can be
Is still sitting outside
And is waiting for me.

The goblin in the accompanying illo is a harmless looking little fellow with a pair of spectacles perched upon his nose. Even when I was younger I always thought the kid in his bedroom, hiding under his bedsheets, was being a big ol' wussy. Last night I wrote a new second half, something I've wanted to do for years.

There's a goblin as green
As a goblin can be
Who is sitting outside
And is waiting for me.
When he knocked on my door
And said softly, "Come play!"
So I packed a bindle
And we both ran away
Into a world of weird
Revel and dark delight.
Now I'm forever marked
As a child of the night.

A little rough, but maybe not bad for a few minutes work while my daughter and I were watching Halloween cartoons.

Prelutsky wrote several other books of children's verse. At least two of them, Nightmares and The Headless Horsemen Rides Tonight, cover similar subject material but are more spookified for an older audience. I really need to get copies.