I'm just giving my honest opinion. I believe the author will appreciate this more than the sycophantic remarks these things normally get. You obviously disagree, which is your prerogative.

About the cloning-games part - *the only thing* "outhouse software" seems to do is cloning well-known games :-)

I mean - look at their page :

"Roco bro's" -> Mario
"Dorf the destroyer" -> Conan the Barbarian
"Jake Blast'em" -> Duke Nuke'em.

Nuff said ?

plus you do that every time and it's annoying so cut it out

Some of the comments on IOTD remind me of a scene in the great movie 'Cocktail' starring Tom Cruise as Brian Flannagan. The scene where Brian tells his Professor that the only reason he's lecturing is because he can't cut it in the real world. What a scene! And so many parallels with our good friends in this forum.

Congrats on finishing what looks like a great product! Keep it up.

Hi Erik,

Genesis3D used to be owned by Eclipse Entertainment, which sold all it's properties, including Genesis3D and the unfinished Genesis3D 2.0 code to my current employer, WildTangent Inc, who in turn, took the Genesis 2.0 code, refined it, and created Web Driver 2.x (a 3D engine that runs in a Web Browser.)

We (WildTangent Inc.) allowed the Genesis3D engine and domain to live on, with the stipulation that it could not be used in a manner which would intrude upon our target market (which essentially is games that are streamed from the net and/or run in a browser.) The owner and CEO of Eclipse Entertainment was allowed to publically release the unfinished code up to the point of sale, and did so in the form of Jet3D.

A new version of Genesis3D (Genesis3D Classic) was planned by several community members over a year ago, it never materialized, and Jet3D failed due to lack of project leadership. Sadly, one of the guys who really held things together for Jet3D passed away suddenly last year due to a heart attack (if I remember correctly.) At the end of 2001, the Jet3D codebase and website was planned to be handed over to a long time Genesis3D contributor (I think he was a former Eclipse employee as well) however that has yet to happen, thus the domain is somewhat dead in the water right now.

The group that was planning Genesis3D Classic decided to start their own engine from scratch (Destiny3D - http://www.destiny3d.com). To date, they have yet to release a product publically.

So there you have it, that's the brief description of what happened to the Genesis family of engines over the last year and a half or so. :)

But there is NO "deserves" to be an IOTD! You send it in, it looks like ano honest project by a reader, Kurt puts it in the queue.
I think this shot, while not graphically amazing, looks like it has a lot of work put into it, and that alone warrants respects.

But let's look at the acronym: Image Of The Day. I take that to mean that the image is worth of some recognition from the viewers because it is pretty, novel or different from other's images or work. I don't believe that just anything should become a IOTD (I've got some interesting shots of windows behaving badly if that were the case, how how about some great artwork from MS Paint), and I think there needs to be some screening of the images before they are queued.

And for my general IOTD complaint: I really don't like how the thumbnails appear much nicer than the actual images :(. I though this was going to be from a cool-looking game. Unfortunately in this case, I was wrong. But I like the concept of the game (having never played Mario 64, or any console after the Nintendo Entertainment System), although I do agree with others in regards to Nintendo's use of the legal system, having known somebody who found out first-hand how nasty it can be (he's now a business software engineer).

That's my fair-dinkum $38AUD (equivalent to 2c USD). You want to see my IOTD? Gonna have to wait a while (I'm 4 months into my 12 month break from graphics coding, currently working in the far more exciting world of microcontroller design and programming. But I will be back!).

Simon Wilson
(Yes, all Australians are crazy. But at least I'm not from Tasmania...)

Interesting.
I like the Wild-Tangent engine. (at least from what I can see of it as a user - I have no idea what it is like from a programming perspective.)
It really is too bad that so many projects from small developers that get off to a good start end up fizzling before becoming anything worthy of a mainstream release...

-CyberVenom

I disagree. I have shown no disrespect to the programmer (his use of middleware looks ok), only to the artist - because the artist is not very good - you think the artist is good?
Considering its an image, I don't think it deserves to be image of the day. It's not original, it's not well done, it shows no imagination, it's technically (as in "use of modelling package") inferior to most things I've seen in this gallery.
I don't know how the game plays - but this is "Image of the day", not "gameplay of the day".
I would never submit something of that quality here.

Dude come on, people submit IOTD with programmer art and you complain about the artist...? If you want to look at what good artists do go to http://www.gfxartist.com/!

Thanks, that's very enlightening. I didnt actually try to go to the home page there (I just went to the Roco link). Yes, these people do seem to like taking advantage of other people's trademarks. I'm not familiar with the conan video game. I just did a search for it, and I actually think the screenshots of Dorf the Destroyer actually look more like Ghosts & Goblins. But that Jake Blast'em definitely looks Nukemish. Funniest part though, go back to that Super Roco Bros page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, past the Outhouse Software logo, past the Genesis 3D logo, and right past the Reality Factory logo:

"All trade marks acknowledged"

LOL

who does NOT remember the great giana sisters? :D

still cant decide if its best on c64 or amiga.. ok.. more hardcore on the c64.. but the gfx are looking sooo sweet on amiga and there is not as many bugs.. + you have to play it everyday ;)

Aye...

anyone remember the fuss over the "Great Giana Sisters" on the C64 ?

There are no does/doesnt deserve to be IOTD as long as it conforms to the guidelines that it show us a project you are working on and the accompanying text at least tell us something that us game development folks would like to know. Doesnt matter if its more revolutionary than Doom 3 or the 1 billionth tetris clone. As long as you are proud enough to send in the image and you follow the directions and give us some technical details, its worthy of being posted. Of course, if there becomes a backlog, I would expect Kurt to pull out the best ones of the bunch to make sure we see "more revolutionary than Doom 3" instead of "1 billionth tetris clone". However, stuff like completed projects (no matter how good, original, or polished) are quite rare around here, and that alone deserves special recognition. My only compaint with this IOTD is that they didnt follow the rules and give us any of the juicy details.

As long as they change the name they'll be fine. There aren't many legal issues to be concerned with except for the name and the green pipes, which I can't seem to jump into. If going to court because of a mustache or being Italian made any sense at all then we'd all be rich, or dirt poor, because of all the characters out there of the same ethnicity or species. You can't put eyes on your guy! He wears overalls and a cap? Where's my lawyer! Ok, ok, we'll turn the cap backwards!

The game looks no more like Mario than any other platformer of it's kind, Sonic, Maximo, Crash, Spyro, Jak and Daxter, or anything old school. All of the games that I mentioned have breaking boxes, wierd, little monsters, and sidekicks. Sure, this game isn't any of those games. It's not Mario either! If anything, it reminds me of BurgerTime. It has hotdogs, pickle like creatures, a chef, things that fall when you step on them, OH MY GOSH STAIRCASES (legal action pending), and everything!

To be honest, I don't think this game is ready to be sold. On a P4, 2.2GHz, it took several minutes to get past the third party screens, unless that was just a contractual requirement. The gameplay mechanics need a lot of work. It took me a while to get the gist of the key setup, which I wish there were options to change because it's literally impossible to move and jump. The controls aren't responsive in anyway. Jumping has issues near staircases. It's also really not clear how the enemies hurt me or how I'm supposed to kill them, if I can.

You guys rock for making the effort to make your dreams flourish. Keep kicking ass. I don't know about the mass market but if you find the right way to advertise, and fix those issues, the little kids that play all of those silly games on Nick, Zook Disney, and Cartoon Network will love it. I hope my constructive critism helps.

Nothing is precached so it's very noticable when something new gets loaded, geometry, effects, whatever it may be.

Good luck.

ehm well... it looks like its made for fun and not for hitting the commercial market...

1) the collisiondetection is über crappy + when you walk the guys moves very funny.. 2steps forward 1step backward;)
2) the 3dgraphician cant have spended more than 5-10minutes per mesh or he's a coder ;-)
3) the music is really terrible (sorry;)
4) the load-from-file-at-random-times is really killing all feelings..
5) the feeling yeah.. its not there.. the control over the person sucks >D fix that and it can maybe be a fun hobby game ;)

For a parody, you need to make fun of the target of your parody. I see nothing here trying to make fun of Mario. In fact, mario is somewhat comic to begin with. Its hard to see how you could ever make fun of it in a parody sense. That kind of like trying to make a parody of a Wierd Al song.
Well, if so, how do you explain that Scary Movie was a parody of Scream (amongst others) which was a parody of teen slashers in general...

My point is that you can't say that you can only parodize "serious" stuff. Things as "qualitative" and "social" as 'parodies' don't work in such analytical terms.

I never said the mustache or being italian was itself a problem, just that it ads up with all of the other issues to create a problem. Change the name and 90% of the potential problem is gone. Without the name, there is still a chance that all of the other similarities might irk Nintendo, but he would probably be alright.

Good, so Im not the only person to think of BurgerTime too.

Scream was not a parody of teen slashers in general, it was a teen slasher. Maybe a mediokre one, but it most definitely was not a parody.

Hey, what's going on?
I expressed an opinion on the work, that's all. Now I'm getting grief because I didn't say "yo dude, nice work!".
I didn't say that because:-
a) I'm not american, or a surfer.
b) I didn't think it was any good, so I told the author this - others thought it was good, and told the author.

What are you? Nazis?

Emoticon ... overload ... explosion imminent ...

Orf, buddy. I haven't told you this yet. Jet3D has begun to stir again. There's a new sheriff in town and his name starts with 't'. :)

Too bad your comments aren't worth @#$! ...

WildTangent.. reminds me some spywares..

Alexis.

To decide if an image is pretty or not is a question of taste.
Some ppl will always like and dislike it. Who is gonna to decide that ?
As for IOTD, there is more than just being prettiness, i mean the idea/work behind the image counts too.
For me the IOTD's sometimes give me impulses and new ideas of things i've done before but other ppl do differently, it's refreshing.

Well, it's better than calling everyone a sucker.

I think the music is pretty good, except for the main menu music, which sucks.
:-)

I think Scream was more of a satire than a parody. Not that it matters.

Shame about Jet3D. I remember that seeming very promising.

I'm with you KieranIsOK, the art in the image is poor quality and there's nothing at all wrong with you saying so. As you noted it would've been sycophantic to say otherwise.

One thing I'm curious about though -- with all the bland, boring, vanilla, and just plain monkey-butt-ugly images ppl submit to IOTD, was there something about this one that really offended your eye?

(And for the rest of you knee-jerk reactionaries, get off your moralistic politically correct but intellectually barren high horses. You carry on like that and soon ppl can't be arsed offering any criticism and ALL of the value of IOTD to the submitters is lost.)