Shut up!
Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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Finally!
After a few very frantic weeks, I've managed to all-but wrap up a bunch of projects.
The semester at work is ending this Friday, and I taught my last class Monday. Of course, when January rolls around, I get to start it all over again. 
The manuals for Space Battle, Phantom II/Pirate and the AtariVox are basically finished, and are just going through final proof-reading now.
And yes, since they're already on sale, that's probably a good thing. 
The sprites for Toyshop Trouble are, as far as I know, all wrapped up as well. I didn't have to design anywhere nearly as many as I did for Reindeer Rescue, but these are all in full color. So it was fun to be able to really push the look of them to a (hopefully) really polished level.
The development for Toyshop Trouble was an interesting process, to be sure. Last year, it was just basically Bob doing the programming, and me handling whatever he needed graphics-wise.
This year, there were programmers all over the place. John Payson (supercat) emerged as the main programmer for the project, but there were certainly a lot of others contributing ideas, code, feedback, optimization, title graphics and... well... some extra stuff, too. 
Hopefully, they'll get due credit and post some stuff in their blogs about their work on the game.
In the end, (and truth be told... it's not quite the end yet) Toyshop Trouble turned out pretty cool. It's a very unique title for the 2600, and feels a little bit like Food Fight, at least to me (which is a good thing). It's pretty amazing how fast the game came together, although I'm thinking Albert really needs to start on this in October next year.
Incidentally, I'm really glad to see Reindeer Rescue back in the store this year. It's nice that, after all the hard work Bob put into the game, more people will get to enjoy it. I'm kind of hoping it will show back up on the top sellers list, too. Last year it hit #2, and hopefully, all of those sales will still count towards its total. 
Anyway, as I was playing around with my AtariVox, in prelude to working on the manual of course, I was really struck by the coolness of having voice synthesis on the 2600. It's especially cool in Man Goes Down (which I loaded up via my Krokodile Cart), and makes me hope all the more that Alex Herbert returns to health and is able to finish the game someday.
So that brought me back to one of the things on my "To-Do" list... coming up with Stupid Game Ideas. (The first one being Bosconian - which actually looks to be a fairly popular idea.)
This time though, I thought... "You know what I'd really like to have for the AtariVox? A cartridge that lets me make it say stuff."
Using either the keyboard controllers or a joystick, you would type (or select) letters on screen, and form words and sentences, then have the AtariVox spit it out. I think this would be the perfect companion to sell with the AtariVox, and would provide people with hours of mindless entertainment, as they got their 2600s to speak all sorts of funny, stupid, or vile things. It would be great for creating answering machine messages too, depending on how long of a string of words it could put together. Plus - since the AtariVox has memory in it - you could potentially store your favorite phrases in it.
You should also be able to control pitch and speed as well. Ideally, on a word-by-word basis if possible, so you could make the AtariVox sing, too.
There would need to be some provision for odd letter combinations (sh, tion, augh, ough), or an included phonetic pronunciation guide, so people would know what to type in order to get the results they wanted.
And the name of this cartridge? Well, it could only be one thing, of course...
"Shut up!"
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