Yahoo is going to stop offering its "Geocities"-Service, in which every user could create a website on their space with an amazing 15MB of space, or something. However, now this ends and all these pages will die on the 29th of October.

This is, all things considered, not that tragic, but it's really the end of an era. The era of incredibly stupid gifs.



Some of you might not even remember these dark age of the internet. Are there still webrings around? Man, those were annoying. But I guess the rise of Giant Google killed the need for them. So in essence, we traded privacy for an easier ability to find porn and other things. Well, thats progress, in a way.



So do you have an old Geocities-webpage? The dark, embarassing, early times of your internetlife, maybe? Because now is the moment to show them! So we can laugh at with you! Was it about the cheats to Diablo that you found and/or collected? A fanpage about your favorite, now long-forgotten band? Or maybe, but that's ridiculous, maybe it's about videogames you made! Ho ho ho!



Shit.

Okay, gang, so this is ... was my page, located at That incredibly long URL that I still know from memory. Geez, it's been a while since I've set foot here! So it's probably full of spelling mistakes, bad grammar, horrible puns and all the other annoying traits of the old "Error". Sheesh, remember that guy? Make a camera thread and that idiot will ALWAYS post there. (In another hilarious episode I created a thread about ulillillia, defending him. That one didn't end well, and in hindsight, I can't for the life of me figure out how I could ever have considered that a good idea)

So the slogan that I've cut here is "The page with no design awards at all", which even for my standards is incredibly unfunny. It's true though, and there is a reason for that, the page uses frames. Which... are bad, I guess? I'm not a webdesigner. But back then, i thought they were INCREDIBLE, so I used them, of course! I guess thats how you learnt how to create webpages in school. Which is, in another way, pretty embarassing.

... Wait, whats that?!



Thats the visitor counter. Yes, thats right. My webpage has been visited an astonishing zero times. So now that you look through this, you actually witness things never ever seen before by anyone!

Okay, so actually, that visitor-counter is broken for years, and I never bothered to fix it. It was actually a neat thing Yahoo allowed you to add in with "one click" (which then took me an afternoon to figure out). Since Geocities didn't support PHP, this was - to my knowledge - the only way to add a visitorcounter (save for using another service using another server, but thats cheating).

So on the left, we see a "menu", which is a sneaky little word for what should be called "Embarassing factoids". Thankfully, even back then I was surprisingly aware of my privacy and didn't register that website on a service that shortened the URL to something memorable - a friend of mine did, using both his and mine name. To this day, I still receive Spammails from them - speaking of which, anyone looking for cheap Viagra? Because apparently, I'm a lucky guy who could order now lots and lots of those for an incredibly cheap price. So drop me a message if you want some.

So there is "NEWS", which is just the page you just saw. It says in rough translation:



Yeah, thats how you lure your visitors in, huh? Tell them "Go get lost in this trainwreck of a page, HAVE FUN LOOKING FOR THAT ONE THING I WANT PEOPLE TO LOOK AT".

Okay, to be fair, it's not like that. Originally, the News-page actually hosted, you know, NEWS. ... Well, not news as in "Obama is president!" but rather news as in "New Tutorial online!".
For most of you, it's unthinkable, but back then, I was actually doing GAME DESIGN!* And I made tutorials and minigames and effects and screenshots, and I put them up there. For you guys to look at. Then, I would create a thread in Showcase (nowadays "Projects"). And then, people would reply "I CAN'T SEE IT", since you could not hotlink Geocities. So I would then tell them to please copy&paste the URL into the adress bar and they would be like "Man, your page sucks" and I would be like, ":("
I would contribute things like tutorials and code - mainly an AI-code that used a surprisingly ineffective pathfinding algorhithm, as well as some Point-and-Click-Adventure code that to my knowledge was downloaded and used even recently, but I don't think anyone ever used it past the initial trial phase.
Theres also an inventory code still up there - back then, inventory wasn't trivial! Turrican might remember conversations about this.

So what kind of Tutorials were there? Ah, lets just click the "TUTORIALS"-link!

... only to find out it doesn't exist, sadly! I'm sure I had something up there, a tutorial explaining vectors and then using that knowledge for particle effects, but apparently - I'm mistaken. Or I took it down earlier because I was too embarassed of that.
Who knows.

On to the "PROJECTS"-Page. Aaah, what might be behind this?



First of all, there is a link to 3dgamestudio dot de. Because nothing screams "I'M A GAME DEVELOPER" like saying "I USE GAME STUDIO". It's like I were to put up a cooking site, and on the recipe-page, I'd say "MICROWAVE LASAGNA - buy and put in microwave. Serves one".
I knoooooow, obviously, that Gamestudio allows real design, but the name sure doesn't sound like it. Which is why I put "A6-Engine" on there. Man, am I clever. There is also the beloved old "I am not responsible for external webpages", which, as I'm sure some readers will remember, was a curse - and somewhat still is - along germen webpages.

So theres "Mini-Games" and a secret "Real Project". What might it be???? Some people around here KNOW
Will do that one later on. For now, let's check the Minigames.

We're greeted with a friendly remainder that "WE NEED TO HAVE DIRECTX 8 INSTALLED" or else! (the games won't work). Also, there is the disclaimer oh-so-prominent on the internet. I still use the english version of this, since it's simple and to the point. Is it something that would actually be heard in court? Who knows. So, "If it blows up your machine, it's your fault", it is.

And then, there were games. Three games, to be exact, "Ball Madness", in which you had to draw lines in order to get a Ball to the goal, kind of like Kirbys Canvas Curse (only not as fun), which is described as something for "people who liked Lemmings". Sheesh, EVERYONE liked Lemmings! Too bad those two games are nothing alike at all! This devious plan for lots of downloads backfired, though, since, well, this is a geocities page and as such won't allow more than two downloads in an hour. Lots of disappointments were had in the Showcase-forum back then - mainly by me as people shrugged and moved on to the next shooter since my game won't load. Aww man!



The next one was called "Asteroid Race", and we can see a superblurry picture up there. Why so blurry? I was afraid that my limit of 15 MB was almost up (and at that point, it was!), so I had to compress this. A lot.
The game also had three updates and bugfixes, which means it had an incredible lifespan for my standards. It was fun, and still is, actually! Had lots of modes, a nice and easy concept, and even a two player mode. Music is missing, sadly, but its really not that bad, and the explosions look nice. So better try it today, since this will be gone in October.

The other one is Block Run, which I thought was incredibly innovative, but apparently, even Nintendo did something similar back in, I don't know, 1823 with Warios Woods. Time-travelling thieves!
It's still very different, but its not all that fun. It's just missing a clear goal.


And ... this is it for now. I might continue this look through the ages later. Why?

[img]http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/501/17070832.jpg[/img]
(Pic doesn't show up? LINK)

FOOTNOTES

* I still do.

EDIT: Stop dropping me messages for cheap Viagra, goddamn.