Bill the Demon
(Now with the double jumping bug fixed)
You are Bill, a somewhat wimpy but extremely plucky young demon. To get more respect in the underworld, you'll descend through the nine circles of Hell, in hopes of getting the autograph of the Devil Himself. Basically a running / jumping / screaming / soul eating platformer.
This is a port of a Mac game I wrote way back in '96. In fact it's virtually a rewrite, because I brilliantly lost the original Pascal source. A friendly soul with a Mac, Chaz McGarvey, extracted the original images, sounds, and level definitions for me, and then I had essentially to reverse engineer my own game. There are a few new features, including an extra level at the end, that weren't in the original.
Making a port imposed a few design constraints. One is music: I know how desirable background music is, but I couldn't bear to fiddle with the original recordings (taken by holding a tape recorder over a piano and playing it back into a computer).
Another is difficulty. I like games to be *hard*. I grew up on arcade games like Ghosts 'n Goblins where the commercial pressure was to kill off the player as quickly as possible and get his next quarter. Ever since Nintendo and especially Super Mario Bros the emphasis has been on the console / PC markets and creating an environment to explore, so naturally the games have gotten easier. I actually did adjust a setting or two to make this version a tiny bit easier than the Mac one.