For all you people hiding under the rock that is mainstream games, and haven't bothered to stick your head into the bottomless cesspool that is shareware, you may not have heard of Wolfire Software.

Wolfire was started by mad scientist and future prophet David Rosen. It started with David as an innocent young lad, entering into the iDev games contest. The first entrance made by David was in 2001 with GLFighters. Inspired by games like Marshmellow Duel, GLFighters featured two players in a variety of mazes trying to murder each other with a variety weapons: swords, lightsabers, laser guns, and a large collection of automatic weapons that would put the NRA to shame. While fun, it usually devolved into matches between siblings killing each other and tea-bagging their brother's corpse before they could respawn.

A year later, David submitted another freeware game by the name of Black Shades. In this you played a psychic bodyguard with the ability to slow down time and have an out-of-body experience, which the game Prey later ripped off. The point of Black Shades was to protect a VIP from armed assassins for a certain amount of time. The player would, at the last second shoot, him in the kneecaps, and laugh satanically as the pansy man in a white suit crumpled to the ground.

The last Wolfire game to be submitted to iDev was Lightning's Shadow in 2003. Lightning's Shadow was a Worms-style game in which you played a crazed monk out to kill other crazed monks in a contest to see who was the most mentally disturbed. Of course, the monks were all magic users, so to kill each other you had a few spells that fell into three categorys: ZAP, BURN, or FREEZE. Each round was only over when all but one of the monks had been suitably roasted, toasted, flayed, blown up, electrocuted, or heavily lobotomized due to chronic frostbite.

All of these games got critical acclaim in their respective years, so of course all the fame and fortune went to the creators head. The next project was a shareware game named Lugaru (pronounced Loo-GAR-oo), a freeform hand-to-hand combat game in which you played a bipedal bunny rabbit named Turner with superhuman martial arts skill and a surprisingly low IQ to match. After being tricked into leaving his village, Turner returns to find his friends and family slaughtered by the local raiders. So with nothing better to do, Turner swears vengeance on those who did this and sets out to find the raiders and brutally murder them in their dreamless sleep. Turner logically takes the next step down this road and commits regicide on the rabbit monarchy in order to save the island of Lugaru, as well as having to kill off a bunch of wolves who want to dine on the delicious inhabitants of the island.

The game did well for a shareware game, especially in Mac communities that thought it was the best thing since EV Nova. Now, David Rosen has started the end of days. By rallying together a group of talented people, he now sets out to take on the world with his new game, the sequel to Lugaru which now has an official name: Overgrowth. You will again play Turner, and when asked how the sequel will be different, Jeff Rosen of Wolfire Software said "Lugaru was kindergarten, Overgrowth will be grad school." Interesting, but how much of the Lugaru style violence will we get? "Overgrowth puts the DIE in indie!" Which better mean I'll be able to kill enough people to fill a small country.

Recently I had the chance to sit down and talk with John Graham, COO and QA Grunt of Wolfire Software. While much of Overgrowth is still under wraps, I managed to get some answers out of him. I would like to thank John, and by extension Wolfire, who took time out of the day to be kidnapped and tortured in a grizzly fashion at Best Damn Podcast Ever HQ.

Best Damn Podcast Ever: So what made you think of the name Overgrowth?

John Graham the QA Grunt: Phillip (Isola, Programmer) came up with the name Overgrowth I believe, while we were having trouble figuring out a name

BDPE: Really? Well tell Phillip to ask for a raise.

John: (Laughs) We discussed names for a while when we weren't busy working. We feel that it's at least a triple entendre but won't say why yet

BDPE: Is Turner's hair going to grow in real-time? When it grows long enough you get the Overgrowth bonus, complete with dandruff?

John: That's an interesting idea, I'll forward that to David and see what he thinks about it, I'm not sure Overgrowth will have hair care technology but we will have some kind of fur shader

BDPE: From what I've seen of the technology you guys are putting into this, so far I'm impressed.

John: We think we're doing a lot of things that other companies might not think of, all our developers are good at coming up with new ideas. We've noticed mainstream games tend to recycle the same old features a lot, it's part of their business model, but us indie guys can take some risks.

BDPE: What are your feelings though if Wolfire ever gets big? If Overgrowth turns into a breakout hit instead of a cult classic, what will happen?

John: Oh gosh, that's pretty far down the road. If we have the good fortune to be able to expand we want to do it slowly and carefully. The last thing we want is for wolfire [sic] to turn into another gamedev beaurocracy [sic].

BDPE: Final question. What are your words to people who think you should 'Get a real job'?

John: Two parts I guess. If you mean that start-ups aren't real jobs: It's surprisingly hard to work for yourself. Building a company out an amorphous blob of an idea is a very daunting task. However, I think Wolfire fortunately has great focus and an extremely experienced team. So we're optimistic and we're working harder than we did when we had "real jobs".

If you mean making video games isn't a real job: We think that video games are the up and coming entertainment industry. Technology is always improving and along with it so will the experience that can be created by game developers. I think in the long run the video game industry will be the major entertainment industry.

BDPE: Thank you for sitting down with us to answer our questions.

John: No problem, have a good one.

BDPE: You too.

Wolfire is now accepting pre-orders for Overgrowth, which allows for early beta-testing to the game, and a super-secret Bat Cave forum to discuss Overgrowth. So head over to their site at http://www.wolfire.com to pre-order or keep up with their blog, which they update often about graphics plateaus.

In closing, keep the wise words of Jeff in mind:

"Give us money," Wolfire, LLC

VOTE AT PODCAST ALLEY!

So how to describe this story...the briefest would be to say Star Wars minus the Jedi stuff set in the here and now. Okay, so a bit more elaboration: Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), a trailer park handyman, yearns to escape the mundanity of his life. However, instead of studying for college loans and scholarships, he prefers to spend his free time playing Starfighter, an arcade game too good for where its at. However, despite the universal credo of parents everywhere, Alex's video game playing does do him good, as the breaking of the high score automatically drafts Alex into the Rylan Starfighter Corps, where he is tasked with fighting the Rylans battle for them against the Ko-Dan Armada, led by Xur (Snow), a Rylan traitor. At first, Alex refuses, obviously needing to get back to the oppressive lifestyle he'd been bitching about all through the movie. Luckily, after the other Starfighters are destroyed in a sneak attack, Alex pulls his head out of his ass and goes back to defeat the Ko-Dan through button-mashing and the severe ineptitude of the enemy. Alex is given a heroes welcome to from both the Rylans and the trailer park, where he goes to pick up his girlfriend (Stewart) since he needs to rebuild the Starfighter Corps and no one there probably matches him anatomically for some heroic fucking. And thus the saga of the Last Starfighter begins!...and ends.

This film plays out like lame Mary Sue Star Wars fan fiction altered to avoid copyright infringement (and would go unrivaled until the release of Eragon). What no one bothered to tell the writers is that the Star Wars Trilogy had ended the year before, the bad rip-offs had already come and gone, and no one really wanted to see more of the same repackaged with 80's CGI. And while the Star Wars Trilogy contained many incredibly memorable characters, most of the characters here are pretty much forgettable. Perhaps the best character is Centauri (Preston, his final role), the creator of the arcade game Alex plays. The aliens, aside from a few of the Starfighters, come off as Battlestar Galactica rejects. The Rylans are the worst example, being nothing more than balding white people who chew scenery like it were made of Laffy Taffy (and Xur is the worst of them), and considering they are not only responsible for the shit hitting the fan but also for creating the Starfighters, one has to wonder why they are opting to stay off the front lines. Grig(O'Herlihy), Alex's co-pilot, is a poor man's Chewbacca, and you'll be begging to hear the fuzzball's grunts and growls instead of this guy's old man wheeze-laughs. As for the trailer park residents, they're just there to show how much Alex wishes to leave the shit hole, and the prime example I'll describe at the end of this section. Once Alex goes into space, you'll forget these guys until the story deems it necessary how much Alex's Beta Unit (Guest, unsurprisingly) is fucking up what little social life he had.

Speaking of 80's CGI, all the space ships and space sequences are fully created with the future animation staple (with the minor but incredibly noticeable exception of every explosion). While impressive for its time, it's really no more than a quaint experiment and a means of saving money. Return of the Jedi utilized no CGI for its space battles, and quite honestly they still look good today, and that was a year before this film. Still, for CGI before Terminator 2, it is great, perhaps second behind Tron.

As a final note, I would like to say how personally horrifying Alex's shithead little brother (Christ Herbert) is. We first see this kid as he pretty much ignores his mother;s protests that he not shoot at their neighbors with a pellet gun, making Bamm Margera look downright polite and considerate in comparison. Later, we see that he has an extensive collection of Playboy magazines, as if he has a subscription, and considering the little shit hasn't even dropped his pair, let alone know what to do with it, this just comes off as stupid rather than humorous. At the end, he's at the arcade machine to practice for his chance to become part of his older brother's Starfighter Corps. I'd have signed the kid up immediately, hoping the little fucker crashes into the first meteor he passes.

One would suspect that the video game industry secretly funded this film, banking that all the kids coming out of the theater would begin pumping quarters into Space Invaders in hopes that all the time and money they've previously committed to what was, so far, just a quaint hobby. Sure, we've all joked about it, but none of us came out of two-hour sessions of Street Fighter II knowing kung-fu.

And let's be honest, college loans are not refused because you come from a shit hole trailer park. They are competitive and accomplishment-based, and poor Alex just doesn't want to admit that he probably put just a little too much time wishing and pumping quarters instead of...you know...STUDYING. Sure, Alex got lucky this time, but are we all to put hope that we'll be recruited into some video game related force or league that will serve as our career? How many girls do you know immediately dropped what they were doing to become hookers after seeing Pretty Woman?

Once again, we get ANOTHER scene where everyone watches the main character play a game. What elevates this to a more ludicrous degree is Alex's boss calling all trailer park residents from whatever mundane task they were doing to watch. What's worse, the fact that no one has nothing better to do or that Alex considers this the highlight of his life?

It's odd that the moviemakers didn't seek to create a game tie-in for this movie, although they do allude to one in the credits. Perhaps they were afraid our warped, fragile minds would feel they were being recruited into the Rylan Star League? Paranoid? Not so fast! Seems that someone, perhaps in the army, recently saw this and developed America's Army with the sole purpose of opening a gamer's eyes to the opportunities of utilizing their 1337 shooting skills in a real world setting. With this in mind, the film seems to become a 90 minute recruitment message for the military. "Hey guy, not good enough to get into college? Come join the Starfighter League!" Hey, scoff all you want, but just make sure you read the fine print during the demo mode of the next game you play, or you may find yourself digging a foxhole in some morally-ambiguous war...excuse me, freedom force.

This isn't too hard to find on DVD. Plenty of copies are available at perfectly affordable prices. It even made the jump to high definition last year when it was released on HD-DVD. Yep, 20 years later and the producers are STILL making dated, bone-headed decisions.

Pretty much nostalgia is what drives this film, so if you enjoyed it back in the 80s, you'll probably like it now (I obviously missed it). If you were born afterwards and saw Star Wars, you'll really only see this as a laugh. Still, nostalgia has brought about an off-broadway musical...for what that's worth.

VOTE AT PODCAST ALLEY!

VOTE AT PODCAST ALLEY!

VOTE AT PODCAST ALLEY!

VOTE AT PODCAST ALLEY!