The Vault

Sweeeet, you found the secret vault! ;D

Here in the vault, you will find ALL the games I made during my childhood/teenage years. These range from weird/fun little experiments I did in Game Maker, to serious large-scale projects, while others were just gags/inside jokes between me and other childhood friends. Hope you find this entertaining! :)

Title	Year Created	Description
Calvin & Hobbes	2001	The first game I ever made with Game Maker, in 2001. I thought it would be fun to try and make a game about the daily life situations of Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. The controls are very awkward because I was literally still learning how to use Game Maker, and I took the controls from Game Maker's demo project, which happened to be a space shooter.
Tommy & Sonic in the School of Torture 2	2001	Back when I was younger, I had started a game series called "School of Torture". As a kid I didn't like school very much, so I thought it would be interesting to imagine school as a torture facility and make a game out of it. Basically the goal of these games was to find your way out of the school without getting killed. This is the second one in the series (the first 'School of Torture' had unfortunately been lost a very long time ago). At this point I was learning how to make a "health" mechanism in games, and I was playing around with the player getting hurt.
School of Torture 3	2003	While the first two School of Torture games were top-down/2D perspectives, I decided to bring it a step up and make the School of Torture 3 into a 3D horror game. This was my first attempt at making any kind of 3D game, and it clearly shows. The premise is very much the same in that you just have to find your way out of the school.
School of Torture 4	2004	School of Torture 4 is also a 3D game but uses cleaner textures for the graphics. This one also has redesigned teachers that interact with the player, and you can be sent to the principals' office if your're unlucky.
School of Torture 5	2005	The School of Torture 5 is the last 3D game in the series (apart from the unreleased/canceled 'School of Torture 7'). Here, the teachers are smarter and are nearly impossible to avoid without employing a clipping glitch where you get the player to go through the walls. At this point, my games were becoming a lot more complex in scope. There is a full title screen with an intro animation, different in-game options to choose from, the ability to switch between 3rd person and 1st person viewing modes, and a plethora of other things.
School of Torture 6	2006	The School of Torture 6 scaled things back a bit and returned to the classic top-down 2D style of gameplay. This time though, there are a lot more interactive objects than before, and over 40 rooms to explore. There are also cheat codes in the game, as well as a side mission where you have to rescue various Sonic characters from the school. This would ultimately be the last School of Torture game I'd finish and post to earlier iterations of megatoxic.com. As mentioned earlier, the School of Torture 7 was in development between 2006 and 2007, but an accidental hard drive wipe caused all the source code and game assets to be permanently erased. The only thing that remains of the 7th game are its teaser video and a couple of in-game screenshots.
Cars 2	2003	Cars 2 was my first attempt in emulating the popular GTA subgenre of games. I gave it my own unique spin and made the game super weird and awkward. There honestly isn't much you can do except drive around, and going off-screen will simply take you to the next area of the "city". Oddly enough, for whatever reason I never made a first "Cars" game, so this is essentially the first game in the series.
Cars 3	2004	Cars 3 is the more advanced sequel to Cars 2, and it certainly shows. The maps are bigger and more intricate, there are different-themed cities you can drive around in, you can actually get out of your vehicle and steal other cars, and there are splash screens between each city as you travel to the next one.
Cars 4	2005	Cars 4 is the third and final game in the series, and is perhaps my most ambitious game project ever. I was getting much better at optimizing my games and figuring out new ways to push Game Maker's engine to its limits. I actually made a special level editor tool specifically for Cars 4 to allow for larger maps (because Game Maker's built-in room editor would only make levels so big). I also included a full Megatoxic intro screen, a title screen, a stage select, 2-Player mode, a day and night cycle based on your computer's actual clock, a felony system, an advanced car damage mechanism amongst other things. You can also shoot people and get in trouble with the police in this game. When Parts of this game are actually left unfinished because I either simply forgot about them or I couldn't quite figure out how to go about programming them at the time. There was going to be a helicopter that would fly overhead into view, but it's never seen in-game. Definitely worth a look.
Strange X-50	2004	This is another pretty substantial project I worked on in 2004. The Strange X-50 is a platformer game heavily inspired from the Sonic series, and can possibly be classified as a "Sonic fan game" of sorts. I used to love Sonic CD's time travel element, so I implemented my own version of it here.  One notable thing about this game is that it was originally distributed on CD-ROM's in jewel cases that I distributed to certain friends in my school. I actually printed cover art and CD labels for the game, and used red-colored CD's to kinda match with the game's theme a bit. The game also makes use of CD audio, so you can actually put the game CD into a normal CD player and listen to the music (like many video game CD's at the time). Due to the game making use of CD audio for the music, you may have trouble playing this on a modern computer. I recommend a Windows 98/XP-based machine with a CD drive, and be sure to burn the game onto a CD-R using Audio/Data mixed mode. You can use any music you want, but the game looks for around 13 tracks of music.
Cop Cycle	2004	Back in the early 2000's I was a huge fan of the Driver games for the original PlayStation. One of the most hilarious parts of those games was its "Survival" mode where the police go insane and crush you at a thousand miles per hour. I found this idea so entertaining that I really wanted to make this idea into a spoof game of some sort, and this was the result. LOL
The Abandoned House	2003	This is one of my rare attempts at making more of a story-driven game. Sonic, Tommy and Tails crash-land on an alien planet and find a random, out-of-place abandoned house. They go in to explore and find many strange rooms, but the real question is-- what is an abandoned house doing on an alien planet like this? Only way you'll know for sure is by playing the game, lol. :D
The Psychotic House	2004	This is one of many examples of me just messing around in Game Maker. I was trying to come up with a very weird, random concept for a game. The idea was to make it as unpredictable and strange as possible. That's about as far as I went with it.
Possessed	2007	When working in Game Maker I would often use invisible objects to trigger certain actions or events that happen in any given game. One day I thought of an interesting idea of making invisible objects the center of the gameplay. Here, there is one stage which is small enough to span two TV screens, and there are CPU versions of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Cream the Rabbit walking around. There are also nearly-invisible objects called "Nitrons" floating around the environment randomly. If any of these nitrons touches you, you're dead. If any of them touch the CPU characters, they suddenly go on a rampage and come after you, shooting fireballs and such. As the game progresses the nitrons keep reproducing and multiply. The goal of the game is basically to see how many nitrons you can survive through before you die.
Possessed: 2nd Offense	2004	This game is basically the same as "Possessed", but it takes place in a quiet city at night rather than a generic field of greenery. That's about it.
Dark Force	2011	Dark force is actually a game based on a real nightmare I had. In the nightmare, I was in a neighborhood at night, and I was being chased down by an evil, non-human/supernatural entity of some sort. I remember going up to random peoples' doorsteps and begging for them to let me in.  This game plays off of that idea, and the goal is basically to survive as long as possible. There's a high score system and multiple levels, but other than that it's actually a fairly small game. You can knock on peoples' doors with the space key. Some people will be nice and let you in, and others won't.
Ghost!	2007	This is a very weird game, also based on another real-life dream I had. In the dream, I was actually playing a top-down game revolving ghosts in a simple maze-like level. I basically tried to recreate what I remembered the game looking like, and this is the result. There are various stages of different themes here, and there's actually a 2P mode (though it's a bit clunky, as it relies on both players huddling around the same keyboard).
Game Catcher!	2004	I remembered hearing about how hard it was to get a PlayStation 2 when it first came out, and that gave me this strange idea for a game, about collecting video games. This is a collect-a-thon game where the goal is simple: collect more games than the CPU without running out of money. If you reach 100 games before the CPU does, you move on to the next stage. This is the original Windows/PC version of Game Catcher that I made in 2004, and since then it would eventually get an enhanced port for the OUYA, as well as an Atari 2600 port (which you can find on the main website :D ).
The Forbidden Beach!	2003	When I was in middle school, my friend at the time came to me with a suggestion for a video game: walking around a forbidden beach with demented lifeguards, skeletons and bodies all over the place, and seagulls that crashed into walls. So I took this wacky idea and actually made it into a "game", and this is what resulted. There is no real objective in the game, you literally just walk around. If you press (I believe) the CTRL key, a leg comes out from below the screen and kicks you off-view. I made another slightly better version of this game where you can actually walk into a restroom on the beach, which had automatically-flushing urinals, but that version of the game is probably lost forever.
Superfight DND (Windows)	2016	Superfight DND is not so much a game, but rather a nifty little tool I made to assist in playing Dungeon-and-Dragon style games with your friends. It essentially keeps track of all the in-game characters and gives each of them their own stats. It also keeps track of enemy stats. I eventually took this "app" and made a more advanced web-based version of it, but one thing that this Windows version has is a neat little "battle" mode, where you can pit a player character against an enemy character.
Twisted Terror: SUB	2004	Twisted Terror: SUB is actually my attempt at making a Twisted Metal-style game. Here, it uses 3D-isometric graphics (some which I took from Rock'n'Roll Racing. Like Twisted Metal, there are various powerups and guns you can use, and many enemy cars to destroy. It's actually kind of random, but is still somewhat enjoyable for a quick playthrough when you're bored, lol.

Other Apps

Below are some other "apps" I made in between the bigger game projects I was working on. Here are all the ones I was able to recover from the archives...

Title	Year Created	Description
Mellotron	2011	This app is quite fun to play around with. It essentially emulates a mellotron using looping *.wav files, and turns your computer keyboard into a playable piano. The instruments are actually external files and folders, and I made it so you can create your own instrument packages. The keyboard is a little delayed when you strike a note, but I have actually used this app for my own music compositions.
Waveboard	2011	This is essentially the same exact app as Mellotron. Only difference here is that it's meant for instrument sounds that don't loop (e.g. drums).
Groovy Explorer 4.2A	2003	Back when we were all using Internet Explorer and Opera to browse the internet, I had this strange idea to make my OWN web browser themed after Austin Powers. I have no idea what compelled me to do this other than sheer boredom and way too much free time, but it's actually a really fun little app! This web browser actually has a built-in CD player, a built-in MP3 player, a built-in visualizer and a groovy color theme. It also has the ability to minimize to your Windows system tray, a playlist editor, and a shortcut for launching AOL Instant Messenger. Very strange, but has quite a bit of character that makes it a very unique app.
Groovy Explorer 4.6	2004	This is an updated version of Groovy Explorer. It refines the interface a bit, moving the browser controls to the top rather than on the left side. It also adds the ability to change the browser's theme (which was actually a very forward-thinking idea for a web browser back then LOL).
Groovy Explorer 5.0	2005	This was the final version of Groovy Explorer I made, version 5.0 (high-res apparently, lol). And yes-- it certainly is a high-res browser as it apparently gets cut off at the bottom even on modern 1080p displays (I wasn't aware of responsive design at the time). Anyway, this new version of the app has all the features of the previous versions, but with new themes, the ability to change the sound visualizer's colors, and the ability to check if a URL is a "valid" domain, whatever that means. You are also able to change your default home page, which is nice. Still just as wacky of a web browser as the other ones.
48 Weird Sounds	2004	Before the internet and YouTube were a thing, I remember growing up with various Windows 98 CD-ROM's that gave you "packs" of assets like graphics, clipart or sound effects. This was my version of that. Half of the sounds are of me, half of them were ripped from the internet somewhere and a couple of them feature my childhood friend at the time.
54 Weird Sounds	2004	This is basically an enhanced version of "48 Weird Sounds". It displays all the sounds in a nicer "list" view, and has a couple weird features like playing the sounds at different speeds and pitches, or you can also export them to your computer.
Mini-Explorer	2004	Need a VERY minimal web browser? Try Mini Explorer. It literally does nothing except browse the web. Kinda forward-thinking I guess, lol. Oh, and it also has a built-in CD player.
Wish Granter	2010	This is a funny little "joke" app I made, which allows you to wish for anything. It acts like a simulator of sorts and behaves as if it were REALLY a sophisticated system that grants wishes. Kinda funny and worth a look if you're bored.
Cinematic Movie Player	2017	I thought of an interesting idea for an app-- I wanted to take the experience of being at a movie theater and bring it to your house. And by that, I'm referring to the pre-trailer slideshows you see at the movie theater where a bunch of trivia questions are displayed, plus the trailers themselves. Yes-- this app is a system for creating your own cinematic experience that occurs before your feature-length movie. It also allows you to play specialized "theater feature reel" videos in-between trailers, and you can even schedule everything to start playing at a specific time. Pretty unique idea for an app honestly, but it probably doesn't work so well on modern systems anymore because it seems to rely on an old QuickTime plugin. Feel free to give it a shot though.
Time Machine	2016	When I was working at my crappy software support specialist job (first job out of college), the days in the office would be long and stressful. So during my free time, I came up with this nifty little app called the "Time Machine". The idea is, you configure the app with your work day schedule, and the app will actually show you a progress bar of how far you are in your work day. It can also be set to remind you when break time is, and on Thursdays the progress indicator will display as an overflowing beer bottle for "Thirsty Thursday". LOL. Pretty fun app if you're at a boring job. :)