Upset stomach, upsetting Americans

A while ago, I joined a community for people in and around Boston (sensibly titled ) in the hope that it would let me know more about the city in which I have somehow come to live (and to provide more to read on my Friends page when nobody updates). Unfortunately, all it's taught me so far is that everyone here is very loud, very stupid and/or very rude. I've been meaning to take it off for a while, but when it occasionally throws up gems like this it's difficult not to want to see the reaction.

You can get a pretty good idea of the attitudes of most of its members by just looking at the rules: "Snark is okay! This is b0st0n. We are cynical and sarcastic. Deal." Translated out of the bizarrely abbreviated way in which most Americans speak, this seems to say "We're a shower of insufferable bastards and if you don't like it, that's your problem." A take on life that many people may also say applies to the entire country.

As you can probably tell I'm not in a particularly good mood at the moment, because I'm lying in bed off sick from work due to a touch of some sort of stomach flu. In fact "a touch" is something of an understatement - I thought I had had stomachache before, but it had never previously felt like being stabbed in the stomach from both directions while the fattest xenomorph in the world forced its way out of my navel sideways. I hope it's not something that I ate that caused it, because I only had a filled bagel last night, and scrambled-egging myself to death would be one of the most embarrassing ways to go ever.

Crystal Towers 2 - First Boss

Well, I have to say that I'm beginning to regret not buying a whole lot of furniture last Spring. But at least Boston's decisive win against Colorado in the World Series (which doesn't actually invite competition from more than one country) means that there won't be any massive crowds of people in red shirts during my commute home in the next while. It's almost enough to get you to start caring about baseball - I'm only vaguely aware that it's nice that a team that previously seemed to be totally useless have won twice in such quick succession.

For carefully thought out attention-getting reasons, I'm going to stop putting Crystal Towers 2 progress posts exclusively in its own journal and include them here under a tag instead (I'll backdate them when I shovel over the rest). To give the best impression of what the game looks like to date, I have hit a new low and posted a video on YouTube.

This video shows a weekend's work on the first boss of the game, which I finally sat down and wrote after weeks of not doing anything. Most of the graphics are yet to be drawn, but it shows what the general gameplay of it will be like, and I'm rather pleased with the result. Bosses are very difficult things to program, needing a complex attack pattern based on several different states and branches, but I think this is the most competent one that I've done yet. The only bit of this one I'm not totally happy with is the large length of time that it spends just sitting on the ceiling if you destroy all the bouncing bombs quickly, so I might have to think of something to do there.

You can also see two transparent areas on the left and right of the playfield, which restore the magic points you have available. Usually you restore your magic in-game by picking up white vials, but this situation needs something to allow you to rapidly get back to full magic and back to attacking again, but I don't want them to make it too easy (particularly as you can also use magic to heal yourself, and if you have an inexhaustible supply the boss becomes impossible to lose to). I could either disable curative spells or make them affect the boss as well so that there's a disadvantage to using them. I may replace the restoring fields with one "magic field" that floats from left to right, then reduce the hit points of the boss a bit to balance things out.

The eventual goal of the game is to find eight instruments and restore music to the Music Castle (an idea that I only noticed I'd stolen from Zelda well into making the game). The instrument carried by each boss is random, and as luck would have it, on that attempt I got the only one I hadn't drawn. The name of the instrument is chosen at random, too, which explains the strange names that appear at the end of the video.

I'm an exceedingly large cake

! This.

(NB. To everyone else - This will probably make no sense)

(NB2. To everyone not in Britain - This will probably make even less sense than that)

Actually, additionally - since when has Livejournal had these HTML previews? I'm sure they weren't there when I was at work, so it must have been about an hour at most.

Pomposi-T

Dear The MBTA,

Over the past two weeks, my evening commute on the T has taken up to 45 minutes longer than usual. During this time I have been routinely trapped in broken-down trains with the doors locked, either in stations or in darkened tunnels with no means of escape, with no information other than that a "disabled train" is stuck ahead of us and that we will be moving "momentarily". (This use, while I'm on the subject, is wrong - a grammar refresher for your drivers might be in order.) Having seen most of a train's occupants having to force their way out of a train and band together in refugee groups to organize taxis to Park Street, I wouldn't describe your treatment of paying passengers as anything short of appalling. The contempt that you are showing to them by assaulting them with the new tidal wave of advertising that you've dubbed "T Radio" - simultaneously going back on your agreement with the subway performers - is similarly despicable.

I would discontinue my use of your comically inept service, but this isn't an option for me because the Green and Red lines remain my only way of getting from one side of the city to the other (the buses being mostly immobile in Boston traffic even if they somehow manage to stick to the correct route). I can only respectfully request a refund of my subway pass for the month of October, as your trains are only occasionally capable of actual movement and therefore I can no longer consider them a mode of transport.

No regards
DavidN.

---

Did I let them off too lightly?

Resident Evil 4

We've started playing Resident Evil 4 now. I had never played an RE game before getting it, but and said it was good, so I was confident enough to buy it without any further knowledge of what it was like.

It stars an American agent called Leon, who looks only slightly like he's in Duran Duran. The story so far involves investigating a small village in Spain in connection with the kidnapping of the President's daughter, because the Europeans are up to no good as usual. On arrival with some police officers with outrageous accents, Leon wanders towards the village, goes into a hut and asks the inhabitant for directions. And gets a knife in the face. And seeing as this is Spain and not Glasgow, he realizes that something's not quite right.

This is where the issue of the controls arises. At first, they feel absolutely dreadful - to give you some idea of what it looks like at the start, Leon takes up a large proportion of the front left of the screen, making it feel a bit like a first person shooter with your own head blocking most of the view. He seems to run diagonally forwards meaning you have to aim a bit to the left of where you're expecting to go, and aiming your weapon is a matter of accidentally shooting the sky, then the ground, then eventually hitting where you were intending to shoot.

But after a couple of practice fights (and largely due to a side mission early on which involves finding and shooting some blue medallions scattered around the place) things suddenly and inexplicably seem to work. You get used to where you're pointing, what you can see, and how to aim without taking out a large portion of the floor and ceiling first. When you're not running around and shooting, there are brief set-piece sections that resemble rhythm action games, having to press buttons at the right times to dodge Indiana Jones-style boulders and harpoon an undead version of Moby Dick.

So far, most of the game feels rather like playing a Simon Pegg film. You spend your time getting Leon to commando-roll out of ridiculously high windows or perform superhuman leaps off towers, kicking zombies in the head until they explode or alternatively shotgunning them in the chest while they're carrying lit dynamite, causing them to fall over and then explode. Even though it's said to be "survival horror" I'm not finding it particularly frightening (unlike Silent Hill, which terrifies me to pieces). You've often got more than enough firepower to deal with the hordes of the undead coming your way, with the only exception so far being the man with the sack on his head like the scarecrows out of Doctor Who, who is intent on chainsawing your head off and refuses to die, or re-die, or whatever it is that Spanish zombies do.

Again unlike Silent Hill, the enemies you face drop useful items such as suspicious health-restoring herbs or extra ammunition. Quite a lot of the time, they leave behind little treasure chests, which doesn't make much sense unless they're zombie pirates. I had wondered at first what money would even be used for in a game like this, but that was answered at the beginning of the second stage where a dodgy man with an even dodgier accent turns up with a coatful of lethal weapons that you can buy from him. This eventually becomes central to the game, getting different upgrades and weapons by using your money rather than having a small fixed set of weapons like in Silent Hill, and trying to stuff them all in your attache case Tetris-style.

I should say, finally, that I don't like escort missions in games. In fact, no one in the world likes escort missions - they always involve trying to protect a particularly dim individual or vehicle that trundles along merrily ignoring all the obvious orc/alien/Soviet/chav/Greenpeace ambushes in its way, trying desperately to clear a path ahead of it and then looking back only to realize that it's been squashed by a falling snooker table in your absence. And after the first couple of sections to where we've played so far in RE4, the game seems to be one giant escort mission as you try and get the President's daughter out of the village. But she's intelligent enough to duck out of the way of your gunfire, doesn't go off on ridiculous failed-pathfinding routes around the other side of the map, and you can even tell her to stay behind for a moment while you busily exterminate the zombies and clear a path. Overall, even the escorting seems to work. And that's probably one of the highest compliments that you can give to a game.

From life's RPG log - Part 2

Well, some people found the first one of these funny. I also plan to make a real entry out of this, because last night was a real adventure (the kind that makes you want to kill people).

> DavidN has arrived in Davis Square Station.
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Train arrives.
> Train defends itself with Broken down and going out of service!
> DavidN almost attacks Train.
> DavidN finds Driver instead.
> Driver is found to be clueless.
> Waiting...
> Train begins to move.
> Train is stuck just after the station.
> Another train arrives.
> Another train is stuck just before the station.
> DavidN rolls against Judgement.
> DavidN's Judgement is Really Catastrophically Dreadful.
> DavidN takes train home anyway.
> Train has arrived at Porter Square.
> Train has left Porter Square.
> Train has arrived at Harvard Square.
> Train has left Harvard Square.
> Train has arrived at Central Square.
> Waiting...
> Train has left Central Square.
> Train has actually stopped one carriage away from Central Square.
> Waiting...
> Driver attacks with misuse of the phrase "we will be moving momentarily"!
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Driver attacks with misuse of the phrase "we will be moving momentarily" again!
> DavidN attacks Doors.
> Doors are impervious to damage.
> DavidN moves stealthily down the carriage towards the emergency intercom.
> DavidN is spotted!
> DavidN initiates Passenger Uprising!
> Passengers demand to be let out of their steel prison and get a mode of transport that moves.
> Driver gets permission to back up.
> Train is defeated.
> Doors open.
> The party has moved to Central Square - Above Ground.
> DavidN hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> DavidN hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> DavidN encounters Seth.
> Seth joins the party.
> Seth hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> The party encounters Graeme, Laura and Jen.
> Graeme, Laura and Jen have joined the party.
> The party heads for Kendall on foot.
> Graeme hails taxi!
> Hail successful!
> Laura and Jen have left the party.
> The party has moved via taxi over the Longfellow Bridge.
> Graeme has left the party.
> The party has moved via taxi to Boylston.
> Seth leaves the party.
> DavidN attempts to board train.
> Doors attack!
> DavidN is hit for 50 damage!
> DavidN's normal commute recommences at nine o-fscking-three in the evening.
> MBTA loses ability "Legitimate Mode of Transport".
> DavidN loses ability "Self-Control".
> DavidN finally gets home and orders a decently large pizza.
> DavidN attacks Pizza.
> Pizza is defeated.
> So is DavidN.

You're in trouble if your hit points don't bubble

First of all, are Roysters still around? There's no indication of the above advert line ever having existed and I'm starting to think I just imagined it. And I'm quite looking forward to having meat-flavoured crisps again when I come back to Scotland for Christmas (tickets booked today) - American crisps are very different and come in gigantic bags rather than a large plastic packet with child packets inside them.

You're also in trouble if you go off on that much of a tangent before you even start your point, which is this - after just about a hundred and thirty hours, we have completed Final Fantasy 12. The final boss isn't difficult at all if you've spent any amount of time on the hunting side quest - true, he has three different forms compared to FFX's almost ludicrous anticlimax, but he's nowhere near as difficult as even the low end of the top hunts.

The strangest thing that even after playing it, I'm still not certain if it even had a main character - it's a bit like FF6 in that respect. Apparently they had the characters worked out for a while but switched between who was meant to have the focus, and it shows. Throughout the FF series starting from 7, you had one character that you considered as the "player" and almost always had in your party. However, these characters have got less and less leader-like throughout the series - in FFX the point of the story is that you were clueless about the world you'd suddenly been thrown into along with Tidus. In FFXII, you have Vaan alone in your party for a good portion of the beginning, and he's the one that you control in town areas, but once the plot starts up he never really plays more than a sort of Arthur Dent dragged-along-by-accident role.

The other thing that stands out is the difficulty. Gradually the games have been getting easier over time, with FFX in particular being a bit of a joke. This one isn't as easy as that (you're likely to see the Game Over message in more than two places), and for the most part they've balanced out the lenient way you can swap people in and out of your party at will with enemies to match your abilities. But there are a couple of sticking points. For the optional megabosses (the replacements to the infamous Omega Weapon of FF8 and so on), they've gone for testing not so much your ability as your patience with ridiculous endurance matches against things ranging from eight to fifty million hit points. I didn't bother with the top two of those as I thought by that stage that there were better things I could be doing in the evenings, like catching up with the sleep I lost while fighting all the others.

And to counteract the inflated hit points of the enemies, there's almost too much of a reliance on advantageous spells, after them being almost too underplayed before - in previous games, you had to spend an entire turn for each spell, but in this, you can have them continually cast and ready before you encounter anything. That means that there's no reason not to have them on all the time (Bubble, which doubles your hit points, is particularly vital during the last stages and it feels more something that's a disadvantage when it's off rather than advantageous when it's on).

The ending, though, is as amazing as you'd expect from Square, and genuinely nail-biting at a point where you've spent over a hundred hours with the characters. You genuinely just want it to be over and for them to make it out alive, while there's a tense inappropriately comical air when the token British smeghead Balthier moans about how it's always up to him to save everyone. Although the game wasn't afraid to laugh at itself in several other places - if you talk to one of the people next to the Rabanastre gates quite near the end of the game, he'll start talking to you about all the "spoony bards" coming through. The several days worth of time we spent playing it was definitely worth it even though the series has been going a bit strange.

This is the last post about Final Fantasy 12, I promise. Now on to Resident Evil 4.

Prisoner of the Red Line

"Attention passengers. This is a test of the public address system. This is only a test."

That message was being looped over the speakers at Park Street with a one minute pause in between, calling us for attention in exactly the same way as it says when a train is about to arrive, but then telling us to pay no attention to the message. Additionally, I've heard that the MBTA are experimenting with piping appalling music into the underground stations in an effort to break the will of their imprisoned passengers and prevent further uprisings. If this is just the beginning, I predict that we'll be seeing several Michael Douglas-type rampages taking place in Boston soon. Most of them by me.

In addition to that, one elderly gentleman sitting next to me noticed my exasperation at the continual non-messages and started reminiscing about the time they'd found a bomb in Alewife station and delayed everything for two hours. Once I replied to that, the same thing that happens when I talk to anyone in this country happened, and soon he was off about his distant relatives in Scotland. The train was arriving at this point, and it seemed rude to wander away to another carriage, so in what was perhaps karma coming back from last week, I found myself stuck with the Boston One-Man Boring People To Death team.

There really was no escape as he bounced from Scotland to immigration to the Iraq War to American history to road-building techniques and back, and his way of shouting over the noise of the train meant that most other passengers in the carriage were watching us as I nodded and "mm'hmm"ed my way through the tidal wave of gibberish that lasted all the way to Davis Square.

Defending against the onslaught wasn't my immediate concern, though. That was the fact that I still had several pages of ZZ Studios up on my computer and had rather been relying on the time on the Red Line to sanitize my Internet history before work. Always plan ahead for this kind of thing.

Four Thousand Words About Me

Once upon a time, there was a meme going round that invited you to post a comment and receive a list of some of your interests to explain. I did this twice, getting lists from both and . As if the doubly long list (with a couple of overlaps) wasn't enough, when I'm interested in something it's very difficult to get me to stop talking about it, and what was meant to be a quick meme turned into this monster of an entry, with a list of explanations and thoughts in almost alphabetical order. I hope some of it's interesting, and that you don't notice my criminal overuse of parentheses too much.

Albion

This is a German science fiction RPG from the beginning of the CD-ROM era that's always been rather special to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it for (which needs more contributors, by the way - have a read of it), and I'm going to copy and paste blatantly from that to describe it.

The game begins as a huge mining ship arrives at an unexplored planet, with the plan to pull it to pieces and ship it back to Earth to replace its natural resources. A pair of Germans (Thomas and Rainer - a partnership of names dangerously close to the membership of Modern Talking) venture out in a scouter to inspect the desert world, something goes awfully wrong, and they're forced to crash-land - where after waking up, they discover that the planet is not a lifeless desert as they had thought but home to an intelligent race of vaguely catlike creatures, the Iskai. One feature of the game that was amazing for the time was that you don't just interact with them directly as the storyline dictates - you can go up and talk to anyone at all and learn about their job, life history or anything else about their society. A wide variety of topics come up - diet, the way they grow their buildings from plants, laws and traditions, their biology, sexuality, anything.

About half the storyline is taken up by trying to find the landing site of the mining ship and exploring the world. During the course of this, thanks to the massive amount of thought that's gone into writing about this other race, you gradually discover more about the planet, getting to know its places and people, and in a way, falling in love with it. Stop laughing, I'm serious. Then, halfway through the game, the storyline suddenly turns around with a catastrophic twist, and asks you to save it from disaster. By the stage the real plot emerges, you've learned enough about the world to genuinely care what happens to it. And there's something about the way it does that, as annoying as the combat and vague as the game is, that has an enormous charm to it - something that not many games have ever achieved. It's available for download here.

Black Books

This was a series that started in 2001, I think, on Channel 4, and was unique among the channel's output at the time in that it was actually funny. In fact, in hindsight I would call it one of the best comedies that British TV has ever come up with. This is mostly thanks to the critical mass of eccentricity produced by Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey. Graham Linehan, who wrote Father Ted (see below) was one of the original writers, and his surrealism is very recognizable for the first few episodes, but the programme managed just as well without him for the next couple of series even if it waned slightly at the end.

TV Links has all of the episodes. If you've never heard of it, I'd recommend watching "Cooking the Books", "Grapes of Wrath", "The Entertainer" and "Elephants and Hens", but it's very difficult to choose between them.

Father Ted

And this is what Graham Linehan was doing a few years before Black Books. In a similar setting to all his programmes, it involves several men and a woman of varying degrees of social incompetence - this time a group of priests that have been sent to an Irish island because of being considered unsuitable for anywhere else (Ted because he stole money from a charity, Dougal for being... braindead, at best, and Jack for being a mad old man who sits in the corner and shouts "Feck", "Drink" and "Girls" in strict rotation). But it's difficult to explain it without making it sound too simple. Even though I've seen some episodes of it too many times - the "Plague" episode with the rabbits is particularly overplayed - there are some moments in it that still never fail to make me laugh. Unfortunately Dermot Morgan died of a heart attack the day after the third series finished, so only about twenty episodes were ever made. However, Graham Linehan never seems to let his programmes go on for long.

A video of the programme was part of the "British Culture Box" that I kept in my room in second year to introduce Americans to British programmes, and I think it was always one of the highlights. (No one ever understood Knightmare unless they'd watched it growing up.)

I should mention that I'm still confused by Graham Linehan's latest effort, The IT Crowd. It's a programme that I really want to work as it's meant to appeal to people like me, but it just doesn't gel together anywhere near as memorably as the above two series. The actual storylines of the episodes have decent ideas, but the dialogue is often dreadfully written and atrociously overacted. You can hear some of his trademark surreality coming out, but it sounds forced, like someone trying desperately to be him ("A bus was shouted at"). The second series has been mildly better than the first, but I still think that it's definitely the worst thing that Graham Linehan has ever done. (However, saying that isn't really saying much compared to most of Channel 4's other content).

And the "nice screensaver" line was funny.

Clickteam

The company that made the Multimedia Fusion series of graphics-based authoring tools. (Or just "game creators" if you don't want to dress it up.) I've worked for them in the past, doing some tutorials for the Learning Resources section of their site, and am about to take part in the Java conversion of their runtime. Even though I honestly believe that MMF is the best of these programs available at the moment, they've still not achieved much more than a cult following and moderate success as an educational software company. Hopefully with the new interest generated by developments like hardware acceleration and the potential to export MMF-made programs to multiple platforms, they'll be able to achieve the recognition that I believe they deserve.

Clickteam's site, which I failed to include in the text, is here.

DDR

Not the former East Germany, you understand, but the Japanese rhythm action game with the same initials. It was one of the first rhythm action games to gain popular recognition, even though the competing "Pump" series was actually thought of first. It involves stepping - "dancing" would be stretching the term beyond all reasonable use - on four panels arranged in a cross shape to the beat of manic J-pop (or, if you play the Euromix version, cheesy Euro-pop instead). And I don't care how stupid you might look doing it - it's fantastic fun. The introduction of this game to the student union games room is probably the only reason that I wasn't spherical by the end of third year of university, and it's started to become part of exercise programs, too - classes based around the game have started for it (and importantly, this is somewhere other than Japan).

Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to play it much at all in fourth year and am very out of practice - I could fairly comfortably pass nine-foot rated songs before, but now I struggle on the sixes and sevens without dying. It's a bit embarrassing to explain, but it gets worse, because of the forty-two possible interests that the two of them could have picked, the next one on both lists was...

Furry

So thanks a lot to both of you for trying to get me to talk about it. This is one of the most awkward and difficult to define terms on the entire Internet (and, by the way, I'm surprised you haven't heard of it if you've spent more than an hour on it). I know that there are several people even on my own friends list who will come in and offer several hundred ways in which my definition is wrong. The reason for that is that it's a cover-all term - it stems from a generation of people who were strangely overattracted to characters like the Cadbury caramel rabbit and Maid Marian from Disney's version of Robin Hood (which you were - this is not negotiable). If you don't grow out of it, it can manifest itself as anything from just enjoying anthropomorphic-themed artwork and other things (see Albion, above) to actually dressing in fur-suits - but to be honest I always find those immensely frightening no matter how much work goes into creating them. (The lion-woman on the right is by "baroncoon" - it took me ages to find something pretty but tasteful.)

I don't know if I would actually define myself as one personally, because that tends to imply that you have a character or form of your own, and being unable to draw in communities like this renders you pretty much invisible. But I discovered last week that I was on this list, and they know everything. I have become rather disillusioned with the community recently because even though it's meant to be a fictional perfect world that can only really exist because of the Internet, it was made out of hate for the real world and populated by people who are rejected from society by what I have to admit are usually extremely good reasons. Those being that if you talked to them in real life you'd be tempted to give them a swift punch on the nose after about five minutes of talking to them.

I should add that when searching for the Cadbury advert above, I came across Minerva Mink, who seems to be pretty much the American equivalent of her (some of that video, I promise you, is absolutely scandalous - the highlight comes at 3:10). These things mess with your head permanently. Anyway, why did I agree to take this meme? I think I've avoided answering this quite well, so I'll move on.

Prince of Persia

Is fantastic. The original game, written by Jordan Mechner (who apparently lives down the road from Whitney's parents), was most notable because of its fluid human animation that was very realistic for the time. Without the techniques of motion capture and rotoscoping that are available today, these were just achieved by the author studying films and photos of his brother performing the actions in the game and copying the movements.

The game itself is also unusual, even today, in that most of the challenge comes from mastering the controls and the game engine (most other games try to make the controller as invisible as possible). If you've genuinely never heard of it, it's a side-on platformer, but calling it a "platform game" doesn't sound right at all - it's a race through twelve levels with an hour-long time limit, and as such is the first game that I can think of that was ideally suited to speedrunning. Which I did, constantly, for several years of university.

I don't play it nearly as much as I used to because I hit a plateau of getting a time of 42:20 remaining (the official world record stands at 42:24), but I always meant to go back and redo my video of Prince of Persia in 20 Minutes so that it was actually watchable. I'm not too keen on the idea of the new ones, though, purely because they've tried to give it a new look that it never had before and turned it into Prince of Linkin Park. Jordan had this to say about it: ""I'm not a fan of the artistic direction, or the violence that earned it an M rating. The story, character, dialog, voice acting, and visual style were not to my taste." Hooray for him. Now write us a better one, or I may be forced to do it myself.

Silent Hill

(I gave up on finding an image that represented the series as a whole, so used this one by somebody called foreverdelayed at DeviantArt.)

This is another game series. I'm not usually into horror, but this series manages to mess with you on a psychological level so much that you just have to respect it. I played the first game on a "promo only" CD that one of 's friends had acquired (entirely legally, apparently), and had to rely on him and my youngest brother being employed as atmosphere-ruiners to be able to play it even during daylight.

One of the most impressive aspects of the game are the puzzles that appear throughout - they're vague enough to be challenging, often relying on the player interpreting a poem or set of apparently unconnected clues together with items in their inventory, and make you feel fantastic when you interpret them correctly and manage to get past. One of my favourites was the music room in the school from the original game, where you had to examine the verses of "A Tale of Birds Without a Voice" to work out the sequence of keys to press on the piano.

The series appeared to go a little downhill in the third series, with more of an emphasis on combat - and this is the one thing that the series isn't really good at. You always play as normal people rather than the military types featured in the Resident Evil series, and this is a major part of the weakness and vulnerability that you feel during the game. Most of the time in the first couple of games, you were relying on nothing more powerful than a shotgun that your character could only shakily handle. In the third game, they happily threw in a sub-machine gun as well, and quite a lot of the background scare factor is lost when you can blast oncoming monsters into next week rather than have to creep around and hope they don't see you. The puzzles in this edition also seemed to try too hard to be like the ones in the first (in Hard mode), and they went far too over the top, requiring insane abstract reasoning and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Complete Works of Shakespeare to be able to get past the bookshop at the start of the game. (My whole family was in the front room trying to work that one out.)

The fifth one is on its way, and already contains something called Siam, which looks like the wrongest thing that the writers have ever come up with (and that's really saying something) - like Voldo from Soul Edge/Blade/Calibur but with all the wrong body parts. After the fourth one went in a completely different direction (I've never played it, but apparently it really isn't much good at all), it looks like the new team might be keeping its promise of going back to what made Silent Hill the way it was.

Something Awful

This is one of the sites that would like to think that it runs the Internet. It went downhill quite a lot since I put it on my interests list, and I haven't read it recently because of their strange decision to turn the front page into something that resembled Yahoo News. But let's look on the bright side - it's still nowhere near as bad as 4chan and the like (although perhaps I'm just saying this because I don't have access to the forums). I used to read it primarily for Ben Platt's film reviews, which were frequently hilarious, and Photoshop Phriday (a weekly forum thread to do up Photoshop images based around a particular theme) came up with some really good material, as well. You won't be surprised to learn that my two all-time favourites were the visual pun ones, both for computer terms and items from the news.

I suppose that one of their most recognized contributions to culture in general is the fifteen minute Doom House film, which was made after they decided they were fed up of reviewing terrible films and made their own instead. Oh, and that funny-ten-years-ago All Your Base song was done by a group of people from their forums calling themselves The Laziest Men on Mars.

Sonata Arctica

Surprisingly, this was the only band that was picked out of the number that I have on my interests list. I used to think that there were two distinct forms of power metal - the German style which is harsher, led by powerful choir vocals and medium-paced (e.g. Gamma Ray, Iron Savior), and the Finnish style, including Nightwish, Stratovarius and Sonata Arctica, which concentrates more on being as fast as possible with more of a classical influence behind it - but the two blur together so much that it's difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Sonata Arctica, however, fell firmly into the speed-classical category for at least their first three albums - they're one of the more instantly likable bands that I listen to, and as such gained a lot of popularity even a few years ago when power metal was relatively unheard of.

An extremely unlikely thing about the band that is nevertheless true (and I bet that Dragonforce would have absolutely loved to have this happen to them) is that they're so speed metal that a sound engineer thought that the master copy of their first single was running at the wrong speed and slowed it down before releasing the first batch. These days they have calmed down the speed and moved into a more medium-paced style for the most part, but the wintery sound of their music is still very apparent.

One of the unexpected uses of Youtube is for listening to music, as so many people set things to dreadful "AMVs" (anime music videos) stitched together in Windows Movie Maker. As such, Kingdom for a Heart is just about the most appropriate thing ever to use in a video of Kingdom Hearts - and while I'm on the subject, Modern Talking's Witchqueen of Eldorado is just about the most unexpected.

Other recommended listening from one of their later albums includes White Pearl, Black Oceans, which is quite possibly the most powerful song they've ever written, and (don't laugh) The Boy Who Wanted to be a Real Puppet, which despite the stupid title is very memorable. You can safely ignore the video on that last one.

My brother also pointed out to me that the chorus of Picturing the Past describes the story of Zasalamel from Soul Calibur strangely perfectly.

He cannot live neither die in this world
Burning sensation inside, you know how that hurts
Making up for the crimes of your life
With scythe as your sword, you must fight 'til the end of time
So I first thought that Zasalamel must have been a character from somewhere else that they'd both appropriated/written about, but I can't find anything on that so it appears to be just a strange coincidence.

They're also going to be in an upcoming RPG called Winterheart's Guild, in which you play as several members of the band in a post-nuclear winter Finland. An idea almost as inappropriate as Shaq-Fu. However, you can't deny that they have an excellent logo, even if they're beginning to look a bit like Nickelback these days. (I get the feeling saying that's going to cause a few comments.)

ZZT

Not a band with huge beards, as many people seem to think, but another game creation system. It doesn't stand for anything, instead being named that way so that it would appear last in all alphabetical bulletin board lists at the time of its release.

ZZT was written by Tim Sweeney and was the beginning of Epic Games, the team that's now known for Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament series. A lot has changed in fifteen years, as this shareware action-puzzle-adventure game was entirely composed of ASCII characters in the sixteen-colour screen mode used by DOS. And it was actually great - female ring symbols became keys, arrows for blocks you could push in limited directions, Ö characters for bears (see the resemblance?) and the like built up a fairly large puzzle-based game world.

But the most significant bit was the editor, and the ZZT-OOP language inside it. Actually, Tim Sweeney never expected the editor to become the most popular aspect of the game, which showed quite an astonishing lack of judgement - limited though the language itself was, it was a new idea, and the way of having each object with its own individual procedure means that writing things like basic artificial intelligence and unique behaviours is made very easy (more so than even most modern environments).

I made only a few releases under ZZT, mostly rather linear adventure games, but a couple were a little more significant. One of these was "The Mercenary", which began as a project in a different game creation system that was abandoned because I decided that what would be mediocre in Megazeux would be impressive to cram into ZZT's limits. And sure enough, it won the last Game of the Month award (the last because the admins were fed up of the usual cheating and controversy the Game of the Month caused). "ZZT Crime" was a tutorial pointing out some common mistakes made in ZZT games and how to avoid them. It was liked by some (though is the only one I can name offhand), but I'm not totally happy with it, mostly because it's obvious that the text was written by a sixteen-year-old idiot version of me (one board in particular is notorious for its message that is totally different from the one I had intended).

The last game I released under ZZT was "Castle of ZZT", which was finished in 2006 (I was waiting for delivery of new computer bits and ZZT was the only thing my laptop could run with any degree of reliability). This is definitely the one that I'm most proud of, but it wasn't without its problems either - strangely, after a while sitting in the upload queue, I checked on it and found that someone had replaced it with a sabotaged version, with a lot of boards entitled "Third Floor" and "Free Will" leading to a different ending. My name had been left on it. It was most strange, and quite honestly a reminder of why I moved on from the site in the first place.

However, the community is rather special on a personal level because it was pretty much my introduction to the Internet - even though it was in about 1997 when Scotland finally invented a way to connect to it, there was still a very active community surrounding the game. I wrote an entry on my general experience with it a couple of summers ago, and while the community is now really just a ball of in-jokes that happens to share a name with an old DOS game, it's still going strong. Look at the Wiki, too - their list of in-jokes tells more about it than I ever could.

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I should probably add "Going on about things for hours" to my interests list, too.

You wait ages for a bus, and when it comes, it's on fire

Let me tell you about the horrors of yesterday evening.

As usual, I came down to Davis Square station, which was unusually crowded for 6:30. This sometimes happens when there hasn't been a train on for a while, but isn't anything special in itself, and it wasn't long before one came and we all squeezed on.

It wasn't until it took us ten minutes to get to the next station (a short walk down the road) that it emerged that something was dreadfully wrong. We stood paralyzed in a tunnel just before the platform for a while, then the announcer came on and said that they had some traffic problems ahead because of a fire at Park Street, the central station where I change over to another line. This was when I began to get worried, but stayed on the train because of the constant reassurances that we would be moving "momentarily" - this added grammatical torture to the experience as well, but was unfortunately quite accurate because from that point to the next station, we never succeeded in limping more than about a carriage length at a time.

It was then that I got a bit fed up, and decided that if I was going to make it home before Sunday evening, I would have to overcome my fear and hatred of buses (a condition brought on by taking a sleeper-bus to England a few times and being on too many when I used to travel between Dundee and Aberdeen in first and second year of university). So I left the train and went up to the surface, where I waited about twenty minutes for a bus to bother arriving. (Nevertheless, I would later find out that this was a very good choice).

As the bus tried with difficulty to navigate through the traffic (nobody knows how to drive in this city, there are no road signs and everyone is on the wrong side of the road), I had a decent conversation about Doom with the skater dude next to me, who recognized what I was playing on my laptop. Apparently, even though the bus seemed as slow as the train, that was its perfectly normal operational state. With some guidance as to where to get off to be nearest the Green Line, I eventually got to Coolidge Corner to see an entire pilgrimage worth of people stranded there waiting for a train to arrive. At that point it felt best to walk home - another journey that had taken me double the normal time.

But when I looked up the various Boston news communities, it turned out that I was the one of the people that had made a good decision. Later on its journey, when crossing the bridge from Kendall to Charles/MGH over the river, the train had stopped for about forty-five minutes, doors locked, with only the constant reassurances from the driver that they would eventually move. After an hour of this, driven mad by the heat, cramp and her misuse of "momentarily", the passengers formed an uprising against the MBTA oppression, forced the doors open and walked to freedom. (The story behind the link happened in the morning - so it's rather incredible that a repeat of the situation happened hours later).

Now, if Park Street had been a blazing inferno, I could possibly have understood the reason for this complete breakdown. But according to the news sites that I looked at, the gigantic incident at Park Street was a small fire in a bin that a station employee stamped out with his foot. Apparently there was also a bit of smouldering plastic that found its way on to the line, so they had to turn the power off and on again, but this hardly accounts for the delays that they were experiencing last night - something else must have been going on while the MBTA officials were cheerfully saying to the media that service was never affected. Unless Boston is now genuinely this scared of terrorism, light boards, batteries, fire and twigs. We might as well just give up and hide under blankets.

Crystal Towers 2 - New Display

The only thing worse than not updating for months is pointing out that you haven't updated in months. I'm thinking of just merging all the posts in this back into my standard journal under a tag, actually, as they're so few and far between that it isn't really worth the bother of logging in and out to post in it!

Anyway. The thing that I'm really excited about at the moment (and you'll think this is pathetic) is the rearrangement of the counters and icons around the play area.


Before


After

It's amazing just how much a few blue boxes can bring the look of a game together and stop it looking like a load of counters plonked onto the playfield. The best bit is the score and health displays - they expand to give room to each counter as they need them! No one's ever going to notice, but it's the little things that do it...

After that I went on a transparency spree (even though I did think that it made it look a bit "Crystal Towers 2 Vista" at first) and did a fade-in/fade-out that I copied from FFXII for the pause menu as well instead of filling the screen with really quite ugly scanlines that I copied from Kingdom Hearts.

Fight fire with fire

I have developed a new tactic for dealing with the clipboard patrol. Boring them to death.

Last Friday I was halfway across the zebra crossing from the sushi place (who now actually recognize me, proving that not everyone in Davis Square has their brain erased overnight after all) when I looked up to the pavement opposite me to see a girl in a blue T-shirt with a shining zit-like piercing in her nose and a grin that was several times wider than her face. I had been trapped. She had seen me, eye contact had been made, and being in the middle of the road, I had absolutely no route of escape. Even worse, I didn't have any prepared dismissive things to say. These people are getting better.

But as I approached and she began her prepared speech about what a hard time the MBTA are having with their increased fares and rubbish drivers, I realized that the only way to stop her from speaking to me was to fight back and talk myself. As she handed the standard blue propaganda folder to me (I've no idea what she thought I could do with it, as one of my hands was full of takeaway sushi) I looked at the front and then launched into everything I knew about the issue on the cover, the Big Dig - mostly that bits keep falling off it and hitting people. And then I remembered about the renovations that were happening on the D line, and invited her to talk a bit about those, interjecting with my own thoughts on the buses, then in typical Scottish fashion, started talking about the fare increase and how it was still only a quarter of what I would pay if I still worked in Aberdeen...

It felt slightly cruel after a while, but I was actually trying not to laugh as I thought up more things to say about the T (any incident that I had had in the entire year I've lived here) and droned on and on about them - I found myself unintentionally speaking in a slower, more ponderous voice, which helped a lot as I thought up the next thing to say about the lack of ticket machines on the C line or the drivers that squish you between the doors when you're not expecting it. By this point, in a wonderful role reversal, I could see her eyes darting around to the sides trying to find some means of escape from me. Eventually I ran out of breath, steam and imagination, and she managed to get a word in again. "Well, you're clearly familiar with our issues..."

"I am. Thanks a lot for your time," I said, shook her hand again and walked merrily off before she had a chance to realize what was happening. It didn't save me any time, but it felt fantastically ironic, and besides, that's ten minutes less that she could spend bothering other people that day.