My Way Home

It's strange how much people who read this journal know about me, and yet they have no idea what I do on a day to day basis. This is because I have great difficulty explaining it myself without sounding phenomenally boring - the best way I've found to describe my job is that I work at a company that builds online database systems for other companies. After which people tend to sort of drift away and talk to someone else. And as I'm sitting on the train at the moment, I thought that another way to give you some snapshot of my life would be to describe my journey home from it. Well, it seemed a great idea one paragraph ago.

After avoiding the lifts by going down the artificially one-way stairs, the best bit of the journey home is that the entrance to the station is literally about ten steps away from the Vanguard building, where we have an office on the top floor. I'm certain that entering the door of Davis Square triggers the arrival of a red line train, because the tannoy always announces that my train is coming when I step inside. After that, it's a matter of performing an Olympic hundred-metre downhill escalator sprint (if it's working and not in bits at the side of the platform being polished), waving my wallet at the automatic gates and hoping they open. I've got quite good at this, and can now easily make it in time without resorting to jumping off the higher level.

For people in Britain, the train is just what you'd imagine the tube in London (or indeed any subway system) to be like - a set of slightly tatty carriages with plasters covering up the holes in the seats, with announcements read out periodically by someone who sounds like Marvin from the Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy. Because I don't go home until about seven o'clock, it's common to get a carriage virtually to myself, at least until we pass Harvard University where a variety of odd students get on.

Seven stops along, Park Street is where I change over. This is one of the central Boston stations (unlike Central Station, which isn't central at all) that were built as part of America's first subway, and it contains connections for a number of lines, designated by colour. The green line is the one that takes me home, and it's unusual in that it splits into four sections halfway along its route - the B line for Boston College, C for Cleveland Circle, D for... er... riversiDe, and E for Heath Street. 'Eath Street. Well, I didn't come up with it.

After climbing the stairs from the red line, I manoeuvre myself in front of the second pillar on the right, next to the perpetual puddle on the floor under the leak in the roof because that's where the door of the carriage always stops, and if I get in first I'm more likely to get one of the seats to myself in the corners. At the time I come back in the evenings there's usually a man there who's either playing an ancient Chinese instrument or murdering a cat - I've never gone far enough down the platform to check which it is. The trains are arranged on two lines - B and E on one side, C and D on the other. After about eighteen D trains go past, eventually a C one arrives.

The Green Line has a fleet of trains powered by magic that turn into buses halfway along their route. After about six underground stations the carriage rises to ground level and follows Beacon Street, the main road that stretches from inner Boston all the way out to where we live and presumably continues halfway across the country. Even though it's a perfectly straight line the drivers somehow manage to make it an uncomfortable bumpy ride, and I often feel a little ill by the time it gets to Brandon Hall six more stops away. This is usually because of concentrating on playing something on my laptop (so far I've gone through almost the entirety of the first two Lemmings games, the original GTA, a couple of complete games of Civ, some Sierra adventures and various independent titles - suggestions for further train-entertainment are welcome).

My walk to the flat is slightly longer than the non-existent walk from work to the station, as it means wandering down a sort of lane-driveway on to the corner with the block of flats. Recently there's been a group of workmen there who obviously didn't think my journey home was dangerous enough, so they've turned off the lamp post opposite our street, making it necessary for me to cross the road in pitch darkness if I'm home at all late. Provided I survive that, it's then just a walk up the hill to the front door of the building. And after checking the post, finding a pile of junk mail and going down a floor in the second-scariest lift in the world, that's the end of the journey and also the end of the worst post ever.

The Fourth Floor

When I was small (and yes, I have been smaller), I used to be very scared of lifts. I wouldn't go on one if I could help it, instead opting to climb twelve flights of stairs whenever we visited anyone in an Aberdeen block of flats rather than be shut in a metal box for thirty seconds. I don't think that it was claustrophobia, but it was more a fear of not being able to get out again - everything in them happens according to some invisibile mechanical brain, and you can't see where it's taking you. Somehow I was all right with the one in the Bon Accord Centre (which I had to go back and correct after spelling it "Center"), as that was entirely made of glass and you could see where you were going as you moved between the three floors, or of course, shot through the roof.

I somehow got used to them after that, but having to experience the lifts in the Vanguard building have put new fear into me over the six months that I've worked there. It's bad enough that you have to wait about ten minutes for one of the two to arrive, and that they take so long to go anywhere - it's like the London Underground stood on its end and reduced to four stops, and I spend just about as much time waiting for the lifts during the day as I do on the red line leg of my commute. Now, most of the building is made up of parts of a medical centre so there are a significant amount of people in it who genuinely can't climb stairs, so it's natural that the lifts should get a lot of use throughout the day. That's fair enough. But regularly you'll see a perfectly able-bodied staff member get on at the second floor (after waiting about five minutes for the lift, I might add) and ride up to the third floor, further delaying the whole process. This is a sure recipe for heart problems.

One of them had emergency repairs done to it last week (the lifts, not the staff members), but I can't see any difference as to its method of operation - it still takes half an hour to go anywhere, the light still flickers, the metal bar at the back is still close to detachment and the Close Front and Back Door buttons don't do anything no matter how hard you press them. The buttons are vital defence methods when you're stuck with an escaped mental patient who insists on rabbiting on about when he was in Vietnam, or believes that the burrito that you got for lunch is actually a bottle of spirits in a brown paper bag, and have to cut the journey as short as possible. In fact, the only difference I saw was that it smelled slightly worse than before as someone had tried spraying an overly sweet air freshener around it.

The lift does have a certificate in it saying that it passed an inspection, but when it was replaced last time it was about three months overdue and we're fairly certain that they just photocopy the certificate every few months and alter the date on it. I can now recognize the timings of each and every characteristic of this lift on its upward journey:

On leaving 1st floor: Knocking sound from under the floor.
If stopping on second floor: Slight swing from side to side.
Just after passing 3rd floor: Hideous grinding noise from upper left corner.
On arriving at fourth floor: Hold, vibrate...
Finally: And drop a couple of inches, then open - whereupon people get out as soon as possible, glad to have made it out alive.

So why do I even use them at all if I can't stand them? Well, there's a very good reason. Naturally, after a couple of mornings of the lift ride of death I had decided that it really wasn't worth the time and risk involved, and opted to take the stairs instead. However, that plan failed when I realized that the main staircase in the middle of the medical centre only went up to the third floor. The route to the fourth floor continues only through two rather narrow fire stairs at either end of the building that you can only enter on the first floor. Further, you can't get into the fourth floor from those stairs either - the door only opens in one direction, so you have to take the lift up if you're heading to the top floor offices.

I happened to ask another fourth floor worker about this arrangement soon after starting, and he explained to me that it was because there had been a large break-in not long before I started working in the building. To counteract that, he explained, the fourth floor doors were kept locked from one side so that people couldn't get in during the night - but so the workers could get to their offices at all hours, the lifts were just locked out of the second and third floors rather than being turned off entirely after everyone else had gone to bed.

"So what stops people from getting in and taking the lift up to the fourth floor instead?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, after a pause. "I never thought of that."

This is what they're paying me for - Great British intellect.

"Breaking Things" Day

My first Memorial Day weekend in America was spent alone, indoors hiding from the volcanic heat outside, with a giant fan next to my desk. I'd previously asked what the holiday was about and nobody seemed to be able to remember, though it seems to be roughly equivalent to Remembrance Day in Britain (ironically enough). The long weekend passed very quickly as I tried not to think about "working" on the various projects that I have going at the moment, instead going on TV Links (which I'm absolutely addicted to now - more on that at a later date) and occasionally getting up to cook something.

The worst bit of it is that now that Whitney's out of the house, everything electronic has decided to turn on me at once. It's like what happens at my parent's house when I'm not around to fix things. The problems started exactly at the beginning of the weekend, when I got up to leave work and my space bar fell off. And as it's on a laptop, trying to put it back on is a fiddly task normally never seen outside an Angry Man sketch from Chewin' the Fat. There are two little plastic hooks that have to lock in to each other, a task only made possible by pulling the outer one apart with your teeth and one hand to get the millimetre of room required to slot the other one in between it with your other hand. And then it all has to be hooked on to the base of the keyboard, hit down until it stays, and the key replaced on top of them, hoping that they'll all fit together again. And it's almost worked - the space bar now produces a space as long as I don't hit the very edge of it with my right thumb. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the place that I've ingrained my brain into hitting it on my old desktop keyboard because none of the rest of it worked.

The next problem was the suicide of the oven. And I use that word very carefully. I got home on Friday night to find that it had been beeping insistently for any time up to most of the day, and it wouldn't stop no matter how many times I cancelled its meaningless "F7" error code. I found out later in the weekend that the "bake" and "broil" buttons were stuck, and the oven was continually trying to turn itself on at immense heat, giving the error as a safeguard. This is quite hurtful in a way - does it not seem to you that the oven was actively trying to kill itself rather than be used by me ever again?

My phone is another thing that's broken recently. That is, it still works - I can talk to people over it, and that's all I require of a phone. I noticed that the speakerphone had stopped working the other week, but I didn't see that as a massive problem. Now it's given up ringing - or, as I pointed out to Whitney, "It doesn't ring. It's not that I'm not listening to it, it's on the desk here in front of me, it doesn't make a sound when you call me. I don't need to change the volume, my volume is fine, it doesn't ring. It's right next to me, nothing happened to it, it doesn't ring, its ring isn't working, it does not ring." Just to make that clear. But it always seems to work when she previously warns me that she's about to call over IM, so it's clearly evil as well as insane.

And the Dave Gorman book I ordered from Amazon about a week and a half ago still hasn't arrived. This isn't a huge problem in itself because I still have a good fifty pages of Jeremy Clarkson shouting about foreigners to keep me going on the train, but I'm starting to wonder where it's gone.

Melting

Yesterday evening was a bit rubbish, all things considered. I stayed at work until about 8:30 doing some finishing touches to the bit of the system I'd been working on all week as it's a long weekend now (this isn't as tragic as it seems as I usually work until about 7 anyway).

When I got back to the flat it was just in time to hear the oven exploding. Well, it wasn't that bad (and that would have been quite a feat because it's electric) - it was just beeping frantically for who knows how long, flashing the helpful error message "F7", and kept coming back with it every thirty seconds after being turned off. I looked up the fault on the Internet, and it seems to be a pretty common problem with General Electric ovens that can mean anything from a button's stuck on the keypad to the circuitry is about to catch fire, so after some discussion with the superintendent's wife we turned it off at the circuit breaker and will probably be getting an entirely new one. Which is good news because it means I won't have to bother cleaning it, but I'm now going to have to try and cook without the oven.

And with the weather just now, that means I could probably just put dinner down on my desk and it would cook within about half an hour. The flat is close to experiencing maximum entropy and subsequent heat death - I'm here with a fan blowing next to me, putting my head under the shower every half hour to stay alive. And it isn't even summer yet.

But, good news - I've found an artist who's agreed to help out with Crystal Towers 2. It's Hayo Van Reek, who has worked on a few very impressive-looking games in the past, so there's hope yet for the game not looking appalling.

Further, I may not only have acquired a sprite artist but also a vocalist for my music as well - someone requested sheet music for one of my songs, and after ploughing Modplug's mad MIDI export through some notation software, I've sent it off. I'll have to see how that goes...

The Spirit of Megazeux

Before I finally settled on the Click community as my main focus as far as game making is concerned, I used to experiment with a few other game creation systems. One of the earliest of these was ZZT, which if you haven't been listening when I mentioned it before, was an ASCII-based action-adventure type thing written by what was eventually to become Epic Games. Shortly afterwards, I also discovered Megazeux, the spiritual successor to the program - and it allowed such advanced technologies as modifiable ANSI character sets and four-directional scrolling.

Megazeux was the system that I've been least productive in, having at least finished and released one game in all the others that I've tried. I think the major sticking point for me was that it was basically the same keyboard-based creation process as ZZT, but required a whole lot more effort to get something acceptable-looking out of it thanks to other people's talent at tricking the engine into doing a huge amount of things that weren't obvious at first. What resulted was that a large directory of MZX files was left languishing on one of our old computers' hard drives. (I honestly cannot remember most of the home computer inventory now, having pulled them all to pieces and reassembled them into various other computers during my summers away from university). But these have been rescued at last, thanks to sending me a 16MB RAR file of a pile of MZX games that we created together and never actually finished.

After looking through them, enthusing over the old ideas, I decided I wanted at least some other people to see them, so this is a 7.2MB selection of things from that file. I've trimmed it down quite a lot because not everything in the RAR was actually ours, but it's often difficult to tell just what files you can delete from an MZX folder and which ones will cause catastrophic results if removed, so sorry for the size of it - still, you've all got broadband connections by now, haven't you? Think of it as a collection of abandoned games with a library of quite possibly illegaly distributed MOD files included.

The ZIP includes Megazeux 2.80h (for Windows) so you can actually run them - I'm not certain if this is the latest version, but I'm confident that I downloaded it fairly recently. The highlights I've included are:

Crusade

This one deserves to be remade. How or when, I don't know, but it has the makings of something fantastic - a story spanning multiple dimensions in the same space, told from the perspective of three different characters. This was a joint effort by me and my two brothers, with each of us taking a character and writing their storyline, converging at different points along the way. It spawned from a piece of ZZT daftness by Richard, which was then remade in Megazeux and had a plot tacked on to the end, but somehow it works. Well, I say "works" - some of it is atrociously put together and the dialogue is mostly terrible, but I can see myself redoing this. The idea of randomly switching dimensions is a way to effortlessly go between styles as disjointedly as is needed, which made it great fun to write. Actually, mine is the least developed of the three characters, as I kept taking over the others' storylines.

Ground

Uniquely amongst the collection, this is finished. It was written by , and contains what in hindsight is actually a really good RPG battle system. It's based on Scissors, Paper, Stone-style random chance, but it's more involved than anything that I ever wrote in it. And after the RPG section, it switches suddenly to one of the most frustrating platform sections I have ever experienced, including a generous non-working save point halfway through. I'll get you for that.

Space Assassin and Scorpion Swamp

When in school about six years ago (and do I feel old saying that), Jamie and I hit on an inspired way to motivate each other to actually complete something - rivalry. We would make sure to start on incredibly similar projects at the same time, which created the sense that we had to beat each other by producing a better game than the other. It did wonders for my final year Computing class, where someone would announce smugly that their calculator program handled cubic roots, and we'd all respond by annoyedly writing in support for arbitrary roots, formula memory and an instant messenger service. (I should add that under this plan we never actually completed anything, but it seemed like a good idea.) I've gone on about that for far too long. The point is, these are both adaptations of the Fighting Fantasy books with the same titles written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and despite having similar source material they turned out very different.

Scorpion Swamp, 's effort, is a very RPG-styled game in which only the introduction is really done, but it has a battle system set up and accurate recreations of the story branches. It also has the fantastic feature that allows you to sell out at the beginning of the game!

Space Assassin is a little more loosely based, focusing more on exploration and getting the elements of the book to work in a more typical MZX action game. I rather like the feature that makes your character visibly deteriorate when low on health (an idea copied from Doomguy, whose name completely escapes me at the moment. Flynn Taggart! That's it). The game is more complete than Scorpion Swamp, but still just ends abruptly - there are a couple of early endings to the book there, though.

Traps

This is another clever idea by , or Jamie, or whatever name I'm meant to use here. In a demonstration of how Megazeux can be used for game types that weren't originally intended by the authors, this is a puzzle game along the lines of Lemmings. Except (because he is dangerously insane) the object isn't to help the bear-like creatures get to the exit - instead, the idea is to prevent as many of them as possible from excaping, by dropping large rocks on them, getting them to wander into lava, or other traps of varying nastiness. Only a couple of levels were ever done, but this was a decent concept and could probably be done quite a lot better under MMF.

WRISE

I'm sure that title stood for something, but I've no idea what it might have been. This is another of Jamie's efforts, being an action game based around several cramped rooms. The objective of the only mission so far is to get some data on to your pendrive, while getting around the building's incredibly dodgy disks.

Dark Side

This one's pretty interesting. It's another action game by me, with a title stolen from an old 3D PC game, in which only the tutorial and first level are complete. It was an attempt to make an almost Doom-like shooter from a top-down 2D perspective, with the added complications of experience, level-ups, and collecting orbs, gems and keys (prize items of increasing difficulty to collect) to unlock more levels. Games like this are simple to make in MZX, but it was the progression system that I was very proud of, and you may have recognized the layout of it - indeed, I liked the idea so much that I wanted to revive it for Crystal Towers 2. Dark Side also features the first hints of the style of music that I revived in the first CT game (with the water stage music being directly converted).

It's also worth mentioning that the reason this game was scrapped was because I decided I wanted to try to cram it into ZZT instead, because it was a game that was pretty standard in MZX but technically impressive in such a limited environment. After struggling to get it into ZZT's memory limits and running out of room in the end, it eventually worked and became my magnificent octopus, The Mercenary.

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And now, the technical bit

Megazeux is a very different way of programming from Click - allowing each object to have its own individually running program allows things like artificial intelligence to be coded far more easily, and everything is kept globally over an entire game rather than expecting you to keep track of your variables over frames and deciding which need to be saved and restored. To remake most of these, I'd probably have to write my own interpreter in MMF2 - but I put together an experimental editor not so long ago, and a full interpreter might not be such a huge jump after that...

The World

All things considered, I think I've done pretty competently here so far. I got the first job I went for, have lived well enough, and can understand nearly all the rules to baseball. But sometimes, it hits me that I am now living in a place a great distance from where I've spent most of my life, without so much as a Tesco sandwich within 3000 miles. I had one of those moments yesterday evening.

Believe it or not, it's the weather that makes me realize it the most. When the sun's out, even the smell of the air is different - maybe from different plants, different... I don't know. Even the way that I have to put on sun lotion in May (as I am the second-whitest person in the world, after Michael Jackson) and not plan for sudden downpours makes it a completely alien environment. As long as I live here, I'm going to have to get used to my accent and home country being a huge talking point for a group of people who have never in their lives been further away than down the end of the road to get the papers. (Not that people even do that here anyway. See how difficult it is?)

And after living here for just under a year (has it been that long already?) I can see why. This is a huge country, segregated into fifty pretty diverse sections, all of them separated from most of the rest of the world by two vast oceans. Most of the population are dimly aware of some hockey players to the North and some people with big hats to the South. Owning a passport is special. Even being able to drive a manual car - or "stick", as it's called here, in a term that I despise utterly - is special. That's another thing - people say that at least the country speaks the same language as the one I came from, and I thought I knew most Americanisms and how to translate them into English English, but the words for everything are different. Virtually no one understands my voice or the words I use at first, and when they do, it's ensured that I'll be talking about said voice for the next ten minutes.

I used to think that Americans thought of their country as the world - but now I can see that this place is a whole world in itself. I've noticed that when people mention places on the message boards I visit, I recognize what they're talking about now. I habitually call America "here", or refer to the West coast and East coast, without thinking to mention where "here" actually is - because it seems that the whole Internet is based there and the rest of the world is the outside. "What state are you in?" posts no longer annoy me or tempt me to reply with "Knackered", because now I am here. The world.

Part of the feeling is because I went straight here from university. By making the jump from university to real life at the same time as moving to a completely new country, it feels like everything I learned before was a practice run for the real world with the difficult bits cut out, where things were familiar and I knew what I was doing (or how to correctly order something for lunch, or write a cheque, or drive, or any number of things that are commonplace to everyone else). Here, it's like relearning life again. And it's not that I want desperately to undo it and go back... but it scares me sometimes.

(Sorry about this.)

June releases

It's a very exciting time in the European metal world at the moment, because there are three bands releasing albums within a few weeks of each other over the next month.

The one I'm most excited about is "Megatropolis" by Iron Savior, the Gamma Ray side project-turned-real-band who got me started on all this in the first place. Despite sounding like the title of an early Genesis game, it sort of suits them, and I've been watching the recording studio reports and videos closely as they've been put up on the site. (They're a very "interactive" band in that way - not many bands visit and reply to their own forums quite so much.) While not as legendary or extensive as the introduction videos for Condition Red or the "director's commentary" series for Battering Ram, the videos do give some idea as to what to expect. Namely a more melodic version of Judas Priest, it seems.

On searching for the title on Google I came across some 30-second samples on a dodgy Russian site, and I was surprised to discover that (from my interpretation of the words) it appears that they've written a song about World of Warcraft. I'm not sure whether this is appalling or absolutely brilliant. Piet Sielck has the remarkable talent of being able to write supremely dodgy lyrics (rhyming "sword" with "restored", for one) and then making them sound not embarrassing at all. This might be because he's so massive and German that you don't really dare laugh at anything he sings.

Kamelot are also back with "Ghost Opera", which looks like a continuation of the general sound that they were exploring in The Black Halo. There's a video from the title song on the front page now, featuring a trademark 5/4-3/4-possibly 7/4 changing time signature, bullet-time hair-flinging and Roy Khan with an all-new record-breakingly stupid beard.

Their musical history is strange and difficult to explain - they started off several years ago with two absolutely appalling albums fronted by Mark Vanderbilt, who sang like a dog chewing a toffee. After kicking him out along with their drummer, they started heading in a better direction, but it took a couple of albums before everything suddenly and inexplicably worked. At that point they became a sort of everything-band, able to write lighter and more aggressive music with equal ability. Then they started getting a bit too clever for their own good and ventured away from power into progressive metal, becoming a sort of "Dream Theater Lite" with pretentious symphonic musical self-references and connections to various points in a continuing storyline. It's a bit like what would happen if Russell T Davies started a band.

And Sonata Arctica are about to release "Unia". This time, samples are available officially rather than having to rely on Mafia-funded MP3 sites. From going through the samples, it seems that the band have calmed down considerably since the days that they were a more manic version of Stratovarius that succeeded in dramatically upstaging their main influence - I couldn't find a single fast song on there, and they seem to be relying on their slower, more string-led style now. As I expected, just like the previous album, the song with the silliest title is once again my favourite ("My Dream's but a Drop of Fuel for a Nightmare", or MDBADOFFAN, which sounds a bit like a kind of cake). It's also mildly disturbing to see that they're beginning to look a bit like Nickelback.

Dinner, bachelor style

I really shouldn't be posting this. If I kept it quiet, no one would ever know and the whole thing would just go away. But in the interest of finally writing a decent entry , letting the Internet share the story and not worrying about my reputation, this is an account of dinner this evening.

The plan was simple. Home-made pizza. It's not the most amazingly complex of meals, but still respectable enough to be impressive for someone who doesn't normally cook for himself. The last time Whitney and I tried it, it all got stuck to the baking pan and could only be removed by chiselling at it with a fork for hours, and I was determined to do it right this time.

Again, in a none too complicated fashion, I went for chicken and pepperoni as my toppings. I've always found chicken a terribly frightening thing to cook because it'll obviously kill you instantly if you so much as touch it when it's raw, so I always end up frying it for about four hours and it's as dry as a sheet of paper by the time it comes out. Not this time, though - in fact, I'd like to think I got a rather perfectly done chicken thigh.

Rolling the dough isn't a difficult task either, even though the stuff I was using seemed pretty resistant to my efforts to actually spread it out. Nevertheless, I guessed that that was just because it had been in the freezer for a while. After battering it a bit with the rolling pin, I got it into something resembling a circle, oiled a biscuit sheet, slapped it on and threw it in the oven.

About ten minutes later I came back to see that it had formed a huge mountain in the middle. (I was later told by Whitney that you're meant to puncture dough before you put it in the oven to stop it from doing that. Who knew?) Still, this was easily solved by battering it down a bit with a spatula. After that, it doesn't take Gordon Ramsay to know that you slather it in tomato-based sauce and put cheese on top along with your choice of topping - cubed chicken and sliced pepperoni. What could be simpler?

So after about another ten minutes, I went back to check it. It seemed ready enough, so I got it out, tipped it on to a plate and, after a painstaking half hour or so avoiding any kitchen-related disasters, sat down for dinner.

That was when I realized I'd used piecrust instead of pizza dough.

The result was a perfectly formed, crispy, flaky pie crust - one that happened to have a load of cheese, chicken and pepperoni on top of it. Or, to put it another way, the ugliest, saltiest pizza in the world.

After trying a couple of bites, then staring at it with mixed feelings of despair and hysteria, I scraped the toppings off on to a slice of naan. Then I rolled it up and ate that instead in a kind of salad wrap arrangement, cusring the Gods of Home Economics for making a mockery of me once again.

I think I'll stick to salad from now on.

Crystal Towers 2 - Rise from your Grave

You thought you'd never see this journal again, didn't you? But I've been working away on it after a considerable amount of time shaping up the bug tracker for the project. (I've temporarily chopped a bit out so that you can view the issue list here without needing an account, to show what's happening with it so far.) As you can see, my current testers aren't confirming the fixed issues too fast (grr), so if you want to be given an account and be given access to the game as it's built, comment here!

So, to the new pictures. After doing a tutorial and working on fixing the various bugs in the main game (it looks pretty presentable now), I've been working on a new level that's provisionally called Dust Hill, after that abandoned Sonic 2 stage. Knowing me, it'll probably be called Dust Hill in the final game, too.



As you can see from that health bar, I've also added an "überificate" option for testing.



Most of those graphics will be neatened up a bit eventually. I rather like the movement of the worm-like things, though - they throw themselves forward in bursts, making them pretty difficult to land on accurately. And it's even more difficult to hit them with magic, as I discovered while testing it. I'll make that one of the missions.

Music in the news

"Metal listeners might not be stupid after all", says the Telegraph. About two months ago, now that I look at it - I'd been meaning to comment on this article for absolutely ages and never got around to it. It seems to me that metal is experiencing something of a revival in British youth (if you'll allow me to use that frankly frightening term) now, and it's always nice to see mainstream media giving this underrepresented genre a chance.

But reading that article through, some problems begin to emerge. "Participants said they appreciated the complex and sometimes political themes of heavy metal music more than perhaps the average pop song" is pretty fantastic, and I could just about understand the section about using music "to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders". I can't say that that was my thinking behind the music at that age, but it might just about work.

I just feel that it's being portrayed as a good thing for the wrong reasons. I don't listen to music to work off anger or remind me how troubled and alienated I am. If you want that, you might as well give up and listen to Fall Out Boy. Presenting it that way in the article does still gives it a negative image - instead, I think metal has a huge amount of power and energy behind it that can be very positive and uplifting. Something that makes you want to sing out loud while feeling like you're being thrown across the room backwards. (Ignore the way that that last video was edited by a 10-year-old with Windows Movie Maker.) I know that sometimes you just need a bit of this, but it's not representative of the genre as a whole. Neither is anything, really.

Where the article cocks up completely is the example list of bands, "including System of a Down, Slipknot, Tool, Dragon Force" - No! I know you don't want me to go on about this, but "true" metal is something that's held as virtually sacred to a lot of fans, and System of a Down and Slipknot are definitely not it. And as far as I'm concerned, Tool's only contribution to the music world is to convince a group of people to label themselves accurately as such via the band's T-shirts. Before the accusations of elitism come flooding in, I should mention that I actually quite like some of System of a Down - Serj Tankian (or Սերժ Թանգյան if you want to show off) actually has a pretty good voice in between all the screaming and bizarre squawking noises that punctuate their music. I'm not even sure what I would call them - they're listed on my iPod as "Unclassifiable".

It also makes me finally realize why I don't like Dragonforce. Musically they're all right, if a little repetitive and a bit too much about WAAAARGH WE CAN PLAY THE GUITAR REALLY FAST rather than actual melody or coherence, but I thought for a while that I simply didn't like them because they were popular (which is stupid). Instead, it's because in a genre that should be imageless, I don't like their angry image - and the way it causes them to get lumped into lists like this. They almost seem to be this generation's version of Iron Maiden, something to annoy your parents with before you leave for university. And I, as much as I wish I wasn't, am a bit over the hill. Colon, open bracket.

Hosts

Wired is down again! And as soon as I'd posted quite a few links to my site on Retro Remakes, too. I know there's only so much you can expect for £6 a year, but it seems to be going for six hours a week of uptime at the moment.

I might upgrade my Byethost account to a paid one, as it's only three times the amount per year, and migrate my site over to it. If I do that, I'll have to release new versions of the games that point to my Wired database. The only other drawback I can see with that is that I don't have practically unlimited space and bandwidth, but I don't think I'm ever realistically going to use 250GB of bandwidth in any month unless I suddenly become phenomenally popular (here's hoping).

Red hats and blue hats

This morning, Whitney and I got up at 4:30 in the morning so that I could see her off to the airport for a trip to see her family in California. This is the advantage of being at university and having holidays for up to four months at a time, which is something I'm sure I'll miss more and more sorely as time goes on.

So I'll be living the bachelor's life again for a fortnight, or at least would if I knew how or had any idea what it was. Going straight from university to marriage has tended to cut out the difficult bit in the middle where you no longer know what you're doing with your life or degree. I am proud to have been entrusted with cooking and looking after myself for the first time rather than just being left a load of frozen pies as always - I can finally prove that I can survive by myself without losing a leg when trying to make the bed or cutting my head off while shaving.

With a great sense of timing, there was a powercut this morning just before my alarm was due to go off, so I've experienced only three hours of sleep followed by half an hour of being awake, then an indeterminate amount of dozing afterwards. At the moment I'm not even sure where most of my fingers are at any time.

This is the most distressingly hilarious thread I've ever read (and that includes the comments section on Youtube). Since the Myspace English Stupefaction Act of 2003 I've never expected most places on the Internet to be particularly clever, but these people are writing the software that runs this world. Half of them are loud, stupid people who can't read, and the other half are stupid, loud people with superiority complexes. In this respect, WorseThanFailure is even WorseThanYoutube - it's the same level of argument, but they use longer words.

And if that wasn't enough, read this to overwhelm yourself quite admirably.

SheezyExplosion

It's been said before that submitting anything to the Internet is like doing stand-up to a brick wall. For the most part, people don't feel the need to provide feedback or commentary on anything, and because you don't see who you're reaching or how many there are of them, you have no idea whether you're going in the right direction or not.

Predictably, this happened when I started submitting MP3s to SheezyArt as an experiment a while ago, so that I would have a place for my music where I wasn't hesitant to give out the link. (Although to be honest I'm still not entirely certain what the site is, largely due to its slick Web 2.0 interface rendering it completely innavigable.) I put a couple of my newer pieces up, often forgetting that I had the account and leaving a few days between submissions. By gradually hacking at the bricks with each submission I got a thin trickle of commentary back through it, which is nice to have when starting out.

Yesterday morning, I took a swing at the brick wall again and it exploded. I cannot imagine why over a hundred people decided to click on that submission after having a maximum of ten or so before, but the reaction has been pretty amazing.

"I can definitely hear some elements of Maiden's Powerslave era in this..."
"I really wish Maiden covered this to hear Dickinson yelp out to it... it would be incredible."
"This would be interesting to hear actually done live, or with actual performers."
"I listened before I started reading, and the Maiden elements are very clear."
"Might be interesting to hear a band like Dream Theater perform it..."
"Also reminds me a bit of Nightwish, their older pieces of course."
"Awesome stuff here. It reminds me of Iron Maiden, SNES games, and sometimes anime music."

You know that bit in Black Books 2 when Bill Bailey screams "Ahh! I can play!" at his hands after discovering he's actually a master pianist? That was roughly the reaction I had this morning when I checked the site again.

But, again rather frustratingly, you can see the theme of "Do it with real instruments!" coming up as always - the inescapable electronic sound is something that I've half-heartedly tried to get away from over time, but I've never been able to shake it off just using the computer, and putting together something "real" is a bit beyond my time and ability at the moment. Although there was a guitarist on FA that seemed quite interested, now I come to think of it. Perhaps computer science isn't my calling after all and I'm actually the next Kai Hansen. I'm a whole inch taller than him, you know

(By the way, I should mention this too - I submit music along with lyrics to two pretty major public "art" sites and have no hesitation in doing it, but as soon as I paste a link to one of them in my journal, where people I know rather than anonymous entities on the Internet will probably see it, it becomes an immensely frightening thing. That's one of the most illogical things ever.)

Windows for Mac Users

I did try, I promise, but my journal seems to have entered a huge slump again. Since the 23rd of April, I have posted three times. The first of these was largely comprised of a copy and paste from a Unix terminal. The second was composed of one sentence. And the third was a note saying that there wasn't a post there after all.

After a build-up like that you'd expect me to have something interesting to say, but you're about to be disappointed again. On a whim last night I decided to install CrystalXP on recommendation from someone at Clickteam, just to see what the "Vista-like" interface was like.

But the description really didn't prepare me for what looks something like what would happen if Windows, Mac OS X and Linux were fired at each other at 100mph and the most recognizable bits picked out from the remains. There's a dock, Start bar, extra folder menu and various other shiny things, and you even get the swirling Beach Ball of Doom in place of the hourglass when it's busy.

Despite all that, I sort of like it - enough not to uninstall it instantly like every other time I've tried an alternative XP theme. It's clean and shiny without being intrusive. I also notice that it seems to make things run a little faster when it's on (startup for MMF2 is only about five seconds), but I don't know how that statement would be grounded in any sort of logic.

This is not the post you're looking for

I've just put another article up on . I only mention it because it was put here for about five minutes by mistake and someone might be wondering where a gigantic post had disappeared to.