The Underside - second preview

Arthur Lee has released another preview version of The Underside, a side-scrolling platform adventure. I've mentioned the game before a few times here as something that I have very high hopes for - Arthur Lee, let's be honest, doesn't get on with a lot of people in the Click community, but you have to admit he's got a very professional-looking game here. He's good at getting the intangible charm and character in sprites that make things look so special.

And what's really impressive about this release is that it includes the wonderfully-named Almighty Paintbrush, which is even at this stage a pretty complete world editor for the game. This is possible because most of the game is externalized into little script files, sprite sheets and level layouts - by modifying any of these it's possible to create your own adventure using the game's engine, making it one of the most fully modifiable games in the Click community next to Knytt Stories. A mod loader is included, but I couldn't get it to run and just overlaid the files myself. Two of them are included in the preview.

There have been many jokes about how similar the game looks to Cave Story, though those are wearing a bit thin now, and so is the frankly slightly schizophrenic defence by the author. It's never been a secret where the inspiration came from, though, and to be honest I don't see the problem with it - this might be the nearest thing we get to a sequel, and if it promotes the use of Click software by being a great example of what you can do with it while it's at it, all the better. In the end, the similarity is going to be an advantage, because even if it's labelled a "Cave Story creator"... that, to me, sounds like a pretty fantastic idea. Who knows, if the language and tile editor is simple enough to pick up, it might even become a new ZZT of sorts. But without the community - they can keep that.

The Underside preview 2

Crystal Towers 2 - Menu Makeover

After a long period of inactivity, I've revived Crystal Towers 2 and over the past week I've been working to get the interface looking a bit less hideous. Most importantly I've thrown out the OCR Extended A font that I initially thought looked "retro" but have recently reassessed as "ugly", and replaced it with some alternative more acceptable fonts. I've also been using the Text Blitter object a bit to include bitmap fonts, but it's doubtful that you actually care about this, so here's a video.



That shows the player setup and tutorial, as well as a bit of what I have of the online scorecard system - the idea is that you'll be able to upload data from computers within the game and then visit a site and compare your progress against others. I know that the sooner I find a video codec that doesn't mangle pixel art the better, but you can just about read it if you squint a bit.

Moment of Truth

All last month: "I can't believe they're doing this, it's revolting."

All last week: "It looks like you're plumbing new depths of television now."

This evening: "Well, I'll watch it anyway, just in case."

Obviously as a direct result of the writer's strike that suddenly eliminated what little worthwhile American television there was, Moment of Truth is the latest "quiz" programme to appear on FOX - Television for Idiots. And I'm saying "quiz" with that irritating air-quotes action because there isn't one - the premise of the programme is that a contender, wired to a lie detector, answers increasingly personal and/or embarrassing yes/no questions for unlikely amounts of money, while people related to them (those who would be most shocked to hear the answers to some of the questions such as "Have you ever used the Internet to flirt with other women since getting married?") look on. You can decide to stop after each question, but after a question is asked you must answer it, and if you're caught lying then you're booted off instantly. Simple.

Before I continue, I must mention we can't blame America entirely for this. The TV company Endemol used to put the Netherlands firmly in the lead position of having some of the most consistently bad television in the world* and therefore the programmes that people were most eager to export - their latest worldwide example is Deal or No Deal. But against all odds it's Colombia that has come up with something duller, because even a full hour of somebody picking random numbers is more captivating than this (though over here they attempt to spruce Deal or No Deal up a bit by featuring twenty supermodels wearing very little in an attempt to extend the average American attention span).

If we examine the rules for a moment, which doesn't take long - from your point of view (and this is the only real decision-making moment in the whole affair) there is no point in lying. If you tell the truth, everyone knows Awful Secret #94 and you continue. If you lie, you're detected lying, you miss out on the cash, and everyone with the slightest sliver of a sense of deduction by elimination knows Awful Secret #94 anyway. There's no sense of skill or tactics to it. There's no challenge. There isn't even a game, to be honest. You've got to say "yes" fifteen times or give up halfway through if you don't feel like humiliating yourself any further (or filing a divorce if you've just admitted to anything particularly incriminating). The programme has actually been taken off air in some countries after one woman was arrested after exposing certain truths, but then I wouldn't have expected "Did you murder your late husband in order to get his life insurance money?" to have come up as a random question either.

I rather miss the era when TV games were actually enjoyable instead of relying on ridiculously overblown tension, and had some sort of challenge to them (at this point even any sort of game at all would be nice). Nostalgia is kinder to everything, but I don't think that it's just the rose-tinted spectacles that make things like The Crystal Maze look inexorably ace by comparison. And, of course, some things go without saying.

* Apart from MTV

Nationwide

Thanks to the eleventh wonder of the world, Youtube (placed after the Internet, Barack Obama and Crunchy Nut corn flakes), I've just rediscovered something that I hadn't seen in years. It's a set of adverts that Nationwide, the largest British building society, thought up in the early 90s. And they're so strange that I had been beginning to think that they only existed as a figment of my imagination - they're characterized by everything moving in a demented stop-motion fashion, rather like Jacob's Ladder with added cheerful music in the background. Apparently they're based on Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, but not realizing that at the time, I thought they just looked like the dreams you would have after swallowing an entire bag of sugar before bed. They come in three varieties:

• Home is the one that I remembered, with the walking postbox, garden gnome and rearranging letters on the garden gates.


• Saver isn't much better, featuring among other things a set of walking bagpipes. The best bit, though, is the office chair that slides all the way in from the foreground.


• Business is probably the best experience as a whole, starting off with a normal enough scene but gradually getting more and more demented, finishing with waltzing tables, siren-screaming violins, and naturally, a bathtub on wheels.

I can't really make any more commentary than that - they have to be seen to be believed, and then you'll probably never forget them.

Overenthusiastic search spiders

Look who's listed on ZoomInfo as a surveying officer for Buckinghamshire County Council.

Well, I thought it was funny. I'm particularly intrigued that they appear to have an email address for him.

Knytt Stories again

Knytt Stories has just been named as the top freeware game of 2007 by Gamasutra. Like I've mentioned before, Nifflas is one of the most well-known independent developers to use Clickteam's software, and this is a further step towards people taking it seriously as a way to create very competent games.

It should be added that a lot of work went into the game from the community in general, in tileset drawing and in some cases writing custom extensions to make the game possible. My entry on Mobygames now shows me as being part of it, even though I was only involved tangentially. It credits me with working on Hellgate London as well for some reason, but I'm not going to argue with it.

Bob III

Christmas saw a new addition to our family in the form of Bob III - who, despite the name, is apparently female like all other Macs. Bob the First was Whitney's old laptop, which was followed by Bob Reborn when the hard drive eventually gave out and had to be sent off to Apple to be replaced, so this is the latest in their lineage. (Curiously, my old laptop was also called Bob because I got it from my dad and the hard drive had that volume label. You know you're meant for each other when you own laptops with matching names.)

Whitney is a Mac and I'm a PC. This is something that's been known ever since we met each other, and causes its own difficulties. Not between us, most of the time - just that it's rather difficult to get our computers to talk to each other, because both of them think that they're too good for the other. More specifically I'd guess that it's because Windows is just awful at networking to anything that isn't itself, but moving on... I have never been a fan of OS X, because of its unfamiliar layout, I don't see the point of the Dock, and I'm a firm believer that making right-click more inconvenient to get to and renaming it isn't the same as simplifying it away.







But this thing is very nice. First of all, you ought to see the size of the thing - it's a 24-inch monitor with the entire workings of the computer mounted behind it and is about the size of my two monitors combined. It stands in the corner of the desk area of the kitchen, looming over the chair but in an entirely nice and friendly way. When you turn it on for the first time, you get the smiling Mac logo and are guided very nicely through the setup. It then takes a photograph of you to use as its default user icon, which came as something of a surprise and made it look rather more self-aware than I'm comfortable with - even now I get the uneasy feeling that it's watching me whenever I'm in the room.

I know that Macs are regarded as one of the most expensive examples of style over substance the world has ever known (and the "expensive" part is right - do you have any idea how much its memory costs?), but it's got a lot of style. The backup utility exemplifies it. In Windows, you open a window called System Restore, click through a calendar and select a day you want to go back to. On the Mac, you start up the Time Machine, the desktop drops away, and you're suddenly flying through a starfield approaching a distant nebula. I was half-expecting the Star Wars fanfare to start up. Then you zoom through a front-to-back display of folder windows, look through the one that looks the most likely, select it and are returned back to Earth again with the restored folder. See what I mean?

Apple's image is largely based on gimmicks like this, but I haven't seen gimmicks done quite that well before. And it's true that the Mac operating system does get some more basic functional things right as well. Installing a program works just how it should in theory - drag an icon out to install a program, drag it to the bin to uninstall it. Everything is entirely self-contained (helped by the way that Mac applications are actually folders in disguise) and has no outside references to search through when anything goes wrong. Although dragging a disk to the bin means "eject" rather than "format disk" as I'd expect, but that's a separate issue.

And there's the fact that you get a remote control with it and can scroll through your music and films from the other side of the room through Front Row and its flamboyant zoom/flip/rotate menu. It's exactly what people in 1980 thought the computers of the future were going to be like, and while it doesn't add to the functionality, you have to admit that it looks good.

There is one last thing. It's rather clever, excruciatingly smug, and is a perfect demonstration of the reason that Windows and Mac users don't get on with each other. Do you know what the default icon is when you connect a Windows computer to the network?

Keyboard adventures

Keyboards go through a lot of punishment in their lives. Since my current keyboard replaced the useless one that came with my PC and needed a ton of pressure on each key just to register anything, it's been having a tough time - mostly because of my habit of eating breakfast at my desk and spilling incrementally large quantities of sausage and egg into it. As we were moving the PC about last week we decided that it was now revolting enough to consider cleaning it out. However, this is normally a dull process involving cleaning between and under each key with an awkward implement fashioned from a cotton bud and paperclip. Not being a normal person by any stretch of the imagination, I instead opted to use the dishwasher.

Now, a lot of people think this is a mad idea - electronics and medium to large amounts of water have rarely got on well together. But if you can get inside it and strip out all the sensitive bits, it's all just plastic. (The page about this I first looked at described just throwing the whole thing in, but I felt that this approach was a bit too stupid even for me.) So we got the screwdrivers out and set about dissembling it.

Click to see more, if you're that sort of person.

I honestly didn't know what the inside of a keyboard would look like - I thought it would be a set of little switches fixed to the back and all wired to the cable. In reality the layout is as confusing as the phenomenally awkward computer cases that I keep buying. Once you've undone twelve screws and finally got into the thing, you find a multitude of metal plates and plastic cushioning - the photo was actually taken so that we would have a hope of getting it back together once the process was complete. The first step was to get the cable out so I could get rid of the rest, and this had to be done by forcing three different connectors through the tiny hole in the back of the case - Whitney did this herself as she's far more confident at bashing electronics around a bit than I am.

The photo shows it with that cable off - the circuit board in the bottom right is for the Num Lock, Caps Lock and other LEDs, and most of the rest is taken up by a large sheet of pressure-sensitive film and contacts. Underneath that is the layer of cushion that presses on the contacts when you hit the keys, and with that off, you're left with just the rack of keys at the front. With everything neatly laid out on the table, we put the two halves of the stripped keyboard into the dishwasher along with the usual stuff, turned it on and went to do something else.

The next step was drying it out - even with the dishwasher's drying period some moisture had been left on the keyboard's many crevices, so we blasted it with a hairdryer for a while before I felt confident enough to piece it back together. The difficulty with this part was that even though I had specifically remembered that the cable attached to the top then the bottom half of the keyboard, I was completely unable to remember where it did so - a problem that was only solved through process of elimination as I put the other screws back in. This is where taking the photo slightly earlier would have come in useful. Nevertheless, we got it plugged in and switched on eventually. As I've said before, as long as you know how to put things back together the way they were, there's little danger of destroying them.

Which is why I was worried to discover that it was completely buggered. Everything still felt fine on the surface, but I'd lost the use of most of the bottom row of keys. For a while, it looked like I would have to plug in the old keyboard, but after leaving it open overnight to dry out completely, and spending a frustrating morning putting in every single one of those tiny little screws, it worked perfectly again. Whether it was because of some moisture or due to me not exactly following the original way that the cable comes into the keyboard I don't know (it's like a Chinese metal puzzle, needing to be looped back under itself once it's plugged in to three different places), but it's a relief to have it back - and sparkling clean, as well.

So a final word of advice - if you're thinking of doing this, then it's probably easier to just get the acetone and cotton buds out instead. But if you've got a cheap keyboard and an electronics shop just down the road, there's no harm in trying it.

Challenge and fighting and fighting and challenge

Seriously.

It's always nice to find MMF2 games "in the wild", as it were - the program doesn't have nearly the recognition that it deserves, and when somebody else on one of the many boards I visit points out a game that was made with it, it feels like another step towards people actually knowing what it is. We do have our poster-boy Nifflas who makes wonderfully atmospheric games that admittedly aren't to everyone's taste, and the release of The Underside at some indeterminate point in the future will probably help out a lot, if only for the "It's Cave Story", "no it isn't", "yes it is" arguing that's already been going on for some months.

Anyway. Somebody called Kayin Nasaki has used MMF2 to open the gates of digital hell and has written "I Wanna Be The Guy" (no relation to Strong Bad) - a platform game that is deliberately unfair and impossibly hard. Naturally this has made it immensely popular, and his demented creativity in trying to create overwhelming opposition at every turn is most impressive. Even the first screen contains a rotten trick within another rotten trick that I had to look up the walkthrough on Youtube just to get past. I am currently very proud to have made it to the third screen.

Have a look at this if your life has been a bit too nice recently

Additionally, I'm going to attempt to start writing a bit more about Clickteam-related news and my work with them (as loose as that term is seeing as it's been about half a year since I did any writing for them) under its own tag, because I know a couple of people from the forum read this and I might even be able to drum up some interest if I go on about it for long enough.

Scotland

In truth it felt very strange to be back in Scotland after nearly a year away. The two weeks that we spend in Inverurie (formerly Inverury, Nrurin and Inbhir Uraidh) were the longest that I'd been there since July 2006 when I left to spend an awful weekend in London. At that time I hadn't really realized that I wouldn't really be back permanently for the foreseeable future, and just a couple of years before I left, I had no idea what I would be doing with my life. I've very little idea how it all happened. But this isn't going to be a panicked entry about suddenly realizing I'm living three thousand miles away from the nearest Tesco sandwich (something that still hits me for just a moment at least once a week) - I'll save that for later.

Everything was almost the same, but a little unfamiliar. I'm still the only one who knows how to work the various bits and pieces connected up to the TV. My room (which I really shouldn't call my room any more, because it isn't, but it's difficult to let go of these things) still has the same furniture and miscellaneous items of junk in it, only most of it is in bits. The heating manages to maintain Arctic temperatures despite the new double-glazing (although this is probably just because we're used to living on the second floor and having all the heating from the flat below ours). The house windows, as a result of the previously mentioned point, are no longer blue. The house is still in a charming state of disrepair, the new characteristic being that the front door doesn't open unless you twist it in just the right direction. And the family are much the same except a hideous sort of mullet monster seems to have attached itself to 's head. All my siblings are in Melville now. And I'm not.

We walked down the high street a few times, with my mum reassuring me that everything was as I left it while pointing to all the shops and going "That's closed... that's new... the furniture shop's gone... they're being taken over, they're selling the shop, that's gone, that's gone too..." Normal, gradual changes like this seem very large when you haven't been around to see them, but at least they haven't done what they used to do when I was in university and build a new roundabout every time my back was turned.

The visit to Scotland was also an opportunity to visit some friends that we hadn't seen for a while. I don't know if this is a common thing, but the group of people from school that I stayed in touch with after university was almost entirely exclusive from the group that I actually hung around with while inside it (that group formed a band, released an album and then went off to do engineering in Aberdeen).

The only large trip that we went on while there was to Inverness to see Don, who I can't refer to by Livejournal name because he's deleted his. Driving seemed to come naturally back to me after never having driven any considerable distance for two years, without ever stalling or being on the wrong side of the road despite the Fiesta's brake pads feeling like someone had cut gingerbread men out of them. We were headed for the hotel where Don works (which thanks to him we got at the staff rate, thanks very much) - it only took us about an hour and a half to navigate the insane three-lane head-on traffic road that leads there, and we spent a while wandering round a department store in Inverness before coming back to have dinner.

Probably because of being Scottish, I firmly prefer real and inelegant food rather than soup in a tower and rabbits stuffed with pigeons stuffed with quails, but dinner there was actually very nice and only faintly ridiculous. Their only real lapse was the weird sort of broccoli sandcastle that Whitney was given. Even though it's the only food that I actually have a moral objection to, I tried pate de fois gras for the first time because it came with my steak, and I am pleased to inform you that it's absolutely revolting. Not quite as bad, however, as when I realized later on that we hadn't been given any toothpaste and instead opted to brush my teeth with the little bottle of lavender body soap.

If you were just skimming your Friends page, I bet this got your attention.

Back in Inverurie, we also saw some of the older family friends. As usual I was employed to fix the chronically ill computer of one of my neighbours, but I only got halfway through doing that before wanting to format the whole thing and start again. We also saw most of the old church group at the Hosiehoosie - a name which made Whitney laugh hysterically for almost a constant half hour. This prompted us to produce this diagram of what a wild Hosiehoosie might look like. (I'm not sure how large it is, why its mouth is in its leg, or whether that's a trunk or an extra leg growing out of its nose, but maybe it's the actual ingredient of Scotch pies.)

Speaking of food - korma. We went to the Indian restaurant at the end of the High Street, lacking the inclination (and available flat) to go down to St Andrews and get to Jahangir, but I would go so far as to say that the one in Inverurie was just as good. Perhaps, though, that's because thanks to America I'm now used to ordering korma and getting an exploding tomato soup rather than the coconut-based mild sauce it's clearly supposed to be. Ironic that one of the things I most miss about Scotland was in fact Indian, but we also made sure we paid a visit to the chip shop.

I needed an actual break, as opposed to the Thanksgiving week where we were constantly visiting grandmothers, zooming up the length of California, cutting down the builders and arguing with the tree. And after the luggage problem, that's exactly what this was - it's surprising how quickly days go past when you're not really doing anything with them.

Jetlag works better going West, as well - I'm now up at 6:30 each morning and working on some of the large array of music software and hardware that I got for Christmas until I leave for work at the new earlier time of half past nine, ensuring that I'm the first coder in the office by a decent hour.

Gladiators!

I have about two weeks of past holiday to write about, but before I do that, I bet you'd like to hear about a bunch of sweaty men beating each other up with gigantic cotton buds first. Yesterday we watched the return of (American) Gladiators, which is a bit of 90s television that I'd sort of missed without realizing it.

Each Saturday when I was in school, we'd watch the British version with my uncle (my parents were unsurprisingly never much into it). I had only ever seen a couple of episodes of the old American version, but it was strange seeing how low-rent it was - the British one had spectacular events like swinging from a burning pendulum in Birmingham Indoor Arena and plummeting six million feet onto a crash mat if you slipped, but the American one looked rather like something filmed in a school gym as a joke. The update, though, has fixed that by being so completely overblown that it becomes hysterical - the character roster at the start was clearly thought up by someone who had played rather too much UT3. And it definitely wants to be a programme from the early nineties - it even has Hulk Hogan presenting it. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything so comfortable with its own cheesiness. Apart from Hammerfall, of course.

The games were pretty much how I remembered them, though because this is American TV, the whole thing is sped up a bit. Admittedly this is probably a good thing - I remember a couple of events that went on for far too long before, and they've been shortened or livened up a bit here, with most events being different for the male and female competitors so that you don't watch the same thing four times. The amount of conversation is also minimal - each competitor has the chance to spout some ridiculous overconfident clichés before each game, but this just makes it all the more satisfying when they are inevitably minced.

The new series opened with Powerball, which was one of the games that I felt was a bit overplayed, but perhaps just because of not seeing it for fifteen years, it wasn't as bad this time. The monotony of it was also broken by the fact that one of the women bent her knee in the wrong direction shortly after it started, taking her out of the competition instantly.

Joust was another of the old games that featured (which was called Duel in Britain, with "Joust" being a different game involving bizarre rotating bucking horse-things), and was pretty much the same, though the crash mat for all games that involved falling from great heights has been replaced with a water pool - this will probably result in slightly fewer broken necks. And naturally, they weren't always put up against Shadow the boggle-eyed steroid abuser, either. I don't think I'd seen Earthquake or Hit and Run (which really should have been called Bridge of Death) before, though - involving sumo-wrestling on a shaking platform and running over a bridge while dodging hundred-pound swinging weights, Galaxy Quest-style, respectively.

And the trademark final, the Eliminator, is familiar without being the same. As far as I remember. it involves a wall climb, then a new swimming section under (and I'm not joking) a wall of fire, and a net climb while soaked and heavy. This is followed by those hand-bike things that looked totally impossible, the balance beams from near the end of the 90s version, a climb up the Pyramid, and an overhead slide back down. Finally, ropes are now provided on the new steeper Travelator (something that I have only just now learned how to spell), but after seeing the state of excruciating pain and exhaustion most competitors are in by this point, it's not difficult to see why.

To sum up, it's exactly the same muscle-bound daftness that your parents didn't want you to watch fifteen years ago, and something I'll be watching just for the memory of it all. The referee is significantly less Scottish than ours, though.

Zzzz

I did try to write more over the holidays, but somehow there was never time even though we were never actually doing anything. This will probably become one of those situations where I cheat the LJ system and write about things in the past and then go back to move their dates around.

To summarize, we're back in Boston now, KLM did not lose our bags this time, and I'm exhausted.

Oh, happy new year, by the way. Now I'm going to have to get used to writing '2008' on everything, and I'd only just got used to putting '2007'.