Noitu Love 2: Devolution - Demo released

RUN SPIN JUMP HIT THINGS GO FASTER AAARGH

Well I never. Really, even if you normally skip over Click game posts - if you read one of them, read this one.

The demo of Noitu Love 2: Devolution by Konjak (Joakim Sandberg) was released at the end of this week. For all the versatility I claim of MMF, I do seem to talk about platform games an awful lot - this one is still a side-scroller, but the gameplay style really is unique. It follows in the footsteps of Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns from a couple of years ago, which was a NES-style beat-em-up that was impressive but never really grabbed me, largely because I was rubbish at it. But this one is a lot more accessible.

A tutorial is provided to describe roughly what you'll be doing. Control is via both keyboard and mouse, with an onscreen crosshair to aim and arrow keys to move around. You can click once to run up to the enemy and attack, hold the mouse button to grab, right-click to place a shield, or double-tap in one of three directions to boost or perform a whirly special move.

But none of that actually prepares you for the game itself - with the features like physics and hardware acceleration that have been added to MMF over the last few months, the games produced in it are getting more and more impressive, and I can promise you that I have never seen a Click game with anywhere near this sense of pace before. In fact, the only thing I can think of that it really compares to is Gunstar Heroes. Nothing ever slows down - it's even more manic than the average episode of Banzai. You have to blaze through a new mass of enemies at every step, hardly touching the ground for minutes on end, all the time encouraged to "GO! KEEP GOING!" by a flashing display at the bottom of the screen. If you're at all interested in playing it I recommend you do that before reading the rest of this, so that the surprise moments aren't spoiled.

It starts off with a wonderful use of misdirection. You begin in an office building like in the first game and therefore think it's going to be a pleasant enemy-bashing stroll, but before you've taken even a couple of steps, a giant helicopter pops up outside and shoots out the window. It then continues to chase you as you zoom along the floor, with chairs, desks and entire bookcases flying out in all directions. Jumping out a window, you land in the park where the rest of the level takes place, and have to alternately go through the mass of lesser robots and avoid attacks from the pursuing helicopter. Eventually you do get to destroy it, only to then be put up against a screen-high boat on tank wheels.

By the second stage you're bashing enemies pouring in from both sides and rocks from above while a slab of masonry scrapes and crumbles down a tower, and when you eventually reach the bottom you're immediately put up against a scythe-twirling spectre right out of Devil May Cry. And this is where the demo comes to an all too premature end. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this - it's the kind of thing that isn't just good as far as independent PC game standards go, and really could be on something like the DS, especially with the dual controls.

Now, to something that's a tricky issue in the community, and something that I'm sure the author knows will raise a lot of argument... it's not going to be freeware. The price has yet to be decided, but honestly, seeing the amount of work that's gone into this game and how it feels to play, asking for a bit of cash for it isn't misplaced. I promise I was actually shaking after having to rip myself out of the game quickly after it nearly caused me to miss my subway station, having had to concentrate just from the sheer pace of it. And the passenger next to me even enthusiastically asked me what the name of the game was so he could download it himself - that's never happened with any independent game before.

Play it, for goodness' sake. If only to see just what the independent game-making community can do with MMF now. Once again I'm proud to be part of it, even if things like this do tend to make my own efforts pale a bit in comparison.

How to make the Chzo Mythos even scarier

Even though the Internet should by now be the most impressive information exchange system yet known, we all know by now that it plays host to a miscellany of horrifying things and people. And I don't just mean the places where record-breaking thickness runs rampant - it also gives the opportunity for far too many overly loud people to voice their stupid opinions.

The world of fanfiction is responsible for a fair amount of this, because even though the trend of the Internet moved more towards audio and video recently, writing is still the largest direct window into what you're thinking. And as I've just discovered it completely by accident, I really would like to know what the writer was thinking when he came up with this chapter in what seems to be an epic.

Like I've said before, I'm not against freedom of expression but there are some things that you're just not meant to touch. I'm not going to say what the above horror is because it's interesting how it seems to come off in layers if you read it - it begins normally enough, then you'll realize what it actually is at the bottom of the first page and it'll seem like merely a terrible idea for a crossover. But then it'll keep piling in more and more unexpected characters from increasingly unlikely places until you snap under the strain.

(In case you can't tell, work's rather slow today.)

ZZT - Where are they now?

Being one of the last survivors of the ZZT community not to have drifted off into insanity, I am immeasurably fascinated with ZUltimate. It's a wiki that was set up about a year after I ran off after deciding I could no longer understand the community, and documents the people it attracted and the arcane in-jokes they built up over 15 years. Picking through it is like some sort of twisted electronic archaeology, uncovering layer upon layer of its unique form of organized madness and trying to translate it into something understandable. This is a decent example of the hive mind sort of mentality of it all - I don't know what it is about an ASCII-based game creation system that attracts these people in particular, but the minds in this place are truly unique.

I'll start with the obvious. I was slightly surprised to discover last year that Chase Bramlage murdered his girlfriend. (I should mention that no-one knows for certain what happened, either of the event itself or the outcome of his trial, but all signs so far seem to point to him being incredibly guilty.) It could be because I never really talked to him very closely during my time there because as far as I remember I was only intermittently in the forums and chatroom, but somehow this doesn't even seem very unusual. It's probably better to move swiftly on from this...

Less disturbingly, in general, quite a few members of the community tend to be associated with a variety of colourful (sometimes quite psychedelic, actually) substances. In fact I seem to recall that last time I poked my head into the chatroom one of the people there was in the process of having his door battered down by an irate dealer, but I could be remembering that wrongly. Drac0, for example, is now allegedly quite into his crystal meth, but with the amount of sense his games made before that habit started I don't think you'd really notice.

Mooseka went for a different approach, as out of all the substances he could have been caught taking, someone walked in on him when he was busily trying to ingest nutmeg via his nose. And then decided to tell the community in general about this, ensuring he would be mocked mercilessly for generations to come. I don't think that even this matches the sheer inspiration of burstroc, though. It seems that after a considerable amount of usually relatively harmless cannabis, he somehow believed himself to be Blat Hoople and proclaimed himself the President of Water.

By the way, if any of this is making any sense then I'm not telling it right. Even the less dangerously mental people sometimes had their moments - the ZZT community is one of the areas in which my usually good memory fails me, so I have no idea what I thought of all these people at the time, but I think that Wildkarrdex might have been someone that fell into that category. He did, after all, give a glowing review to one of my own little productions saying it was "nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be", and made a cameo appearance in another. I don't remember him being an administrator at any point, but according to the article, he was:

He used this position to spend his time reading everyone's private messages, and changing forum names into German translations of Twin Peaks episode titles. Administrative privileges were eventually removed when he added a word filter changing the letter e to something like "mumumumumumumumumumu", rendering the forums utterly unusable (but in this author's opinion, substantially improved).

And as for me... all things considered, I think I got off lightly. In fact I never really considered myself one of the in-crowd, not really understanding the mentality that a lot of the community shared, and it was enough of a surprise to discover that someone had honoured me with my own page that wasn't even particularly damning. I am still in contact with a couple of people in the community, but a completely different set of people from the ones I knew when I was still in it (who, yes, all right, are , , until recently who now goes to the same university I went to, and someone from the forums who occasionally pops up on my journal telling me to come back). And let's be honest, that's an improvement too.

One significant thing to be born from the community was created by Misteroo, who after several years around the ZZT and Megazeux boards reached such an advanced state of mental decay that he managed to produce the Arfenhouse series. (I have to confess that I actually wrote the rest of this post more than a year ago, never got round to putting it up, and everything you've read up until now was just an attempt to make it relevant again.) In the old days we were happy shouting things like "GREEN IS EVIL" and "OOF MON WHERE'S ME PIE" at each other over the forums, but from that chaos and disorder came... well, more chaos and disorder, actually, but packaged up neatly in the form of this series.

If you're not familiar with them, they're a series of Flash cartoons that allegedly involve someone called Joseph who is trapped in a dodgy Flash animation. Most of the storyline, or at least what's coherent of it, involve the Housemaster (who happens to be a slice of bread with some MS-Painted limbs around it) and the other inhabitants of the Arfenhouse - the heads of a dog, a cat and blue sphere named Woogy - being harrassed by a malevolent yellow ball with eyes on it called Billy. Though to be honest what actually happens in any of the animations bears very little resemblance to this plot outline. Subtitles are provided in something resembling the Dadaist language of FishIg. In a way it's quite an accurate model of what the ZZT forums would look like if they were somehow physical - a thought that is frightening indeed.

Let's be clear. You will not get this. Or this. I don't understand most of it. It will appear as a string of gibberish to the uninitiated, and a marginally more coherent string of gibberish to those who were in the community at the time I was standing around at the sidelines trying to make sense of it. My entire introduction to the Internet consisted of said gibberish.

I really miss it sometimes.

Mio Mao Mio Mao

Every time I mention anything I watched growing up, I seem to have to say it with the special disclaimer that I wasn't actually brought up on milk laced with LSD and what I'm remembering is verifiably real. Therefore, I should mention now that this isn't actually something I grew up with at all - instead, I saw five minutes of it at about 6:30 in the morning about fifteen years ago, and so unique was its dementia that it's remained burned into my brain ever since.

It's a claymation short from Italy called Mio (and) Mao. On the surface it's simply a programme about two stop-motion plasticine kittens, Mio (the white one) and Mao (the red one. Appropriately). I vaguely knew even at the time I saw it that Mao was the name of someone from China who was a bit dodgy, even though I didn't exactly know the details. But getting back to the video - these are no ordinary kittens, instead they're sort of mutant T-1000 kittens from the future. Nothing moves in a way that you would expect - things twist, morph and grow extra limbs when needed, and the titular characters themselves transform into Slinky-type tubes that turn end over end, unroll, turn into balls and bounce, flatten and reconstitute themselves, combine, separate, and do anything other than walk to get from one end of the garden to the other. It's absolutely incredible to watch no matter what age you are.

This one's quite good as well - it has a spider that morphs into bits of random mathematics. It's the cutest thing you'll see all week, apart from possibly a duck with tragically miscounted legs.

It's not often clear exactly what's going on - there's absolutely no dialogue, and apart from their signature cat/communist dictator noises all communication is in a strange sort of gibberish language that sounds like the sound man swallowed a few helium balloons and an entire bag of sugar and then recorded the best bits of the result. It seems some of the later episodes were broadcast on Channel 5 with an attempt at a translation over the top, but I think that takes away from the nonsensical flow of it.

It's rather nice to have it confirmed that I wasn't imagining this whole thing after all, and I rather miss when television could be as charmingly bizarre as this - that era still produced people who nearly grew up all right. I should also warn you that if you watch any of the videos that bloody tune will be stuck in your head for the next week. Oh, too late.

The Thing That Should Not Be

A sudden flurry of emails from LJ signalled that I'd just had my fourth accepted post on . This one is little more than a link, but it's much funnier than the last one because it doesn't involve me.

And judging from the comments so far I may have actually increased the sales of the abomination of nature quite dramatically. So everyone's happy.

Invisible Gear Solid

Progress through Metal Gear?! Solid 3 has been pretty slow so far. I had meant to carry on with it while Whitney was away, but somehow never got around to it during the week and then decided to wait for her to return again to continue together. And I'm still not sure where to place it in terms of how good it is versus the previous two games in the series.

I think the only bit that Whitney really hasn't liked is the scene just after you meet up with EVA, where Snake is finally handed a gun that doesn't fall apart within five minutes. He spends an inordinate amount of time absolutely ejaculating* over it, drawing attention to all its modifications such as balancing the grip, relining the barrel, extending the trigger, moving the flint-gaskets and filing down the cockflaps. So he's clearly meant to be a bit of a gun nut, but this is probably an advantage when you're stuck somewhere in Russia and about to spend hours in the jungle fighting a group of leftovers from the X-Men.

Similarly, his way of dealing with bosses so far is mostly by boring them to death. During the first two or three encounters with Not-Revolver-Yet Ocelot, rather than getting to any sort of armed conflict he just goes over exactly what he's doing wrong until he runs away like a big girl's blouse (or is hit in the face with a motorbike). Once you finally get to fight him, he's alternately gushing over how exciting reloading feels and pinging bullets off rocks at you like the Riviera Kid from Red Dwarf. With the addition of snakes biting at your ankles, I'm certain that the fight is much harder than anything I experienced this early on in the first two games.

In fact, the whole game seems a lot harder. Taking away the radar was a brave move, and I'm not sure how I feel about it - the nearest thing you get is a motion sensor and the ability to move the camera around a bit more, but it's hardly a replacement for knowing where each enemy's field of vision is all the time. It seems that you have to rely on luck while poking your nose around a corner or making a run for it into the next area, hoping that a guard you missed won't spot you.

And I miss the presence of guards most of the time, because I'm at a particular disadvantage here. Colourblindness normally only stops me playing very puzzle-oriented games that rely solely on colour such as Puzzle Fighter (I'm very pleased when puzzle game designers are thoughtful enough to give some other distinction to the playing pieces as well). But camouflage is a major theme of this game - in the previous ones I could at least see what I was trying to shoot at, but honestly, this entire game is green and brown, and the guards that are meant to be difficult to see for people with normal vision might as well be totally invisible to me. So Whitney has to be my eyes during the outdoor sections and tells me where to aim.

Despite that fairly major obstacle, at the moment we've just defeated our first unlikely Hideo Kojima villain - this one's The Pain, who is a large man who's covered in bees! and can get them to somehow form various deadly weapons while vomiting explosive hornets at you. He was actually quite a lot easier than most of the game we've gone through so far, because unlike everything else, I could see him.

* NB. This is a perfectly legitimate use of the term

Korma fried rice

I think I might have just invented korma fried rice by accident. If you're interested, this is done by attempting to reheat a previously successful chicken korma (the real kind, no tomatoes) by throwing the whole thing, rice and all, into a frying pan, and getting the amount of liquid wrong so that a vague yellow mass comes out ten minutes later. It tastes reasonable, though while it's far from my worst invented meal, I'll probably just order in pizza tomorrow.

The IRS sent us an important-looking letter with all kinds of red boxes on the front today, and I was afraid that it was going to be about fining us one squillion dollars for missing out one field of our tax return form. But after tearing off no less than three perforated strips that secured its contents, it turned out to be a standard letter about how much money we would be getting in the Economic Stimulus Act. (This is a plan that the government thought up a while ago that involves paying out up to $1,200 of their money per household in the hope that people will immediately spend it and help the economy. Apparently this makes sense in George Bush v2.0's head, though I can't help but feel he could have provided a better boost to the economy by resigning a few months early.

Apart from that and otherworldly invasions, nothing much has happened in the flat while Whitney's been away so far. I have been trying to play the guitar for at least some meaningful amount of time per night, and I've found that it's amazing how with a bit of practice your fingers can suddenly fall into place on barre chords after ages of them seeming totally impossible. I am getting rather sick of Canon in D, though.

I have joined Ultimate Guitar's forums in the hope of learning something new from being around other players, but so far it appears to be full of Kryptonite. However, it does instead spur the feeling that if illiterate marijuana-addled American teenagers can do this, then so can I.

The perils of an overactive imagination

But not, as you'll see, an overactive drawing ability. No game series should make you afraid of the dark all over again.

On my own again

Last Saturday, in a torrential downpour, Whitney left to visit her parents in California over her spring holiday. This leaves me alone in the flat for just over a week. Already the flat seems strangely quiet, which I could probably view as a positive thing if I had any drive to do anything at the moment. However, I've already been enjoying the freedom of playing music without headphones, and even got a couple of songs finished that I'd been meaning to do for ages the other day. I could even connect my guitar up to the real amp instead of using the software one for a while if I wasn't afraid of subjecting anyone in the rooms around me to the hideous noise that I produce with it.

Some people (not least my own mum) have expressed doubt that I'm able to survive unsupervised for much more than four hours, and judging by my past record of cooking I think that's a view you could forgive. However, this time I have been saved by the way that out of nowhere at the beginning of the year somebody offered to send me about half a cow through the post, and Whitney took up the offer for Valentine's Day, leaving us with a freezer packed with boxes of meat from various parts of a variety of farmyard animals. So that's already formed part of my diet this weekend, and with some carefully-planned easy meals for the week ahead, I think I can get through this time without any real disasters.

And the latest kind of cornflakes in my continuous cereal challenge is Special K (strawberry variety). It's all terribly exciting.

The price of health

Have you any idea of the cost (with dental insurance) of getting your wisdom teeth out? It's $931. As if there weren't going to be enough painful extractions on that day. We have the bank balance to cover it easily (although it might shoot, stuff and hang over the mantelpiece any plans we had for a holiday later in the year), but it often seems that this country's government and health system has done nothing but rake more and more money out of me since I started applying to be allowed to set foot in it.

Now 's comment on the last post becomes much more relevant, as I naively thought that having both medical and dental insurance would be enough to bring it down to a reasonable figure. However, despite the surprise cost, I am still leaning towards being convinced that there is good reason to have them out now, as Dr Fine's opinion was more along the lines of "Get it done here, go to the surgeon in MGH, wherever you like, but whatever you do, get them out". Apparently I could also wait until my entire head becomes infected and then claim it under the medical insurance, but I'd rather do this soon than risk them getting worse and having to endure even more physical pain than necessary.

Overall that visit to the dentist last week didn't go as well as I'd hoped.

My rebellious teeth

My first visit to what I had begun to mentally call the castle of Doctor Terrible took place this afternoon - I've opened a new entry tag to record the development of this new storyline that life has thrown at me. In reality it's a nice enough basement suite, clean and quiet and only slightly funeral-home-like. Dr Fine is a little older than I expected, but nice in a pushy sort of way (but everyone in Boston is pushy, so it averages out to just being nice).

After filling out the obligatory confusing mess of an insurance and consent form while listening to the gentle call of high-pitched drilling noises, I was led through to a dental-looking room where he asked if I was from New Jersey (apparently the accent is very similar) and poked around in my mouth a little. After that, he immediately said that we'd better 'relocate' and distractedly led me down the corridor. I was half-expecting to be taken to a small dungeon somewhere, but instead I was shown to a tiny room with an X-ray lightbox and desk.

The consultation that followed was calm but not fantastic. Essentially, my wisdom teeth are all partially impacted, infected, extruded or exploded, and from just taking one look in my mouth he was surprised that I wasn't in complete agony because of any one of them. To look on the bright side, not being in agony even though my wisdom teeth are having such a hard time is probably a good thing - we must be more resilient in Britain. Still, he made it clear that they had to come out as soon as possible to prevent future catastrophe, and that process would involve a considerable amount of pain and swelling. Apparently there's also the very, very rare possibility that removing wisdom teeth will sever a nerve running along the jaw, but apparently Massachusetts General Hospital are rather good at repairing those.

So I had to read through and sign an absolutely terrifying sheet saying that I understood the risks of surgery and the possible problems (because as he says, America has too many lawyers in it), and I've been sent home with a leaflet called "Impacted wisdom teeth" illustrated on the cover by a large and happy third molar at a crazy diagonal angle. Now I just have to wait for a phone call from somebody from the office so I can arrange to get them removed from my head, and I'm sitting at home on the sofa eating chocolate biscuits while I still can.

MGS and CSI

My life tends to go through a set of stages in a cyclical pattern - sometimes I'll have extended periods when I'm in the mood for writing, musicianship or game-building (and you can tell which one I'm in by the relative number of posts I make to this journal or various other forums around the Internet). At the moment, after a brief spurt of activity on CT2, I think I'm slowing down again and am getting into the mood for creating... nothing in particular. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it allows me to have some actual free time instead.

I don't know what all that nonsense was about above, but the point is that Whitney and I were in Gamestop the other day to pick out a couple of PS2 titles after it hasn't had much activity for a while. Now that the next generation of consoles are becoming this generation, it's not uncommon to find at least a couple of gems in the second-hand bin, and on this occasion I found Metal Gear Solid 3 for $10. Meanwhile, Whitney picked up a CSI game, which I promise you is called "Three dimensions of murder", from the other end of the store - a surprisingly quick visit.

America has a slightly ELSPA-like rating system for games (in that it's separate from the film classifications) in the ESRB ratings. And the people in Gamestop ask for my ID whenever I buy anything in the "M" category. Do I still look six years younger than I am? I know I'm short, but I even had a rubbish beard last time it happened. In addition, this time the woman at the till cheerily told us that they had a seven-day return policy, specifically in case we wanted to bring back CSI after playing more than five minutes of it. That's what I call thoughtful service.

When we got home from our other tasks of the day, Whitney's CSI game went on first. And, indeed, first impressions were that it was an abomination. It could be vaguely described as something that might have come out of point and click adventures if anyone did them any more, but with said pointer stuck in the centre of the screen and first-person shooter controls added instead. I have enough difficulty with FPS controls through dual analog sticks, and I think Whitney finds it totally impossible to point in the right direction half the time.

The game consists of going from location to location via a dull overlong control-explaining loading screen that looks like something that would have been stuck on a demo in a hurry, clicking on things and then using appropriate equipment to gather evidence (you're guided by a vague likeness of someone from the TV version during this, so that you don't attempt to do things like pick up blood using tweezers). After floating around bumping into everything and clicking on them, you then go back to the lab, where the 3D engine wheezes and puffs as it strains to show more than ten objects on the screen at once as you spin round looking for the right bit of equipment to piece together, pull apart or compare the things you've grabbed from the crime scene.

It's not fantastic by any means, but it seemed oddly interesting after a while, if only to see what incriminating things you'd find in new locations as you gathered likely addresses. Games based on TV programmes don't tend to work very well (I have difficult imagining how even Knightmare could be done decently) and there's only so much you can do with a format like this. Dull adventuring, then, to sum up, but we're unsure whether to return it just yet, and I think that's just about the highest praise you can give it.

I had a brief go at Metal Gear Solid 3 in the evening - this was something that had completely passed me by when it was released, and I'd only played the demo of it before. And I say I played it "briefly", but the actual game time on my save is two hours in - Hideo Kojima is known for his long cutscenes, but so far this game's been virtually nothing but them. I'm unsure how I feel about the lack of a radar in favour of a camouflage system and ability to look round a bit further than before - it would certainly required a change in tactics if it would let you actually play the game long enough to work anything out.

Even though it's cutscene-saturated, though, you have to admit they're good (when they're not just half-hour-long radio conversations, anyway). I particularly liked the introduction of not-Revolver-yet Ocelot and his Red Dwarf-style automatic pistol ricochet shooting. But I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older now or the token supervillains really are more ridiculous this time, but it really does seem from the introduction section that we're going to be fighting the X-Men (complete with a creepy hornet-summoner, an old man with bulgey eyes and someone who I've chosen to christen General Electric).

So far we've just gone through the start of what I thought was the game, then in true Kojima style it ripped us out of that and put us in a different one, so I don't actually know what it's about yet and will have to update this as soon as something interesting happens.