Newton's Theories

Gamma Ray - To the Metal

Thu, 24 May 2012 01:35:51 GMT

I started this write-up during my first week of work last year, when I didn't really have much to do. One year later, it's probably time to finally post it.

An extraordinarily long time ago, then, I recall saying that one of the things about Gamma Ray is that as each of the songwriters has such a distinct style, you can easily tell who wrote what without even looking at the booklet. I had planned to do just that when I next wrote about an album by them, and prepared a list of the songs' respective composers as I listened to it for the first time. As it turned out I got most of them entirely wrong, so I will have to throw that out and do a more traditional writeup instead.

I can only excuse my bad guesses by saying that this is a bit of an unusual album for Gamma Ray - it's not a huge departure like Helloween's Chameleon, but for a power metal group that's remained so traditional, it has some experimentation in a lot of different areas and new sounds. You wouldn't think it from the cover, which is as traditional as ever - there are actuall three possibilities, one in a rather Iron Maiden style, one from after Rob Halford saw 'Cars 2' and had too much cheese before going to bed that night, and the 'default' one shown above, which looks like a manic Karl Valentin expressionist painting in which a collection of miscellaneous vaguely awesome things are smashed together in a tumble-dryer and set on fire. And their now-trademark 'borrowing' of bits of other people's songs is simultaneously more and less blatant - I can identify rather fewer passages that were obviously taken from elsewhere, but the ones that are really make absolutely no disguise of it.

Quick thoughts first - Empathy is an unusually andante start to the album, with a verse quite reminiscent of Helloween's enigmatic Sun 4 the World. As the opener, it's easy enough to recognize it as by Kai Hansen, who immediately starts singing about "rising from the cross" despite having written a six-minute rant against religion just one album ago. All You Need to Know is another Kai song that welcomes Michael Kiske back for the 2,784th time since he left metal forever, and can therefore be pretty much said to be an 80s Helloween song. To the Metal continues the tradition set by Majestic of making the title track the worst one on the album - I've never much liked meta-songs like this, not for them going a fair distance to reinforce the image of metal as some sort of cult, but just because I've always found them faintly stupid.

With that out of the way, though, it's at about this point that you realize that Gamma Ray are beginning to pioneer a completely different type of self-plagiarism, of writing songs with almost completely identical ideas. Compare the first line of the chorus of Rise to From the Ashes from the previous album, for example - "Rise in victory", "Rise like phoenix from the ashes". And this together with the chorus of Shine Forever a couple of songs later ("Rise up, shine forever" - which itself brings back memories of Shine On) and was, according to evidence here, originally called Rise Up!

Still. After that, Deadlands is unusual, not for being based on a television series (which Iron Maiden were doing for a long time with songs such as The Prisoner and countless others throughout the 80s and 90s), but for being based on a television series that is itself fictional, having been invented by Kai in a bid to justify what the words meant. It's actually one of my favourites from the album, even though I found it quite strange the first time I heard it.

During the last couple of songs, the album ventures into the Twilight Zone, starting with a very Final Fantasy 6 haunted forest keyboard introduction that leads into the floaty-chorused Chasing Shadows. The instrumental section is strangely fragmented and random, almost like a Dream Theater piece in parts, although I could still identify this as one of Henjo's songs because of his signature arpeggiating towards the end. Over time he's been moving away from his most recognizable styles in favour of writing progressively weirder stuff. And finally, No Need to Cry is a ballad - unusual enough for them as I don't think they've done one since 2001. It was obviously written by Dirk Schlachter, and features him on lead vocals for the middle section - it's for his father, and combined with Mother Angel for Kai's mother earlier in the track list, it's rather telling that even this combination of songs makes for a far more upbeat album than anything Kamelot released in their most irrationally exuberant moments.

But Time to Live really is a standout. Normally, I would joke about it being a bit 'inspired' by another song and link to where they got that chorus from, but this time... I don't even need to - on first hearing this I wound back and listened to it again about five times because I just couldn't believe it. I'm now beginning to wonder if this frequent borrowing isn't deliberate after all and that after twenty years of being around 5000-watt amplifiers they're all just suffering from absolutely debilitating memory loss, forgetting about songs they've already written. Being such a classic Kai Hansen song (literally), it's all the more surprising that this was one of Henjo's - but it does have a really wonderful harpsichord section before the final chorus (and just the fact that I'm even talking about a harpsichord section in a Gamma Ray song should tell you how different an album this is for them).

I'm not really sure how to justify liking an album so much when I can identify that I've heard quite such a large amount of it before - particularly as they're venturing into the same problem that I always talk about with Dragonforce, as Gamma Ray haven't released a new album since Powerplant so much as taken bits from their back catalogue and Judas Priest's and mixed them around a bit. But somehow, they still manage to get away with it. They certainly do for me, at least.

A brief word

Tue, 22 May 2012 01:04:39 GMT

A wonderful bit of editorialising I found through a link that happened to be posted on Facebook, which I tend to check in the mornings to catch up with the less interesting people in my life -

After a fellow student posted the yearbook image on her Facebook page, it was picked up by Tosh O, The Daily Mail and a slew of other humor sites

If that was accidental, it's fantastic. If it was deliberate... well done.

Physically Impossible Dizzy

Mon, 21 May 2012 01:40:48 GMT

I was playing a couple of the Dizzy games last night with rakarr looking on and providing much-needed help and encouragement - I hadn't realized that Treasure Island Dizzy and Spellbound Dizzy existed on the Amiga but hadn't made it to the PC, and so it was like discovering completely new Dizzy games after all this time between the 386 era and now.

Unfortunately, after said amount of time, I have to admit that the series is showing a few cracks in the shell of nostalgia where they had previously been so safe. I decided to give up on Treasure Island Dizzy quite early on - a game in which you have one life and instant death around every turn and in the form of every off-screen cage that can come down and trap you - and instead turned my attention to Spellbound Dizzy.

The first thing I noticed is that it's got quite an unusual graphical style, with a black-eyed Dizzy who is animated in a bit more of a camp manner than the other games - though his boxing gloves and vacant smile are still intact.

The second thing I noticed was that for reasons best known to themselves, the people who laid out this game decided to base the above-ground section largely on adding to your weight so that you can go down a big hole with an updraft in it - this involves ferrying big rocks back and forward across a couple of screens. There's a quarry with an infinite supply a few screens to the left of the hole you need to get down...

Unfortunately, there's an obstacle in the way between these two places - it's a big pit, shown in this doubly wide screenshot. A trampette is provided to get out of it, but you can't put it in a position where you can reach both sides without moving it.

So, then, to sum up the situation...

At the start of the game, you have two inventory spaces.
You require two rocks to weigh yourself down the hole against the updraft.
The trampette at the bottom of the pit (between the quarry and the hole) has to be moved back and forth to allow you to bounce up the sides of the pit every single blasted time - this requires a free inventory space
Rocks can always be picked up from the quarry, but they shatter when you drop them on the ground

In this situation, how do you get two rocks over to the hole on the other side of the pit from the quarry? You can't take two at once - the trampette-moving kerfuffle takes care of that - and as soon as you drop one on the ground, it shatters and can't be picked up.

If you said to try putting them on the grass, it was a good guess but wrong.

If, however, your suggestion was to put the rock down on a cloud to safely store it while you were off getting a second one (a cloud which, I must stress, doesn't hold Dizzy for too long before he drops right through it) then congratulations - you have solved the puzzle and also suffer from the same mental imbalance as the makers of this game.

I stumbled across this... extraordinary solution by accident, in desperation. The rest of the game isn't exactly awful, but the rock-ferrying (which increases to the need for four rocks later on, though you have more inventory space) is an astonishingly tedious thing to put in - I was very glad that I had the chance to increase emulation speed to 200%.

All Iron Savior songs in chronological order

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:46:58 GMT

I was at a loose end, all right?

Iron Savior storyline

(A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away)
Battering Ram - Stand Against The King
Battering Ram - Time Will Tell

(Atlantis)
Condition Red - Titans Of Our Time
Iron Savior - Protect The Law
Iron Savior - Riding On Fire
Iron Savior - Atlantis Falling
Condition Red - Paradise
The Landing - March Of Doom

(350,000 year gap somewhere out in space)
Condition Red - Protector
Condition Red - Mindfeeder
Iron Savior - Watcher In The Sky

(Iron Savior arrives at modern-day Earth)
Iron Savior - The Arrival
Unification - Coming Home
Iron Savior - Iron Savior
Iron Savior - Assailant
Iron Savior - Children Of The Wasteland
Iron Savior - For The World
Unification - Captain's Log

(En route from Calderia)
Unification - Starborn

(Earth - this gets a bit more straightforward from now on)
Unification - Forces Of Rage
Unification - Deadly Sleep
Unification - Brothers (Of The Past)
Unification - Mind Over Matter
Unification - Prisoner Of The Void
Unification - Eye To Eye
Unification - The Battle
Interlude - Stonecold
Unification - Unchained
Unification - Forevermore

(Masters of Time aborted storyline)
Interlude - Contortions Of Time
Interlude - The Hatchet Of War

(Shadow arrival)
Dark Assault - Never Say Die
Dark Assault - Solar Wings
Dark Assault - Seek And Destroy
Dark Assault - Dragons Rising
Dark Assault - Predators

(Iron Savior awakens)
Dark Assault - I've Been To Hell
The Landing - The Savior
Dark Assault - Made Of Metal
The Landing - Starlight

(Shadow removal)
Dark Assault - Firing The Guns
Dark Assault - Eye Of The World
Dark Assault - Back Into The Light
Dark Assault - After The War
Condition Red - I Will Be There

(Dark Savior storyline)
Iron Savior - Brave New World (somewhat unexpectedly)
Condition Red - Ironbound
Condition Red - Condition Red
Condition Red - Walls Of Fire
Condition Red - Tales Of The Bold

(Voyage to Andromeda)
Condition Red - Thunderbird
Battering Ram - Battering Ram
Battering Ram - Tyranny Of Steel
The Landing - Moment In Time
Battering Ram - Wings Of Deliverance
Battering Ram - Starchaser
Battering Ram - Machine World
Megatropolis - Farewell And Good Bye

Separate storyline that isn't really much to do with the rest of it

Megatropolis - Running Riot
Megatropolis - Flesh
Megatropolis - Megatropolis
Megatropolis - Cybernetic Queen
Megatropolis - A Tale From Down Below

Non-storyline

Iron Savior - Break It Up
Iron Savior - This Flight Tonight
Interlude - Touching The Rainbow
Condition Red - Warrior
Condition Red - No Heroes
Battering Ram - H.M. Powered Man
Battering Ram - Break The Curse
Battering Ram - Riding Free
Battering Ram - The Call
Battering Ram - Living On A Fault Line
Megatropolis - The Omega Man
Megatropolis - Cyber Hero
Megatropolis - Still I Believe
Megatropolis - Hammerdown
The Landing - Heavy Metal Never Dies
The Landing - Hall Of The Heroes
The Landing - R. U. Ready
The Landing - Faster Than All
The Landing - Before The Pain
The Landing - No Guts, No Glory

Positions of songs from "The Landing" are pure speculation as it doesn't have a storyline guide. Rationale available upon request. Debate encouraged, but not seriously expected. Suggestions to get a life - vice versa.

Legend of Grimrock

Wed, 16 May 2012 23:35:29 GMT

I'm not sure exactly what's gone wrong with me mentally, but I've been enjoying playing through Legend of Grimrock recently. Its approach is pretty simple - you form a four-person party of fighters, mages and rogues from a selection of humans, minotaurs and insectoids, and you're sent into a grid-based 3D dungeon full of doors, buttons, switches and enemies, and your objective is to explore and reach the bottom. I always found dungeon crawl games completely impenetrable during the 90s when people were building so many three-dimensional-ish games out of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules, but Etrian Odyssey must have... done something to me.

There's really nothing stopping you from walking over there.

This one gives you the option of playing with an automap, or "old-school", where in the best traditions of these immensely boring games, you're meant to get out the graph paper and draw along as you explore - and you can't reconsider once you've started. Being spurred on by a burst of overconfidence thanks to the mental imbalance that the recent DS series gave me, I elected to turn it off, but found myself regretting it quite early on as I switched back and forth so much with Excel, plotting out my route through the dungeon and the locations of all the switches and doors. The map is actually much more complicated than anything from Etrian Odyssey, being full of teleporters, walls that can move or pits that can open according to various triggers and floor plates... but this complexity also means that there are landmarks, and each individual area looks much more unique. I gave up mapping on about the fourth floor, and never really felt that I needed one much thereafter.

Most of my previous experience with these games was from Eye of the Beholder, a game which assumes that you know a lot about the D&D rules, seems to consist mostly of butting your head against walls to find unmarked secret passages, and which traps you underground with poisonous giant ants while taking away your ability to rest halfway through the first dungeon. (I actually replayed it quite recently, finally got myself past that bit with the use of a guide, and then got stuck about eight inches later, dying on some laser floor tiles while being stabbed and paralyzed by a great big mantis.) This update to the genre happily gets rid of a lot of the awfully irritating bits - there's still the occasional hidden switch, but for the most part, the puzzles are at least forthcoming about what elements they have. A lot of rooms look rather like Knightmare, with their opening and closing pits, and it's very satisfying to find your way over to the next challenge.

The combat with the various creatures of the dungeon - including, horrifyingly, horse-sized snails from the very start - is less satisfying, mostly because the miss rate still really gets to me. In the Japanese approach to RPGs, missing is something that's quite a rare event, caused mostly by having your chance to hit ruined by status effects, and your statistics trickery is usually based around trying to reduce the damage dealt by successful attacks on your party. In the Dungeons and Dragons rules that Eye of the Beholder used, being 'missed' is very much part of the system and you have to try to tailor statistics to encourage it happening on your own characters while making sure they miss enemies as little as possible. This game doesn't complicate things as much as the AD&D games did, but you still miss enemies that are standing in front of you about half the time, and I'm unprepared to believe that anyone who knows the correct end at which to hold a sword could be that bad with one.

My chief complaint in action

Therefore, fighting becomes an absurd square dance, with you striking and then sidestepping around to make the enemies waste their time lining themselves up with you again before they can strike, with nobody on either side ever realizing that it might be possible to face diagonally. I used to think that this tactic was cheating, but especially with some larger later enemies, the game really does expect you to do it - and if you get into a situation where you have to stand still and fight, it's more of an exercise in annoyance, waiting for your weapons to charge so you can use them again - it might personally take me five or six seconds to ready a battle axe for another swing, but a seven foot tall, three hundred pound bull-man shouldn't realistically suffer the same preparation time.

I'm getting oddly negative here, even though I rather enjoyed it - I feel its problems are just inherent to the genre. It had some clever ideas like the grid of runes to cast spells, even though I never found myself using any of the spells that involved clicking more than two of them, and it's full of optional secrets (the Iron Doors that taunt you on the statistics page) that encourage you to look a little deeper. I was also impressed with the ending - I thought it had one of the most oppressive conclusions that I'd seen in a game since Earthbound, with the environment suddenly becoming very dark and metallic and giving you an unusual objective, even doing some odd things to the interface after a while as it seems everything turns against you. And the awkward nature of the combat only helps the ghastly enemies seem even more frightening - this game drew more yelps out of me than any Silent Hill has, and when you hear the flapping of undead wings or the scuttle of something far too big for its own legs just beyond a wall next to you, it's difficult not to just curl up where you stand.

There's one thing that I feel people should be warned about, even though it might give away a puzzle solution - keep a skull. This isn't a problem if you have the character trait that allows you to increase in attack power depending on how many skulls you carry, but if you don't... on the ninth level, you're suddenly asked for one of these items - there are five in the entire game, and by that point you've most likely picked them up, turned them over, examined them, flung them against walls or down pits or put them in boxes somewhere, and you'll have no idea where to get one. At that point I was saved by studying someone's map online and finding a skull that I hadn't previously touched, but... it's at that point that the game really does something surprisingly mean-spirited, for something that until then has done quite a good job of bringing only the good parts of those games into the modern age.

Anyway, the release trailer will show you all you need to know. And so will Dungeon Master. (Additionally, the theme music is absolutely stunning, though sadly it's the only song of its kind in the game.)

Signal from the Sky artwork

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:56:56 GMT

Look at this!

Just look at it! This astonishing front cover was done by Jubatian, who (rather appropriately) found me through my coverage of Albion as a song subject, many years ago when I posted on Modplug.

I had been thinking about what I wanted this cover to look like for a long time, but I had no idea who to approach until I remembered about his rather beautiful desolate cityscapes. Even then, I had absolutely no idea that I would get something that was equal in detail to Iron Maiden's covers - apparently I just happened to email at exactly the right moment, when he wanted to start a big art project but didn't know exactly what he wanted to draw. And after exchanging ideas, a terrible sketch by me was gradually painted into what you see up there now.

I really admire people who have the talent to draw - it's an incredible thing, watching someone perform a process that you can't do.

I've done a back cover as well, complete with the final track listing (but not the final track times) - it feels unimaginably strange to even associate my music with something this professional-looking... now I really need to press on and put the finishing touches on the introduction, final and bonus songs, before releasing it for real at some point this month. I just couldn't resist the appropriateness of announcing such an accidentally maritime-themed album on May Day.

Preorders are available on Bandcamp now - donate $10 or more and I'll post you a physical copy when it's released! (As soon as I work out how I'm going to print it.)

Flowering Bricks

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:30:33 GMT

Use the mouse. Saving is automatic.

Okay!

But... how do I get that over to...

So how am I meant... but... how do those...

WHAT?!

Continuing the Japanese tradition of humble understatement last seen in Hatoful Boyfriend, this is an independent game called Hanano Puzzle ('Hanano' from the Japanese meaning "how the bastards am I meant to do this one".) I heard of it through the GameFAQs classic games board, where several members have been working their way through its challenges and demented PxTone music.

The idea of the game sounds simple - your only available move is to swap blocks horizontally, blocks will grow a flower in the direction of their arrow when they're next to another flower of the same colour, and your objective is to sprout all the blocks on the screen. In practice, the puzzles are so intricately put together and/or consistently sadistic that each one is a maddening challenge - rather appropriately, it really is about as hard as getting flowers to sprout out of bricks.

The game seems to intentionally go directly against the traditional puzzle progression of introducing a technique to you and then encouraging you to use it - instead, what this does is force you to discover a new technique in order to complete the level in front of you, right from the very start. Level 1 is something that I'd expect to find towards the end of a stretch of levels in most other games - instead of giving you a small demonstrative level to play around in, it drops you right into working out how to use the blocks in secondary ways and the physical effects of growing flowers out of them. But after a couple of these puzzles, it lets you believe you're getting somewhere and you make some fast progress until you run into the next flowery brick wall.

I've had a week or so of on-and-off struggling, and I'm now on level 15. There are fifty of them. This is going to be a long game.

Oh, come on.

Hanano Puzzle

Crisp Flavours Utd

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:32:07 GMT

Whitney found these in the pharmacy today.

As you might be able to guess from the shape of the logo, Lay's is the parent company of what we know in Britain as the big-eared-footballer-promoted Walkers - but I've noticed that America has been lacking in ready availabilty of meat-flavoured crisps ever since my arrival here. I had high hopes for this one, thinking that it might be Smokey Bacon under a different name - it's not bad, but it's not quite there. It could be following the same rules as America does for British television, adapting it to their own market by making it slightly less good.

There was one flavour of crisp here I quite liked before, though I haven't seen it in a while - it was mostly cheese with a bit of bacon in it, and was called Fully Loaded. The only crisp flavour to sound like a Judas Priest song.

One year on

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:00:03 GMT

For the first time, there are a couple of anniversaries at this time of year. Even though it really doesn't seem like it, it's now exactly one year since I started my new job (which I should stop calling my "new" job, seeing as it feels perfectly normal now). Going into a company with some semblance of hierarchical organization was a completely new experience to me, as small as everyone else thinks it is, but I seem to have found a secure place and even feel like one of the older people there as others come and go.

I still miss having an office with a door, but now that I'm sitting in an open-plan room next to the corridor where people come in, I feel that I get much more conversation with people. We're moving across the road to a bigger space in about a month, so perhaps I'll manage to get myself a window seat - the only seating plan anyone has put forward so far is just all arriving as early on moving day as they can possibly manage and camping out in the best spots.

The car has also had its first birthday - over the last twelve months it's taken us 4,907 miles that would otherwise have been covered (far more slowly) by buses, and by my estimation, we've spent about $500 on fuel for it (compared to $1400 for the total cost of MBTA passes for us for a year).

The occasion was marked by having to go and have the Massachusetts inspection sticker renewed - it's a test that's done on several aspects of the car to make sure it's safe and within acceptable bounds of emissions, though I'm told that all they actually have to do is to connect the car's computer up to a different computer and ask if it's reporting any problems. This was the first time I'd had to take the car to anybody who wasn't our actual dealership - the whole process was done in about fifteen minutes by the most monosyllabic man that I've ever met. I've owned goldfish that had attempted to exchange longer dialogues than he did, with his entire contribution to the conversation being "Keys? Sit. ... Okay. Cash? Mastercard. Keys on the front seat."

So now I have a new green sticker instead of an old orange one. Quite by coincidence I met my driving instructor this evening, so I could say that his teaching had led me to having no incidents at all for a full year.

Descent

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 02:28:29 GMT

After an attempt this evening to finally get a nine-minute song finished, I don't have a whole lot to say just now, just a couple of things that need preserving...

I saw that ZZT was brought up by a poster on Glorious Trainwrecks (he went by the name /\/ewt when he was in the community - I think that's how it was spelled) and that he was proposing a 24-hour game marathon... it made me quite nostalgic for the 24 Hours of ZZT contests that used to be held quarterly, even though I was always completely dreadful at them.

And another one falls to it. It's a very impressive feat of engineering - I've never before seen someone being reduced from bubbly overconfidence to gibbering madly in the space of just fourteen minutes, using a tone of voice usually reserved for when you're actually drowning.

Meanwhile, I discovered that my group of friends who witnessed the madness that was Hatoful Boyfriend have taken to fan-charactering it up in a thread here. I, of course, showed my level of disdain by immediately thinking it was a great idea and thinking up one for myself. I didn't get very far, but I did find this sparrow who looks like Ian Hislop.

The making of a Prince

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:16:08 GMT

This is absolutely fascinating (disclaimer: this might not be very interesting)

Jordan Mechner recently released the long-lost source code for Prince of Persia on the Apple II after having to drag it through several layers of gradually advancing disk drive technology. Along with reams of assembly language with wonderfully descriptive comments like lda #Splat ;yecch, he also unearthed a design document that he sent to the people who worked on the various ports, who dutifully ignored it and messed it up massively instead.

That document is an interesting, understandable look at how the game works underneath - revealing things like the way that all the enemies are actually treated as the same object (named as Shad even though it's very rarely used for Shadowman, as he has now been christened) which is loaded at the start of the level, which is why the levels with the skeleton and Fatty are unique in having no other enemies on them. It's also quite clever how he managed to make the game so fluid - the levels are drawn on a grid but characters only adhere to it when it's absolutely necessary, and it's impressive that he draws parts of the screens that are hidden off the edges of the visible area to keep objects active nearby.

A table near the beginning describes the background graphic sets and enemy types, and it confirms the game's long-standing numbering confusion in that it has three separate levels at the end that are all called "Level 12" - but the biggest surprise for me was that all the levels were actually given names!

Level	Name
0	Demo
1	Cell
2	Guards
3	Newskel
4	Newmirror
5	Thief
6	Plunge
7	Wtless
8	"329"
9	Twisty
10	Quad
11	Wild
12	Tower
13	Final
14	Victory

Some of these are very obvious, like "Demo", "Tower" and "Cell" - I assume that "Newskel" and "Newmirror" replaced earlier attempts that he had at the skeleton and mirror levels. "Thief" is the level where the shadow steals the potion from you, and "Quad" starts you off in a room with four doors that you have to revisit a couple of times. I was less sure about "Wild" and "Wtless" (though rakarr realized that it was short for the level with the "weightless" potion) and am absolutely mystified by why level 8 is called "329". It doesn't physically resemble the number, and its special feature is that you're rescued by the mouse - the release of this design document has created an entirely new mystery of its own.

The spirit of Ceefax

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:41:49 GMT

Chock-a-sad news from the choc_a_block community today - the BBC's analogue Ceefax service suffered a major turning-off this week and will be phased out entirely by October. I don't think that many people I know in America will really understand this, because the people I've talked to say they just never had anything like it at all and are confused by the entire concept.

But I have really fond memories of all the Teletext services, crude as they look by today's standards - they were text pages broadcast over the television by an aging BBC Micro somewhere in Broadcasting House's attic. It was what we had before the Internet, and somehow it's easy to get nostalgic about these primitive things with their blocky textmode 8-colour graphics despite their inconvenience compared to what we have today. Quite a lot of my memory is in having to enter a number and then wait while the page counter rolled around until it broadcast the page you had requested (and on the subject of speed, if the person in that BBC article is finding that their updates to Internet pages are happening at anything less than the speed of light I would probably ask them to take a serious second look at their infrastructure).

Alongside the weather (presented in a glorious 4-colour map of dots), cricket results and recipes from the latest episode of Ready Steady Cook, there was some really strange stuff on it. There was a page called "Mega-zine" that I used to read a lot but never participated in myself, full of thoughts from people with manufacturedly stupid pseudonyms like The Twelfth Lemon, and some lunatic who always talked about polo and whisky who called himself The Brigadier. In that way, it was much like a very slow Internet forum as we know them today - with Backchat over on Ceefax being a prototype of Youtube in being exclusively populated by complete dipsticks.

My favourite place, though, was Digitiser, the one-man sort of combined computer magazine and mental asylum where news was distributed by text-art characters such as Fat Sow and Zombie Dave (along with the beatboxing snakes and Inspector Morse) - just trying to explain it or its surreal sense of humour is a futile task, but its Wikipedia page makes a straight-faced attempt at it:

A further element of Digitiser's other-worldly charm was its unusual take on the English language. Often this amounted to little more than [...] adding curious suffixes to existing words (including, but not limited to -uss, -O, -ston, -Oh! and -me-do), but occasionally invented whole new sounds using words that never been used in that context, such as "huss" becoming an exclamation of some joy rather than, as is more common, a variety of dogfish.

Typical jokes would tell you to press reveal to see what a certain character thought of your letter, or a news item, and you would be presented with a surreal non-sequitur, such as a man shouting "Swayze!"

Biffo continued to write the bulk of the magazine solo, apart for occasional, part-time contributors, who helped him out with the letters, tips, and charts pages. These temporary assistants went by the names Mr Cheese, Mr Udders and Mr Toast.

I was actually on this at one point, after answering a request for help on the tips page (which was then hosted by a character called Mr. Nude). Unfortunately, my already quite short letter had to be trimmed down to fit on the page and it came out mostly as gibberish. Much later on, the original Crystal Towers got mentioned on its successor, 4-Players.

One feature that I'll really miss from it will be the old-style subtitles, which lived on page 888 of all the major services - double-height text on a black background, coloured to indicate who was speaking (which I used a lot, because I tended to watch Friday night television at low volume in my room after everyone else had gone to bed). One of the all-time hidden classics on British television could be found in putting them on for Never Mind the Buzzcocks during the intros round and watching how the subtitlers had handled the unearthly noises produced in the panel's attempts to impersonate pop songs, with #Do do do do nyoot nyoot weeka weeka bow being a typical example.

This wasn't the only treat to be found - the subtitler for ITV's showing of Back to the Future made the questionable decision to subtitle the soundtrack, inserting notices like SCARY MUSIC in the middle of the dialogue. And during a programme I can't remember* which had a feature on the European Vegetable Orchestra, the person responsible for the captions made the best of his chance to let people know exactly what he thought of their performance, subtitling it first as VARIOUS ABSURD SQUAWKING NOISES and then concluding with CACOPHONY.

The text services that are possible over digital television must technically outclass all of this in every way possible... but to all of us, it just won't be the same!

* All right, Eurotrash

Can I Play With Madness

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:31:16 GMT

A question which in 1988 was meant to be rhetorical. But if this game had existed at the time, they wouldn't even have felt the need to ask.

How we laughed. Then cried. Then did both at the same time. Then booked ourselves into the nearest mental institution.

A long and arduous journey came to an end this weekend, as kjorteo streamed the very last section of Hatoful Boyfriend along with his audience/support group. After a three-and-a-half-hour marathon to finish off the last chapters, we have finally emerged with only the slightest of mental scars to share between us, and quite possibly a new respect for what the visual novel genre can do to people.

When I spoke about this last time, I said that it was a sort of pigeon dating simulator, but really the only thing that it simulates is your brain being gradually torn to pieces and stamped on by a steroids-addled bird screaming about it being a foul debasement of pudding. The author, known to us as Moa, was asked where she got the inspiration to make it, and replied that she just loved pigeons and wanted other people to love them too. This description deserves to go down in history as one of the great classics of understatement - it falls so short of giving any impression of this game that I can't believe she's not in on it and deliberately winding us up. But then, perhaps it's better not to try to explain it any further, because I don't think any words have been invented to adequately describe this game.

Part of why I feel the need to talk about it again after completing it is that it turned into a completely different game from the one that I thought we were playing. I went in expecting a silly game about dating pigeons, and while the game certainly delivered on that, I wasn't prepared for the sheer breadth and depth of insanity with which we would eventually be presented. And it doesn't just impress you with its level of lunacy and leave it there - it raises the bar on every single new storyline you encounter, even when the bar is already halfway up a space elevator and the ground isn't even visible any more. During the game, you peel layers and layers back, diving deeper into this onion of madness, until eventually you reach the centre and you find that even that is much bigger than you ever expected...

I'm aware that it will seem patently ridiculous to compare this to the end of Blackadder IV, but nevertheless that is what I'm about to do - it's because comedies have the greatest amount of space in which to swing their mood. This thing is... it tricks you. It's like one of those ancient masters from kung fu films who pretend to be senile, harmless comic relief before suddenly jumping four hundred feet and cutting your head off with a karate chop - it acts daft and allows you to fall in love with these characters, and then suddenly - just when you think you've finished it all - the game does roughly what the writers of Reboot did about two series in. Namely, it goes completely psychotic and throws you into a storyline of tragedy, comedy, horror and absurdity, switching between those emotions within minutes of each other in the rare moments where it's not provoking all of them at the same time.

If this game were in need of a subtitle, "Don't ask" would be quite a good one.

And that constitutes the greatest bait-and-switch of genre and storyline that I've seen in any game ever made. Suddenly, the entire game is revealed to be just an introduction, a collection of scenes played out with these characters before it allows you to progress to the real story. The writing is much cleverer than it has ever let on up to this point through its apparently random gibbering, making things that you learned before suddenly meaningful - we all laughed when Professor Snoozebag excused something by saying he fell asleep in a washing machine, and then forgot about it - but then much later on at the end of the game, you suddenly realize exactly what he was covering up, and you feel like you've just laughed at somebody's singing voice just before being told that they're deaf.

It's because of springing things like this on you suddenly that the game delivers the kind of mental knocks usually only achievable by flinging your brain down three flights of stairs. You're laughing at me right now thinking how impossible it is that a game with these stupid pigeon cutouts could ever provoke any feeling except vague disorientation. But it's only once you've reached the very end that you realize just how much you've been strung along by the author and her cunningly laid trap, and how brilliant this game is for it.

Now that we won't be gathering each Saturday to have our sanities kicked in by birds, I really want to continue the tradition with another game, but the trouble is we've started too high and that nothing - nothing can top this. Like diamonds, the only thing that could upstage a Hatoful game is another Hatoful game.

This just announced: The requested "fling money at Moa" button is available here! Press it as much as possible!

Stumbling through Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:04:16 GMT

You know, when I played Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou I was expecting it to remain at least fairly near the top of the list of games I'd played in this project as far as madness was concerned. It was a complete surprise to me that it was instantly shown its place by a game that wolfekko gave me, with the apparently innocent title Pac-Man 2.

To be fair, is it going to be any madder than any other recent events this weekend? Don't be stupid, of course it isn't. But it's going to make a decent attempt anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTTgZjL9Fd4

There are two interrelated facets to this game that make it quite so remarkable... the first is that I have no idea why this is called Pac-Man 2. It has the greatest, most irreconcilable genre shift that I've ever seen between a game and its (alleged) sequel - it is not, as you might expect, a maze game with some enhancements over the original. Instead, it's a sort of adventure where you watch Pac-Man yomping through a cartoon world, occasionally pointing out something that you want him to pay attention to and hoping that he'll interact with it in the way that you expect. This leads us to the second unusual thing - the player doesn't really do a whole lot of playing, being reduced to vaguely influencing the course of events by shooting things with a catapult and getting frustrated when Pac-Man runs off in the wrong direction.

For the rather indirect method by which you control it, it's a bit like Scribblenauts - except your character is a manic-depressive Tamagotchi with the mind of a particularly stupid toddler and won't listen if you cheese him off too much. Despite all this, in this video I explore all of the game world that it will allow before remembering what I'm supposed to be doing, and even when I know the solution it takes me an age to manage it.

How did anyone get anywhere in this game before the Internet? Or, having listened to the sound, play it for long enough to do so before having their parents come through and ram the player's head through the television screen?

A partnership in madness

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:39:04 GMT

Since their inception a couple of short months ago, kjorteo's weekend broadcasts of Hatoful Boyfriend have become one of the highlights of my week (and, I imagine, a pretty unforgettable weekly experience for everyone else who watches them as well). Initially, we were prepared just to laugh at a charming and slightly tacky pigeon-dating game, but none of us were prepared for just how comprehensively mad this game is in breadth as well as depth - and how it continues to impress and terrify us with how much deeper it's going every time it's turned on.

Once, this was the culmination of the game's madness. Now it's just the tip of the iceberg.

We're now in the sort of Silent Hill possessed darkworld version of the game, which reveals itself when you complete all the other chapters -

[Spoilers]

the game's name changes to Hurtful Boyfriend, the protagonist is killed, with her head stuffed in a box and the rest of her delivered in bite-sized portions to the rest of the school, and you have to play as one of the other characters and investigate the murder like a bird-filled episode of Inspector Morse made with the aid of amphetamines.

But this week I was to become a greater part of the insanity - I was away at PAX East on Saturday and so missed our weekly recommended portion of the game, and to make up for it I was coerced (after honestly not a whole lot of convincing) to broadcast my own playthrough as I caught up to the place the others had left off - an effort that spanned five chapters in two one-hour sessions.

Part 1 - A 13-minute pause, some audio-related windows flying around, and then chapters 1-3 (without the introduction)

Part 2 - Chapters 4 to 5 and a half

The game provides you with some Japanese names to imagine as the voices, and a drama CD is or was actually/has been being produced, though this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past-present impossible never tense (it's sometimes quite difficult to tell what's going on through the author's filter of madness) - though I can't say what the characters were intended to sound like as I do not have a clue who any of these people are. Therefore, my limited ability for impressions was taken frankly to beyond breaking point as I found myself switching rapidly back and forward between various silly accents to narrate a complete cast of frantic talkative pigeons.

Ryouta: My own unaltered (though increasingly stressed) voice.

Sakuya: I had a lot to live up to for the aloof, contemptuous Sakuya, and started off with my own attempt at the accidental Liquid Snake soundalike that kjorteo had accidentally elevated to classic status, meaning that this was a British person attempting to sound like an American attempting to sound British. This degenerated into just something vaguely posh later on, though I was slightly perturbed to discover on playback that both of these variants left my normal voice basically unchanged.

Kazuaki: I was expecting to have to do snoring noises at least once during this session, but his narcolepsy appears to have been cured for this part of the game! I attempted a sort of doddery, absent-minded Patrick Moore-alike for him, but within about half an hour he had become David Mitchell.

The library bird whose name always escapes me: Squall Leonhart. This was another one that Kjorteo did by accident on first meeting him, and I could only follow suit by sounding dull, despondent and as flat as if he'd just been run over by a steamroller.

Yuuya: After some floundering here, I had tried to give him a calm, floaty sort of Pierce Brosnan lilty voice, only to find that he had now been christened "Stoner Yuuya" in the livestream chat as a direct result of my efforts. That's about as good as this one is going to get.

Shuu: The technique is simple - clamp your teeth together not quite closed, and speak without allowing your lips to touch your gums, drawing out all closed-lip sounds mmmmmmmmmelodramatically. You now sound like Alan Rickman - or at least, like the Potter Puppet Pals' interpretation of Severus Snape.

Oko-san: I was encouraged to do a full Brian Blessed for this energetic dove, but I couldn't oblige because my parents-in-law are staying with us and my basement office is not blessed with a door. After some attempts at that sort of whispered shout that you do when you're giving the impression of shouting without wanting people around you to think you're crazy, I realized someone who was perfect for his obsession with speed and powerrrrr - unfortunately, I only got to use it on the single line he had in the entire second half!

Anghel: Bombastic and a tad insane - as you might expect from those requirements, this immediately turned into Tom Baker (or would have, had I the ability to do so). Now that I come to think of it, he could just as easily be voiced by Sammy Thunder of Limozeen.

One: A bit of a surprise for this one, starting near the beginning of part two. It certainly surprised me when it happened, anyway - apologies once again to Kjorteo, specifically for the distribution of pizza over his monitor and keyboard.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing how everyone else coped with that same session as told through our regular narrator's eyes - something that I'll watch this week before the impending grand finale this weekend. It's been an incredible journey - perhaps we will yet emerge intact.

And then we'll have to do the sequel.

Easter Sunday

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:53:09 GMT

Whitney's parents are around, and they treated us to the same place where we went to the Easter brunch last year (the day before I started the 'new' job!)

Once again I was caught by a marauding Easter rabbit who was handing out posh doughnuts (the name of which I can't remember), and competition is stiff between this year and the last as to which costume was scarier. This one doesn't quite have the cold, dead eyes of the one that arrived last time, but made up for it with the smile instead - this is the kind of thing that you'd normally see at 2am just before being smashed in the face with an axe.

Calling card

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:26:26 GMT

Whenever I see one of these on the front door from a distance, I always have the most irrational pang of panic that somebody's issued my house a parking ticket.

Alive for a 10000 Days

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:48:17 GMT

I had an unusual message from the calendar on my phone when I woke up this morning - it simply said "10000th day". And I vaguely recall now that during a moment of boredom at some point last year, I found some sort of online date calculator, worked out when I would have been alive for ten thousand days, put it into my phone and then completely forgot about it. It happens about four and a half months after your 27th birthday - and after that, you stay in five figures for the rest of your life.

Sadly, my 10000 days of experience haven't come together to allow me to think of anything particularly profound to say about this moment... now that I'm looking around online, I'm seeing that it's meant to be the point where you start considering yourself an adult, after having failed to do so at all the previous age milestones. All things considered, this isn't looking like a good time for me to turn into one either (see the last few posts). But I don't feel any different - when I was much younger I always thought that I would somehow be magically changed as an adult and would just have a natural knowledge of how the world worked and what I was doing, but I really don't. Perhaps in another ten thousand days.

Lesson Zero

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:34:55 GMT

Over the past year or so, I've looked on as my male (if admittedly slightly gay) friends succumbed one by one to a baffling craze that was sweeping the Internet - the My Little Pony cartoon. Respectable, talented FA artists fell to drawing and writing about complex mythologies set in places with names like Ponyville, and some haven't emerged since. Thinking that I actually had some things I wouldn't stoop to, I resisted for a long time, but this weekend curiosity got the better of me.

I watched an episode of My Little Pony. Lesson Zero, in fact, which kjorteo had been trying to get me to watch for ages - and I have recorded my reactions for the benefit of others.

Save me now

The episode opens with a purple pony who might be blue, called Twilight (I cheated in getting this bit of information, reading it from the Youtube episode description). She's merrily trotting around her luxurious tree-apartment getting her personal assistant, a diminutive dragon called Spike, to check off a recursive list of checklists as she steps through them in an accent and personality that instantly makes me feel like I'm watching an equine version of Sex and the City.

Fortunately, one title sequence later, any handbags and shoes on the list have already been dealt with, and the next thing on the calendar for the day is cupcakes. The two of them arrive at the bakery to find the baker-pony dashing about carrying other cupcakes and boxes around on her mad twirly haircut. It was at this point that I wondered how these creatures with four legs that end in blank plastic hooves could hope to manipulate anything with more precision than just kicking it across the room, but my question was answered a couple of seconds later. Spike reaches for a cupcake and is suddenly surrounded by a pink sparkly bubble and whisked away as Twilight's unicorn horn glows - it seems that they have telekinetic powers to make up for their lack of usable limbs, like Homestar Runner or Psycho Mantis. Overall it seems a fair trade.

Anyway. The first signs of Twilight's underlying mental disorder are hinted at here, as she complains because two of the cupcakes are touching each other and "I don't want anypony to be like somepony else is getting more icing". We're two minutes in and my urge to slaughter things is already lodged at a level for which I hadn't realized I had the capacity. The baker-pony obligingly just puts on a show of humouring this clearly mad customer as Twilight floats a spatula over to herself and whittles the mass of red icing down like a Chewing the Fat 'Angry Man' sketch until there's a microscopic amount per cake, covering Spike and making him lick the mass of spare icing off himself in a fantastic Tasmanian Devil manoeuvre.

Back at the house, Twilight panics as she remembers that she hasn't sent a letter to Princess Celestia this week - she's meant to send a regular report describing something she's learned about friendship and the whole programme suddenly turns into a dystopian sort of false smile-land where not being happy or useful enough leads to swift, quiet termination. The actual punishment for failing to send this letter isn't specifically mentioned, though it's said that Princess Celestia holds everyone's fate in her hooves - a real predicament because as I detailed earlier, you can't really hold many fates in those hooves before they all just sort of slip off. Twilight asks "Do you know what teachers to do students who don't pass?" and has a mad vision of herself being sent back to pony kindergarten, which is pronounced with a D - I quite like how Spike is the straight man here to her insane frenzy, equally trying to reason with her and making aside glances of utter contempt.

In a panic, she gets her organizer out and... balls, I actually laughed at that. She horn-summoned her calendar over to herself while Spike was still attached to it and he whacked against the side of the lectern. What are you doing to me? And we've only been going five minutes. Perhaps, across all tastes and artistic media, watching others in pain is always slightly amusing.

Anyway, she goes out to find someone who has friendship problems that need solving, so that she has something to write about. Instantly hearing a scream from a pony who I think she says is called Rarity, she runs up to the nearby house that looks like a demented carousel, heroically kicks her door in and pulls a terrifying face as she happily realizes she's in some manner of distress. Rarity, who has a very in-and-out slippery accent from that place that doesn't really have a name but is what happens when Americans try to imitate how British people speak, has lost some sort of inconsequential accoutrement but then finds it again in the shortest mystery ever, and Twilight has no choice but to leave her alone to spend the rest of the day prancing about with ribbons and fainting.

Certain that someone else will need her shortly, her next encounter is with a pony boy called Rainbow Dash who is furiously demolishing a barn with the aid of just goggles, the power of flight and his Pride Parade hair. However, the owner of the barn, a pony in a Speed Racer helmet called Applejack who has the accent that happens when people from Britain try to imitate how Americans speak, explains that he's just knocking it down so they can put up a new one, as the kamikaze rainbow-pony concludes with a vertical dive-bomb which causes a sort of atomic gayplosion (a scene which I also, much to my chagrin, also found absolutely flippin' hilarious).

Trotting away from that waste of time, the next of the ponyfolk she heads for is Fluttershy, who got her name from a photo printing website, and the... oh my goodness. I've just, honestly, watched a cute plastic yellow pony breaking a bear's neck, complete with a rather sickening bone-snapping sound (and a Strong Bad Japanese cartoon background). Four seconds later, though, just after Twilight has moped off, it's revealed that it wasn't a fight after all but that she was just trying to massage a knot out of the bear's shoulder, though personally I haven't heard of spine-snapping as a normal treatment for this.

Unable to find a problem, there follows a sort of mental breakdown where she talks schizophrenically to her own reflection in a pool, exactly like Gollum, and watches a group of childreswfsidfsdfAAAAGH! This... this programme isn't right. Why are you making me watch this? This is just... demented. I'm writing to my MP.

I had started cataloguing Twilight's impressive collection of disturbing expressions, but I realized here that I was never going to keep up. Fortunately, Spike arrives to slap her to her senses, and at a pony-picnic somewhere else, the not-British one finds that she's forgotten the plates, but is fortunately able to magic up a chaise-longue for short notice fainting purposes. I thought that this was going to have some relevance, but it doesn't - Twilight arrives, her mane frazzled and with the cold grin of a killer on her face, and tells them about her near-due letter, only for them quite rightly to tell her that she's overreacting like a complete girl. She leaves in a huff via teleportation.

He'll kill you while you sleep-le

Twilight, by now clearly mad as a Dopefish, decides to engineer a friendship problem of her own, and telefrags the children's ball as they're in the middle of playing with it. She advances on them twitching like a maniac on Red Bull, and offers them... Christ almighty. It's the equine version of Uncle Feedle. The children - who are called Sweetybell, Scoodaloo and Applebloom, proving that our world hasn't quite yet plumbed the true depths of humiliating names - politely go along with it at first and then wisely run away very fast indeed. They only get into Twilight's planned dustcloud Beano-fight when they argue about which one of them has to stay and risk being in the vicinity of this nutcase to play with the monstrous voodoo-teddy. Then she spurts hearts out from her horn and hypnotizes them into loving it, symbolized by their eyes being somewhat disturbingly replaced with hearts.

Realizing she can't halt the newly refuelled punch-up, she calls on a nearby monosyllabic pony who I think is called Big Mac, who plucks the undead monster-doll out of the fight and falls under its curse as well, causing an growing tidal wave of ponies as everyone in the entire world chases after it. It eventually lands near Rainbow Dash at the picnic, and he... oh, it's a 'she', sorry about all that - I just looked at the comments. I wonder why I thought she was male - I'm sure her voice sounds less feminine than the rest, but that's like saying Gilbert Gottfried's voice is less annoying than sandpapering the back of your own head. Anyway, the eye-heart infection almost gets her as well - however, in a moment oddly reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Twilight appears to cover all of their eyes and screams not to look at it as chaos breaks out around them and darkness covers the world.

The sun sets and Celestia descends from the heavens like an avenging Vidal Sassoon advert, undoing the spell and breaking up the plague that had gripped the land. She then summons Twilight away to the library for extermination, melting down and being reformed as individual little Kinder Egg toys. From here, at least, things are unsurprising - she's not going to be punishing her after all, and they've all learned to take people's feelings seriously lest they become mad as a bag of spanners due to overstressing themselves, and so on and so on. It ends with them all composing a summary of what they've learned to send to her almighty postbox - closing with Spike trying to editorialize the letter and then giving us exactly the kind of withered look that I would expect from someone condemned to eternity existing in a twisted dreamscape full of squeaking, sparkly plastic girls.

So there it is - I now don't have the proud male state of "not having watched an episode of My Little Pony". You can tell it was made by someone from the Internet - I went in expecting a girly cartoon about plastic horses and got Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. When I first saw the artwork style I thought it was extraordinarily ugly, and the uncannily creepy expressions they can pull doesn't exactly help with that, but in motion there's a certain odd charm to the style that's different from the angsty, angular cartoons that I thought existed exclusively today - I liked the way that throughout the episode, the sun wrenched itself through the sky like an arthritic clock. If I had a daughter (or a son without a sense of school self-preservation), I'm happy to say that I wouldn't mind watching this with them, up to a certain dosage - but only after we'd run out of Bagpuss.

~~Actually I might watch another one~~

Ram Ray

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:37:55 GMT

Conversation during the last hour before leaving work this Friday led us to the subject of television, and things like Inspector Morse versus David Caruso (who plays a sort of ginger-haired crime-busting Richard Whiteley on CSI).

I chose to show them a typical segment of UK Saturday morning television - this was a studio game which was actually a number of years past my own era, in which callers get a dwarf (who this week is dressed up as a cake for some reason) to run at a set of five doors, except four of them are nailed shut.

They said the same thing that everyone here always says when I talk about British children's programmes - that it's like something that they would have expected to see on Japanese television, or after taking a large quantity of drugs.

The worst morning ever

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:55:26 GMT

I'd just like to note that the local rock radio station was on at the dentist. I spent a morning having my head irradiated then my teeth assaulted with sharp instruments, in a chair with a broken armrest, listening to Linkin Park.

Journey

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:24:04 GMT

During the conversation that I mentioned in my last entry, ravenworks also mentioned another, less mad, game - and I can say that Journey is extremely beautiful. It is also extremely short, which did make me question the $15 asking price a bit, but I've spent $15 on much worse than this (namely, Kamelot's first two albums). After playing through it - an activity that took about one and a half hours - I'm not even sure if it's a game so much as diazepam administered in digital form. You could say that it's a bit like Shadow of the Colossus without the action-packedness, and impossible as that premise sounds, I was just overwhelmed by its... incredible niceness.

There's not really much to say about it from a gameplay perspective, as the objective can be summarized with "go forwards and get to the mountain", with the side quest of "grow a big scarf" - but even though the obstacles that it puts you through are rather gentle and usually based on finding what to squeak at to lift you higher, the combination of the soundtrack and graphics create a really wonderful journey through different environments (what else can I say?). I really loved the way that it could guide you into reaching the crest of a dune and then suddenly reveal something behind it - and the game had the important feature of a very satisfying base movement, being able to ski down the sand dunes towards that next interesting thing (I was delighted to see the entire levels full of that later on). It never felt artificial - it gently kept you within the boundaries of the game by blowing you backwards in the wind if you went too far in the wrong direction.

This probably isn't something everyone experienced because it relied on me entering the game knowing absolutely nothing about its premise at all, but it managed to spring the greatest surprise that a game has sprung on me for a very long time - that being the stealth co-operative aspect. I had reached the second area of the game when I noticed movement in the distance, and moved towards it to see another robed thing jumping about the landscape. I assumed it was a part of the game, a computer-controlled player that showed you what to do, and we hopped about building some carpet bridges together. Then... all throughout the game, Whitney and I were wondering whether this was somebody we'd been paired with online - I couldn't quite see how it would work, and I felt that the focus of the game was too much around me for it to be multiplayer (I always felt that I was in control, and there were only a couple of places where my partner activated something instead of me). Later on in a snow-covered mountain, the partner took a stupid route into a dead end, and I wondered about that - then I thought that computers were more likely to do that than humans. Eventually the game ended and presented me with a list of "People you met", and my flabber had never been so gasted - without knowing it, I had helped other people get through the game, and they had helped me. Apart from the one who kept too far ahead for us to heal in each others' aura, the git.

Despite the simplicity in the robed things' communication, I really felt empathy for my character, especially towards the end of the game - cringing when I was caught by the headlight-dragons or in danger of freezing, and feeling rather heartbroken when I lost my scarf. There was a wonderful contrast between the game's unusually earthbound start (I can't remember the last game where I had to worry about jumping too much and using up my energy) and flying free up the mountain at the very end. And being able to communicate with an unknown partner by meeping at each other... it's all incredibly charming.

The strongest message I took away from this game was that Internet people are much more tolerable when their mode of speech is limited to the level of Sooty and Sweep. Having that expressed in art is alone worth the $15.

Stumbling through Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou or something like that

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:47:48 GMT

ravenworks reminded me about this series a couple of nights ago, and having put Amnesia aside for a while due to its rather dull translation to a playthrough video, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the SNES era. Having apparently felt that my life hadn't quite been weird enough recently, he came up with this suggestion, a specimen from Japan. Sorry about the stripe down the right hand side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCjl3H7V7Ss

I had no idea what it was about when I started, but I was quickly to find out that it was a side-scrolling beat-em-up. It has an alleged storyline, but just by looking at it I can't really make any connection with what goes on in the game - it appears to be about beating robots up and stealing their ingredients so that your Robochef 4000 can bang two of them together until they form a meal. I suppose that's where the "Gourmet" bit of the title comes from - I hadn't realized that until now.

Anyway, just look at it - it defies description, and I didn't even get very far. It did lead me to notice, however, that I have a tendency to vocalize pain felt by my player character - and I hadn't realized that during moments of stress my voice could get anywhere near that high.

I should make it clear - if you can't tell - that during my complete incoherence on the first boss, I was looking at her bizarrely muscular robo-legs. Goodness gracious me.

The fruits of madness

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 04:51:24 GMT

Angra

Silent Force

Edguy

Sonata Arctica

(Two here)

By the way, I've got about fifty of these, so you might as well get into it.

Evolution in action

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 03:08:01 GMT

I've just realized that when I came into this country five years ago, Americans used to say "Seriously?" to express surprised or appalled disbelief. Now they say "Really?"

Anyway, have some Miyazaki-slippers.