I read a lot of Lovecraft. If you’re not familiar with his work, his core concept of “cosmic horror” revolves around mankind’s innate ability to blissfully ignore the obvious fact that on a cosmic scale nothing man can do will matter. We are a speck of dust enjoying a lull of quiet in a swirling, endless, uncaring void. In Lovecraft’s time, before the internet shrank us all down, when even the weight of a man’s home town could utterly dwarf him, this notion was enough to drive people absolutely bonkers.
Lovecraft, an atheist, had no such shield as religion to instill in him a sense of significance. He was a fearful prejudicial man. You could argue that his ambitions as a writer was a grasp at immortality and significance, and in a way, he has succeeded; We still read his work, and will for a long time to come. This is the classic conceit of the starving artist. We grasp at creativity and produce to expand our existence enough to hopefully touch enough people to matter. As a musician and programmer, I see literally no difference between development and art.
So I’m struggling, as I do periodically, with the cosmic horror of Flash development, or indeed, with web development. On general terms, the absolute fewest of us have the luxury of working on a large project; something intended to last beyond the span of a client’s advertising budget. The last time i wrote something special -a role-playing game for kids funded by a well-paying client that still gets significant use, years beyond its intended lifespan- was years ago. I look at the work I do slip between my fingers and vanish into the uncaring void of the internet.
How do you cope with the sensation that nothing you do outlives the common housefly? I return to this subject on at least a monthly basis, and it can be absolutely devastating.
Outside of the money, what really keeps us in this industry? Anyone have any inspirational stories of transition? Goals met, the future changed?
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while, but every time i started it felt like i was trying to teach a crowd that already knows better than me, and that’s a level of arrogance beyond even me.
But i can’t help but feel there is something to how i do things that must be at the very least affirming to some developers out there. Flash developers often work alone or in small groups, and few really have a big community to hang out with. It creates an atmosphere where you are never really comfortable with your own skill level, and for me at least it fostered a belief that everybody out there were doing rocket science and I was still building Lego cars and didn’t even bother to make the colors uniform.
I’ll write down some specific beliefs that have helped me a lot.
Dreamweb was a 1992 cyberpunk adventure game that gained notoriety for its adult subject matter and an uncensored sex scene. That said, the sex was top-down, poorly drawn and took place over a space of 30×30 pixels, which i think counts as mosaic censorship anyway, so big whoop to that. It got an absolute buttload of press for its violence, which was graphic, frequent and over the top, and landed a fair response with reviewers. Over time, it has become less remembered for its sex and gore, and more so for its poor puzzle design, awkward interface and aimless storytelling.
But i love Dreamweb to death. Because i infer.
In 1992 i was 10 years old, and despite trying hard, completely incapable of understanding what Dreamweb was all about. It was a Blade Runner-esque dark sci-fi trip into a perpetually rainy city where the protagonist, Ryan, is suffering through a psychotic break. Ryan, through his dreams, receives messages from a mystical council of hooded monks, who assure him the world is going to end unless 7 powers are stopped. These 7 powers conspire to tear apart the Dreamweb, which i assume is akin to Stephen King’s “beams”; the fabric of reality. These 7 powers are contained by 7 people. Ryan must murder these seemingly completely unrelated 7, or the world will end. As such, the game boils down to 7 murders. The puzzles are essentially murder scenarios to be played out.
In waking life, Ryan is miserable, working as a bartender in a dive bar. His frequent nightmares and messages from the dream world are beginning to distort his perception of reality, drives him into a deep depression, skewing his priorities to the point of open neglect. His girlfriend, Eden, a receptionist at Sartain corporation, is at the point of the game’s start weary of Ryan’s constant nightmares and turn towards the dark. She loves him, but he is drifting away from her, and she’s realizing that at this point she can do nothing but watch.
The game begins as Ryan wakes up from yet another apocalyptic nightmare. He’s been given the name of the first power, and has reached a point where the dreamworld seems more real than reality. He is convinced, and sets out to perform his divine duty. It’s the middle of the night, at Eden’s apartment. Eden sleepily tries to console her boyfriend, but drifts off, as Ryan gets dressed and exits into the perpetually rainy neon-lit metropolis, knowing only his target’s last name.
Granularity
The heart of Dreamweb’s appeal is atmosphere. Almost every element of the game is fanatically detailed. A common criticism of the game was the ability to pick up nearly every item that wasn’t bolted down, which resulted in a whole heap of confusing puzzles. Why, for instance, would you need a screwdriver to bend open a locked cabinet when you were already holding a full set of cutlery? It’s telling that the game’s UI contained a separate zoomed-in per-pixel view of the cursor’s surroundings;
This was a game that knew it was firmly embedded in a hardcore pixel-hunt and gave players a sniper scope to carry out the grim task. It was also not above putting players in situations where, if they failed to pick up a key item, they could leave without it and never be given the chance to get it back. Knowing what a key item was was hard enough to begin with.
Rather awesomely, the game models a sort of 1980s conception of the internet, being console command driven. Ryan can access a terminal to check his mail and the daily news, as well as check the contents of the game world’s common storage unit, the Cartridge. Some cartridges hold information vital to advancement, but the world is literally strewn with red herring cartridges, and the process of digging out the gold could be absolutely maddening.
The murders themselves, the payoff if you will, were loud and graphic. Ryan’s first kill involves breaking into a penthouse hotel room, burying an axe in the chest of an unsuspecting man, taking the head off another with a gun, and coldly executing his target as he begs for his life. The red flows free and often, and morality is never a question. Everyone is rotten, and anyone can die.
All this is framed in a wonderfully moody synth-based soundtrack by Matthew Seldon, which elevates the game from oddity to something quite special. If anything is fondly remembered about the game these days, it’s the music.
Dreamweb flounders a bit in terms of storytelling. It paints a broad picture of a man who thinks he’s saving the world, but is wildly out of control, and bombards us with hints that he might not be mad at all. Taken at face value, Dreamweb is a basic story of a Jesus figure who suffers for our sins and saves us all from chaos and oblivion, and for me this was both its largest strength and weakness. It begins with enough hint that Ryan is simply going bananas, but spends the last two thirds of the game reassuring us that he is in fact right. We are never forced to question our motive for murdering these people, and characters close to Ryan vanish as soon as they appear. The game can’t see the forest for the trees, and struggles to draw emotional investment. The mystery dies quickly, and leaves us with atmosphere and gore. A concept this good deserves so much more.
A Unity3D remake
I’ve been scrambling for a Unity3D project to devote my time to, and I’ve always gravitated towards the adventure game. Dreamweb is a wonderful place to visit but a tough place to stay, and every time i boot it up i recognize more things that could be bettered. A dark cyberpunk murder-scenario psychological adventure game? Why not give it a go!
I’ve been working on a Dreamweb re-imagining for the past month. I’m doing basic engine work at the moment, putting the mechanics into place for puzzle mechanics, item use, inventory management and, yes, combat. The game will be a first person adventure game in the vein of Penumbra, with a large emphasis on atmosphere, physical interaction, item-on-item puzzles, social engineering, computer interfacing and short, sharp combat. This is not a first person shooter. Bullets are important and big events, and a single one will do.
Besides this, i am writing a new script. The outline and characters are the same as the original game, but dialogue, puzzles, locations and core elements of Ryan’s character are thoroughly altered. So much so i am considering hiding Ryan and his name, as well as making his gender ambiguous.
I’ll keep posting news here as i go on. For now, as a teaser, here are the first 3 pages of the script for your perusal. Enjoy, and do post feedback! Dreamweb! Yeah!
Me and Anders Psychofreud started putting together a messaging application today that i think is totally weird, but for certain reasons really compelling. First a little history.
If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, but its weird implementation of massively multiplayer online play is really worth a long look. Nintendo are infamous for their friend code system, which puts users who want to play together through a good few burning rings before they can actually do so. Because of this system, you will never openly communicate with an identifiable unknown. The system allows for play with random strangers, but communication seems to be reinvented every time. If you are connected friends, you might get a full suite of options, but for random strangers you’re typically given what amounts to a few emotes and canned phrases. For a game with MMO pretentions, this is obviously hugely challenging.
Animal Crossing lets users that aren’t connected friends “interact” through side-effects of their actions. I had a real moment of wow when i spent a few irrational minutes making a pixel perfect nazi swastika pattern and put it up in my clothes shop for my (already utterly irreverent) animals to wear. Soon, the swastika pattern had migrated from my town to my few friends’ towns. And then the ball just rolled from there. Friends of friends of friends of friends would see nazi animals show up in their towns.
Media in Animal Crossing spreads like a disease. It’s a viral mmo.
An animal will show up in your town and ask for a new catchphrase. The next day, it might have moved out to another town. Which town? You’re not the one who decides. This lets you communicate ideas, but only to random recipients. This system is epitomized in the bottled mail system, which lets you write a message, put it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Whoever gets the message is apparently completely random, throughout the online service. I have gotten bottled messages ranging from ascii cats to sorrowful suicide notes.
This is what makes Animal Crossing so enticing for adults i think. A combination of pure OCD collectomania and a world that seems wildly chaotic. In my mind, after a few weeks play, an Animal Crossing town is like an out of control train in a tight turn teetering on one rail.
What we begun putting together today is a purification of the bottled mail system. An anonymous client that lets you post messages into a pile, and retrieve random ones you haven’t written yourself. When you retrieve one, it is removed from the database. This ensures that a message is anonymous and personal. Of course, the system is widely open to abuse, but i actually don’t mind that aspect. Sitting on the beach sifting through debris for gold, you’re likely to find a whole lot of junk.
I’m hoping the system will find a place as a way to let off steam, and let off guilt. Somewhere to confess, or to be heard by someone who will know that somewhere, out there, a single individual posted this thought for a single individual to read. The internet is so often about the individual entity spreading information as widely as possible; the cluster bomb collateral damage model of information.
This narrows the focus back on the individual recipient, and theoretically eliminates the egotist exhibitionist publisher.
It’s the Anti-Twitter, anti-Facebook. It’s not about the masses, but the individual, sporadic connection of strangers’ eyes meeting sporadically through the window of a passing bus. The prototype is in development here, and I hope you’ll find it interesting as it evolves. At the time of writing it has almost no effort whatsoever put into the UI. Making it pretty comes next.
Well look what dropped into my mailbox today! A review copy of Packt’s new Unity book; Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone. Just in time to break my inspirational drought!
I haven’t written anywhere near enough about Unity on this site yet, but i have a couple of large projects in the pipeline, and this is a nice kickstart to get writing.
Lovely looking book so far. It’s a thorough beginner’s introduction to the Unity editor and its unique concepts, and contains enough references to Flash to be a real asset to the Flash designer/developer wanting to test the Unity waters. When I’m done with it, being a wonderful man, I’ll do the right thing and tell you if it’s worth your time
I’ll be first in line to say I’m a slow learner, particularly in terms of math. I’m the sort of guy that will need facts banged home with a sledgehammer for at least half a year before they finally stick, and then 6 months more before they start mingling with the other facts and i start being able to combine things into new things. I’m not embarrassed about that; it’s just my class of brain. I have no real education to speak of so everything I’ve learned has been on a per-project basis; experiences.
Splines is one of those concepts I’ve only recently started futzing about with. Bezier splines are neat for drawing, and i use Catmull-Rom splines for smoothly interpolating sequences of keyframes in animation. They’re neat, useful things. A toy I’m working on uses user-drawn Catmull-Rom splines as the basis of lofting and revolving 3d geometry. It’s not exactly NURBS, but it’s definitely in the same realm. It’s fascinating as hell. One of the earliest issues i ran into was getting the normal of a given point on a spline. And this is where it gets retarded, and i start over-engineering.
Instead of looking at the bigger picture, i immediately start looking for one-stop solutions for spline normals. After banging my head into that for a while, i realize a spline tangent is a more common goal, and i start banging my head into that one as well. The lesson here is that you don’t need one-stop solutions, and you don’t always have to use the smartest stuff if what you do winds up working. Turns out the easiest and most practical way to get a spline normal on a catmull-rom spline segment is to do the following:
Sample the point on the spline you want a normal for (p1)
Sample another point (p2) on the spline slightly further along; for instance if p1 is at 0.5, sample p2 at 0.51
Subtract p2 from p1: Bam, you have a unit vector (v) parallel to the direction of the spline at p1
Get the normal to v by swapping and inverting its components.
Since you’re sampling *along* the spline, the normal won’t ever flip.
It’s such an epic facepalm moment. Why did i think about it so hard? When you take a couple steps back and look at the problem “physically”, it’s dreamily clear! I’m sure there are “smarter” ways to get this information, but aside from the double spline sample (which is just a bunch of multiplications anyway) the rest of it is lightweight enough to be negligible. Unless you’re doing this a shit ton of times for a lot of geometry, the approach i outline works just fine, even for real-time purposes. In my naive fanciful mind, the “proper” solution is this overwrought slow thing that takes longer to execute. That might be complete bull, but hey
I Googled this problem and found nothing this straightforward, so i hope it’ll help someone else too.
Going through old backups i stumbled across this 2006 live PA by my old labelmate The Enticer. When we were doing things as Hardcore Crossbreed, i really, firmly believed that we could change that genre. We went in as pretentious hateful bastards, and did our own thing; Vicious noise paired with depression and sadness. Really a product of the time, but i really believe we were doing something unique. While Hardcore got slicker and tighter, our brand of generous horror hasn’t really been matched since then to my knowledge, and listening to this set reinforces that impression.
My god, it makes me want to get back into hardcore. Give it another go. Every time i make another pass into what it’s become now i get more and more depressed by it, but listening to this still-fresh 4-year-old stuff we were up to makes me think there’s still hope
It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time when Microsoft releases another operating system or other high-profile product, and Apple breaks out their douchebag license in order to be first in line with the water balloons to spoil the party. In other words, it’s time for another Apple-related rant.
I’ve started a separate page under the Music header for my DJ sets and mixes. Typically hour long sessions of music i simply enjoy listening to and working with, and typically dark. Hope you’ll find something you like!
A feature request for the Doomsday Console was a UNIX-style double-tab search. When typing a word, hitting tab twice in quick succession would take the word currently under the caret and do a search of all available commands and list them for you. Definitely handy if you have a command or method name on the tip of your tongue.
The trouble, of course, is that the tab key in the console is currently seriously crowded. Shift-tab toggles the console, tabbing while typing autocompletes, tabbing while typing an argument adds a space. Adding double-tab, which by necessity means i have to wait for a few milliseconds (more like 150 for my slow fingers to keep up) before committing actual tab actions reduces all the other tab functionality to a nagging crawl. What seems like a short moment soon becomes unbearable; in keyboard terms, 150ms is an aeon.
So how to implement it effectively? On one end, i’m actually really big on the idea of putting as much on the tab key as possible, making it the natural go-to-guy for your fingers whenever you want something done that ISN’T a command call, but on the other, i’m only up for that until it gets confusing.
Kieran/dBlue suggested an AJAXian approach where typing a word and then waiting a second or two automatically performs a search for you. I call this the “uhhhh-search”. I like how simple it is, but the fact of the matter is that the list of hits grows HUGE as soon as the search term is short enough. The idea is that searching for “cannon” will return both “bigCannon” and “cannonBall”, so a search of “ad” will typically give you a list of at least a couple lines. To have the console cluttered with random searches is not an ideal solution.
The final solution i’ve settled on is to drop any doubles or combinations, and try to be contextual. If the word under the caret is known in its entirety to the dictionary, skip to the end of the line and append a space as normal. If it is unknown however, do a search for it. I’m not sure it’s the optimal solution, but it leaves a minimum of clutter, can be toggled off, and still follows well with the tab-for-everything idea.
I published a 41(!) minute screencast of me just blabbing and showing off features of my AS3 console project. If you want to hear a sick norwegian talk about shit and show off sort of buggy code, go for it! Yeah!
Relatively unsung hero Alan Shaw has published a version of his Delaunay triangulation and voronoi AS3 library. This is good news for everyone! There’s been a heap of talk about voronoi libraries and triangulation in the community recently, but for me at least the stuff has been at arm’s length simply because, well, that stuff is a bit over my head. I got about as far as an algorithm for finding the circumcircle of 3 vertices, but why bother now? Go Alan! Hello applications!
Personally i’ve been really interested in navmeshes for pathfinding, a topic i intend to write about as soon as i’ve sussed it out. This library is an amazing enabler.
You may have noticed the “code” page link at the top there. I don’t exactly have a long, proud history of sharing my code and libraries, but i do have a fairly long, proud history of writing code and libraries. This is mostly because i’m terrified of what better coders will think.
First awkward attempt is my googlecode publish of a console utility i wrote for use at work. The googlecode page has a long sales pitch i tried to put some effort into, so here’s a snippet from that:
“The primary goal is to let users avoid having to create custom GUI every time they want to test a method with different arguments. Here are examples of ways in which i’ve used it to date.
Trying various image URLs with an image gallery to see if scale and layout automates correctly
Passing arguments to a socket connection to test connectivity and remoting
Adjusting tween times alongside an AD without having to recompile
Adjusting pixel position, rotation and scale of display objects alongside a designer without having to recompile
Changing game agent states at runtime to test various conditions
Changing application states under various conditions to make sure it doesn’t break
Reloading site XML content descriptors at runtime, letting me compare documents and make changes to documents without having to recompile to test them.”
If any of this sounds useful to you, hop on over and check it out. Also give feedback. Also be nice, i’m aware of my limitations
Keith Peters put up a comprehensive blog post on why he disagrees with generic keyboard managers. It’s well worth reading. I have to admit, i couldn’t even conceive of input events directly altering the model without first passing through an input testing step in the game loop. It’s practically game dev heresy!
It apparently boils down to an optimization issue. I’ll say that if you need those extra tiny cycles, then sure, Keith’s approach is a fair optimization. But, call me conservative, i would personally never think to base my game development workflow on such an approach. Writing custom code for a very abstract step of the game framework on a game by game basis seems like an unnecessary speed bump. In other words, i’d go mad writing boring code before i got to do any of the fun stuff.
Iain Lobb is considering publishing his gamepad class, and i do believe i’ll do the same soon.
Got back from Brighton a couple days ago, bringing fresh diseases. Let me start out by cursing the dude that chose to sneeze me square in the back of the head during the last talk. I’m real grateful to you, you rude prick. Hello influenza.
I much enjoyed FOTB this year, even more so than last year. I feel i made good choices as to what sessions i attended, and i came back actually having learned something. Last year was more of an affirmation thing, where i came back knowing i wasn’t completely retarded about how i was doing things. This year, the themes of performance and pushing the platform further was really strong, and restored a lot of faith for me.
I’ll try not to ramble on and on about the things i saw and enjoyed, but hey:
Thea Eaton’s talk on accessibility really resonated with me. I’ve done some installation/expo work in the past, and accessibility was always handled in terms of the tactile user interface. Thea’s talk highlighted users with impaired vision, and i realized both how amazingly unfair it is to write content excluding the blind, and how messed up it is that the internet is as much of a visual medium as it is when sound is so amazingly evocative. It got me thinking about an experimental XNA game called The Pit, which put players in a pitch black room with a monster, and the task of avoiding it by sound alone. Closing my eyes and letting my imagination fill in the gaps was a fantastic experience. I also recalled the reason why i’m so fond of games like Thief and System Shock; The soundscapes and the sense of place they give you.
I got to thinking about going further with sound than i have before. As a Flash developer you’re almost indoctrinated to think of sound as something people typically turn off or don’t want to have to deal with, and that’s a huge shame. People like Andre Michelle put in so much effort pushing Flash audio, giving us tools to dynamically create really full soundscapes, yet we don’t.
It was discouraging to see how many people left her talk near the end. She went far overtime but the actual content and message of her talk was really important stuff. You’d think people would care more.
Post FOTB challenge list #1. Make a shoot’em’up with no visuals.
Joa Ebert’s talk on compiler-level optimization, crowned with a mindblowing demo of C# and Java compiling to Flash, is absolutely my favorite talk of the convention. I learned a hell of a lot about how compilers work, and it made me realize how absolutely mindboggling it is that we have to stop ourselves from writing nice, verbose, readable code for optimizations the compiler should take care of for us. A 30fps to 500fps optimization demo really slammed that point home for all of us. Long, standing ovation. He’s a fantastic speaker and a very likable character with a lot of important stuff to say. I feel bad for everyone that missed it.
Keith Peters‘ talk on game frameworks was one of those affirmation moments for me. It’s always good to see i’m not crazy. The one thing i really couldn’t wrap my head around though was the notion that a keyboard manager that you poll for key states in the game loop is a bad thing. The argument is that polling a keyboard manager 30 times per second is wasteful compared to simply reacting when a key is pressed and released.
I have no idea how i would write an effective game loop that doesn’t check if a key is currently pressed or not. In addition, in AS3, For me it boils down to whether you’re calling a method to do that check or testing a boolean. Either way, the key state needs to get stored someplace.
My keyboard manager simplifies down to the following:
From elsewhere in the application, a singleton of this manager could be queried with keyDict[keyCode] to check if a key is currently pressed.
I’m very, very curious about other alternative event driven approaches now. Disagreeing with Keith on something feels like very unstable ground on which to build a castle.
Andre Michelle’s session reiterated a lot of what he said last year (at least it felt like that) but he showed off some things i’m currently praying hard he releases to the public. A granular loop player using ray reflection to alter playback position and direction blew everyone’s mind, but for me the additive wavetable pad synth was the most musical of anything he showed. So much so, if he releases it, i will be using it to create instruments. It’s that good.
Beyond these talks, i think every single session i went to was interesting. Grant Skinner’s talk on optimization made me more aware of how the garbage collector works in terms of framerate (time to pool our objects guys!), and the Adobe town hall surprised me with how many are insecure about how the GC operates in the timeline context.
The parties were great, meeting people and talking shit was great, and outside of the horrible diseases i brought back home; thanks to everyone i met. Super thanks to Keith Peters and Andre Michelle for putting up with my fanboy nervousness Next time i talk to you will be less scary for sure.
Super special thanks to Paul, Mark, Jay, Glenn, Anders, all you #actionscript folk. It’s always nice to see you lot again.
As for the rest of the Oslo crowd, i ‘ll be seeing you next FUGN Promise!
Super crappy random iPhone camera shot gallery time!
[nggallery id=4]
Oh Tecmo. Seriously. Fuck you, you god damn imbeciles. You’re sitting on one of the best action adventure properties of the modern world, and you resort to this shit. You stupid motherfuckers. Watch me Ninja the eff away from your brand.
Merely concept art, this stuff is nonetheless absolutely abominable. I would love to see stuff like this on Deviantart, but as a visual guideline for a Mickey game? A post apocalyptic steampunk Disney universe. How BORING could you possibly be man?This is the least Disney Disney Disney has ever seen! Disney was ALREADY steampunk! Not “x-treme” enough for you?
Tell me, mr designer hero man, why the world needs another rosy red ideal painted over with the moral grays and apocalypse browns of the post 911s. We already live in a world smeared with shit, and we like nothing better than to add more depressive shit to it. If your idea of brand renewal and going further is by taking the chief characteristics and utterly reversing the polarity, i must confess to serious misgivings about your ability.
There is a rich cosmology to take from. There is a largely overlooked internal logic to the Disney universe that could be used to create an interactive experience where the most mundane things of day to day life could be made mad and incredible, but you choose to break everything and shove it down the post-apocalyptic game world dead-end. Make a darker, edgier Gummi bears while you’re at it. Jesus fucking christ. We do not need more of this brooding depression.
Match day! I made arrangements with my opponent, and our match began at 8pm sharp.
It turns out either i had misunderstood, or my opponent had, but having been told every team would be freshly rolled i was surprised to meet an experienced team of Lizardmen featuring a scrimmage line of level 2 sauri all equipped with the block skill; a serious problem for a rookie Skaven team, which hasn’t matured enough to feature any players really capable of a good punchup.
Blood bowl tackles (or “blocks”) are carried out with sets of special dice with icons for the various results. One of the results is “both down”. If player A attempts to block player B, and his roll comes up “both down”, he goes down along with his opponent, causing a turnover, forfeiting any further moves this turn. “Block” is a skill offered to certain player types, or won through level advancement, which essentially replaces the “both down” result from the die with “opponent down”. A block-equipped player will never go down on a “both down”.
Lizardmen teams are divided into two core player types, “skink” and “saurus”. The skink is lightning fast, dodgy and agile (though weak), while the saurus is a bumbling monster that can barely pick up the ball, but can cause serious damage to opponents. As a Skaven player, my primary weapons are speed and agility, and i’ll be spending as much time staying AWAY from the opponent as i will be trying to get the ball into his end zone. If i allow a player to be blocked, it’s a complete gamble in which “both down” is practically a jubilant occation. Facing a team of dedicated blockers, like the dwarves, skaven defense will be piled high. In advance i was glad to know i was facing Lizardmen, as they have no inherent block skills, granting me the dubious boon of possible both downs. Not so against this team.
Dauntless, i spent my pre-match balancing cashes on extra rerolls and went forth. Blood Bowl is after all a game governed chiefly by the winds of luck.
I’m playing a Blood Bowl cup! Following Kieron Gillen’s game reports and extended Blood Bowl press over at Rock Paper Shotgun, i was delighted to be asked to join a coworker and his friends in a cup organized through Facebook. Blood Bowl is the kind of game you really want to play with friends, which was partially why i could never really play the tabletop game before, but here i am, finally!
Blood Bowl was originally a popular tabletop board game by Games Workshop (of Warhammer fame) from the late 90s, depicting a fantasy version of American football pitting elves, orcs and the like against each other in a game that’s equally as much about luck and chance as it is about tactics and strategy, with persistent team members (adding a management and roleplay aspect to the game) as well as a high bodycount; putting your star players in harms way might just get them killed!
Recently, Cyanide games have produced a PC version of the game, and while it’s sort of a mess in terms of polish and presentation, the board game itself remains intact, complete with online multiplayer.
I’ve never played Blood Bowl before this, and my opponents are veterans, but it’s not a very complex game to learn, and because the game has such a large element of randomness to it i figure i stand as good a chance of failing miserably as of failing gloriously. I’ve spent the past week playing a bunch of games against the AI, learning the ins and outs of the various teams and figuring out a play style i agree with.
At first i was drawn to Orcs, as playing the game in a bashy, agressive way is instantly satisfying. As much success as i was having beating opponents to a pulp however, i wasn’t scoring a whole lot of touchdowns. After experimenting with more agile teams like Goblins and Elves, i eventually became rather comfortable with the Skaven. Skaven are essentially evil rat-men with a sharp emphasis on moving fast and dodging out of the way. They have exactly NO tools with which to break through a solid defense, but get their hands on the ball, and a touchdown is rarely more than 2 turns away. Provided you can keep their impossibly fragile frames out of your opponent’s reach that is..
Ladies and gentlemen, i present to you my Skaven Blood Bowl team:
Team Ratzeputz!
Blood Bowl players tend to grow personalities as they grow experience, so i’ll refrain from describing every individual rat just yet; They aren’t very varied as it is.
I’m set to play my first match this week, pitting my team of Skaven rat-men against a bunch of stinky lizards. Lizardmen have highly specialized player types catering to both the bashy side and the speedy side of the game, but nothing inbetween. I found them hard to play, and i’ve won my best victories over lizard teams. Then again, an AI is never anywhere as devious as a human player..
I’ll be back with a game report once it’s over. Predictions? I’m gonna get my ass kicked in a most epic way.
Given complaints that my writing typically falls into the camps of
Being happy about video games
Being angry about video games
Video games
Being angry
and also realizing that this is essentially true, i think it’s time to diversify.
I’ve been thinking a lot the past year about what makes a relationship work. I’ve seen friends and their relationships, i’ve reflected on my own, and i’ve considered the literal term “love” and what that means for people.
I’ve just up up a page of music links. If you’re interested in digging through an unorganized heaving great heap of old and new stuff from as far back as the mid 90s up til sketches i put together last week, it’s all there for you. There’s more scary text on the page itself.
Regardless of the awkward format and the fact that the list has EVERYTHING including the really, really shit stuff, i hope someone will find some enjoyment in there. Watch the volume though!
A special notice. Jeroen of Zero71, and Aaron of Hardcore Crossbreed; I know i let you both down tremendously near the end, and i’m deeply ashamed at how poorly i handled things. I hope you understand that i was at somewhat of a musical critical point, where i literally was feeling pain at cranking the stuff out. It wasn’t fun, it didn’t feel good. Like a gangrenous leg, I needed to cut it off completely. I’m nothing but grateful for the support you showed me, and i hope you can forgive me.
So my second warranty-less 360 died a week ago, and since my economy is currently shot for a couple of months, i’ve returned to my other systems for gaming sustenance. The Wii has gotten a lot more play (though mostly through VC stuff), but also my PC, my Dreamcast and bizarrely my Xbox classic (got to play Oddworld Stranger again, woo!).
I’m struck with some really odd emotions that have taken me a couple days to process fully. The first while i actually felt sort of desperate to pick up another 360, in spite of not having money for things like, you know, food. Getting to a point where i realized i had other gaming media was immensely liberating, and i got back to playing games i haven’t had time for in the longest while. I’ve finally finished Metroid Prime 3, i’ve been playing more Super Mario Galaxy, i finished Zelda 3 again, i’ve been getting into tournaments of Blood Bowl on the PC (which despite its bullshit frontend is really enjoyable if you’re a board game kind of person), and i started replaying Freedom Force and its sequel. I even got time to plan a weekend co-op session of System Shock 2 with a friend who never played it but loved Bioshock.
Got around to addicting my girlfriend to Rez on the PS2 as well, which is still a killer game.
Since my review of the original release of Aqi and Korg’s brilliant but crucially flawed Nintendo DS soft synth, the DS-10, development apparently hasn’t stood still! Shocking! To announce their DSi-powered update, Aqi have posted an absolutely hilariously fake “keynote” on youtube.
For all its ridiculousness, these are seriously good news! I’ll sum up the tastiest bits gathered from the available info.
Uses the faster DSi clock speed to effectively double the available synthesis. That’s 4 dual-osc synth parts and a ridiculous 8 drum sample channels.
Even if you don’t have a DSi, DS-10+ will finally unlock the song sequencer nice and proper. Videos show performers tweaking parameters and making on-the-fly edits while the song is playing. Previously, the song sequencer was an either-or situation, meaning for the most part if you wanted to make music, you were stuck with rapidly toggling patterns manually OR tweaking parameters. Now you can sequence the track in its entirety and make parameter adjustments as it plays. Hello effective live performance!
To give an indication of what people can do with a dual DS-10 setup, have a gander at this rather nastily polished trance track.
Well i’ll be damned. I had no idea John Ajvide LIndqvist’s brilliantly disturbing vampire love story Låt den rätta komma in was being made into a movie, but what do you know. Not only is it made, it’s getting great reviews on IMDB, and it’s seeing an international release!
If you get the chance, please read the book. It’s one of the bleakest, most unpleasant things i’ve read in a long time, but somehow comes out poignant and sometimes.. sweet?
Highly recommended. I can’t wait to see the movie.
… where i basically complain that every single time a movie critic looks for a way to describe a film as soulless or shallow they grab for the video game comparison. Call it a pet peeve, because it is. I can’t stand it. At the very least quantify your comparison; call it a BAD video game. But just lumping them all together isn’t doing anyone any favors.
It’s double annoying because i love cinema, and Roger Ebert is easily my most trusted film critic. So seeing him grab for that video game horse and give it another kick every time a movie with lots of crappy cgi in it comes along is really disappointing.
So my question is; what does it actually mean that he ran my letter, but had no response to it? Am i like.. An enemy of Roger Ebert now? Haha. Oh dear.
We’d been waiting impatiently for the DS-10, an official Korg condoned MS-20 emulator for the Nintendo DS, for quite a while, so finally getting the box in the mail and unpacking it was somewhat of a religious experience. Now that the gadget honeymoon has been going on for a while, i feel i’ve got enough of a grip on the software to speak confidently about it. So here i goes.
Next time i talk to you will be less scary for sure.
