Smoke Signals isn’t my favourite movie of all time, but this song is just absolutely hilarious. (The video is not from the movie. I wish I could find the whole scene from the movie on YouTube, but the only video I can find is too short.)
Transformers
We saw Transformers yesterday.
Verena: So, the real test: is this worse than Immortel?
Jonas: They’re bad in different ways. If these two movies were sweets…
Verena: What?
Jonas: Sweets. If these two movies were candy.
Verena: Oh.
Jonas: If it was candy, then Immortel would be poisonous. Transformers would be just a little unhealthy, and bland… but buying it would be supporting Hitler!
Full review may follow when my brain stops hurting.
Last Rose / Infinite Ocean mirrors
Since apparently some people were having the occasional bit of trouble downloading from the JustAdventure server, I uploaded copies of Last Rose in a Desert Garden and The Infinite Ocean to this site. So, if you want to see some of my older work, it should now be easier.
Awesome.
There’s a review of Desert Bridge up at Jay is Games which is so awesome that words simply fail me. Well, actually they don’t. Awesome is a pretty good word. And awesome it is.
That being said, House at Desert Bridge is a wonderful work to behold. It’s a story book for grown ups, a fairy tale for philosophers and parents. It instills in you the memory of what it is like to view the world as a child, to see everything with wonder, and at the same time it bears the burden of age, conflict, and struggle. It is a labor of love that is a story that is about labors of love, and while it’s not for everyone, if such things appeal to you, I suggest you check out the manual from Bob the Spider (comes with the download, for your convenience), and step through the window that leads to the House at Desert Bridge.
The bit that I put in italics – that’s perhaps what made me the happiest. Because that really is the essence of the game.
And that’s why I need another mirror. Hmm – let’s see if I can get my JustAdventure webspace to work again. I always have to end up asking for technical assistance, because in the time between games they tend to change stuff on their server, and I always feel rather embarrassed about it…
Hosting
I could really use some input here: what would be some possibilities for hosting Desert Bridge? I could really use a couple of mirrors, to ease this site’s burden.
Would really appreciate some suggestions.
Bars of Black and White
Gregory Weir recently released a new Flash-based adventure game called Bars of Black and White. And here are some thoughts:
- The game’s basic mechanic of using a scanner to read barcodes (found in all kinds of places and forms) is simple and original, and works excellently with the game’s Orwellian theme.
- Speaking of the theme – I like it. Using the room as a symbol of mental and physical imprisonment is something that I have also done myself, and an image that appeals to me.
- The only thing the game lacked for me was surprise, but that’s actually a compliment. How so? Well, that’s because large parts of the game are exactly the way I would’ve made them. It was almost… familiar.
- The use of crudely drawn black and white graphics is excellent. It creates an appropriate atmosphere, and also strongly supports the game mechanics. If the game’s graphics weren’t so near abstraction, you couldn’t believably use the scanner on so many different objects.
All in all, an excellent little game. Gregory has promised to release a game per month for the whole year; I am looking forward to all of them.
Now go have a look.
The Incredible Arghness
Recently another abyss of human behaviour has opened up in front of us, and it’s not pleasant to look at. I have only vaguely hinted at some problems we had about a year ago with certain people (which included the joyous event of someone putting a rootkit on my old computer and us getting the blame for what was done with that, which was more than a little shocking and absurd), but now it turns out that when that whole situation should’ve finally been put to rest, it in fact continued festering, and people have been spreading the most insane rumours about me and Verena. So, yeah, apparently we’re criminals who live in a three-way sex commune. (This is not a joke.)
Now, the sickening part of all this is not that people are saying these things. There’s a reason that I got so tired of the theatre group we were part of: the endless backstabbing and rumourmongering are nothing new, and we had to contend with that a great deal when doing our last show. What sickens me, what really sickens me, is that a number of people who should quite simply know better apparently do not. Not any close friends, thankfully – all of those think this is about as absurd as it gets – but nevertheless people that we have known for years, people that we have at times gone out of way to help or to support, both personally and in terms of the theatre. People who should know us well enough to know that this is all insane. (Though, frankly, these rumours have reached such a level of weirdness that I can’t help but think that anyone should see they’re insane.)
I’ve always believed that most people are essentially good, and more clever than they are given credit for. Sometimes I doubt the latter.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…
From: Obama’s program of war
Gates told the senators: “There is little doubt that our greatest military challenge right now is Afghanistan. As you know, the United States has focused more on Central Asia in recent months. President Obama has made it clear that the Afghanistan theatre should be our top overseas military priority.”
The war in Afghanistan, he added, would be “long and difficult.” The short-term time frame he placed on the conflict was “five years”—at least until 2014. He said an increase in US casualties was “likely” as operations are stepped-up against the anti-occupation insurgency being waged by loyalists of the former Taliban regime and other Afghan Islamist movements.
Gates stressed that as the new administration escalates military action in Central Asia, it has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq. Warning that resistance could erupt again against US forces in Iraq, he said “there may be hard days ahead for our troops.” Even if units designated as “combat” are pulled out roughly according to the 16-month schedule promised by Obama during the election, Gates emphasized that a sizeable force would remain and “we should still expect to be involved in Iraq on some level for many years to come.”
And from what they’re saying, the situation they have created in Afghanistan should be cleaned up by others, while they go kill more people. Because bombing a country where most people don’t even have access to water is the true path to democracy. Oh, and of course killing people in Pakistan is the way to peace.
More choices
I just noticed a user review of Desert Bridge in TIGdb, and felt I needed to remark on a couple of points it makes. I hope my posts about reviews don’t feel like I’m constantly being defensive; I’m mainly writing this to illuminate game design choices I made, in the interest of furthering discussion/thought on these matters.
Navigation is awkward at best; it takes a while to get used to the idea that each room is 4 screens, one in each direction, and even then it’s easy to get turned around. There’s no map function, making navigation even more difficult.
I’m not sure what to say about the first point. I realize that the idea of each room having four views is not how most modern games do it (and why should they; they have a different graphical style). But it’s not like this is some weird idea that I dreamed up. In older games – which Desert Bridge is very much modelled after – this was pretty normal. I guess some of these old conventions are being forgotten, which is also normal, but a bit of a problem for an old-school game… not sure where this train of thought leads.
The lack of a map is, indeed, sometimes confusing, and I considered including one at some point. But that just didn’t feel right in terms of the concept. Besides, what’s wrong with making your own map? We’re used, these days, to being spoonfed everything – but I actually think that making maps and jotting down notes is fun – and enormously immersive. Games like Desert Bridge are an intellectual exercise, after all. It’s worth playing them a little differently.
Menus are a bit unreliable, you can only use actions on things that are puzzle-specific, and thus, you can’t take a closer look at any of the myriad possible red herrings and other potential easter egg spots… some people would consider this a good thing, but I still have fond memories of licking a building in the opening screens of Space Quest IV to find Roger Wilco responding with “MMM! Wild berry!”
I’m not sure what “menus are a bit unreliable” means. I hope it doesn’t mean that there are any bits where menus don’t respond – as far as I know, everything you can do in the game will get you a response. I made sure of that.
The simplicity of the interaction with the environment – well, obviously that was a conscious choice. Having multiple interaction icons/verbs/cursors/whatever would add an unnecessary amount of frustration, making the game’s internal logic much harder to understand. I also have very fond memories of some of the odder respones you could get in some games – Quest for Glory comes to mind – but the House at Desert Bridge is weird enough without making the interaction more complex.
Since every single response you can get in the game is specific (and there is a LOT of them), changing interaction in this way would also have meant having to write even more incredible amounts of text, or sacrificing the specificity of the responses. Neither was a reasonable option. Keeping interaction simple and content complex is a choice I am very happy with.
The main part of this game that I was frustrated with, navigation aside, was the download. 40 megs normally isn’t bad for me, but it took a dozen attempts – each time I tried, it crapped out around the 80% mark. Frustration, thy name is “no mirrors available”.
A couple of people reported problems with downloading the game at one point – I think the servers were being updated at one point, which is probably what caused the problem. But I would love more mirrors. Well, having any mirrors at all, actually. If anyone has any good suggestions…
More editing
Yesterday we spent about an hour and a half editing one paragraph.
One. Paragraph.
Still, it’s absolutely worth it, and it’s bound to get quicker as we get to the parts with less exposition and more action. And I have to say, editing is a fascinating process. You can really take a whole paragraph apart into individual bits, and then reassemble it in a totally new way. The result has all the same highlights as the original, but works a thousand times better.
And then there’s cutting. I’ve been working in the university’s Writing Center for two years now, and I’ve always emphasised the importance of cutting what you don’t need. Applying this principle to fiction is sometimes painful, but often also a relief. Some sentences or sentence parts not only do not work, they ruin everything around them by screwing up the structure, rhythm, even the mental associations of the rest of the paragraph. You kick them out, and suddenly everything flows.
And when you’re tired, you play some Might & Magic VII.