I think this is number seven? Here's something that I found in the shared files on the network at university in 2005 or so, put up there by someone I knew as Steveo, who used to stay in the same residence as me and who is now the Earl of Cumbria or something. He was into stuff that was on the pretentious side, and alongside Stratovarius and Pink Floyd he had a fairly large collection of songs by a band I'd heard the name of called Dream Theater. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence was the first song that I heard from them, but Scenes from a Memory is the one that has stayed in my mind the longest.

Dream Theater are possibly one of the most recognizable names in progressive rock/metal, a cousin of the power metal genre I was familiar with, where music is characterized by its length and complexity. And there's no doubt that they're a group of incredibly talented musicians, but a lot of the time I feel they lean a bit outside actual music in the traditional sense and into the territory of show-off wank that happens to be in the shape of music. Scenes from a Memory does contain a certain amount of this (take for example The Dance of Eternity, a song in every time signature known to man and some from space) but it's connected so wonderfully together, with a story about solving a murder that happened 100 years ago through what Wikipedia tells me is called past-life regression therapy. Oddly, I feel I got an even better experience out of this album by downloading the songs individually as the connection allowed, before eventually buying it for myself, rather than being able to listen to the album beginning to end at first - a mountain of themes and references are woven through its 77 minutes so I could discover them gradually song by song, and it was another step in the idea of telling stories through music that I'd come to love.

The highlight for me is the wonderful ballad The Spirit Carries On, which builds gradually into a triumphant reprise of the very start of the album. As it was one of the last songs that I downloaded, it was all the more effective at tying together the story and calling back to this simple guitar strumming that I'd heard in the opening. It made me want to take my own attempts at music in a more story-focused direction, but I wasn't anywhere near being close to being able to pull that off at the time (and doing something of this complexity will frankly always be beyond me).

What, yes, okay, I'll keep doing it. How are you gentlemen - formative album five is the soundtrack to Zero Wing!

This might seem a bit of an absurd choice because people know and love this game mostly for its farcically poor translation, but I really wanted to include something that represented my roots in loving game music. I thought about a few different soundtracks to represent it - Frank Klepacki's guitar smashings on Command and Conquer, the excellent soundtrack to the first Soul Blade game (which I actually started writing this post about before changing my mind) - then settled on this due to it being the most power metal thing ever forced through a 16-bit FM chip.

It really shows where the sound I loved came from - game soundtracks at the time had to rely on synthesis unless they wanted to devote 75% of their cartridge space to music alone, and I think that forced music for action games to be attention-grabbing with a strong focus on melody to get its energy across. This was a combination of sounds that I didn't know existed in "real" music for a very long time, but now that I understand where the roots of a lot of this came from I've begun to recognize a lot of influence from early metal in games (take Doom for example, which lifted some Alice in Chains and Metallica songs wholesale).

The composition that went into the Zero Wing background musics is something that still impresses me, despite the Megadrive showing off its comparatively poor sound chip through its bizarre and alien efforts to sound like drums and electric guitars - the sound of that attempt is just immensely nostalgic to me. And the intricacy of the drums particularly stands out!

In the early 2000s the music industry was at war with the Internet. Peer to peer sharing programs like Napster and Kazaa were making redistribution of music (not to mention viruses) easier than it ever had been before and the lost revenue was preventing Lars Ulrich from buying a fourth yacht. Noise Records was one of the first record labels I saw really embracing this wave instead of pushing against it, with a tagline of "Download, Burn, Spread". For each album they released, you could go on to their site and get a ZIP file with a song or two as well as cover and disc artwork and so on, to print your own copies of a single at home which you were encouraged to give away everywhere. It was a concept very much like shareware music, before people stopped caring about physical media entirely and everything was put on Youtube instead.

Iron Savior was the band that led me to discover the Noise Records site, but on it I found an absolute goldmine of similar bands in the power metal genre. One of the other standouts was Kamelot, with a K as in Mortal Kombat. Unexpectedly given the stupidity of their name, they had a more sophisticated kind of flavour to their music - still heavily guitar-based but with the addition of orchestrations, piano parts and experimenting with traditionally non-metal instruments that I'd never even heard of like the bandoneon and djembe. Vocalist Roy Khan also had an unusual tone for a metal singer, very smooth and measured compared to the vocal acrobatics that are more characteristic of the genre.

This particular album was about to be released when I first discovered them, and I think it remains my favourite - Epica is the first of a two-part adaptation of Faust, and continued my fascination with music that told a story. There's such a variety of different styles here, each song having its own unique characteristics.

"A list of 10 Albums which have greatly influenced my taste in music. One title per day for 10 days. No explanations, no reviews, only covers." That's what the thing I was tagged in on my mostly defunct Facebook account said, and it gave me something to do, honestly. And what's the point of posting just covers - I'm going to share my memories and thoughts about them anyway!

I wasn't into music for a long time, but Iron Maiden was the band that changed that (actually it might have been Crush 40's melodic rock as a stepping stone to this but that's a much dorkier-sounding story). Their songs were so different, melodic and interesting - and were made even more fascinating when I found the fansite http://www.ironmaidencommentary.com/ with in-depth background on what every Iron Maiden song means. Discovering a thirteen-minute retelling of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (which we had recently slogged through in English lessons) opened a completely new world to me in terms of what you were even allowed to do with music.

I first noticed them on the soundtrack to Carmageddon 2 which I was playing with a school friend, then went home, dialled into Freeserve and downloaded a load of their songs from Napster - from there, we gradually spread them around our group of friends. After a long time downloading random songs, Powerslave was the first ever album I bought for myself, from a music shop when on holiday in Germany. It was a good time to get into them because Bruce Dickinson had returned to the band very recently on Brave New World, and these albums were part of the soundtrack to our 6th year of school whenever we wrestled 5ive and Steps off the stereo.

I miss our common room.

Out on a distant dwarf planet beyond the solar system, the UAC subsidiary Vulkan Inc has been tapping a promising source of geothermal power. The planet's internal temperatures are far in excess of natural levels, giving it a breathable atmosphere and even liquid water despite its huge distance from the sun. The struggling corporation is ardent in their efforts to accelerate extraction of this energy and set themselves up to profit off the growing power demands on Earth - a huge set of extraterrestrial drilling complexes have been set up to extract every valuable resource the planet has to offer. The latest addition is Borehole SG3, a superdeep vertical tunnel currently under construction that is on the point of breaking through into the planet's mantle eight miles below the surface.

To defend their prize, the UAC has set up a heavy presence of their military security division throughout each complex - but today, a helicopter ferrying recruits from the lower outposts into the base surrounding the new borehole has been met with an eerie silence. One senior officer disembarks, signalling to the pilot to return while they investigate. As they venture down into the deepest reaches of the power station, they'll discover that the new borehole has hit a passageway to hell...



Download Vulkan Inc 1.5 for Windows

This is a completely reworked version of my WAD "Vulkan" from 2017! It's called "Vulkan Inc" now to distinguish it from the renderer, as I spent a long time making sure no other WADs were called Vulkan and I overlooked that it was the name of an entire upcoming graphics engine. I've prepared a standalone version as a novelty, as it doesn't actually use any Doom resources - however, it uses modified sprites of the monsters originally from Brutal Doom that are identical enough for me not to quite be able to consider this a standalone game.

It features a "Tourist" difficulty if you just like looking around as the monsters pound you with their rubber teeth and squeaky mallets.



Download Vulkan Inc 1.5 for Windows

Download Vulkan Inc for GZDoom

I meant to talk about games I'd played in here in an effort to become an interesting person again, but I haven't really been great at actually executing on that. I wanted to mention, however, that I've been doing some writing elsewhere - I was recently headhunted to write for the GZDoom Spotlight, a new column on their site which shows off the best games or mods written in the GZDoom engine.

I've done three articles so far, and all of these are great:

Determination - A small but terrifying Undertale mod as a warmup
Hocus Pocus Doom - An amazing conversion of Apogee's Hocus Pocus into 3D
Shadow/Rise of the Wool Ball - A set of two really wonderful stylized games about being a hedgehog in a little tie fighting fascist cats from outer space.

When we were snowed in a couple of weeks ago I asked my mum for her treacle scone recipe so we could have a fireside snack. I used to record my rare successes in the kitchen for future reference and wanted to revive doing so for this one, especially because I had to convert it all to America's stupid measurement system and wanted a place to write the altered recipe down.

Granny Bun's Treacle Scones


2 cups plain flour
Pinch of salt
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 tbsp butter
1/2 cup milk (to start with - might need an extra 1/4 cup or so)
1 tbsp molasses

1. Whisk or sift the flour, salt, baking powder, sugar and pumpkin pie spice into a bowl and mix it all together. (Originally the recipe calls for mixed spice, but pumpkin pie spice seems to be more readily available here and is almost identical)


2. Chop the butter into pieces and rub it into the mixture with your hands until you have a uniformly crumbly mix.


3. Pour the milk into a separate bowl and then mix the tablespoon of molasses into it so you have a concoction of... brown semi-sweet milk.


4. Pour that into the dry ingredients and mix it together to get a soft cohesive but not sticky dough - add more milk if needed to stick it all together.


5. Slap that on to a baking sheet, roll it out to half an inch thick, cut it up and bake for 12 to 15 minutes. You can roll it out and use a biscuit-cutter on it if you want, but I just use a pizza wheel to separate it into wedges.


6. I did some icing with icing sugar, milk and more molasses, but it didn't work out very well. You can try if you like.

I should begin recording my finished projects here again as well! Here's one of them. It's something that started as a side project and then consumed my life for two and a half months.

"BDLite Trailer" (Watch on YouTube)

This is my own reworking of the ZDoom mod "Brutal Doom", which was released a few years ago and added a ton of new more violent and spectacular material to the base Doom game. Unfortunately its complexity (not to mention the way that it was made from a ton of different other mods jammed together in a big ball of duct tape) makes it extremely difficult to comprehend and work with. This more lightweight edition that I've christened "BDLite" completely reworks the monsters, weapons and effects so that the faster and more aggressive take on Doom is still intact, but jettisons the extraneous things and makes the code easier to build on. I wrote it specifically as a base for my own project "Vulkan" (which I'll re-release soon) but I'm hoping it will also be useful to other ZDoomers - and it's fun to play with on its own as well.

This is the thread on the ZDoom forums about the mod's development - the people in the community are great! Oddly for such a famously hellish and violent game, it's one of the most friendly and helpful communities I've been in online - perhaps due to a higher age and level of maturity than the Internet on average. Elsewhere, I saw some other fan of the original Brutal Doom describing my own mod as "a spiteful attempt to "clean up" Brutal Doom by tearing out about half the stuff and tossing themselves off over how much better they think they are" and I was ready to get all offended about it but then realized that that description is 100% accurate and put it at the top of the site as a ringing endorsement.

If you'd like to try playing Doom with this, you can download it from its own page here, including a boatload of tools that assist in ZDoom mod making that I might clean up and release separately. You'll need GZDoom and one or more of the Doom or FreeDoom WADs.

On Black Friday, I walked into a surprisingly calm and non-apocalyptic Best Buy (if we ignore the fact it was 7:30am) and got the last Oculus Rift off the shelf. I'd wanted to try out games and development for VR for a long time, and the experience didn't disappoint - once you've got your room set up, they have you go through an introductory scenario with a friendly little Wall-E type robot and summoning things by picking up and inserting disks, and the feeling of actually being there is truly uncanny.

I had been interested in building environments in VR through GZDoom, but the VR version of that isn't quite in a playable place yet. I had a look around for official first-person shooters for it instead and saw one by the name of Robo Recall that I could download for free because I had the Oculus Touch package. Thinking that it would be a simple sort of demo game due to its title and free status, I gave it a try. I couldn't have been more wrong about it.


To describe the feeling of playing this game is really very difficult - now that I attempt it, I don't think I can adequately convey the feeling of 2018-era VR and how different it makes things from anything I'd played before. The game opens with you standing in a scene on a futuristic city street opposite an electronics shop window, with shiny faceless servant robots milling around on various errands. A group of robots begins to gather around you as the news on the big television in the window reports gradually escalating violence among the robots and eventually the announcement of a recall. It's suddenly interrupted by a burst of images and QR codes that make the robots twitch and stutter in obvious distress, slump for a moment, and then SWIVEL TO STARE RIGHT AT YOU! It's impossible to describe the moment adequately - it sounds like such a little movement, but having it happen in 3D is so stunningly more intense than seeing it on a screen, and it got a massive scream out of me.

You're then put into the shoes of a Robo-Ready recaller hired to fix the situation and introduced to your state-of-the-art office, which is a damp basement - the game has a bit of a Portal/Five Nights at Freddy's/The IT Crowd feel to it as you wander around and go through the tutorial on how to move around. The Oculus Rift is really pretty good at tracking you if you walk around in your physical space, but for covering large distances, you teleport around with a flick of the analogue stick. You're shown how to use weapons, by grabbing a pair of pistols from your hips then pointing and shooting at some targets - and then you're teleported to a tutorial level.

This is where the game really started to defy expectations for me. You're put into the city and have to shoot waves of robots that run or fly in in a Time Crisis-style arrangement, then teleport yourself over to their location to scavenge the microchips from them. But other facets of the controls start to emerge quickly, almost by accident - during the tutorial, it's mentioned that you can also grab things. I hadn't given this much thought until by instinct I put a hand up to defend myself against a spider robot that had thrown itself at my face, and I caught it at arm's length. Then another one leapt at me as the first wriggled in protest, and I whirled it around like a shield to make them both explode in front of my face. A robot jumps down from a tall building, and you hit it with a pistol shot before it lands, juggling it in midair. Maybe you'll see another one approach out of the corner of your eye and swing your left hand around to aim at it instead, keeping them both stunned as you shoot at two of them simultaneously. After a couple of streets the game asks you to reach over your shoulders, and you grab and come back holding a pair of shotguns.


From then on, you get to star in your own futuristic remake of Devil May Cry. Your duty as a "recaller" is to blast the malfunctioning robots to pieces in as creative ways as you can imagine - you can use the pistols to take them out at a distance, shotguns if they get too close, or grab robots by their chest, head or limbs and tear them apart with your bare hands. Maybe you want to try a combination - reach out for a robot that's come up behind you, fling it in the air, pull out a shotgun and juggle it while drawing another pistol from your hip and finishing off a flying drone that has a laser pointed at you. With your ammunition for the shotgun exhausted, the recently earthbound robot makes a crunching noise as it returns to the pavement and in desperation you throw the weapon at the other assailant, hitting it and making it spin out of control, bursting in an explosion as you catch the gun on the rebound (now fully reloaded, as a bonus for scoring a hit) and whirl around to blast another wave of spider droids. Behind those, there's a pair of robots with their pistols pointed at you - as they aim, you lunge forwards towards one, grab it, tear its arm off, discard it and whack the other across the face with the stray component. And that entire paragraph has taken about two seconds in real-time. I have never felt as awesome as this while playing a game, or indeed in my entire life - the incredible stylized approach to combat makes even people of limited agility like me feel like they're Neo in The Matrix. As you might imagine, it's also absolutely exhausting, and is probably doing wonders in terms of how much exercise I'm getting.

It's made by Epic Games and the soundtrack is also fantastic - I'm not sure it's deliberate, but the electronic/metal sound is definitely evocative of their other famous robot-based title One Must Fall.

I haven't been genuinely excited about playing a game like I am with this in about three decades - the jump to VR over a game played with a mouse and keyboard is finally equal to the exciting leaps in technology that games made between the NES and SNES and then to the Playstation. It's so hugely different from anything that I've ever experienced in games before, and has brought my expectations of VR as a platform to a new level.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw1d9eMOKfY

Finally reaching the end of my almost realtime coverage of Epic Megagames' releases in 1993! This video covers three games from a group of developers in Poland that were later packaged together as the Epic Puzzle Pack. These are Robbo and Heartlight, which are puzzle games, and Electro Man, which isn't.

During the video, I release the first game-related thing I've done in a very long time - a rudimentary editor for Heartlight, which is downloadable here.