Four Thousand Words About Me

Once upon a time, there was a meme going round that invited you to post a comment and receive a list of some of your interests to explain. I did this twice, getting lists from both jenny0 and danni_ellie. As if the doubly long list (with a couple of overlaps) wasn't enough, when I'm interested in something it's very difficult to get me to stop talking about it, and what was meant to be a quick meme turned into this monster of an entry, with a list of explanations and thoughts in almost alphabetical order. I hope some of it's interesting, and that you don't notice my criminal overuse of parentheses too much.

Albion

This is a German science fiction RPG from the beginning of the CD-ROM era that's always been rather special to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it for videogame_tales (which needs more contributors, by the way - have a read of it), and I'm going to copy and paste blatantly from that to describe it.

The game begins as a huge mining ship arrives at an unexplored planet, with the plan to pull it to pieces and ship it back to Earth to replace its natural resources. A pair of Germans (Thomas and Rainer - a partnership of names dangerously close to the membership of Modern Talking) venture out in a scouter to inspect the desert world, something goes awfully wrong, and they're forced to crash-land - where after waking up, they discover that the planet is not a lifeless desert as they had thought but home to an intelligent race of vaguely catlike creatures, the Iskai. One feature of the game that was amazing for the time was that you don't just interact with them directly as the storyline dictates - you can go up and talk to anyone at all and learn about their job, life history or anything else about their society. A wide variety of topics come up - diet, the way they grow their buildings from plants, laws and traditions, their biology, sexuality, anything.

About half the storyline is taken up by trying to find the landing site of the mining ship and exploring the world. During the course of this, thanks to the massive amount of thought that's gone into writing about this other race, you gradually discover more about the planet, getting to know its places and people, and in a way, falling in love with it. Stop laughing, I'm serious. Then, halfway through the game, the storyline suddenly turns around with a catastrophic twist, and asks you to save it from disaster. By the stage the real plot emerges, you've learned enough about the world to genuinely care what happens to it. And there's something about the way it does that, as annoying as the combat and vague as the game is, that has an enormous charm to it - something that not many games have ever achieved. It's available for download here.

Black Books

This was a series that started in 2001, I think, on Channel 4, and was unique among the channel's output at the time in that it was actually funny. In fact, in hindsight I would call it one of the best comedies that British TV has ever come up with. This is mostly thanks to the critical mass of eccentricity produced by Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey. Graham Linehan, who wrote Father Ted (see below) was one of the original writers, and his surrealism is very recognizable for the first few episodes, but the programme managed just as well without him for the next couple of series even if it waned slightly at the end.

TV Links has all of the episodes. If you've never heard of it, I'd recommend watching "Cooking the Books", "Grapes of Wrath", "The Entertainer" and "Elephants and Hens", but it's very difficult to choose between them.

Father Ted

And this is what Graham Linehan was doing a few years before Black Books. In a similar setting to all his programmes, it involves several men and a woman of varying degrees of social incompetence - this time a group of priests that have been sent to an Irish island because of being considered unsuitable for anywhere else (Ted because he stole money from a charity, Dougal for being... braindead, at best, and Jack for being a mad old man who sits in the corner and shouts "Feck", "Drink" and "Girls" in strict rotation). But it's difficult to explain it without making it sound too simple. Even though I've seen some episodes of it too many times - the "Plague" episode with the rabbits is particularly overplayed - there are some moments in it that still never fail to make me laugh. Unfortunately Dermot Morgan died of a heart attack the day after the third series finished, so only about twenty episodes were ever made. However, Graham Linehan never seems to let his programmes go on for long.

A video of the programme was part of the "British Culture Box" that I kept in my room in second year to introduce Americans to British programmes, and I think it was always one of the highlights. (No one ever understood Knightmare unless they'd watched it growing up.)

I should mention that I'm still confused by Graham Linehan's latest effort, The IT Crowd. It's a programme that I really want to work as it's meant to appeal to people like me, but it just doesn't gel together anywhere near as memorably as the above two series. The actual storylines of the episodes have decent ideas, but the dialogue is often dreadfully written and atrociously overacted. You can hear some of his trademark surreality coming out, but it sounds forced, like someone trying desperately to be him ("A bus was shouted at"). The second series has been mildly better than the first, but I still think that it's definitely the worst thing that Graham Linehan has ever done. (However, saying that isn't really saying much compared to most of Channel 4's other content).

And the "nice screensaver" line was funny.

Clickteam

The company that made the Multimedia Fusion series of graphics-based authoring tools. (Or just "game creators" if you don't want to dress it up.) I've worked for them in the past, doing some tutorials for the Learning Resources section of their site, and am about to take part in the Java conversion of their runtime. Even though I honestly believe that MMF is the best of these programs available at the moment, they've still not achieved much more than a cult following and moderate success as an educational software company. Hopefully with the new interest generated by developments like hardware acceleration and the potential to export MMF-made programs to multiple platforms, they'll be able to achieve the recognition that I believe they deserve.

Clickteam's site, which I failed to include in the text, is here.

DDR

Not the former East Germany, you understand, but the Japanese rhythm action game with the same initials. It was one of the first rhythm action games to gain popular recognition, even though the competing "Pump" series was actually thought of first. It involves stepping - "dancing" would be stretching the term beyond all reasonable use - on four panels arranged in a cross shape to the beat of manic J-pop (or, if you play the Euromix version, cheesy Euro-pop instead). And I don't care how stupid you might look doing it - it's fantastic fun. The introduction of this game to the student union games room is probably the only reason that I wasn't spherical by the end of third year of university, and it's started to become part of exercise programs, too - classes based around the game have started for it (and importantly, this is somewhere other than Japan).

Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to play it much at all in fourth year and am very out of practice - I could fairly comfortably pass nine-foot rated songs before, but now I struggle on the sixes and sevens without dying. It's a bit embarrassing to explain, but it gets worse, because of the forty-two possible interests that the two of them could have picked, the next one on both lists was...

Furry

So thanks a lot to both of you for trying to get me to talk about it. This is one of the most awkward and difficult to define terms on the entire Internet (and, by the way, I'm surprised you haven't heard of it if you've spent more than an hour on it). I know that there are several people even on my own friends list who will come in and offer several hundred ways in which my definition is wrong. The reason for that is that it's a cover-all term - it stems from a generation of people who were strangely overattracted to characters like the Cadbury caramel rabbit and Maid Marian from Disney's version of Robin Hood (which you were - this is not negotiable). If you don't grow out of it, it can manifest itself as anything from just enjoying anthropomorphic-themed artwork and other things (see Albion, above) to actually dressing in fur-suits - but to be honest I always find those immensely frightening no matter how much work goes into creating them. (The lion-woman on the right is by "baroncoon" - it took me ages to find something pretty but tasteful.)

I don't know if I would actually define myself as one personally, because that tends to imply that you have a character or form of your own, and being unable to draw in communities like this renders you pretty much invisible. But I discovered last week that I was on this list, and they know everything. I have become rather disillusioned with the community recently because even though it's meant to be a fictional perfect world that can only really exist because of the Internet, it was made out of hate for the real world and populated by people who are rejected from society by what I have to admit are usually extremely good reasons. Those being that if you talked to them in real life you'd be tempted to give them a swift punch on the nose after about five minutes of talking to them.

I should add that when searching for the Cadbury advert above, I came across Minerva Mink, who seems to be pretty much the American equivalent of her (some of that video, I promise you, is absolutely scandalous - the highlight comes at 3:10). These things mess with your head permanently. Anyway, why did I agree to take this meme? I think I've avoided answering this quite well, so I'll move on.

Prince of Persia

Is fantastic. The original game, written by Jordan Mechner (who apparently lives down the road from Whitney's parents), was most notable because of its fluid human animation that was very realistic for the time. Without the techniques of motion capture and rotoscoping that are available today, these were just achieved by the author studying films and photos of his brother performing the actions in the game and copying the movements.

The game itself is also unusual, even today, in that most of the challenge comes from mastering the controls and the game engine (most other games try to make the controller as invisible as possible). If you've genuinely never heard of it, it's a side-on platformer, but calling it a "platform game" doesn't sound right at all - it's a race through twelve levels with an hour-long time limit, and as such is the first game that I can think of that was ideally suited to speedrunning. Which I did, constantly, for several years of university.

I don't play it nearly as much as I used to because I hit a plateau of getting a time of 42:20 remaining (the official world record stands at 42:24), but I always meant to go back and redo my video of Prince of Persia in 20 Minutes so that it was actually watchable. I'm not too keen on the idea of the new ones, though, purely because they've tried to give it a new look that it never had before and turned it into Prince of Linkin Park. Jordan had this to say about it: ""I'm not a fan of the artistic direction, or the violence that earned it an M rating. The story, character, dialog, voice acting, and visual style were not to my taste." Hooray for him. Now write us a better one, or I may be forced to do it myself.

Silent Hill

(I gave up on finding an image that represented the series as a whole, so used this one by somebody called foreverdelayed at DeviantArt.)

This is another game series. I'm not usually into horror, but this series manages to mess with you on a psychological level so much that you just have to respect it. I played the first game on a "promo only" CD that one of quadralien's friends had acquired (entirely legally, apparently), and had to rely on him and my youngest brother being employed as atmosphere-ruiners to be able to play it even during daylight.

One of the most impressive aspects of the game are the puzzles that appear throughout - they're vague enough to be challenging, often relying on the player interpreting a poem or set of apparently unconnected clues together with items in their inventory, and make you feel fantastic when you interpret them correctly and manage to get past. One of my favourites was the music room in the school from the original game, where you had to examine the verses of "A Tale of Birds Without a Voice" to work out the sequence of keys to press on the piano.

The series appeared to go a little downhill in the third series, with more of an emphasis on combat - and this is the one thing that the series isn't really good at. You always play as normal people rather than the military types featured in the Resident Evil series, and this is a major part of the weakness and vulnerability that you feel during the game. Most of the time in the first couple of games, you were relying on nothing more powerful than a shotgun that your character could only shakily handle. In the third game, they happily threw in a sub-machine gun as well, and quite a lot of the background scare factor is lost when you can blast oncoming monsters into next week rather than have to creep around and hope they don't see you. The puzzles in this edition also seemed to try too hard to be like the ones in the first (in Hard mode), and they went far too over the top, requiring insane abstract reasoning and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Complete Works of Shakespeare to be able to get past the bookshop at the start of the game. (My whole family was in the front room trying to work that one out.)

The fifth one is on its way, and already contains something called Siam, which looks like the wrongest thing that the writers have ever come up with (and that's really saying something) - like Voldo from Soul Edge/Blade/Calibur but with all the wrong body parts. After the fourth one went in a completely different direction (I've never played it, but apparently it really isn't much good at all), it looks like the new team might be keeping its promise of going back to what made Silent Hill the way it was.

Something Awful

This is one of the sites that would like to think that it runs the Internet. It went downhill quite a lot since I put it on my interests list, and I haven't read it recently because of their strange decision to turn the front page into something that resembled Yahoo News. But let's look on the bright side - it's still nowhere near as bad as 4chan and the like (although perhaps I'm just saying this because I don't have access to the forums). I used to read it primarily for Ben Platt's film reviews, which were frequently hilarious, and Photoshop Phriday (a weekly forum thread to do up Photoshop images based around a particular theme) came up with some really good material, as well. You won't be surprised to learn that my two all-time favourites were the visual pun ones, both for computer terms and items from the news.

I suppose that one of their most recognized contributions to culture in general is the fifteen minute Doom House film, which was made after they decided they were fed up of reviewing terrible films and made their own instead. Oh, and that funny-ten-years-ago All Your Base song was done by a group of people from their forums calling themselves The Laziest Men on Mars.

Sonata Arctica

Surprisingly, this was the only band that was picked out of the number that I have on my interests list. I used to think that there were two distinct forms of power metal - the German style which is harsher, led by powerful choir vocals and medium-paced (e.g. Gamma Ray, Iron Savior), and the Finnish style, including Nightwish, Stratovarius and Sonata Arctica, which concentrates more on being as fast as possible with more of a classical influence behind it - but the two blur together so much that it's difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Sonata Arctica, however, fell firmly into the speed-classical category for at least their first three albums - they're one of the more instantly likable bands that I listen to, and as such gained a lot of popularity even a few years ago when power metal was relatively unheard of.

An extremely unlikely thing about the band that is nevertheless true (and I bet that Dragonforce would have absolutely loved to have this happen to them) is that they're so speed metal that a sound engineer thought that the master copy of their first single was running at the wrong speed and slowed it down before releasing the first batch. These days they have calmed down the speed and moved into a more medium-paced style for the most part, but the wintery sound of their music is still very apparent.

One of the unexpected uses of Youtube is for listening to music, as so many people set things to dreadful "AMVs" (anime music videos) stitched together in Windows Movie Maker. As such, Kingdom for a Heart is just about the most appropriate thing ever to use in a video of Kingdom Hearts - and while I'm on the subject, Modern Talking's Witchqueen of Eldorado is just about the most unexpected.

Other recommended listening from one of their later albums includes White Pearl, Black Oceans, which is quite possibly the most powerful song they've ever written, and (don't laugh) The Boy Who Wanted to be a Real Puppet, which despite the stupid title is very memorable. You can safely ignore the video on that last one.

My brother also pointed out to me that the chorus of Picturing the Past describes the story of Zasalamel from Soul Calibur strangely perfectly.

He cannot live neither die in this world
Burning sensation inside, you know how that hurts
Making up for the crimes of your life
With scythe as your sword, you must fight 'til the end of time
So I first thought that Zasalamel must have been a character from somewhere else that they'd both appropriated/written about, but I can't find anything on that so it appears to be just a strange coincidence.

They're also going to be in an upcoming RPG called Winterheart's Guild, in which you play as several members of the band in a post-nuclear winter Finland. An idea almost as inappropriate as Shaq-Fu. However, you can't deny that they have an excellent logo, even if they're beginning to look a bit like Nickelback these days. (I get the feeling saying that's going to cause a few comments.)

ZZT

Not a band with huge beards, as many people seem to think, but another game creation system. It doesn't stand for anything, instead being named that way so that it would appear last in all alphabetical bulletin board lists at the time of its release.

ZZT was written by Tim Sweeney and was the beginning of Epic Games, the team that's now known for Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament series. A lot has changed in fifteen years, as this shareware action-puzzle-adventure game was entirely composed of ASCII characters in the sixteen-colour screen mode used by DOS. And it was actually great - female ring symbols became keys, arrows for blocks you could push in limited directions, Ö characters for bears (see the resemblance?) and the like built up a fairly large puzzle-based game world.

But the most significant bit was the editor, and the ZZT-OOP language inside it. Actually, Tim Sweeney never expected the editor to become the most popular aspect of the game, which showed quite an astonishing lack of judgement - limited though the language itself was, it was a new idea, and the way of having each object with its own individual procedure means that writing things like basic artificial intelligence and unique behaviours is made very easy (more so than even most modern environments).

I made only a few releases under ZZT, mostly rather linear adventure games, but a couple were a little more significant. One of these was "The Mercenary", which began as a project in a different game creation system that was abandoned because I decided that what would be mediocre in Megazeux would be impressive to cram into ZZT's limits. And sure enough, it won the last Game of the Month award (the last because the admins were fed up of the usual cheating and controversy the Game of the Month caused). "ZZT Crime" was a tutorial pointing out some common mistakes made in ZZT games and how to avoid them. It was liked by some (though kjorteo is the only one I can name offhand), but I'm not totally happy with it, mostly because it's obvious that the text was written by a sixteen-year-old idiot version of me (one board in particular is notorious for its message that is totally different from the one I had intended).

The last game I released under ZZT was "Castle of ZZT", which was finished in 2006 (I was waiting for delivery of new computer bits and ZZT was the only thing my laptop could run with any degree of reliability). This is definitely the one that I'm most proud of, but it wasn't without its problems either - strangely, after a while sitting in the upload queue, I checked on it and found that someone had replaced it with a sabotaged version, with a lot of boards entitled "Third Floor" and "Free Will" leading to a different ending. My name had been left on it. It was most strange, and quite honestly a reminder of why I moved on from the site in the first place.

However, the community is rather special on a personal level because it was pretty much my introduction to the Internet - even though it was in about 1997 when Scotland finally invented a way to connect to it, there was still a very active community surrounding the game. I wrote an entry on my general experience with it a couple of summers ago, and while the community is now really just a ball of in-jokes that happens to share a name with an old DOS game, it's still going strong. Look at the Wiki, too - their list of in-jokes tells more about it than I ever could.

---

I should probably add "Going on about things for hours" to my interests list, too.