Stumbling through Surgeon Simulator 2013

[davidn]

Here's another video! But it's not the one you're expecting. I put this together quickly this evening after tamakun posted about the game - I hadn't realized the full context of the game, or more accurately the lack of one. Far from being Trauma Center, it's a sort of... very darkly comic challenge, in about the same mood as if the man from QWOP gave up athletics and went to medical school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8ogPgITUYw

Sound quality isn't fantastic because I was wearing the headphones around my neck, and they have begun to pick up the local radio as well, which is supremely annoying.

I'm aware that, being Shuu, I really don't come out of this well.

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

The first Prem used to play the trumpet in middle school, actually, so I remember enough fingerings to have been squinting a little oddly to try to figure out how your controls were actually mapping to the notes! I figured you were playing some kind of variant instrument.

Anyway, each of the valves lengthens the effective tube enough to lower the pitch by a certain amount: two semitones, one, and then three-ish, with the third valve also having an extension segment controlled by the other hand to keep some of the combinations in tune. The base note is chosen as a harmonic of the fundamental resonance of the air column by injecting more tightly constrained noise using your mouth, so on a tuned B♭ trumpet you start with concert B♭, F, B♭, D, F (he was only able to get there with some difficulty), ~A♭ (usually avoided because it's too far from equal temperament), B♭, …, which can all be lowered by 0–6 semitones using the valves, so that gives you your full chromatic range.

(With all respect, he was never particularly good at the trumpet. Considerably better than the abbot, though.)