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

[xaq.livejournal.com]

"they have begun to pick up the local radio as well"

Ugh, hate that. I've had the same thing happen to 2 sets of speakers myself. Never been able to figure out a way to get it to stop. :/

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"Bad-tempered looking saw"?

"Sorry" for poking his lung XD;

Oh god this is getting hard to watch XD

Do you actually play the trumpet? Or just a good faker? ;)

Did you ever find out whether it IS possible to win?

[davidn]

My knowledge of the trumpet only extends to knowing which way round it points, and that you have three valves on the top that you press down in seemingly arbitrary combinations with your fingers - I don't know how you might get it to play more than eight notes.

I've seen videos on Youtube (that I haven't watched) promising victory - as to whether it is possible for me to win, probably not.

This game is just on the... scalpel-edge of uncomfortable for me - it's set up just comically enough to offset it.

[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.)

[davidn]

Ah! I've just completed it. I was actually disappointingly close to victory in the video without realizing it - all you have to do from there is do a better job cutting the arteries, then lift the old heart out, drop in the new one and that counts as completion. I was expecting to have to jigsaw everything back together once I'd done that, so the perceived insurmountability of the challenge is... not as dramatic as it could be - but bearing in mind the game was made during a Global Game Jam, it's not bad, is it!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I didn't realise that was the case! It's indeed not bad :) (Kinda makes me wonder why they bothered modelling all those other useless tools on such a short timeframe, but... maybe they originally had plans for them, that fell by the wayside when they realised the QWOPiness of the controls they would have to work with :P)