I never used to get ill for very long, but now that Penny is bringing all kinds of exotic diseases back from the daycare I've had to stay off work for longer than I ever have before. I passed some of the time by resolving to finally complete Diablo 2 - during my sixth year of school I think that I got about halfway through the game twice before realizing I was just clicking on monsters and gave up. Having now got to the end, I think I was correct in my earlier assessment.


It's a strangely addictive game despite my underlying problem, which is that I can't name any point in the game at which I made a real decision. The gameplay seems entirely algorithmic - you venture out into the wilderness and bash a tidal wave of monsters as they come at you, you use a potion when your health gets a bit low. Monsters will often drop loot or new weapons, and you compare those weapons to your current ones and toss the old ones aside if the new one is obviously better in speed or attack power or special properties. It might be a bit better if you could keep interesting-looking items in reserve so that you could bring them out when you needed them, but the opportunity for this is very limited - a typical weapon will take up 4-6 inventory slots, and you have just 24 squares of "stash" (which is smaller than your personal inventory!) to reserve items for later. Realistically, with everything else you have in there, you can afford to keep maybe just one or two weapons in reserve - everything else is picked up and then instantly either adopted or discarded.

The nature of this sort of gameplay came to the forefront when I hit a speed bump in the difficulty where I started encountering enemies that gave off uncontrollable bolts of lightning when they were hit. In Etrian Odyssey, for example (a game which I'll always hold up as an example of taking a genre I previously hated and then fixing everything about it), I would have gone back to the town, researched the materials I needed to make items that were resistant to lightning, go out and collect those, then use them to gain the advantage back. Here, there's no opportunity to do that and the best you can do is just hope that a lightning-proof hat or pair of socks or something turns up fairly soon. You have a limited opportunity to customize better items by collecting gems and inserting them into weapon sockets, but you can't remove gems once you've used them, so you have to wait until the exact right randomly-generated weapon comes along and irreversibly take a chance with your also-rare gems.

The whole thing is forced to be very linear from start to finish - especially with the Barbarian I was playing as, you can't really switch gears and decide to do something radically different with your character, because you have to dedicate skill points to improving your skills with a specific weapon class. Actually I was pleasantly surprised to find one character in the early game offered the option to reset skill and stat points, which I didn't remember from before (it was added in a patch 16 years after the release of the game) - but then found out you could only do it once, and I used that opportunity to pour all my points into blunt weaponry to give me an advantage against undead enemies so there was no point in trying anything else from then on.


At the end of the game you face off with Diablo himself, who has elemental attacks that will melt you instantly - having pretty much got everything from the game I was going to get at this point, I cheated up a magic-resistant fully automatic crossbow using a save editor and finished him off with that. You're then invited to continue the game from the start again with vastly more difficult monsters in Nightmare and then Hell difficulty, building up on the stats and weapons you had the first time around (and by virtue of spending longer in the game, finding more randomly dropped items that might be good). In this way, the game really seems geared to reward people who are obsessives, or who at the very least have more time than me to spend on it - towards the end I started having the thought "Why am I wasting my life with this when I could be writing more music?", which I took as a sure sign that I was recovering.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LnAcW_ya-k

Somehow I finished this one a week early compared to my usual three-week timeline!

Continuing coverage of Epic's improbably gigantic year in 1993 - I'm now two videos into it and have covered about half the games they released during that year. Once again, the genres that Epic published are all over the place, and the games covered are:

The justifiably famous Epic Pinball
The completely obscure Epic Baseball
Top-down shooter Zone 66 by Renaissance
One of the very few shareware CRPGs, Ancients by Farr-Ware

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_sDBGjEWM4

Continuing my look through the back catalogue of the great Epic Megagames, covering their history from ZZT to Unreal Tournament! This episode is about the first four graphical games that Epic released in 1992 - it’s called Ventures in VGA even though one of them isn’t.

Features Jill of the Jungle, Kiloblaster, Brix and Overkill.

I'm opening up a new video series that's a lot like my old video series - the Stumbling Through name had meant to be for blind playthroughs of games, but I'd drifted into using the same title for more documentary-type videos as well. So from now on, the videos where I talk in-depth about games, compare ports, and so on will be under the new name, Stumbling Tours!

Watch on YouTube

This one came into being because I was trying to look up a playthrough video for Le Fetiche Maya, a Silmarils DOS game from 1989 that I could never work out at all. Finding there wasn't one, I decided to make one myself, with the aid of a guide from Abandonia.

The aim of the game, as much as you're given one at all, is to venture into the ruins of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc. and recover a strange fetish (probably one of kjorteo's). Along the way, I found the writers of the game had done more research than I'd anticipated, but honestly it didn't help the game make any more sense.

People have been a bit surprised in the past when I mention my love of Doom, but having grown up with shareware on the PC, it was really the flagship game that PCs could do that consoles couldn't (thinking of the 16-bit ports as evidence here). Recently I've got heavily back into its modding community, with source ports like GZDoom adding much more extensive scripting and external asset support to transform it into a ZZT-like base for creating entirely new games from the engine - from transformations like Brutal Doom to recreations of The Crystal Maze. The 2016 remake passed me by at the time, but since I poured some cash into upgrading my bought-in-2003 PC of Theseus to a state where it's capable of playing games made this decade, I wanted to give it a try.


I enjoyed it a lot in the end, but apart from the game's Martian setting and the story (which has been adapted to trying to harness power from Hell instead of accidentally reaching it through a teleportation experiment) it didn't really gel with me as a direct sequel to the original Doom games. Instead, it's more like Samus Goes to Mars (and Forgets her Valium) - you explore, shoot and find or earn upgrades for your base stats, abilities, weapons and so on. The hopelessly generic box art depicts your main character, who is a mute not-quite-human who ascended from Hell and who clearly hasn't masturbated in about a hundred years. All of his actions are done with a comical degree of aggression, from picking up a weapon upgrade from a Ratchet and Clank-style floating service droid then punching it in the face, to "disabling" a delicate piece of power equipment by kicking it repeatedly. His Sim City transport advisor-style fury is of course central to the gameplay, which is about surviving wave after wave of large hordes of demons with a variety of big guns or by tearing them to pieces.

After a few levels where I was tentatively unsure about the game, I found myself getting into it at around the first time that you're pulled into Hell - I attribute this mostly to beginning to understand how the game's secrets were hidden, and exploration beginning to feel like it was rewarded like in the original Doom games. Until this point I'd also felt the melee-fighting Glory Kill system was too over the top and grisly and pulled the action away from the hands of the player, but I definitely appreciated the one where you slap the Pinky across the face with its own pelvis and it just dies of embarrassment. It's a strange comparison, but instead of the pure first-person shooting of the original game, the idea of terminating demons in ridiculous flashy ways and then earning points from them to unlock more stylish slaughter methods is very much like Devil May Cry.

It's around this point that I also began to notice small callbacks to 1993 games - just like in E3M1 Hell Keep, you enter Hell by pushing on a skull to open an inverted door. The post-fight music for the level also recreates the wailing guitar part of E1M8 Phobos Anomaly's music with a haunting choir, right at the very end. And there's a moment during the credits where the Doom marine is fighting off a chaotic mound of demons in hell, and the camera swings round as the action progresses to momentarily capture a perfect echo of the original Doom box art. I also appreciated the option to place your weapon unnaturally in the lower centre of the screen like it's mounted to your chest like a Dalek - these subtle references to the original game are fantastic.

The more blatant references to the original game, however, are not - every level has a secret lever that will open a hatch to a strange out-of-place area from the 90s Doom games in it, and then you get the chance to play through the classic level from the game menu. These are realized completely terribly - I remember being worried about them when they were first previewed, and I was absolutely right to be, because if the rest of the game were like these it would be terrible. All lighting has been removed, making the levels look much worse than they used to (which I sort of understand, as harsh sector lighting would look weird in the modern engine), textures are on backwards, switches flicker for no reason when they're pressed, and doors don't interact with players or enemies correctly - if you stand under one when it's closing you'll get trapped inside it. Not to mention they've had to put up invisible walls in certain areas to avoid the player abusing the non-1993 ability to jump. It's cobbled-together fanservice and it doesn't work at all - thankfully the rest of the game is much better.

I'd like to have played multiplayer as well, but the population seems to have all but dried up - I waited around in the Beginner lobby for ages and I only ever saw one other person there, and you need a minimum of four to get a game going. Perhaps other people on my Steam list might be interested? Much has also been made of the Snapmap feature, which is a reasonable compromise to allow players to create their own missions while not expecting or allowing them to create the ludicrous level of detail that would be required to completely customize a modern map, but as far as I can tell it does much the same as Timesplitters 2 did many years ago on the PS2.

Three games (sort of) into the Westwood RTS series, Red Alert is now out the way! This was a... sort of sequel to Command and Conquer, or was it more of a scenario pack? I'm not really sure. Whichever way, it used the same engine as C&C but set the conflict in an alternative history where Hitler was removed from time by Albert Einstein. The plan had obviously been to prevent World War 2, but instead the change to the timeline resulted in a much worse alternative World War 2 where Stalin's Soviet Union was unhindered by Germany and he chose to act on his ambitions of conquering Europe.



This time I used the CNCNet source port of the game instead of the original DOS version, which is not too far removed from the Windows 95 versions of C&C/Red Alert. The fans have done an incredible job bringing the games forward to Windows with support for higher resolutions and a couple of other niceties like fixing some sprite work, but otherwise the game remains unchanged - Red Alert has the same build-defend-attack gameplay that made Command and Conquer the success it was, but with many new units and buildings (including the iconic Tesla Coil) and it adds snow-capped mountain environments to the grassy and deserty scenarios of the first game.

Many of the base C&C units are still around, but there have been some adjustments to rebalance them. Most notably, engineers have absolutely been nerfed to hell - but in a way that they totally deserved! My confusion in the original game must have come from here - this time around, the engineer can only commandeer a building if its health bar is in the red. This affects the engineer tactics in two ways - it makes it much more difficult to take over buildings rapidly, and means that once you do it successfully you inherit an absolute wreck that you have to repair quickly before an enemy gets to it and finishes it off. All of this makes it much more difficult to repaint an enemy base with a small group of engineers than it used to be - nevertheless, I kept playing a quite engineer-heavy set of tactics because in this game it's even more advantageous to take over buildings and get access to the full set of technologies that are usually only available to one side.

As I went through the scenarios I found myself feeling that despite the adjustments, Red Alert's new units were balanced a bit less well than the original - this is mostly due to the new addition of the Medium Tank, which has a good balance between strength and speed and you can pretty much predict who the winner of a conflict's going to be based on how many of them you build. The Soviet side has blatantly superior ground units and defences available to it, and the balance isn't quite redressed by the Allies' access to powerful naval units due to their use being limited depending on the map. The pathfinding also feels a bit worse than in the first C&C, specifically because it tries to be more intelligent - in the first game, when you told a massive group of vehicles to move through a narrow area, they'd stumble a bit, wait behind others before moving and sometimes get stuck. In Red Alert, they notice that they're blocked and try to rectify the situation by finding another way around, and this can often lead to tanks going on a massive tour of the map and running straight into enemy defences unless you're watching them carefully.

The AI is a bit more eager to tear down your defences this time, but not by a whole lot and it still seemed to prefer trying to drive around my walls and straight into ambushes rather than just demolishing them and walking in. It also seems much more aggressive than in C&C, and it's often very difficult to keep track of what's going on if you're dealing with more than one conflict at a time - the announcer man who sounds like Jarvis from Iron Man will politely say "Our base is under attack" or "Unit lost" a couple of times but you won't get any indication of where on the large maps you're being attacked from. In these cases I was glad to be playing at a high resolution where I could see much more than the restrictive VGA view of the DOS version.

However, a quirk of the AI is that even in missions that start off horrendously difficult, once you're over a hump it just sort of gives up and becomes very passive and easy. The place I felt this the most was in the final Soviet mission which bombards you with a ridiculous number of artillery units, boats and helicopters from all sides while you're trying to build your base up (mostly arriving from off the map so you can't even proactively stem them), but once I had finally struggled my way to taking the first small Allied base and capturing its construction yard so I could build my own navy, the whole rest of the map could be dealt with quite easily by trundling casually around and flattening buildings with my leftover tanks. Meanwhile, the non-base-building missions are even more interesting than before, with a lot of set-piece based ones where you have to make it past patrolling guards and defences in a more puzzle-like way.

Once again, the FMVs are the star attraction of this game for how absolutely bloody hilarious they are - they're much more elaborate than the original game's mission briefings where you mostly just had one actor talking to you directly. This time they're complete scenes with a whole cast of characters in a bluescreened futuristic base, dressed up as European military brass and putting on their bravest attempts at German and Russian accents, making it easy to forget that you're not watching Allo Allo. Despite the camp tone of the later series, the makers of the game hadn't realized how preposterous they were at this point and they're all done straight-faced, even at times when an actor has to 'die' from poisoned tea and crawls unconvincingly on to the table in a desperate attempt to remain in the shot. General Kukov then comes in and doesn't even bother clearing him off the table, just accepting this new centrepiece as the briefing goes on without him.

Tiberian Sun next!

Inspired by DOS Game Club's foray into Command and Conquer, I'm having a try at running through Westwood's entire series of RTSes. I started with an attempt at Dune 2, which is curiously named because they never made a Dune 1 - the name came about because publisher Virgin Interactive somehow became confused about who was actually developing a game for them based on the Dune novels by Frank Herbert, and ended up with two of them. They chose to release Cryo Interactive's first and last interesting game as "Dune", and this unrelated Westwood strategy game as "Dune 2". To add to the confusion, this second game was subtitled "Battle for Arrakis" in Europe but in its native America was called "The Building of a Dynasty" with a long Y (where it was of course based on Doon, the novel by Frank Urbert).

I had this game, whatever it's called, installed from disks from my brother's friend in the 90s, and only vaguely remembered about it - I remembered it being a real time strategy but I hadn't realized at the time that it was the first one as we know them. I also remembered that I never got very far at all, but I was confident that this time around I could conquer it.



Turns out I couldn't because Dune 2 is legitimately completely bloody impossible. I mean, I've watched a playthrough of it that does seem to indicate that it is indeed possible to get beyond mission 3, but I just can't fathom how to do it. A large part of this is that the controls are... appalling, but I say that in the context of today when a lot of RTS niceties exist to compare it to. Most noticeably, you can't select units in a group and tell them to go somewhere - you have to laboriously click on each one, click on the Move command, then click on the destination. It's hard to synchronize your units in order to repel an attack, or to organize them to attack the enemy - I thought I was doing pretty well once after destroying the opponent's Windtrap power source, but then he just plonked a new one down on top of four of my units and erased them from reality.

On top of this, the sandworms of Dune make an appearance, mostly when you least want them to. There are three types of terrain - rock, sand and spice which acts as the game's gatherable currency - and you're only safe from them when you're standing on rock. When you get the status message "Wormsign!" and the music changes, you have to abandon whatever you're doing and jump straight to wherever the ground is quaking, hurrying to get any unit that's on sandy terrain nearby out of the way before the worm's three-lipped head pops up and devours your unit instantly. This is bad whenever it happens, but it's particularly aggravating when your precious Harvesters (which are the ones that will be on the sand most often) are gobbled up, leaving you without a way to obtain spice.

It's interesting that among the huge number of vital RTS concepts that this game invented, worker units were not among them. The closest thing are the Harvesters which you have to send out to gather melange filtered out of the sand, but these are large tough units that pick up tons of cash before transporting it back instead of small weak ones that you use in swarms. And there are no units that build things - instead, all buildings are made in the Construction Yard, the heart of your base, and once they're ready you can command them to pop up out of the ground anywhere on rocky ground adjacent to your existing buildings. Buildings deteriorate over time, but you can slow this process by laying down concrete slabs first (which takes bloody ages and the player above doesn't seem to bother).

It's hard to call Dune 2 a bad game seeing as it (and the game that they took inspiration from, Herzog Zwei - which coincidentally translates to "Duke 2") started off the entire RTS genre as we know it and everything. But it definitely hasn't aged very well due to lacking a lot of the RTS conveniences that we've come to expect, here in the future that it was responsible for.

In the wake of Sonic Mania, I had a go at the 8-bit version of the original Sonic again, just to take a casual look at it out of curiosity. That was the plan, anyway - as it turns out, I have not had my bum kicked this hard by a game in living memory.

It's an odd little thing - it's recognizably a miniature simplified version of the Megadrive classic, mixed around a bit and with some things altered which can throw you off. Three zone styles are recognizable from the 16-bit version - Green Hill, Scrap Brain and (regrettably) Labyrinth and three are new, but all of them use completely different level layouts. As far as game mechanics go, you can't pick up any dropped rings when you're hurt (making you much, much more vulnerable at all times), and as a sadistic further addition to that, the ring counter rolls back to zero when you collect 100 of them. Enemies are pretty sparse, with just a few per level, and seem to be pulled from mostly random zones from the 16-bit version.

It's tempting to say that it has strange breaks from Sonic norms, but it's important to remember that this was 1991 and the norms didn't exist yet. Therefore it would have been totally unsurprising at the time to be faced with a forced scrolling level in Bridge 2, or the strange puzzle/maze-like layout of Scrap Brain 2 and 3 where you have to open up entrances remotely across multiple rooms and then make your way around to get through them. They're not even called "zones" by the game, though fans append the word anyway.

I think my first ever experience with anything Sega was when a school friend called Alex Paton came round with his Game Gear, and somehow I remember getting at least up to Labyrinth - how I did it I'll never know. The Jungle boss is an absolute bastard which took me about twelve lives before I eventually beat it, making you dance about on a slidey curved platform while Robotnik drops rolling bombs on to it and without any available rings to even protect you from one hit. While I'm on the subject, the waterfall level immediately before it will kill you if you fall off the bottom of the screen - even if there's a platform you just left two inches below the screen border!

Faced with all that I obviously haven't completed it, but I got to Sky Base, took screenshot evidence, and I think that's enough for me.

While recording another song for Buried Souls today, I thought I'd give a glimpse into my workspace! This is my own space on the bottom floor of our house, where my desktop computer lives and where I do the majority of my composing and recording. It is also a complete tip, and the guide that I put together just for people to be able to follow the order of the circles looks like an arcane star chart. Nevertheless, here's an insight into how I work.

Computer things

1. First monitor! It's a 4:3 that I must have had since about 2006. When in music writing mode, this usually has Kontakt's overwhelming array of levers and pulleys on it - or otherwise it's got the Internet open because I've got distracted.

2. Second monitor! Mismatched with the other one, this is a 16:9 that I picked up a bit later on which is almost but not quite the right size to fit alongside the other one. I've been meaning to upgrade the first one but I've never really felt a pressing need to. Still, this is the one that houses Reaper's spaceship controls.

3. Logitech speakers. Again, these have probably been around since I came into the country in 2006 and have survived two house moves. I don't actually use these much in music composition because the sound is handled by an external sound card (see 11).

4. Ultra-professional monitor stand (a cardboard box that used to contain a pump that prevented the basement from flooding). I stand up when recording vocals and I used to hunch over the computer to click around and set things up, but having it at eye level is a lot more comfortable. I should really get one of those desks that you can raise to a standing position.

5. DELL QuietKey PS/2 keyboard, a relic and a misnomer because it's the most clackety keyboard this side of using a typewriter. I rescued it from the out-pile when we moved offices a couple of jobs ago - it's very comfortable to type on, has a satisfying feel to it, is built like a Sherman tank and weighs a ton.

6. Similarly 10-year-old mouse, with a Clickteam mousepad - the company that made the Fusion development environment, now most famous for enabling Five Nights at Freddy's 1 through 476. I used to do contract work for them, writing demo applications and tutorials, and they sent a mousepad with one of my cheques. (They're very nice people.)

7. Headphones - my primary way of hearing what I'm writing! These are a pair of Sennheiser PC-350 - I've been meaning to look at others because the headset microphone on this (which I use for recording game videos) has a slight screechy tinge to it, but they're very comfortable and I don't want to give them up.

8. The computer itself. Both the oldest thing at the desk and not the oldest thing at all - I haven't bought a new desktop since 2003, but parts have been swapped in and out over the years and it's now the Computer of Theseus. I can't remember whether any parts in it now (the case included) have been there from the very beginning or if it's a completely different machine.

Music things

9. A guitar! This is one of three that I own - I have a Johnson strat copy that I learned on (and have since modified into an electronically enhanced Frankenstein by drilling holes in it and grafting on mounts for a compact amp and so on), an Ibanez which is my main guitar, and this one. It was salvaged from my wife's grandmother's house after she died, has no markings on it indicating who made it, and could be an expensive antique (but is more likely worth $5 or so). I still can't play the guitar to any acceptable level - they're just used for idling around when trying to think up melodies.

10. A keyboard! This is a very basic one, a Yamaha PSR E243 which has no mod wheels or key velocity. It's connected up to the computer and does what I need it to, though - and since I learned on the piano, it's very useful for experimenting and visualizing where a song is going.

11. This is a Line-6 Pod X3 mounted to the wall (there's no official way to do that - I just had some large bolts left over that happened to be the right size for poking into the screw wells on the back). It's an external sound card that acts as a digital amp for guitars, but I haven't used it that way in ages and I use it mostly for recording vocals instead. You can't buy this model any more, it's been superseded multiple times by now - I think I got it in 2008 or so when my original Amplitube guitar connector broke down.

12. My microphone is a Samson R31S, which is a $30 thing that you can get at Best Buy - I got it so that I could experiment rather than for any serious work. With the XLR cable to the Pod, though, it has no noticeable noise at all, and people seem to agree online that it's a surprisingly good microphone for its cheapness. There is no pop filter, a fact that I get around just by singing perpendicular to it.

13. Microphone "stand" made out of duct tape and suspended from a pipe on the ceiling, so I can't do laundry and record music simultaneously. It's up here because before I recorded The Poison Skies I read about the best place for a microphone being slightly above your mouth, so that you tilt your head back and open up your vocal cords more. I meant to get a slightly more permanent mount for it but I haven't found one I liked.

The back wall

14. The whiteboard! This is where I chart progress when I have a serious project going on - three boxes for each song representing how far along the instrumental parts are, then a box each for whether I've completed the lyrics, the vocals, and got the song to a place where I can declare it releaseable. That's six boxes each, for twelve songs on Buried Souls - a total of 72, and I've filled in 42 of them.

15. A picture of some highland cows. Can't remember why this is there. I think my wife got it and it somehow ended up down here after we moved house.

16. Signed Iron Savior card! This came with a special edition of one of their albums, and is definitely not pre-printed because one of the signatures has a smudge on it where someone put their hand on the wet ink.

17. Picture of a lovely mouse by DAQ <3 http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3590067/

18. A box for a ream of photo paper. I had to put this up in the window during the summer because in the morning the sun reaches the exact angle to come blindingly down through the window.

19. Brown parcel tape mounts for said box.

Miscellaneous junk

20. Black and Decker drill/screwdriver. I should put this away, really - it's been here since we moved in last year and I was putting things on the wall.

21. Pile of DVDs containing British children's programmes recorded from old tapes by my parents and sent over here for me to look at and extract any treasures from. I have a Youtube account for these at https://www.youtube.com/user/TributeToThePast but it's been a very long time since I updated it. I should correct that.

22. Unused invitation to the sponsor/Professor Dinner at Anthro New England 2017, which I couldn't go to due to the birth of my daughter!

23. Water! Very important for keeping my vocal cords cooperating. I don't drink nearly enough of it as it is.

24. A pile of physical copies of furry pictures that I'm yet to find a home for, to be honest.

25. A drinks fridge! Was picked up for free from a yard sale shortly after we moved here. It is currently not plugged in and contains no drinks - it's been acting as a bits-of-paper stand for virtually all its lifetime here.

26. Spare body parts.