The Flamekeblog

We haven't played a game in so long.

2020-07-23T16:46:00.000+01:00

Many years ago I first played Dreamfall: The Longest Journey on a soft-modded Xbox. Three years ago I played through the first game in that series, The Longest Journey. Last night I finally finished the conclusion, Dreamfall: Chapters.

Let's get some complaints out of the way first:

The puzzles in the game are mostly terrible. If there was a hint system I rarely encountered it. When I figured out the puzzles on my own I didn't feel satisfied and the rest of the time I felt the game was wasting my time.
The animation is pretty dreadful. This has been the case for all the games in the series - at best they're animated like something from 2003. At worst they look like the first attempts of a student. Facial animation is not much better.
I'm not a fan of "see what other players chose to do"! When I'm playing a single-player game like this the outside world ceases to exist. It's literally part of the appeal. Frankly I'd be perfectly content with a properly linear narrative rather than this dicking about with branching (given that my yardstick for doing that sort of thing is Alpha Protocol).
Also the "ironman" style of saving (no save slots - it's purely for picking up and putting the game down). Not a fan.

That's the moaning out of the way; it needed to be said but I don't want to dwell on it.

Now let's talk about what the game does right. Basically everything else. Wonderful story, fantastic voice acting, comedy, tragedy, reflection, immersion.

Some characters receive a happy ending. Some do not. Others receive something in between. It isn't always entirely satisfying in the traditional sense and that's arguably a very good thing. It makes it more real. In real life we do not ever receive all the answers and are grateful when we receive some.

This philosophy permeates the whole experience. It's fairly plodding at times but it also means it doesn't feel rushed which I rather like. In fact I despise game mechanics that try to rush me - I'm not particularly slow but I resent being told to hurry within an artificial construct like a game.

The worlds Ragnar has created are beautiful and populated with characters that I want to spend time with. Enu made me smile every time she spoke. I was invested in the relationship between Kian and Likho. Saga's life made me smile and it made me cry. Baeb-Ayae-Gh'aa's physical form was wonderfully monstrous. Various characters made me laugh too - there's a thick seam of comedy running through it, just as there is in our lives.

I do not think I can recommend this game on its own, unlike Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. It's meandering and takes many more hours than I expected. That said when I finished it I was not left feeling pandered to nor was I left with excessive loose ends. If felt instead like the world would go on without me watching - as it should.

There's not all that much else I can say. I've thanked Ragnar on Twitter for the experience because it has brightened my life a great deal (and it was not a bad life to begin with). It makes me grateful for what I have and the life I've built for myself. Thank you.

I honestly expected a lot more rust.

2020-06-29T22:42:00.000+01:00

I recently bought a car. I've never owned a car before.

Up until now I've lived places where walking and the occasional bus have worked for everything. A car was a luxury I neither needed nor could afford. My father has never been able to understand but this may be because he's an alien.

I'm not fussed about driving fast or other bells and whistles. It's not that those things can't be fun but they're not things I associate with motoring in Britain. If I can drive some ramshackle contraption across a desert at high speed that'd be amazing. Doing a few extra miles per hour down the motorway on my way to visit a friend..? Nah.

Instead my criteria for a car were as follows:

A few dents
Small

Whenever I rent a car I'm constantly stressed about whether I'm treating it correctly. Will it get damaged? Will someone attempt to break into it? How much paperwork will be involved?

I want something that I can park somewhere and know that if something bad happens the paperwork will be the biggest concern. I want it to look old enough and a bit dented so that anyone looking at it will think about the much nicer cars around it.

As it turns out the car we found suited me in several other ways. It's a 2003 Suzuki Ignis.

It's a very strange blend between an SUV and a compact car (I don't know the UK terms for those things). In reality it's pretty tiny but it sits quite high on the road with the visibility of an SUV and I absolutely love that. Also kerbs are a non-issue with how high its chassis sits - another concern allayed.

Given its age the inside is quite simple and that's a blessing in disguise. The reason for that is fairly simple. I don't know about you but growing up my parents' car had various blanking plates and similar. The notion of a car having any bells and whistles wasn't really there. That said they did mod them somewhat - usually to mount a radio antenna on them for falconry:

The equipment for that was never properly integrated into the car though and I always got the impression that cars and electronics were beyond the ken of mere human adults. At least, those not professionally employed in that direction.

One of the things I did the other day was figure out how to take apart my car's central console. I wanted to know what the space was used for (mostly nothing) so that I could potentially install things in there. That's something that I feel would have horrified most adults when I was younger (and I mean, say, 15, not 7!).

The car I have is cheap and has very little resale value. That's basically carte blanche to make strange modifications. The first one has been rather more involved than I intended but has mostly worked out just fine (one unexpected quirk aside).

I'm rather obsessed with MiniDiscs. They're like the ultimate refinement of mixtape technology. They have the quality of a CD with better sturdiness than a cassette tape. They're also black boxes in their own weird way. In principle there's data on the disc but there's no way to use that storage space for anything except music (I can't speak for things like NetMD - I'm talking about the original format). No PC drive was ever released for music MDs. They cannot be ripped in the traditional way.

That's strangely liberating for me and so I have a growing collection of mixes that I absolutely love:

They bring me intense happiness for some reason and so I resolved that the one thing I wanted for myself in a car is a radio that could play MDs. To that end I tracked one down on eBay. It came from a Subaru Impreza Newage WRX 2005. My car is not a Subaru but it's a radio so what the hell.

The thing is that standards exist. My car has standard ISO-compliant connectors for its radio. The Subaru radio does not. In fact it has some weird Subaru-exclusive, era-exclusive connector. Also a different antenna plug!

What it should have.

What it actually has.

Of course things couldn't be easy. That's okay. Unfortunately things were hard. As in finding any sort of documentation has been damn near impossible. Even finding out the names of the ports has been a slog. That square one on the end is apparently a CeNET connector (specific to Clarion, the radio manufacturer) and is for accessories. The white one next to it is utterly unknown (I've had the machine apart trying to find a clue and still - no idea). The chunky black one is the Subaru connector and the round one is the antenna.

Let's start with the antenna as that's the easy bit.

So that's a special antenna plug. Great. Trying to source a replacement for it is difficult and expensive. They're easy to source in the US (about $10) but over here I ended up paying £7 postage to get one shipped from Exeter. Apparently the Royal Mail doesn't trust Exeter or something.

However the cable I bought isn't for a Subaru radio. No. It's for a Nissan radio. It works just fine though!

Now the Subaru connector... that's where things got a bit dicey. Just getting hold of the connector itself was damn near impossible. I'd planned to solder the connections to standard ISO plugs (the Subaru pinout can be found here) but I couldn't find just the connector anywhere. In the end I found something unrelated - a cable for something called a "Parrot handsfree kit".

From what I can tell that kit uses ISO plugs and so wouldn't be compatible with a Subaru radio. The cable that's available has ISO plugs (both male and female) and Subaru plugs (male and female). I think the idea is that the device uses the ISO plugs and passes the connection through:

The wire between the two Subaru connectors is the one wire that ISO plugs don't have (pin 7 if you're interested - it's part of the illumination brightness level, I think).

Well cutting that extra wire and using just half the lead worked first time! I now have a Subaru radio in my crappy little car!

Admittedly I had to make extensive use of a Dremel to modify the DIN slots the radio uses (why have two DIN slots if the enclosure they're in doesn't actually have space for devices that use them both?).

before (mostly)

...and after.

I ended up using the chunk I cut off to reinforce the back plate as I had to make several more holes in it to fit the ports on the radio but I got there in the end!

The only issue is that this radio is imported and, as it turns out, that means it's currently set to the Japanese broadcast band (76MHz - 90MHz). I'm going to see whether that can be changed somehow but if not I'll just live with it. I have an FM transmitter that can be connected to provide Aux-in and the two ranges overlap. Then my phone or even a battery-powered FM radio can be used! Perhaps that'd be a fun way to add DAB functionality to the vehicle, I suppose?

One last thing to mention - the radio stated that it supports a CD changer (the label is gone as it came off with the rather sticky perished coating I cleaned off!). I assumed this mean that one could be connected and its slot was just for individual CDs. Nope. When I opened it up I was shocked to see this:

I'll be honest, the CD functionality was of no interest initially but if it's an in-dash CD changer then perhaps I'll load it up with a few of my old albums. The ones I like every song of (I wrote about them back in 2007). That'd be kind of fun.

Next task - replacing all five wheels. That's going to cost me...

One day I will acquire and cook some of that mystical curly sausage

2020-04-24T23:41:00.001+01:00

I've been doing some work with some other people of late. For the most part it's going well. Occasionally I do see something that annoys me though. It's a bit of an old cliché but this is my blog and I'll cliché if I want to.

There's a quote in Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett that goes like this:

... it is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise. And the other is that tranquility is always a good thing.

I was rather pleased that several of us working together managed to make a sale. Not only that but we sold something that was gathering dust on a shelf. Currently sales are fairly low but that's kind of a good thing given availability of manufacturing capacity (yay, pandemic). Part of this sale was customising the product for the customer - which we decided to charge extra for. The customer also now wants to buy two of our other products. We'll see if he follows through on those but even if he doesn't, it's a win.

The thing being that one of the team who handles lots of the admin discouraged me from offering a custom job. I certainly wouldn't offer custom work on a large scale but the idea that we'd rather turn down a sale during a slow period just because it's marginally more hassle? To me that is really indicative of someone who has spent their career isolated from risk. I'm a bit weird in that I basically haven't had that. I've spent the majority of my working life trying to get people to buy my products. If money doesn't come in, I don't get paid.

I'm also reminded of the flip side of this. A while back a friend of mine didn't feel he'd done enough work for the amount of money he made (I can't recall whether it was reselling models on eBay or commission artwork or what). He'd spent his entire life insulated from the same risk. Show up for work and the result is money in the bank.

Both of these examples are issues with cause and effect. Work hard and pay will follow. It's a common cultural value but as Blackadder would have it:

You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan... ...it was bollocks.

Sometimes hard work is required, sometimes it isn't. Often it's more a matter of timing, or publicity, or any number of other things.

This stuff matters because if the enterprise is to stay afloat this must be central to decision making. It would be nice if we could show up, make things, and know that the end result would be a predictable amount of money. Vast armies of consultants are paid to find ways to bring this closer to reality than it naturally is. Our first example thinks that he will always be paid regardless of the fate of the organisation and the second example feels uncomfortable when faced with the reality that sometimes having the right product at the right time results in money with minimal work.

Personally I'm mostly concerned with figuring out which bits of work tend to result in the biggest sustainable payout and where it's safe to take risks. I've not figured it out yet.

Oh mae stahhrs!

2020-01-12T18:29:00.000+00:00

I didn't grow up in a house that watched sport. I've tried over the years to find enjoyment in it but I've never succeeded and at this point I've given up and made peace with it. Playing sport can be fun but watching it... pass.

However in recent years, in our house, GDQ has become our equivalent of the Olympics. GDQ being "Games Done Quick" - a twice yearly week of videogame speedrunning (Summer Games Done Quick, SGDQ, and Awesome Games Done Quick, AGDQ in winter). Obsessive nerds playing videogames to either an astonishing level of skill or breaking their mechanics to an absurd degree.

I wouldn't personally want to speedrun anything, much like I've no interest in participating in athletics. However watching someone be ridiculously good at a game I've played can be quite entertaining.

Something that's a bigger deal to me is that GDQ isn't one night. It's a week. It's like a festival I can attend without leaving home. There's familiar faces, there's new faces, there's silly in-jokes (HONK!), and there's nail-biting action.

Watching the Super Mario Maker 2 blind relay race, for example. Wow. The premise is fairly easy to understand - various people create Mario levels specially for the event. Teams attempt to make it through these torturous gauntlets. Each time they lose a life, they switch to the next player in the team. The first team to make it through the level gets a point and all teams stop and move onto the next level.

The skill involved in playing these is immense. The teams have to learn as quickly as possible and read the cues the creator has left for them to understand what they should be doing. This time the teams were so evenly matched that one level came down to a difference of half a second. It had us howling at the screen when they almost succeeded, cheering when they did, and generally having a wonderful time.

Other runs were fun too, of course, but that was the apex. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was rather cosy, Clone Hero was mesmerising, and the Hebereke run was extremely charming, to name just a few.

What gets me is that a certain subset of folks cannot abide GDQ. It's usually for the oddest of reasons. They don't like that runners are requested not to swear on stream, for example, and will argue until they're blue in the face about it. The point of the event is to raise money for a charity - there's loads of ancillary reasons too, but ultimately the event exists for that purpose. In order to do that certain restrictions need to apply. They're advertised up front, it's not like runners arrive at the event and are then given a list of new requirements. A very odd thing to get worked up about but it does speak to the mindset of these, shall we generously say, "critics".

I say "mindset" because each criticism I read from people of this opinion seems to be tied up in their own social issues. People having fun and being silly on stream are described as "cringe" (as with many other things they're not aware of how to use the word properly, much like "so cliché" rather than "so clichéd"). As we say online "Don't @ me". I do not care to hear your opinion about your insecurities.

By that I mean that I have been to parties. I've been to conventions. I've spent time around humans and you know what?

We're not beacons of dignity.

We have fun, we make fools of ourselves, and we enjoy ourselves. Oh, does our dancing make you cringe? Poor you! Would you prefer if we didn't have in-jokes that make us feel part of a friendly and encouraging social group? Too bad!

You're not required to take part, although you're invited to. The fun is open to all, assuming they're not mean-spirited misanthropes who want to make their inferiority complexes everyone else's problem. I phrase it that way because, you know what? I have issues about looking silly and feeling like an arse when dancing! I absolutely do!

However I recognise that those issues are my burden to bear, my baggage to be dealt with. It's not everyone else's fault for having fun in a silly way. Perhaps I wouldn't be brave enough to dance but I'm confident enough to chance my precious dignity on shouting HONK!

Those tools used on lino are vicious

2019-10-20T14:43:00.002+01:00

Someone contacted me a while ago in order to get access to their old forum account in order to take a trip down memory lane. The forum has been dead for a long time but it's kept private and is mostly there as a digital archive of a different age of the internet. It was founded in 2005 and so at this stage it's going way back.

Today I had a message from them asking to delete the account and so I obliged. I vaguely wonder why but I also understand that everyone has different approaches to their digital past. They also commented that the forum should have been deleted long ago because it's a "ghost town". That's the bit that perplexes me.

It's an archive. Technically it can still be contributed to but I don't expect any further content to be added. I keep it around because it was something we created together and it doesn't feel right to wipe out other people's past without consulting them. Possibly most importantly it's a private archive. Search engines can't index it, new accounts can only be created with admin approval, and so it's just sort of a time capsule.

There's very few forums left online from the time period this one was active in and that's what makes it special to me. The notion that it being inactive is why it should be deleted confuses me. It takes up barely any resources on my webserver, and as it's private even if someone said something as an awkward teenager it's not visible to the wider world.

When these things happen I immediately delete their accounts, as requested. I'm not interested in arguing the toss with them. If they want to delete their content they can. It's theirs after all.

That said if the logic is "it's inactive and therefore should be deleted" then so many things would be lost to the ages. A whole load of podcasts I've enjoyed, webcomics, and other projects would just be gone.

Partly perhaps for me it's because there's something amazing about preserving the mundane. We know the history of great kings from human history but we're scrabbling in the dirt to try to figure out what the lives of the majority of people looked like during those eras. Our forum wasn't big or important to the wider world but it was somewhere many of us visited daily. Relationships were formed (and failed!), joy and sadness was shared, and it all happened during a formative era for the modern internet. The forum predates YouTube. It predates Reddit. It predates modern social media.

Teletext was a mundane part of everyday life in the '90s. These days we've got projects gathering old VHS tapes to try to salvage teletext data from them to try to preserve a small part of what was. Our forum has become part of that sort of thing and I think that's kinda magical.

I probably have a database backup somewhere should it one day be required but it mostly just irks me that people want to carve chunks out of it. It wasn't a hotbed of extremism or something like that - it was mostly chat about the pop culture of the day.

Then again lots of people don't preserve their photos long term. Once they get a new phone they abandon the old stuff. I don't understand that at all but it seems to be fairly normal. I love that I have photos of myself as an awkward teenager with too much neck!

I'll be honest, I gave up on reaching the top of Tick Tock Clock.

2019-09-19T15:30:00.000+01:00

I've ranted about how overrated I think Super Mario 64 is before but today I was watching a video and I think it finally clicked what it is that gets me about it.

The year was 1997, I suspect, and by this point I'd played plenty of games. They'd all been cheaper than the cartridge-based SM64. This game was seriously pricey and I was fortunate enough to have it bought for me (although I did buy the console myself).

There's 120 objectives in the game split across 15 worlds, 16 if we count the overworld and its small secret areas that contain some of them. Effectively there's seven per level.

Remember that famous adage - "Always leave them wanting more"?

SM64 gives no fucks about that. It will have you trekking around those levels until you know them so well that there's absolutely no mystique left. Every time I see pictures or footage of most of the levels my brain instinctively recoils from the boredom.

That isn't to say the levels are terrible - not at all. They're pretty good. Unfortunately they massively outstay their novelty. Many of them change slightly between objectives but they're generally small changes that don't really impact things that much.

By comparison Super Mario Galaxy mixes its worlds up frequently. Areas are sometimes reused but mostly things are shuffled around so that the areas feel fresh and novel.

This may also speak to my utter hatred of backtracking. If I'm going to endure boredom it'd better be for work or someone else's benefit. It has no place in my entertainment choices. If I have to see the same area of a game repeatedly the designers need to:

Have a really good reason
Work very, very hard to keep it interesting

I don't recall ever getting bored of the hub world of SMG. Over time things in it would change and the distances between things were short. The hub world of SMG2 wasn't as good but it was even smaller and so didn't involve an extended stay.

SM64 on the other had has the player traipsing back and forth to get to other levels. It's a slog. As a result I'd rather get the current level polished off and be done with it.

Does that sound like a desirable attitude for players?

A huge, desolate hub world and levels that are used so thoroughly that the question "I wonder what's around the next corner?" is easily answerable as "That thing I've seen three times on this star alone".

All that said I wonder if part of this is my particular wiring. I have an excellent spatial memory, rarely lose things, and can map things very easily (however I can't remember what it is we're doing next week despite being told ten minutes ago). Perhaps the way I experience these levels is unusual and so colours my thoughts on the matter.

Huh.

The walking sound effects were certainly distinctive.

2019-09-11T12:18:00.001+01:00

We all have those half-remembered things from childhood. TV shows we saw a snippet of, perhaps a book we remember reading, or some game that we played.

I was born in December 1986 and missed out on the British microcomputer boom. That's not a lament, just a statement. Oddly enough I did play some Spectrum games growing up. Long before I knew what an emulator was someone installed one on a PC in my parents' office. I've no idea where they got a speccy emulator or the ROMs, especially as this was pre-internet. Maybe it was on the computer when they got it, maybe it was on a floppy. It's a complete mystery to me.

Regardless there were a variety of games on there. It was tricky knowing what was what. This was in the days of DOS and filenames were limited to 8.3 characters which generally would look like this:

filename.txt -> filena~1.txt

As a result filenames were short and this made the titles of the games rather cryptic until they were booted up. I didn't make notes on what was what either because, well, I was a young child.

Anyway, two games that stood out in my memory were Flunky and another one. Both were open world adventure games with fairly nice pixel art for the time. We'll get to that other one in a moment. It's worth noting that "flunky" is six characters, so that's probably why I remember it!

The second game was not so easy to locate. The problem is that I remember vague things about it but not much else. There were multiple characters to play as and it was set in a British town. Beyond that... Erm... There was a pub called The Red Lion?

Bear in mind that I didn't grow up in the 1980s, I was three years old in 1990. I wasn't aware of the culture of Spectrum games, the weird things that received computer game adaptations, and so on. I've learnt about it in recent years and it was... weird.

I found the game though. It turns out that over on the Spectrum Computing forum there's a thread on Pubs in ZX Spectrum games. Yes, really. It's quite a new thread, as it happens, and three months ago someone posted about The Red Lion!

It turns out that the game was "Everyone's A Wally" and it looks like it was quite highly rated. When it was released on tape the B-side was a song by Mike Berry which is rather catchy, as it happens. Something strange that stood out about the game though - the use of "the". Objects the characters picked up had "the" in the name. "The good insulator", "The empty bottle", and similar. Considering the limited screen real estate (256*192) it's surprising that they did things that way but charming in its own way.

You can see the game being played through here:

...and it was always phpBB.

2019-08-06T02:24:00.000+01:00

Way back in the heyday of forums people on forums I'd frequent would create their own and tell us about them. Sometimes they took off but mostly they didn't.

In response to one of these I created a lengthy post with bits of advice derived from my observations about what worked along with a bit of guesswork. Annoyingly there's no reasonable way to find that post - it'll probably have been on the EU PSP forums and those are long gone. There's probably some record on Archive.org but realistically it's not worth the trouble.

Perhaps a bit of context is appropriate at this juncture. Forums as a medium are, for the most part, dead. There's a few kicking about but I know my favourite one, YakTribe, updated its forum software and the user experience is now truly horrendous. I'm trying to get over it to continue to contribute but it's like the site actually wants me to leave.

Something that doesn't fulfil the same role but is inexplicably popular is Discord. It seems that any given community has multiple Discord servers. The system works reasonably well and it's certainly a step up from IRC, but its linear nature doesn't lend itself to ongoing discussions. In an attempt to support this admins create countless channels. For bigger servers this is workable, although any time a discussion veers into a different area there's always someone saying "best take this over to #specificChannel". Usually when that happens I just give up. It kills the flow. If there was a WhatsApp-style quote system then the channel switch could be handled somewhat organically but at the time of writing nothing like that exists.

Now, here's where that old forum advice thing comes in. When Dave decides he wants to setup a Discord server for his thing he imagines that he'll hundreds of users. They'll want to spend lots of time there talking about countless subjects. Better get the work done now and create specific channels for each subject!

People starting their own forums would do exactly the same thing. They'd create loads of subforums. Do you know who mostly starts lots of topics in a silent forum? Extroverts and idiots. The former are like gold dust and the latter aren't good at stimulating discussion.

The end result is 1 - 5 topics in each forum and a constant feeling of emptiness. That doesn't foster a community spirit and as a result they'd usually die on their arses.

Anyone wondering about approaches I know to work:
Create 2 - 4 sections. One off topic and the others related to broad areas of the subject materials.

If a subject comes up multiple times then it's time to start thinking about creating a new area for that - otherwise the existing area will become the de facto right place for that, often at the expense of other discussions.

The other thing to bear in mind is which tool is right for the prospective audience.

I'm not a fan of Facebook. I never have been. I was a late adopter and I don't use it to share many of the traditional things. In fact I mostly use it for hobby communities and work. Like the medium or not there has never been a more active Gorkamorka community anywhere. At the time of writing there are more than 2300 members and it's rare for a day to go by without someone posting something.

Multiple forums have existed over the years, there's several Discord servers with Gorkamorka channels, there's a subreddit, and probably other things too. None of them see more than a few words exchanged per month. Some don't see that per year.

A fresh-faced young nerd of 17 asked me:

"have you ever considered making a gorkamorka specific discord?"

...the other day and that's what got me started on this train of thought. At the time I asked him what that would accomplish and he didn't have an answer for me. I wasn't trying to be harsh, I was basing it on the fact that I run the Gorkamorka channel on the /r/Warhammer Discord server. There are over 3000 members on there. I've probably had less than ten proper conversations about Gorkamorka on there ever. I'm also on an Ork-specific Discord server. Fewer than five Gorkamorka conversations in its channel.

Each time one creates a new space for a subject there's some filtering. Uptake isn't perfect. Any time there's an opportunity for something to be a bit too much faff then a certain percentage of users will vanish.

As a result the hypothetical best tool for the job might be much better but unless the existing userbase is crying out for a move then it's rarely worth it. Even if it is then care must be taken in rolling out the new setup so as to encourage a bit of esprit de corps.

Incidentally my favourite use of Discord has been for programming assistance related to my Twine projects. It's a medium that works well for that sort of thing as its features are richer than IRC and the persistence of conversation means one doesn't need a client running the whole time to get some context.

It turns out floppy disks weren't always utter cack

2019-06-03T16:43:00.001+01:00

Next time I'm curious what that game was that someone brought in for us to play on the ignored computer in the corner of Ms. Seward's (Mrs.?) classroom: Iron Lord.

By a process of elimination it must have been the Atari ST version. The reason being that I'd used an Amiga 500 or 600 extensively and would have noticed and remembered if it was Amiga-branded. Similarly it couldn't have been an Acorn Archimedes because almost all the other computers available to us were those ARM-based wonders. In the next classroom there was one and we used it often to play things like Crystal Maze, Lemmings, Pac-Mania, and Chuck Rock. With the disks kicking about we'd have used the other machine as well if it'd been an option.

Iron Lord was released for the following platforms:

Acorn 32-bit
Amiga
Amstrad CPC
Atari ST
Commodore 64
DOS
ZX Spectrum

We've eliminated the first two. The CPC, Commodore 64, and Speccy all had distinctive appearances and whilst I might not have recognised them (although weirdly I'd played Spectrum games on PC on an emulator at this point, long before I knew what an emulator was!) they were most definitely not "early '90s light grey" (unlike the Archimedes, Amiga, and Atari ST). We had Windows machines at home and I was well versed with gaming on Windows by this point so that's a non-starter.

Quod erat demonstrandum it must have been the one and only time I ever used an Atari ST. I remember the map screen, the arm-wrestling minigame, and vaguely the archery.

Now to track down a game that might have been played on a BBC Micro... but might not. Wait, no, it must have been on an Acorn Archimedes and it really was called "Asylum"! Someone brought it in, as far as I know, and I had a go on it. What a weird time it was in personal computing.

I wonder what became of that cardboard mockup?

2019-04-26T21:15:00.002+01:00

Something that's kind of interesting to me - I initially poured scorn on the concept of Apple's iPad. I couldn't see a good use case for me when they were new. It's now nearly a decade on and frankly... that hasn't changed.

Our household contains several tablets that we've acquired through various means and they're just sort of, well, useless to me. We sometimes use one to interface with our recording equipment for podcasts but that role is equally served by any phone with a headphone socket.

I suppose the general point being that with some technologies I think they're brilliant for me and for others not so much. Some win me over, most don't.

The world has embraced tablet computing and I'm no luddite. I'm just still not convinced. This may be because I'm part of the internet's 1%. I create content. Lots of content. Tablets aren't really conducive to that.

I currently create both images and video, program, and write. Those kinds of tasks don't really gel with a keyboard-less device, I suppose. It does make think of the phrase "I'm a lurker, not a writer" which is apparently a popular motif for underwear. How odd.

This isn't a condemnation of tablets, it's just a little introspection.

The artillery effects on trench systems are impressive, to be fair

2019-04-08T04:11:00.000+01:00

I've been playing the Battlefield series of games for a while now on a variety of platforms. I enjoyed the hell out of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on Windows, had a fairly okay time with Battlefield 3 on Windows, then dived into Battlefield 4 on Xbox 360, and now I'm onto Battlefield 1 on Xbox One X.

It's essentially mandatory at this stage to mention that Bad Company 2 is really the pinnacle of the series. That. Make that. It was an amazing game and still looks lovely today. It also had mechanics that I really enjoyed, weapons that fitted a variety of playstyles, and an expansion pack set in Vietnam.

You can view my stats for my time with Bad Company 2 here. My favoured weapons were the M1 Garand, the Type 88 LMG. Interestingly one can see it's early in my Battlefield career as my cumulative Kill/Death ratio is only 0.82 after 263 hours.

What tends to happen is that I suck most heartily for quite a while. Then I find some weapons that fit my tastes, get a feel for the maps, figure out the game mechanics, and then get (fairly) good.

For some context, here's a little table:

	K/D	Playtime
Bad Company 2	0.82	263 hours
Battlefield 3	0.99	49 hours
Battlefield 4	1.36	247 hours
Battlefield 1	1.23	47 hours

It's taken next to no time at all to get a positive kill/death ratio in Battlefield 1 as I'm just better at these kinds of games these days. I may not be a spritely twenty something but my reactions are plenty quick (and frankly reaction time isn't the limiting factor!).

It's only tabulating the data that has me noticing a trend. I'm writing this post because although I'm now good at BF1, I'm just sort of... done with it. I was similarly done with BF3 and it's rather impressive how close the total playtimes are. Huh.

However I wanted to provide a bit of info first to thoroughly support the notion that I've put the effort in to get to know the game. One could view these hour counts as wasted time too but I don't play these games as a hobby. They're part of actively relaxing. Trying to be productive every waking hour just results in my brain feeling like it's disintegrating. Being that it's me I try to min/max my relaxation too and so blog posts like this result.

A further bit of context - I watch a lot of Forgotten Weapons and have done for some time (Jenny interviewed Ian for her podcast last year!). I'm interested in a variety of firearms, often for their place in history. "Last ditch" weapons are a particular favourite, for example.

Coming to Battlefield 1 I had a rough idea of what to expect. What caught me off guard and still annoys me is the degree of silliness. These games have four classes whose roles vary a bit game by game. There's usually a machine gunny role, a sniper role, and an assault rifle role. Other stuff gets shuffled around but broad strokes here.

World War 1 is the setting for Battlefield 1. Assault rifles effectively weren't invented until the late stages of World War Two. Hmm.

Well we've got light machine guns, they were a thing. Ish. Sure, whatever, if you like. Similarly snipers were very much a thing. My grandfather passed the third cigarette on to his children, for example (Yep, my grandfather was a Victorian - he was born in the late 1890s).

Submachine guns then. What about them?

Basically they weren't starting to see use until 1918. Even then we're not talking vast quantities. Between 5,000 and 10,000 MP18s were issued, for example. It's a mainstay of Battlefield 1. Everyone's packing one. Well, everyone that hasn't unlocked the bloody Hellriegel, of course.

The Hellriegel might as well be fictional. Do you know how many were built?

One.

All we have are some photos of the damned thing.

But if you're playing BF1 you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the main weapon of World War 1. Both in multiplayer and campaign it's everywhere.

Similarly there's various self-loading rifles in the game for the medic class. They're mostly ridiculously obscure things as far as I can tell. No, 200 rifles do not count. In a war as big as that I cannot have that handwaved. Sorry, no.

German tanks. In the game they're all over the place. In reality there were 20. By comparison there were 150 British tanks.

Yeah, sorry, knowing that the chances of a German tank appearing were that minimal makes it very difficult to not feel like the entire game is written by morons. It isn't. They made choices that made sense for their expected player base. It was created to make money after all.

That said it's very difficult to take the game seriously when you're in the Sinai desert and find a German tank has teleported there from France. Sorry, no.

Having seen footage of the sequel, Battlefield V, I'm concerned that they're pulling similar dumb bullshit (24 Flettner Fl 282s were built, DICE. Helicopters didn't feature prominently in World War fucking Two).

I enjoy the odd obscure weapon (such as the inclusion of the damned Kolibri pistol in Battlefield 1!) but they should be fun references, not the main armaments. Once you take it too far the fourth wall breaks and the whole backdrop of the game goes with it.

Woefully esoteric

2019-02-21T12:48:00.003+00:00

Perhaps I'm odd like this but I hate Chekhov's Gun and the writing style it encourages. Cut away everything from a plot or scene until only the bare bones remains results in something substantially more lifeless.

Chekhov wrote about "promises made" to the audience and honestly - no.

Maybe it's because we now live in a world with much greater exposure to stories in a variety of mediums but things like this ruin the mystique of the plot for me. It's like watching a TV show with a "previously on" segment. They're essentially telling the audience which obscure details mattered from previous episodes - thanks for that.

I can give an example from Vatta's War (by Elizabeth Moon). There's a scene in the ship's mess where characters have a conversation about a pen knife with a hidden blade. It never comes up again - even when it might have helped save one of the character's lives.

My takeaway from this wasn't "but there was an implied promise that it'd reappear" (*cough* Chekhov) it was "these characters are having a realistic conversation and it's helping me invest in them emotionally". Of course one can argue that by doing this the knife is still serving a purpose and it is but not in the setup->payoff way that Chekhov's talking about.

My favourite thing about Mad Max: Fury Road is the worldbuilding. There's barely any expositional explanation of what's happening unless it makes sense (e.g. Nux being told what's happening outside because he's receiving a blood transfusion). We're expected to piece it together as we go along - just like real life. It's up to us to figure out which bits are important and which aren't and for me that really helps bring a setting to life.

It's something I really appreciate in slightly older films - every moment isn't crammed with content. There's space to breathe and the editing isn't as tight. I enjoy the modern style too but it's very different and conforms more to Chekhov's way of doing things.

Of course it's entirely possible to overdo this and never get on with the plot but that's where an editor should be getting involved!

How did that standee not terrify me as a kid?

2019-01-04T13:43:00.000+00:00

I'm surprised I haven't written about Dave Morris' gamebook "Heart of Ice" before. I mean, I have, but I would have thought in the decade plus that I've been blogging here I would have covered it.

Growing up from about age seven we would leave south Wales during the nicest time of year and migrate to the north of England where the weather could be best described as "Autumnal" and the terrain "open" (read: barren). It was part of a contract to supply hunting falcons - they needed to be supplied trained during that period. I was dragged along because I was a child and couldn't be abandoned to enjoy the summer. On the plus side this is probably why I still revel in warm weather!

One of the highlights (as this was pre-internet access) was the local library. It wasn't amazing but it was substantially better than the one we had in Carmarthen even though it was smaller. Having revisited that library in the mid 2000s I'm still not sure what large sections of it were for.

Anyway the Haltwhistle library had a promotional standee thingy containing books. I seem to recall it showed a gorgeously printed snake creature but that could just be a false memory. In it were a series of choose-your-own-adventure style books. I'd encountered the format previously having been introduced to the Fighting Fantasy series by a friend. The relatively complex dice mechanics and similar didn't really work for me though and so I tended to read them more for the story than anything else.

I borrowed all the books from the standee at various points but the one I kept coming back to was, unsurprisingly, Heart of Ice. It had a clear slip cover on it and I loved it. I borrowed it every summer and desperately wanted my own copy. My mother tried to track one down (she'd often visit book shops and pick books she thought I might like to encourage me to read - a success but possibly the reason I'm crap at picking books for myself) to no avail.

Years later I emailed Dave Morris and he provided both a PDF and somewhere to buy a reprint. I later contacted him about developing a game based on the book. It would have been an open source game done through a small group I was involved with but whilst I received permission things never got started on that project.

Time passed.

Then last year I thought "I'm working on my own Twine/Sugarcube game - why not take a break and port the original book? How hard can it be?"

You might think the answer would be "much harder than expected" but it wasn't. In programming terms the game is relatively simple. There's no randomness, for example. The thing that took a while was importing every passage (400+) as well as scanning and processing the artwork. As mentioned in a previous post I really don't like my Twine games to be a collection of files. If at all possible I want them self-contained and for this game that meant being clever with the choice of compression. Conveniently (the book cover and map aside) all the artwork is in black and white. Literally. There are no shades of grey whatsoever. This meant I was able to use a very limited colour palette to produce high resolution versions of the images. That matters because have you looked at a modern phone or tablet?

I wanted this stuff to look sharp! The art is gorgeous and it'd be such a shame to only have some blurry JPEGs when something better would be possible with some effort. This did mean scanning in all the artwork myself though but what the hell, why not?

Amusingly because of the way Blogger works it will look fairly muddy but trust me, in the game the illustrations look great.

I also upscaled some additional artwork where appropriate from the original artist, Russ Nicholson. You can see some of it here. Quite an iconic style and the reprinted book I mentioned earlier contained at least one extra piece so in it went too!

Something that wasn't in the original book was sound - it wasn't powered by Ultraword™after all.

If I had the right gear and unlimited time I would have liked to create soundscapes for every location but unfortunately that wasn't an option. Many players may not hear the game's sounds though so I thought it might well be wasted effort regardless. I instead included a few sounds for usability:

Should you be unfortunate enough to die you'll be subjected to the howling wind over snowy plains.
Reloading a barysal gun is surprisingly uncommon and so there's a cue for that too.
Being unable to purchase something due to lack of funds also has a little tone.
There's also a sound for opening the map. The illustration on the inside cover of the original book always felt it was lacking some sort of noise so I had to figure something out!

Finally I implemented some custom fonts to convey when certain types of character speak (usually mechanical voices - I wanted Gilgamesh to be particularly unpleasant to read. Yes, that font choice was deliberate.).

I did some bug testing (not enough as it turns out - is there such a thing as "enough bug testing"?) and then contacted Dave Morris. Better late than never, eh?

If you follow Dave's blog you'll already have seen this but it became his Christmas present to fans!

You can play the game here:

here: https://woodendice.org/flamekebab/heart_of_ice/heart_of_ice_v.1.0.7.html

The URL isn't very nice, I know, but I don't want to finalise things until I'm fairly confident it won't need to be changed again. Oh and saving the web page should get you everything as it's self-contained.

Right, I'm going to go turn the heating on!

Also do you know how long most concrete lasts? It's not hundreds of years.

2019-01-02T15:54:00.001+00:00

I'm still paying Fallout 4. Whilst I'm enjoying it I'd quite like to reach the end because once I'm done I don't plan on ever playing through it again. Not in a bad way - I just can't see my future self sinking this much time into a single game.

I don't like ridiculously short games but equally if a game is over a certain length it's almost an immediate non-starter - assuming I know the approximate length of the game going in of course.

This has lead me to wish that Bethesda could do several things with a future Fallout game. I don't think there's any chance of them doing these things and that's pretty much why I'm writing about them. Furthermore as a player I only think I know what I want. Customers often say they want one thing but then purchasing patterns don't actually support that and I suspect the same would be true here. I'd like some of the following tried though!

1. A smaller game world.

As much fun as a sprawling game world is it's still too small. Y'see when it comes to worlds Bethesda doesn't make them to scale. Most developers don't. Reality is big and that's not actually all that fun to traverse. Add to that the task of detailing everywhere being immense and we're at a situation where it's either a matter of procedural generation (hard to do right) or lots of hours of work for a small army of developers (ruinously expensive and also hard).

Modern incarnations of the Gamebryo engine can at least handle tens of NPCs so the place doesn't feel quite as empty but the idea of an in-game location being a "city" is still painfully jarring. It works fine for a "settlement" but no, that's not a city. That's not even a town.

As with many things creativity is often spurred on by limitations. I wish Bethesda would embrace their limitations and try to tell a compelling and reactive story within those rather than aiming for something beyond the scope of what they can realistically realise.

2. A more reactive game world.

I'm making my way through Fallout 4's story but before I really got started I took the time to build a network of well-populated settlements. I dragged many of them kicking and screaming into civilisation. By that I mean I'd take over a settlement with people living in pathetic shacks that would in no way be suitable for the climate they live in. I'd define a perimeter to be defended and build with concrete. Proper structures that could be defended. Solid concrete walls thick enough to provide a barrier against the radiation storms that often blow in from the south west. Lighting. Water. Food.

This sort of thing is very rarely commented on in the game's story though. It's not programmed to react to my exploits most of the time. When I encountered the character of Deacon I was incredibly pleased that he was on my side on the basis of my exploits. He knew that I'd done things and should be allied with as soon as possible.

Similarly I enjoyed having the option to tell a journalist:

"You're all living in rusty shacks, killing each other, and my God, the smell..."

I'm trying to roleplay as my character and whilst she's generally a force for good I also try to remember that she's a pre-war lawyer. She is intelligent, incisive, and doesn't take any bullshit. Sometimes she will ask questions she knows the answers to in order to see what the other party thinks about the matter.

So upon being presented with Bethesda's idea of what 200 years after a nuclear war looks like I would expect her to think "Really? This is the best you could do?"

Note that this contrasts with what 200 years after the war looks like in Black Isle's Fallout universe. There they've realised that they can, in fact, build... new structures. Mind blowing.

The general point being that most of the time my character doesn't seem to be recognised by the game world. It is unaffected by her and she is unaffected by it. Companions will comment on an area but she remains silent. It's pretty immersion breaking.

Scale it down and make it react more. If I do remarkable things or establish trade networks that's a big deal. It's a big deal because everyone else seems to mostly be sitting around sulking rather than getting their shit together.

3. Stop being scared to create.

There's the headquarters of a toy company. They're a Bethesda creation (and their toy, Giddyup Buttercup is too). Well done. On a terminal one can read about possible future models of the toy that would have tie-in branding. Which companies are named? Nuka cola, Vault-Tec, and Rob-co.

Wow. Yes, obviously. Such natural fits and certainly not chosen because barely any other notable named companies exist within the canon. Would it have killed them to create some plausible tie-ins?

Similarly many of the enemies that exist in the Bethesda Fallout games have at best a very flimsy justification for being there. The same is true for various drugs found in the games. Psycho, for example, is a military drug:

A unique delivery system filled with strange and unknown chemicals of probably military origin. It is supposed to increase the combat potential of a soldier.

But of course you find it all over the place in Bethesda's games because why not?
The drug "Jet" was invented during the events of Fallout 2. You can have its creator join your party.

Fuck it though, let's ignore that and have it spread across America rather than California. We could invent a similar drug and call it something else but we didn't buy the Fallout IP not to use it.

Yeah, it's dumb, it's lazy, and it takes me out of the moment. If you need something in the game check if it already exists and could plausibly be found there. If it isn't plausible create something else to fit the bill.

In general I want a tighter experience that feels less like a load of addictive game mechanics strung together and more like a roleplaying environment. Not much point in creating a roleplaying game if the player's actions don't really matter.

But I am! I am questioning the visions!

2018-12-06T21:45:00.000+00:00

I've been playing Fallout 4. I used to refer to Fallout 3 as "Bethesda's Fallout" but at this point there have been more Bethesda Fallout games than there were Black Isle Fallout games.

I'm not planning to rehash what I've said about Fallout 3 here as my opinion on that applies just as much to Fallout 4. The only thing I'm currently irked about is the vaults.

When I played Fallout 2 the discovery that the vaults were shady was disturbing. It was a brilliant revelation. These days it's such common knowledge that it's not even addressed in-game. My character, "the sole survivor", doesn't even question it. In fact she has the option to say that Vault-Tec is "evil". Arguably she'd be right but based on what?

That is to say I've encountered their work in previous games - she hasn't. She was put in a vault and frozen. It kept her safe from the apocalypse, pretty much as advertised. Nothing particularly shady happened to her aside from being cryogenically preserved - she wasn't part of any behavioural experiments or anything like that. The fate of her husband and infant son were nothing to do with Vault-Tec as far as she knows either.

So when playing the Fallout 4 DLC why does she just unquestionably assume that experimenting on people is something Vault-Tec do? Why does the overseer just blurt this out?

It's dumb and pretty much Bethesda's Fallout to a T.

I guess I'll go make a start on that ironing.

2018-07-16T21:08:00.000+01:00

Perhaps it'll turn out to be a daft set of decisions but I'm going to risk being smug in advance. Hold my text editor, lads.

I'm working on a game. As with most things of this nature it started off as something small and got wildly out of control. It's written in Sugarcube and TWINE - that is to say it's a text-based adventure played in a browser and distributed either as just an HTML file or as an archive with resources.

Personally I'm not a fan of having to package up a load of resources. Not a fan. Also when I started work on it (and perhaps still now) images that were outside the dev environment wouldn't be displayed in the preview functionality.

I opted instead to embed the files as Base64 strings. Basically taking the file data and turning it into text that a browser is happy to decode. I use this method to embed images, sounds, and text.

Of course the immediate reaction from various people I asked when implementing this was "That's probably a bad idea" and comments about bloating a browser and the like. Doing this willy-nilly would absolutely risk that but this is me we're talking about. At this stage I'm old compared to lots of the young folks creating games. I grew up in the age of dial-up, tiny hard disks, and similar limitations. If there's one thing I know it's about compressing files!

The images I'm using are mostly run through Geometrize before being resized and squashed into tiny JPGs. They're also used sparingly. I think there's two images of that kind in the game so far.

The others are PNG-8 files with very limited colour counts to keep their file sizes as low as possible without becoming hideous.

Similarly there's sound in my game. I considered using Opus for audio but Safari doesn't currently support it natively. Everyone else has got their shit together (even Microsoft's Edge browser supports it, for gods' sakes) but that's a fairly big chunk of users and the saving isn't that great. I mean, percentage wise it's excellent - about a 30% reduction in filesize - but that's not really worth the trade off when that's 3592 bytes vs. 5184 bytes. That's the largest sound file in the game.

The largest image is much larger but that's because it's a struggle to compress images with transparency in this day and age because it would seem different vendors can't agree so we're still stuck using JPEG and PNG. As a result in order to actually be supported I've got an image that weighs in at 123 KB.

Fonts are where things get properly heavy

21 KB - Trash Hand Regular
63 KB - Patrick Hand SC
27 KB - Black Biro
21 KB - Rokkitt

132 KB. Ouch. Still - worth it.

So how big is the game? Currently it's 1404 KB. It'd fit on a floppy disk. Here's the breakdown:

9 KB of sound
132 KB of fonts
163 KB of images
1099 KB of text

I think it'll be fine this way.

When is it even set?

2018-03-07T10:24:00.001+00:00

On the plane back from New Zealand I watched a few things but one stood out to me. I watched it from beginning to end and don't recall enjoying a single moment of it. I endured in the hope that there would be a reveal of some description; that in some way the pieces would fall into place and make the whole mess make sense.

I'm still baffled.

It's like the polar opposite of the TV show We Are Klang. That's hilarious, idiotic, and best described as a kid's TV show for adults. Every time I watch it I wonder how they managed to convince anyone to fund it but love that they did.

Its budget wasn't $20 million (2007) though.

This thing has a running time of 123 minutes, or about $16,000 per minute, and in my mind is best described by Moe from The Simpsons.

The thing in question is Synecdoche, New York, in which we follow Caden Cotard, a theatre director of no discernible charisma. He has a wife and a daughter and is generally miserable. Actually that pretty much describes the state of everyone in the film. No one is happy, no one ever becomes happy. The amount of misery they endure varies but basically the film is a study in people having depressing lives as inexplicable weirdness happens around them.

A character buys a house that's on fire. It remains on fire for the entire film. This is never explained and isn't a hallucination. Okay then. Po-mo.

Caden receives a MacArthur Fellowship which would, in theory, provide him with $500,000 over the course of five years. Or $25,000 per quarter. In the film this funding is open-ended and vastly in excess of that.

To try to do something with his life he tries to put on a play set in a copy of New York, in a pocket dimension. It's supposed to be a warehouse but the size makes no sense whatsoever. Yay, postmodernism.

He then spends the rest of his life feebly trying to create something in this warehouse with a small town's worth of actors with no real direction, massive scope creep, and a few different relationships.

That first wife leaves him taking his daughter with her. Said daughter grows up and has a life that could be described as equal parts Bohemian and harrowing. Caden doesn't appear to be able to understand how time works and so is constantly baffled by how she's now an adult. I don't mean in a "they grow up so fast" way - no, I mean in a very literal sense. He thinks she's still four after having been gone for six years. Oh and as a dying adult she thinks he's gay. Apparently she never actually looked into his life despite clearly being traumatised by what she was told about him. The scenes with her are uncomfortable, depressing, and ultimately nonsensical.

His other daughter from his second marriage takes no part in the narrative except to be referred to by the wrong name a couple of times when talking about his first daughter.

Oh and a mysterious illness is slowly killing him in annoying but mundane ways. I suppose this is supposed to signify decay and spiralling out of control in various ways but at this stage it's hard to really know what, if anything, this film is trying to say. In that respect it's a metaphor for itself, I guess.

Here's a trailer that makes it seem like there's anything like a coherent narrative:

Did I mention that eventually he swaps places with the actress he's hired to play a cleaner and she starts running the show? Yeah, so that happens.

I'd sum it up as "Here's a bunch of stuff that happens. You'll find it a bit emotionally disturbing. Don't expect resolution because there's none coming."

I'm mostly writing this to get this irritation out of my head and onto digital paper. It's pretentious guff that is most certainly not "extremely funny". It has nothing to say, just like the play Caden attempts, and much like that ultimately collapses under its own weight.

Did you have help?

2017-12-28T04:05:00.002+00:00

There's lots of things I'm proud of about myself but the amount of reading I do isn't one of them. It contrasts a fair bit with how things were when I was a child - I devoured books back then. Admittedly that was in the age of media poverty (a subject I could have sworn I've written about before).

Anyway, when I travel I like to read (so these days that's about twice a year...) and a better option fell through. A friend let me have a book that she'd finished in the recent past that had disappointed her in its lack of Christmas content. Apparently the name "A Christmas Cracker" and the snowy scene depicted on the cover were somewhat misleading...

Yep, that's actual glitter on there.

I accepted it mostly to be polite but I figured I'd give it a go in transit if I felt like reading. I might have been able to finish it if I hadn't put it down so many times amidst cries of "Oh come on!" and "Who talks like that?!"

Having never read anything by Trisha Ashley before I didn't know what to expect and was rather suspicious of the jacket comment "Trisha at her best". Mmmhmm.

Amusingly I'm the one that reads chick-lit whereas Jenny's preference is for gruesome murders and crime. Anyway, let's get into what I thought of the book and what sort of thing led to that opinion.

We'll start off with the general first act of the narrative, why not?

Tabitha (37), our plucky heroine, is convicted of fraud and sent to prison for a brief stint following a spot of undercover TV journalism. Her "friend" (who we'll get to shortly) perjures herself and this testimony somehow counts or something. It's pretty quickly glossed over how this stuff works (not that it'd make for scintillating reading, admittedly) but it's done in such a way as to feel utterly implausible. Tabitha is, of course, mostly innocent. Innocent enough that it feels incredibly unlikely that she'd receive any punishment at all, let alone a conviction.

So that's our rather spongey bedrock...

A character is introduced who descends like a big dollop of deus ex machina to give Tabitha a, sigh, fresh start. Said patron is wealthy, slightly eccentric (in the happy-clappy way, not the air baths way), and proceeds to remove material concerns of any kind from the list of Tabitha's concerns. Apparently our heroine is exactly who she's been looking for to be her PA. Prior to this Tabitha's CV seems to have consisted of warehouse work and a lengthy stint of care work prior to the death of her mother. Such an obvious good fit. I'm sure a good heart and a laughably sheltered personality will lend itself perfectly to the refurbishment and relaunch of a niche manufacturing concern.

Of course this being this book it does. Nothing presents any difficulties and the rework of the Christmas cracker factory goes off without a hitch over the course of the book. Without exaggeration there is not a single wrinkle in the plan.

They pitch to a prestigious shop and a chapter later they've got an order.
They apply for planning permission and get it with no strings attached.
None of the staff have any issues with their work area being made visible to the visiting public.

You get the idea. That aspect of the narrative was one of the most interesting and could have provided some fun character development and personal growth. Perhaps Tabitha could have learnt that she could surprise herself and feel satisfied in her ability to come up with clever solutions. Yeah, no, that'd be too interesting.

Relationships, people, and the cat

This being the kind of book it is the story is mostly a backdrop for the relationships we're supposed to enjoy reading about. Loveable characters that make us wish they existed. I think that's the general idea anyway.

As mentioned above I put this book down many times in utter exasperation.

This mostly stemmed from how utterly unrealistic the majority of the characters were. I think it's safe to say that I've met a lot of people. Tabitha's saviour, the energetic oldy Mercy Marwood, is a fairly plausible character based on my own experiences. I've met enough people that she seems like a composite of a few of them, I can totally buy that. I particularly liked the touch that she wears trainers with light-up elements on the heels, it made me smile.

Similarly the god-daughter character, Liz from Malawi, seemed fairly real too. Yep, fine, fine.

That's pretty much where it stops. The rest of the main cast are at best ridiculous caricatures and at worst cardboard.

Now, let's be clear here, at the time of writing I'm 31. The characters are supposed to be ~37, not 50+. I have no problem at all with older characters, older people, or anything in between. Lady Cecilia from Elizabeth Moon's Serrano Legacy is a personal favourite! However when that author writes a younger character there's a noticeable difference and similarly characters in their 40s are different again. They come to life and feel human.

If this book is anything to go by Trisha has very little grasp of what a woman in her 30s in 2015 behaves like. It might have been better to set this in the 1980s or something (which would probably have been delightful, if I'm honest). Choosing to set it in the present day results in strangely jarring turns of phrase on occasion:

And the background electronic tape created by one of Arlene's sons sounded wonderfully atmospheric.

We're talking about something to be played in the Christmas cracker factory shop to convey a suitable atmosphere. An "electronic tape"? Really?

That's supposed to be Tabitha's thoughts, I should add, not some sort of objective narrator.

Lacey surveyed the draped and crowned bed and then remarked, "It looks like the set from a bad porn film."
"I'll have to take your word for that. I haven't seen any kind of porn film," I said, glad that Mercy had sent me up to her room, rather than take her herself!

Call me outlandish but that doesn't gel with my experiences of women in their 30s at all. Perhaps it would be true in 2005 but these days I'm afraid that seemed unlikely (coupled with a weirdly sanctimonious attitude from someone who'd previously been living with their fiancé...).

Lacey is unpleasant throughout the entire narrative. The same is true of Tabitha's "friend" and her ex-fiancé. I'm not talking "often a bit of a dick". No. If they're talking they're being horrid. I think Lacey has a single positive comment in the entire 435 pages.

Having antagonists is good, it's how lots of us experience our lives. Except the people I've hated the most throughout my life weren't like that. I hated them because at times they did or said things that I found reprehensible. They didn't eat, sleep, and breathe malice. It's almost as if they were humans with lives, moods, and thoughts of their own.

Two dimensional antagonists are hard to get much mileage out of. If they're present we know exactly how they're going to behave. If that's the case why even bother writing lines for them to say? Oh, a phone call from Kate? I can't imagine what the content of the next passage will be!

Randal

Our male lead, Randal, is not quite as two-dimensional, but there's very little character development until the last quarter of the book. Seriously. He spends the majority of the book appearing, disapproving of Tabitha, having a tough time with his fiancé (Lacey), before vanishing for a bit.

Arguably the most poorly written parts of the book are written from his perspective. He only gets a handful of chapters to himself (rarely more than a few pages long) but they stand out. You see, dear reader, our author has not observed men in their 30s. Either that or she wasn't making any attempt to empathise with them. That makes it sound like he's portrayed in a poor light but that's not the issue - it's much more fundamental than that. He doesn't read like a man. When he's thinking, when he's talking to a friend, or whatever, he doesn't act like a man. That is to say the way he reacts to situations and assesses things doesn't feel in any way real. I find it hard to believe any normal, 37 year old British man in 2015 would use the term "...I'd been cross about her not telling me she was bringing...".

Cross? Is the inside of an Enid Blyton book?

Let's clarify something here - I'm not sure what Randal's upbringing resembled but it seems based on the narrative that it mirrored my own fairly well. Boys at boarding school do not get "cross". They get "pissed off", "annoyed", "peeved", or any number of other (worse) terms. When they become men this doesn't go away. Earning a salary doesn't transform their vocabulary to that of a 1950s matron.

If we pretend that Randal is a real heterosexual man in the year 2015 with a job that pays improbably well then the question becomes - okay, but what does Lacey see in him? She's supposed to be 27, astonishingly gorgeous, and an utter nightmare. Apparently he is a "safe option" for her. Mmmhmm. Okay. So what does Randal see in this narcissistic piece of work? She doesn't seem to care about him in the slightest and there appears to be no chemistry between them either. What does he get out of this..?

More to the point, why is he engaged to her? Dating her, perhaps, for the sake of argument, fine. But what would make him pull the trigger, so to speak? He's not written as someone shocked that she's interested in him and wanting to keep things going, for example.

Yeah, that's a question without an answer. It does rather model the major flaw with the relationships that occur throughout the book though. They feel as real as a crayon scribble.

I was supposed to mention the cat, Pyewacket, wasn't I?

The author apparently thinks we've not met cats before and want to read about him being a cat. He's a cat. He does cat stuff. This is seemingly of endless interest to the author for whatever reason. Like an actual cat he's just sort of there. He doesn't take an active role in the events of the book for the most part but it's rare for more than a few pages to go by without him getting a mention. Make of that what you will.

Right, let's come to a conclusion. Well, in a moment. First I've got to mention technology and 2015.

It seems that the author's idea of technology is from roughly 2006 with a few later touches. Phone charms are mentioned as cracker charms in new cracker designs they're introducing. Uh huh. Is it even possible to attach a phone charm to a smartphone?

Characters are constantly turning their phones off. There's no signal at the house where Tabitha ends up so her phone is usually off. If it's a dumbphone it'd have a ridiculous battery life and if it's a smartphone then why would she turn it off? What does she keep her calendar on (she's a PA, remember?)? What about music? Or all the beauty that she sees around her that she later makes art of - a camera might be handy for that, I would have thought...

Yeah, stuff like that stands out because technology is so ubiquitous in this day and age. My mother was 71 in 2015. Do you know which phone she had then? A Samsung Galaxy S5. I know this because I received it as a hand-me-down some time later. Of my friends only one held onto a dumbphone - which he got rid of years ago at this point. A basic android handset wasn't anything implausible, especially considering the character had a job before her conviction.

My general point is that a smartphone is a given and smartphones aren't just phones. They stay on.

There was also a mention of internet cafés in Vietnam and spotty internet access there. I can't say I've checked but I would be utterly shocked if they weren't everywhere by 2010, let alone 2015.

Conclusion

This all boils down to the fact that the characters, situations, and world of A Christmas Cracker struggle to stay plausible from chapter to chapter. There's the occasional passage where the author's spark can be seen and characters come to life and actually talk to each other. When they appear it's refreshing and fun. Unfortunately there's only about four of those at most in the entire damned book.

Other things:

If Emma doesn't love Desmond anymore why does it take a physical altercation before she actually goes ahead with the divorce she's been talking about for half the bloody novel?
Emma's son, Marco, is seven and a half. Do you know what age Mr. Potato Head is aimed at? Come on.
Men generally court characters at least a little before proposing, even in an Austen novel, especially if their previous fiancé was problematic. It is rather the done thing.
Stop rehashing the events of the book. We read those chapters already. You don't need yet another character explaining what's going on to another in a clunky exposition dump. It's not a complicated plot, get on with the narrative.
The Quaker thing is kind of weird and the book is a bit preachy at times, in a between-the-lines kind of way.
There's about thirty pages of the book set at Christmas. Methinks the cover art was telling a bit of a whopper...

I could probably think of more things like that but it's getting late. I'm glad I read the book as it makes me feel a bit better about my own writing. I could probably rework the book into something else as finishing a first draft is a mammoth task in and of itself. It wasn't created without skill but if I was handed this to give notes on you can see there'd be quite a lot of red ink on the manuscript!

I'd give the book 2.5/5. It's coherent. The English countryside rubbish is saccharine and twee to the point of ridicule but there's a happy ending. On the last page and not before. Fin.

Updating a Kindle Keyboard from 3.4 to 3.4.2

2017-12-10T16:27:00.001+00:00

Here's a post that might get a bit of traffic as I've had no luck finding the answer to this problem elsewhere.

This has been driving me up the wall over the last few days. The missus old Kindle Keyboard died (fairly thoroughly - I'd need a serial cable to check whether there's anything going on in there at all!) and the K3 (B008) I found to replace it was still running 3.4 (1725970040).

Plugging it into a computer and transferring the update files from Amazon didn't work. Some suggested using the other files and changing B006 (or B00A) to "B008" and that didn't work. The file was there but the option to update remained stubbornly greyed out. I was looking into Kubrick to see whether there was a way to force an update on the accursed device. While the USB stick was being prepped for that I decided to try something that actually worked:

**Update to 3.4.1 first.**

Amazon say that updating from 3.4 should work but as this thread clearly shows, that's cobblers.

I grabbed 3.4.1 from Softpedia (which in itself seems rather dubious but was thankfully fine.) and transferred it to the Kindle's root directory.

Voilà! The settings menu immediately allowed me to update!

Once that was done and dusted I transferred the 3.4.2 update over as per Amazon's original instructions and it then happily updated.

I don't have a "before" image because, well, why would I?
But here's an after:

Updated to 3.4.2 (2687240004)

It now happily connects to WiFi and the missus should be good to go on downloading her purchases. Also look at that - a third page of settings! Dead fancy.

I've mirrored the updates here:

Hopefully this post will make life easier for some other Kindle Keyboard owners out there!

I think 5.1 will do nicely though.

2017-12-04T02:54:00.002+00:00

Generally speaking I would rather do without something optional than have an inferior version of it.

Essentially I want to buy it once and call it a day.

☑
This extends to all sorts of things but is especially true of electronics. I recognise that various things I want are not necessities. My life will not be miraculously improved by their inclusion and I'm very grateful for the life I have. I can wait.

In the recent past that's partly been what I've been up to with the AV setup at my parents' house. I'm retiring old games consoles there and connecting them up in the highest quality possible. If there's surround sound audio available that's getting piped into the system. If there's something better than component video then I'm using it - even if I have to solder the damned cables myself.

Similarly I don't currently own a modern games console. The goal posts have shifted repeatedly and I'm increasingly interested in eventually getting an Xbox One X. I do rather fancy a Playstation Pro and that remains unchanged but my attention has shifted to the Xbox One X due to the interesting backwards compatibility stuff they're doing with it.

By the looks of things it'll be the best way to run Xbox 360 games in the near future. I currently do most of my console gaming on a 360 and still rather enjoy it as a platform. The Xbox One X seems to be able to do some quite remarkable emulation that incorporates in-engine resolution changes and improvements to provide something better than running on original hardware.

This suggests to me that even if it's some time before I acquire one it may be the way to go for legacy gaming. They're implementing additional backwards compatibility with the original Xbox too which is of less interest to me. I would be rather pleased as it would mean games could be played at very high resolutions (always a plus for me - up to a point) but the catalogue of games that I'm interested in for the console is... not great. Still, a nice bonus to have.

It's pretty much academic at the moment as there's no way in hell I could justify the expenditure on a new console and even if I could I lack the TV hardware to benefit much. I'm still using the TV we bought for Fort Sanity back in 2007. It's seen better days and is due for replacement at some point in the near future but I'll be damned if I'm replacing it before it's actually dead.

Once I'm looking for a replacement the concept I discussed earlier comes into play.

I'll be looking for something monstrously enormous for a start. A 32" TV was actually quite sizeable ten years ago but looks rather small now. Whether I'll find anything appropriate remains to be seen, of course, but I want something the size of a small mattress. Something that lets me appreciate all the extra detail of 4K.

I've been quite dismissive of 4K for precisely this reason - if the TV isn't room-dominatingly huge it's a waste of time. A desk monitor's resolution is easily appreciated but a TV needs to work harder to justify its pixel count.

If I'm bothering with this next step up I want to do more than say "The colour's a bit nicer, I suppose..."

Generally speaking that's the premise behind all this. If we're doing this, we're doing it properly. I want to appreciate what I have in life and there's not much point in spending money on something that doesn't fulfill that goal.

Otherwise it's like giving a blu-ray player to someone without a high definition TV. Which happened to a friend of mine.

Sigh.

Oh and I suppose then I'll be vaguely interested in Blu-Ray. You know, for the three films that I'd ever watch on the format (to be honest it'll be Fury Road and little else, I can't think of another spectacular film I care to rewatch).

Is that a five-poster bed?

2017-11-28T20:13:00.000+00:00

Something people have asked me about over the years is whether there's going to be a Gorkamorka equivalent to Necromunda Community Edition. I've written about the various versions of Necromunda before (here's the post) but I think we've got time for a brief overview:

Necromunda's Original Rulebook (ORB)
Necromunda's "Living" rulebook (LRB) (odd choice of name)
Necromunda Community Edition (NCE)

The first was the book/s in the original box.
The second was a tweaked re-release about a decade later that simplified some things but wasn't particularly thorough and had quite a few mistakes in it.
The third is actively maintained at the time of writing.

Bit of a mess for new players.

Gorkamorka didn't get the same treatment for various reasons. It also doesn't have a community edition. Partly because creating such a thing is a lot of work and partly because there's not as many people passionate about the game. Passion isn't enough, really. A community edition needs players, expertise, project management, and many other things to boot.

So in the middle of this there's me - waving my staff like Gandalf and screaming "Let's get this sorted!"

Perhaps I have the talents to pull this off. My degree has to be useful for something, right?
Yeah, probably not. But I might still be able to manage this.

On the plus side it's not as hard as it was to get players. We've got a Facebook group that's pushing 2000 members and various excellently talented people are emerging. Back in the day we had Matt's excellent talents and Ross' quirky enthusiasm. Couple that with Liam's brilliance and a few more people to playtest and the team worked rather well. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well remotely. Being able to draw on whiteboards and cover walls in Post-It notes made that work possible.

So now I have a scattered group of talented people who need some direction in order to make things happen. I don't want them duplicating effort or misunderstanding the "core vision" and this blog post is partly my way of trying to codify that vision.

Right, erm, core stuff:

Break as little compatibility as possible.

There's lots of fan stuff out there and it should, if at all possible, not break. We don't want to create a situation where lots of old material that we love has to be modified to work with the new. Players shouldn't need to check whether a ruleset is compatible or not - it should just work. If it breaks it should be the fault of the rules they're adding in, not the game edition.

Aim for speed.

I know the rules to Gorkamorka like the back of my hand (My left hand has an area with dodgy nerves so that's probably a fairly apt comparison...) but even so games later in a campaign end up slowing to a crawl while we look up cascading vehicle damage and special rules. That's a problem. The game has plenty of wonderful complexity in its campaign system. Individual turns of a game should flow smoothly if at all feasible.

Try not to tie the rules to the setting.

Gorkamorka is set on Angelis, a desert world. Many 40K things don't exist there and Ork society is a bit different from on other worlds. GCE should instead be usable for battles in other settings with Angelis being one of them.

That way things can be implemented or rejected based on the campaign rather than the setting as a whole.

There may well be more principles but I'm drawing a bit of a blank now. Then there's lots of specific stuff to deal with but it needs to be informed by the fundamental goals.

Who keeps a bird in an actual chest? How does that even work?

2017-11-07T03:54:00.001+00:00

I'm part of an ongoing group chat with friends I made in my latter days in Edinburgh. Only a few of us remain in the city these days but it's still a fun collection of folks. The other day my friend, Chris, realised that his PS4 controllers work with his computer and so he no longer needed his Steam controller. He offered it up for £20 and I jumped at the chance. I've wanted one for a while but only at a reasonably low price - there's no guarantee I'd like it after all.

I was rather hungry and tired though so I figured I'd sort out postage on so forth later. It was an exciting prospect though and so I told the ol' ball and chain. She immediately blurted out "Don't!", or words to that effect.

It turns out that she's spent the last few months trying to snipe just such a device on eBay as a present for me, knowing full well that they're often expensive. More amusingly though that morning the one she'd bought had shown up!

Mixed feelings! On the one hand, surprise ruined, but also how awesome is she? I felt terrible for ruining her surprise but in some ways it's better to receive it now. I'll be celebrating my birthday in Sweden this year and so will be away from my desktop PC. Sure, the controller would work with my laptop, but it's the Windows desktop I want it for. This also means that it doesn't need to travel to Sweden and then back again. It's not huge but one less thing, you know?

The reason I've wanted one for a while is fairly simple - my desktop PC is connected to my TV. I've not upgraded it in years but it's perfect for playing older games that are a pain to run on my Mac. A solid two thirds of my game library is available on macOS (about 450/700, rounded down) but some things are a nightmare to get running. I'm looking at you, Red Alert 2...

However even if I get them running on my desktop - how do I play them?

A controller is fine and dandy for many game types but it's no substitute for a keyboard and mouse if you're playing a point and click adventure!

It turns out that a Steam controller is perfect for that though. It's like using a trackpad/trackball hybrid with a load of programmable buttons all wrapped up in an ergonomic package that sits happily in my hands. Lovely.

I could probably gush about the controller for several more paragraphs but this post is more about the game I just finished playing through.

At various points in my life, usually following breakups or similar relationship problems, I've immersed myself in videogames while I process. I powered through Assassin's Creed 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and Assassin's Creed: Revelations during a particularly dark time, for example.

I'm not sure if this was one of those times but it could well have been. I'd softmodded a pile of Xboxes (Xb-oxen? Xboik?) that we'd ended up with (I say "I", Matt was of course involved in researching how to go about making it happen).

We had one each and another spare, I think? This was mainly to run XBMC on though as we ran a content server in the living room. Great times.

Some time later it occurred to me that I could play pirated Xbox games on the machine. Not that there was all that much I wanted to play but a few titles stood out so I got hold of copies of them. I may have played Sid Meier's Pirates! until the sun came up. Then some more. Certainly not more than twelve hours at any rate.

Another game I played was Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. I don't recall much of the plot but it stands out in my memory as a hauntingly beautiful experience. The game is set across two worlds and is the sequel to a game I remember reading the review of in PC Gamer in the early 2000s. A game I've been meaning to play for years.

The Longest Journey.

Oddly the game is incorrectly filed on Steam. It appears in my Mac library despite not being available. It's been a problem for years and I wish they'd sort it out...

Anyway I have no intention of faffing about with dual-booting on this machine. It's really not worth the trouble.

The game is from 1999 and so will run on even a low end Windows machine. Technically it wasn't available in English until 2000 but technology-wise it's pre millennium. For the most part it's still an excellent game though, although not without its irritating quirks. I spent about twenty hours playing through it using a Steam controller this past week and I've got to say that the controls worked wonderfully.

That said the game varies between sensible and maddening. Not so much in the "how do I solve this damn puzzle?" way (although I did get stuck on a few occasions) but more in the "Can we not just take it as read that if I go to this location it's to speak to that character? Do I really need to run through four scene transitions each way? Come on!" way.

A pleasant innovation is that when an inventory item can be used on an object it will flash. No need to rub everything on everything else, thankfully. There were several items my character carried for the entire game without ever using though which was annoying in its own way - inventory space is unlimited but becomes paginated eventually - a needless annoyance when those extraneous items could have been pruned during one of several costume changes.

Things that hold up:

The writing. Fun, fanciful, amusing, emotional.

May there always be soil between your toes.

The voice acting. How they had the budget for this many lines of dialogue I'll never know.
The setting. Both worlds, Stark and Arcadia, had their own charm and felt well realised.
Many of the puzzles.
Some of the pre-rendered cutscenes (The Gribbler...)

Things that aren't quite as good...

Graphics. The pre-rendered backdrops mostly look good (apart from the Marcuria harbour - something about the perspective looks off) but the whole game is in forced 640x480. No barn-door effect, it's distorted to fit the screen shape and damn the consequences! †
The animations - low polygon models are par for the course but did the animations have to be so dreadful? I enjoyed the game despite them and that's not the way it should be. There was no reason for Adrian to walk like a bloody zombie - he's frightened, not heavily drugged!
The UI for some puzzles. Particularly the "telephone" puzzle - why couldn't I click on each cylinder to rotate it left or right? Tedious. As a result I looked up the solution to the puzzle - too much faff. I could have experimented and fully figured it out on my own but life's too bloody short for that kind of busywork.
The chapter lengths. There's 13 chapters (a recurring number in the game) and some chapters are over in a few minutes. Others go on for hours! At times this was quite disheartening. Spending so long on chapter 1 and 2 felt like quite the momentum killer.
Oh and some of the pre-rendered cutscenes (mostly those involving April. Her character model looks nothing like her in-game likeness).

If I had a modern tablet or smartphone running iOS I'd have played through it on that - hopefully the port is slightly less agonising. However the game itself was still very much worth playing and now I'm ready to dive into the sequel.

After that... Dreamfall: Chapters! I did indeed buy it in the end and it's been sitting in my library awaiting the right time. I'm not sure if the desktop can handle it but it'll probably run fine on this Mac.

Praise Unity, or should that be The Balance?

† - I played on a 1366x768 screen. To get around this distortion I used CRU to add a custom resolution of 854x480. I then forced the game to render in a window and used WinExplorer to strip away all window decorations and force the program to sit on top of everything (including the taskbar).

I should probably resolder that cable...

2017-10-05T12:47:00.001+01:00

I love stereo audio. It's brilliant.

It means I can separate out two people in an interview and adjust their levels independently or isolated individual bits without getting the other person's mouth soundy stuff in there.

Right, that's that out of the way.

Other than that - what's the point?
I genuinely can't think of any time I've been listening to music and thought "Wow, this sounds so much better."

In some games stereo separation provides some context cues for things but even then I can't say it's a feature I've found of particular use.

However I rather like surround sound!

It's only in the last year or so that I've put the effort in to get audio cables and settings sorted to get actual 5.1 out of most of my hardware and even then it's been a bit finicky (mostly due to the rather knackered receiver I'm using). With 5.1 surround (or similar) I can hear the difference though which is why I bother.

Left and right audio channels are too close to make all that much difference but when I can have an action scene surrounding me then the effect really works. It's how I found out that my parents' receiver has a maximum volume of "89".

Yep, no idea.

However hearing the war rig's horn always gives me chills and this is made all the better by being surrounded by a swirling melee of sound.

That's pretty much it. Mono is fine, stereo is sometimes useful, surround sound is fun.

I can't remember the specifics of the plot of Chasing Amy

2017-05-16T03:25:00.000+01:00

As much as it pains me to talk about something that's not obscure I have to get it out there.

I've been listening to Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl.
So, yeah...

I've been to Galway and frankly it didn't strike me as anywhere worth celebrating. It's substantially smaller than Rotherham, not very glamorous, and apparently now home to John Romero.

Putting the town itself aside for a moment I wanted to just say something against things like this song. Perhaps I'm just incapable of living in the moment and appreciating the beauty of the ephemeral but pretty much all the women I've encountered that fit the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope have had deep seated psychological issues. They might be quirky, superficially brave, and exciting but the behaviour is just escapism. It turns to pumpkins in the light of day.

A kinder soul might put it in terms of enjoying the temporary beauty of the time with such a woman. I find it very difficult to appreciate something that is such a facade though. Longing for that which doesn't exist might produce superior art but it's not exactly good for the mind!

This sort of thing has been explored before though; the TVTropes page is full of examples. I just wanted to comment for myself because it frustrates me to see it.

...a Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists to help the protagonist achieve happiness without ever seeking any independent goals herself.

It's not that remarkable women don't exist - it's just that the stable ones end up in healthy relationships that last and so disappear from the market very quickly. They also don't tend to be quite as irresponsible either which detracts from the zany antics angle.

Not very marketable though, is it?

More games should have a "night mode".

2017-03-23T03:13:00.001+00:00

I've been playing the 2015 Mad Max videogame and it's swirling around my head.

The main thing I can't escape from is that it's not supposed to make sense. I love the setting and it makes for some truly haunting vistas but the concept of a dried out ocean just doesn't hang together for me. I can't think of any plausible reason why resource wars and nuclear war could result in desiccation on this scale.

If you're not familiar with it a large part of the game takes place on a seabed. Lighthouses and shipwrecks sit atop small mountains, pipelines and oilrigs can be found, that sort of thing. It's a great place to set a post-apocalyptic wasteland but I just can't see a plausible way it could happen.

The closest things in the real world are the Salton Sea and the Aral Sea but they're much smaller scale.

The Salton Sea isn't small enough to be worth mentioning whilst the Aral Sea is really just a large lake. I mean, it's big but it's no ocean, and more importantly it's inland. The ocean could recede a bit but it's just too big to disappear.

As a result the game fills me with a sort of sadness at what could never be. Whilst I obviously wouldn't welcome such an apocalypse there's a strange sort of beauty to the devastated landscape. If only its implausibility didn't colour it with a permanent air of fiction....