bafflegab.org

Greetings y’all.  Thought I’d better post something before I actually hit a full year without a post, to whit:

…and there you have it.  B-Dub-P out!

This is a wowser.  Or a bunch of ‘em to be precise…

Crocodile Dundee was on last night.  Naturally, as a good Aussie, I considered it my duty to tape it and study it at length.  (Alright, to get mashed and giggle at the seminal Hogan-led ridiculousness).  Now, its been a few years since the last time I caught it, but it does tend to recur, so I know it better than I really ever needed to.  I was thus a bit surprised to note 3 chunks rather amateurishly edited out:  the first two being the crotch-grab our classy hero employs to confirm the gender of other characters where it is in doubt (twice in one movie!  It’s just that good of a gag); the third being scenes of somebody doing cocaine at a party.

What the hell is going on here?  The broadcast started at 9.30 in the evening, which puts it in the company of Bachelor Party and The Wire, and yet the good people at Nine thought these scenes would offend delicate sensibilites?  For that matter it seems odd that they were happy to leave in scenes of drunk-driving and the deliberate running down of a pimp.  At least cocaine guy wasn’t hurting anyone else.

So, seeking to vent my mighty ire on the hapless quaking executives of Nine I thought I would hit their website.  Surely there’s a feedback email, or a forum, right?  These are people who understand communication if anyone does, surely.  Yeah, not so much.  There was a helpful ‘have your say’ link in the sidebar there… but it only seemed to let me have my say about the upcoming Hey Hey It’s Saturday comeback.  Since my thoughts on such a comeback are better expressed through a primal howl, or some kind of vicious assault, I elected not to participate.

To sum up, channel 9; in the words of Happy Noodle Boy - “Fuck you, fucking fucker fuckeys.”

Nethack is one of a very few games to which I return perennially.  I’ve been playing it on and off for at least five years and I think it’s because of my playing style.  I tend, when playing games for which it is an option, to be an explorationist gamer.  I always do the side-quests, and I loves me a sandbox.  I can show you where every hidden warp tile is in Giana Sisters.  Now, even after all this time, Nethack still finds new ways to kill me.  (I’ve never ascended, incidentally - mostly I die of impatience or silly mistake).  The highest-scoring player on my high-score table at the moment died by falling downstairs.  I was dragging a corpse back to a nearby altar, and idiotically went down stairs while seriously overloaded.  The next down was killed by a hallucinogen-distorted panther.

The fun of Nethack is not so much in discovering the story, or hidden areas (though there are plenty of these, the map is mostly procedurally generated so there’s no definitive knowledge to be had - though some special regions do recur in the same configuration).  The fun is in learning some of the enormous range of ways in which things can interact, then using that to try to survive a bit longer, or to disover yet more new things.  There is a saying amongst Nethack players, (naturally abbreviated to an acronym) - “The Devteam thought of everything”.  You never have the same game twice in Nethack - the random levels and assignment of equipment means you don’t know what you’re getting, and in the case of potions, rings, scrolls, wands etc. means when you do get them, you don’t know which type they are until you identify them somehow.

A list of random things I’ve encountered just in my last few games, to give you an idea of the variety and flavour; my god has gifted me Mjolnir, (Thor’s hammer) as thanks for a sacrifice on His altar; I have been bitten by a werewolf, and while subsequently transformed into one myself, summoned wolves to fight by my side; I have been blinded by a crow; I have been seduced by a nymph into removing a cursed item of armour (along with the rest of my clothing) which I couldn’t remove under normal circumstances; I have been attacked by the ghost of one of my own previous players; I have used a pick-axe to mine my way through the dungeon walls and find a hidden vault full of gold… and so on and on.

Of course, there is another acronymised phrase amongst Nethack players: YASND - Yet Another Stupid Nethack Death.  The thing is, Nethack is pretty hard, which is to say it will hand you your arse if you’re not careful, and maybe even if you are.  It is turn based, so a lot of the time the thing that kills you could have been escaped or overcome if you were paying more attention, or had thought a bit longer before drinking that unidentified potion, hence the ’stupid’ in YASND.  But Nethack pulls off a rare trick by making it fun to lose.  The fun is in the discovery, even your downfall can be pleasing by its novelty, and it never feels unfair.  This last is important.  I always feel cheated when an RTS beats me by giving a dumb AI a shitload of extra units or production capacity.  I don’t mind losing to Galactic Civilisations II over and over again, because the thing is just better at the game than I am.

Graphically, Nethack is very simple.  I’m not so old-school as to actually play in ASCII, but the tileset I use is hardly high-res.  It’s just really not the point.  It’s not much of a looker, but what a personality!  A metric fucktonne (which is 1.7 imperial shitloads) of character types, monsters, magical items, spells, hidden tricks and sly references.  One day I’ll finish it - until then I look forward to the next unlikely death.

Hark, for the video-game muse is upon me.  (She is Consoliope, and she is quick to anger for her attention is ever-divided.)

A new t-shirt concept: enjoy, and so forth.

Having seen one of these elsewhere (would post a link if I could remember where…), am jumping on the bandwagon of posting an image of Google’s search suggestions.  Always marvellous to get a data-mining level look at the groupthink.

So… death, taxes and Twilight.

So we saw Transformers ROTF today…  Hopes for a decent film were not high, but how far wrong can you go with giant CG robots smashing each other to bits, and things exploding?

Quite far, as it turns out.  Don’t bother.

In other news, new t-shirt concept!  Enjoy.

The impulse to censorship is something I have always found objectionable at best (and infuriating at worst).  I can see the argument that certain types of extreme content mightn’t do one’s mental health much good (particularly for kids… Won’t somebody please think of the children!), but the idea that some group (who are presumably immune to said damage for some unstated reason) gets to decide for you which content you should see…. particularly when that group is a political party… I mean, just fuck off, seriously.

On which topic, our proposed ‘Net censorship blacklist; if implemented, will it creep beyond blocking ‘child porn’, and into other areas of discourse?  Well, the leaked ACMA blacklist certainly looked that way, with content on it including information about euthenasia and religious groups, as well as poker sites and ‘normal’ (i.e. not kiddie) porn sites.  Add to this the recent news that the govt intends to use the new censorial powers to prevent access to games that are not MA15+ classifiable (because, alone in the developed world, Australia has no R18+ rating for games), and I’m guessing that yes, if introduced this censorship will be abused.

In light of the fact that even a massive and hugely funded body of wowsers would have no hope of compiling a list of even 1% of the type of material that is genuinely objectionable at any given moment, in fact, it would seem that the abuse is really the only reason to implement it to begin with, eh?

The song this chap covers is a decade old now, but it’s the 4-bit beauty of LSDJ running in that Gameboy which really tugs on the nostalgia strings… The effect over all is rather nice.

Grabbed via William Gibson’s blog:

This is hi-larious.

Visuals particularly are spot-on, though the writing does a pretty good job of reproducing Miller’s gritty style too.

B Dub P out.

As a general rule, I try not to just re-post stuff I’ve seen on boingboing, as I’d end up reproducing half of the site, but I ran across something wonderful;

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/09/erotic_selfstimulat.html

- An article on the history of people mis-using theraputic electrodes they have had implanted in their brains for erotic self-stimulation.  The truly staggering thing here is that this has happened numerous times, and been well documented.  S’pose we aren’t that far from hitting the feeder bar over and over after all, if the bar is implanted firmly in your bonce.

While we’re talking about boingboing, I recently transcribed a speech of Cory Doctorow’s - Life In The Information Economy, which can be read hither, and viewed as video thither. Its rather good.

Now that R0 has revealed the dark substance of his flashgaming habit, I though I would add to the stash.  Most of these were probably culled from rockpapershotgun.  Go there, its an awesome PC-gaming blog.

First up, we have Sunny Day Sky, by Orisinal games.

This has a lot going for it.  Gameplay is fairly simple once you get the hang of it, but the great things about this game are its utterly charming graphics and soundtrack, and the tension between two types of play.

You control a small teddy-bear with an umbrella on a busy street.  Hitting the mouse button will open or close the brolly.  When you open it, you gain a bit of height, so you can float your way upward with a series of controlled open and closings.  You are awarded points for how many cars go by beneath you while you are airborne.  The tension I am talking about comes up because you can get some epic scores if you can stay airborne while hundreds of cars go by, but you only get the points when you land safely on a car roof.  Miss the landing, or get hit by a bird in mid-air, and its game over.  Staying airborne is made more difficult by a fatigue-meter which gradually depletes.  You can refill it by grabbing bonus-lozenge things which whizz by, but miss too many and your brolly will fail and drop you straight down.  This is not necessarily certain death, though, if you manage to land on a car roof you’ll still get your points and be able to re-launch.

Which bring us to Fantastic Contraption.

A fun physics puzzler where you are given an initial block with some fixed points on it and must snap together an object out of bits and pieces with different physical properties.  This contraption must then make its way into the designated target area.  Some of the bits you may use are essentially rigid bars, some more flexible, some provide rotating motive force and so forth.  Getting the mix of balance, flexibility and movement in the contraptions can be quite challenging and the progression through the levels has a nice range of obstacles - inclines, hurdles, low ceilings, gaps and so forth.

Even if you’re not ‘engineer-minded’, give it a go, you can solve quite a few of them, especially the early ones, through trial and error and stick-another-wheel-on-the-front over-engineering.

On to a quite different style of puzzler, we have Exploit.

The guy who wrote this one, Gregory Weir, is probably best known for I Fell In Love With The Majesty of Colors.  If you haven’t seen that, go check it out as well - I am presuming it to be well-known enough that it hardly bears re-reviewing here.

Exploit is a puzzle game where you fire ‘packets’ from those orange things beside the main board.  The object is to hit the objective (the green pyramid) with one of these packets.  Sequence and timing are all here, as different elements affect packets in different ways, nullifying them, splitting them into two packets now travelling perpendicular to the old direction, turning off nullifiers at other points and so forth.

The basic rules are easily learned, and from there the difficulty ramps pretty steeply as you go in.  Once you play long enough to really grok the different icons this is rather addictive puzzling.  The story is quite good too, involving taking the power back from an oppressive regime by white-hat hacking activities.  (Well, black-hat activities for white-hat reasons… grey hat?)

Next on the list; Tri-Achnid. 

This is another of those occasions where the (in this case co-) designer has other things about worth mentioning.  Made by Florian Himsl and Edmund McMillen.  Florian I don’t know much about, but Edmund has done a whole slew of stuff worth checking out - all tending towards the bizarre and with a memorable art style.  If you go looking, and it isn’t already obvious from the title, his game ‘Cunt‘ is probably NSFW.  Best known for Meat Boy (a version of which is coming out in the Wii soon), Aether and Coil, all of which are worth a glance.  Again I mention this one chiefly because it was the one I’d heard least about already.

The game involves clambering a three-legged beastie over the rather nicely coloured landscape by grabbing its feet and moving them around.  They will attach to most surfaces, and you can also pick things up with them.  You can swing your ‘head part’ around as well using wasd keys, and once you get into the swing of throwing your weight as you swing a leg into place you can cover quite a bit of ground.  After the introductory level, levels involve an eggsack which you must bring with you to the exit and keep safe from harm.  You can carry the sack (or other objects) in your mandibles as well which is generally how you get it from place to place.

From a game about sheltering an eggsack, we proceed seamlessly into apocolyptic global disease with Pandemic II.

This is a game which calls upon you to develop and nurture a disease with the goal of infecting and killing the entire population of Earth.  You may initially choose between a virus, bacteria or parasite, each of which gets some starting trait buffs.  As you progress and infect more people, you are awarded evolution points which you can spend on various improvements; symptoms like sneezing, cysts and diarrhea;  methods of infection like being air/water-borne, or spread by vermin; resistances to environmental conditions and drugs.  (Pro-tip: water resistance II + water-borne infection spread means you can infect the water supply!)

Different symptoms have various effects which you must try to balance.  Your disease has 3 attributes - lethality, infectivity and visibility.  High infectivity is generally a good thing as it will help your disease spread, but the more visible it is the more likely people are to react against it.  Eventually they may try to develop a vaccine, the success of which depends on your drug-resistance.  How fast the vaccine is developed depends on how many hospitals are still operational.  Hospitals will be shut down as people die in their millions, but once the disease becomes too visible and deadly airports and shipping will be closed down, and the spread may halt too early.  If everybody who has your disease dies and there are still healthy people left in Madagascar (always bloody Madagascar), then you lose.  Good fun in a mad scientist sort of way.

Now here’s one that R0 recommended to me a while back; Double wires.  This is a comparatively straightforward game of swinging through a landscape.

Your character is a black ragdoll figure who has a wire which can be made to shoot from either arm.  The wire will extend a certain distance, attaching to the landscape if it encounters it within its range.  As you play, the screen scrolls left to right, so you are forced to swing your way along before the trailing edge catches you up.

Your wires will only stay attached to the landscape briefly, so you must continually fire the wire you aren’t currently swinging from at part of the landscape ahead of you.  It takes a few goes to get the hang, so to speak, and it is easy to find yourself propelled forward at near uncontrollable speed if you are not careful.

And thus we come to Samarost 2.   The gameplay in this one is fairly simplistic, being of the ‘figure out which order to click on parts of the screen to make odd things happen which allow you to progress in your mission to save your dog’ variety, but it is worth a look for its unique visual style and lovely soundtrack.

Like its predecessor Samarost, the visuals in this game are constructed of an odd mixture of cartoonish digitally generated characters and a collage of real-life images repurposed in bizarre ways.

Go have a look, its charming in a strange sort of way, even if you spend as much time hunting for clickable bits of the interface as you do thinking about how the puzzles might be solved.

Onward (I’ll stop soon, promise) to another puzzler - Cursor*10.  In this game, the objective is simply to progress through 16 floors.  You advance to the next floor by clicking on the stairs leading up and may collect additional points by clicking on pyramidal structures which are scattered throughout.

Your cursor only lasts for a brief while - nowhere near long enough to progress through the various puzzles on each floor, but you get 10 cursors to try to solve the game with.   The gimmick is that once you have had a go with your first cursor, when playing with the second cursor you can still see the first one on screen.  Thus, you need to co-operate with your past ‘lives’ to proceed.

Many of the puzzles depend directly on this kind of co-operation.  For example you might have to hold a button down on-screen in order to make the staircase appear, so that you will have to just hold it down and wait out the clock with one cursor, then come along and use the now-exposed staircase with the next.  Likewise for boxes which will only open once clicked upon a certain number of times (where the clicks are cumulative across cursor lives) and so forth.

Lastly - Karoshi Suicide Salaryman.  A platform based puzzler where the object of each level is, oddly enough, to die.

Thus the usual platformer tropes apply (spikes; bullets; things falling on you - will all cause death) except that instead of trying to avoid these while collecting rings, coins, wumpa-fruit or what-have-you, the purpose is to plunge headlong into these deadly scenarios.

You receive hints along the way from coloured blocks with ascii-smiley faces (naturally), and between levels there are strange ‘karoshi tv’ sections.  Some levels play out on a ‘meta’ level, as well, requiring you to use parts of the game system which are not traditionally considered part of a level solution.

Whew, well, it took me more than 6 months, but I finally got this bloody post written.  If you’re wondering why I refer to stuff as ‘recently’ when its clearly quite a while back, that is why.  Now go play em.