…a visual novel on screen, where you’re working a fictional hint line, with critical information in The Compendium, a dog-eared binder full of official docs mixed with handwritten
notes from previous counselors who figured out what actually works.
So yeah. It’s a bit like… Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, except instead of bomb defusal, you’re working on a computer game hint line in their heyday of circa 1993.
Customers call you, and you have to help them with their video game problems, ideally in accordance with company policy to try to guide the customer to their own answer
rather than telling them the solution outright. Oh, and also sometimes people call up about products that aren’t covered and you need to identify this promptly and get on to the next
caller.
Obviously you’ve already got an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the games already? No, you don’t, because before they could even start on making Hint Line
’93, the creators first needed to invent a fictional video games company, a catalogue of fictional games (including faked screenshots, history, lore, and BBS posts),
and more. But it wouldn’t matter anyway, because you get a thick manual – the compendium – of hints and tips to refer to
(also code wheels, post-its, and lots more).
The exhibit is designed to be experienced in-person, but – given that I live on the other side of the planet – I was delighted to see that the museum put a (less-tactile) version online
for visitors around the world to play.
Also: speaking as somebody with an awesome name, there are so many people with awesome names involved with this project. Mars
Buttfield-Addison and Paris Buttfield-Addison are perhaps my favourite. Excellent names.
Where could I possibly start this list if not with eccentric games-as-art proponent Pippin Barr. Created in 2016, It is as if you were
playing chess is an interactive experience that encourages you to mimic the physical movements of playing a digital chess game, without actually ever looking at a chessboard.
It’s a 67-second portrait video featuring four partially-dressed young men somewhere in what looks like Tyneside. Two of them kiss before one of the pair swigs from a spirits bottle and
takes a drag from a cigarette, throwing both onto the floor afterwards3.
Finally, the least-dressed young man (seemingly with the consent of all involved) repeatedly strikes the drinker/smoker with a folding chair.
It’s… quite something.
Unless you watch the video and then play the game, it’s hard to explain quite how faithful a recreation it is… and yet it also permits you to subvert the story, by
changing the order of events, how passionately the lads kiss, how much alcohol is consumed (or spilled), how long to drag on the cigarette, or the level of aggression in the chair
strikes. Also, there’s an easter egg if you manage to beat the victim enough…
In his blog post Hard Lads as an important failure, the game’s creator
Robert Yang describes it as “neorealist fumblecore”, and goes into wonderful detail about the artistic choices he made in creating it. The game is surreal, queer, and an absolute
masterpiece.
Let’s sidestep a moment out of video games and take a look at a book.
Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself, edited by Sam Gorski (founder of Corridor Digital) and D. F. Lovett and based on an original series of gamebooks written pseudonymously by “J. Theophrastus Bartholomew”, initially looks like exactly what it
claims to be. That is, a selective reprint of a very-1980s-looking series of solo roleplaying game prompts.
Except that’s clearly a lie. There’s no evidence that J. Theophrastus Bartholomew exists as an author (even used as a pen name), nor do any of the fourteen books credited to him in the
foreword. The alleged author only as a framing device by the actual authors: the “editors”.
Seriously, what even is this book?
Superficially, the book presents a series of ten… “prompts”, I suppose. It’s like reading the rules of a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook, or else the flavour and background in
an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module.
Each prompt sets up a premise and describes it as if it would later integrate with a ruleset… but no ruleset is forthcoming. Instead, completing the story and also how
to go about completing the story is left entirely up to the reader.
It’s disarming, like if a recipe book consisted of a list of dishes and cuisines, a little about the history and culture of each… and no instructions on how to make it.
But what’s most-weird about the book (and there’s plenty more besides) are the cross-references between the chapters4.
Characters from one adventure turn up in another. Interstitial “Shadows and Treasures” chapters encourage you to reflect upon previous adventures and foreshadow those that follow.
There’s more on its RPGGeek page (whose existence surprised me!), along with a blog post by Lovett. They’re doing a horror-themed sequel, which I
don’t feel the need to purchase, but I’d got to say from what I’ve seen so far that they’ve once-again really nailed the aesthetic.
I have no idea who the book is “for”, but it’s proven surprisingly popular in some circles.
What is Mackerelmedia Fish? I’ve had a thorough and pretty complete experience of it, now, and I’m still not sure. It’s one or more (or
none) of these, for sure, maybe:
A point-and-click, text-based, or hypertext adventure?
A statement about the fragility of proprietary technologies on the Internet?
An ARG set in a parallel universe in which the 1990s never ended?
A series of surrealist art pieces connected by a loose narrative?
…
What I can tell you with confident is what playing feels like. And what it feels like is the moment when you’ve gotten bored waiting for page 20 of Argon Zark to finish appear so you decide to reread your already-downloaded copy of the 1997 a.r.k bestof book, and for a moment you think to yourself: “Whoah; this must be what living in the
future feels like!”
…
Mackerelmedia Fish is a mess of half-baked puns, retro graphics, outdated browsing paradigms and broken links. And that’s just part of what makes it great.
Historical fact: escaped fish was one of the primary reasons for websites failing in 1996.
Just because I wrote about it before doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play it now, especially if you missed out on it during the insanity of Lockdown
1.0.
As an amateur beekeeper, semi-professional game designer, and generally pedantic person, I decided to play all the games I could find on the subject and rate them
according to their “realism”. The rating goes from one (⬢⬡⬡⬡⬡) to five (⬢⬢⬢⬢⬢) honeycomb cells.
I intentionally avoided all the games in which bees are completely anthropomorphized or function like a spaceship, and games in which bees play a secondary role. I did include short
and semi-abstract games when they referenced the bees actual behavior. Realism is not a matter of visual definition or sheer procedural complexity. In my view, even a tiny game can
capture something compelling about this fascinating insect.
Ha-bee-tat is one of only four games to which Paolo awards a full five honeycombs. And Paolo is picky, so that’s high praise indeed for the realism of this game,
which is – get this – also surprisingly educational on the subject of different species of bee! Neat!
This Twine-based adventure was released for my last Halloween at the Bodleian, based mostly upon the work of my then-colleague Brendon Connelly. We were aiming for something slightly unnerving, slightly Lovecraftian… and very Bodleian Libraries.
The Bodleian’s Comms team and I came up with all kinds of imaginative and unusual ways to engage with the wider world, of which this was just one.
Obviously I’ve written about it before, but if I can just take a moment to explain what we were going for, which didn’t come out in any of
the IFDB reviews or anything:
The story is cyclical: the protagonist keeps waking up, completely alone, in a seemingly abandoned world, having nodded off half way through The Shadow Out of Time in a Bodleian reading room. As they explore the eerie and empty world5, the protagonist catches vague
glimpses of another figure moving around the space as well, always just out of reach in the distance or beyond a window. There are even hints that this other person has been following
them: a book left open can be found closed again, or vice-versa, for example.
Eventually, exhausted, the character needs to rest, waking up again6 in order to continue their explorations, and it gradually becomes apparent that they are the ghost
that haunts the library. The shadows they’re witnessing are echoes of their past and future self, playing through the permutations of the game as they remain trapped in an endless and
futile chase with their own tail.
When I first wrote about this video, I remarked that it was sad that it was under-loved, attracting only a few hundred views on YouTube and only a
couple of dozen “thumbs up”. Six years on… I’m sad to say it’s not done much better for popularity, with low-thousands of views and, like, six-dozen “thumbs up”. Possibly
this (lack of) reaction is (part of the reason) why its creator Yaz Minsky has kind-of gone quiet online these last few years.
I always thought that this staircase looked like something out of an early Zelda game. Now it can sound like it too.
So what it is?
Well, you know how you’ve probably never seen Metropolis with a musical score quite like the one
composer Gottfried Huppertz intended? Well this… doesn’t solve that problem. Instead it re-scores the film with video game
soundtracks from the likes of Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Doom,Kirby, and
F-Zero, among others.
And it… works. It still deserves more love, so if you’ve got a spare couple of hours, put it on!
Like Ha-bee-tat, this is a realistic, pixelated, educational video game about nature. It came out in 1994 but I didn’t get around to playing it until twenty-five years
later in 2019, when I accidentally discovered it while downloading Wolfenstein to my DOSBox.
Like many games of its vintage, it’s not always easy. Imagine my delight when my wolf Glidepath, fighting his injury, managed to find water without getting shot by a human
(and it only took like five attempts).
What you’re seeing is a review of Wolf… but for wolves. I’m not aware of any other posts on that entire site that make the same gag, or
anything like it. That’s weird. And brilliant.
People have done similar thinigs in a variety of ways, but this was one of the most-ambitious:
I’m sure the Steam Frame will make light work of this heavyweight rig, but that’s not the point.
As part of a two-day hack project, these folks put together a mechanism to mount some cameras up a pole, from a backpack containing a computer, connected to a VR headset. The idea was
that you’d be able to explore the world with the kind of “over-the-shoulder cam” that you might be used to in some varieties of videogame.
Theirs was just an experiment in proving what was possible within a “real world” game world. But ever since I saw this video, I’ve wondered about the potential to make what is
functionally an augmented reality game out of it. With good enough spatial tracking, there’d be nothing to stop the world as-shown-to-your-eyes containing objects
that aren’t present in the real world.
Like… what if you were playing Pokemon Go, but from a top down view of yourself as you go around and find creatures out and about in the real world. Not just limited to looking
through your phone as a lens, you’d be immersed in the game in a whole new way.
More “above the head” than “over the shoulder”, but the principle’s much the same.
I’m also really interested in what the experience of seeing yourself from the “wrong” perspective is like. Is it disassociating? Nauseating? Liberating? I’m sure we’ve all done one of
those experiments where, by means of mirrors or props, we experience the illusory sensation of our hand being touched when
it’s not actually our hand. What’s that like when you’re able to visually step completely out of your own body, and yet still move and feel
it perfectly?
There are so many questions that this set-up raises, and I’m yet to see anybody try to answer them.
Even folks who are familiar with the NetHack idiom The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything are still likely to be
impressed with the sheer diversity of objects and their interactions available in Counterfeit Monkey.
What makes it weird? The fact that there’s not really anything else quite like it. Within your first half hour or so of play you’ll probably have acquired your core toolkit – your
full-alphabet letter remover, restoration gel, and monocle – and you’ll begin to discover that you can do just about anything with anything.
Find some BRANDY (I’m don’t recall if there is any in the game; this is just an example) and you can turn it into a BRAND, then into some BRAN,
then into a BRA7. And while there might not exist any puzzles in the game for which you’ll need a bra, each of these items will have a
full description when you look at it. Can you begin to conceive of the amount of work involved in making a game like this?
It’s now over a decade old and continues to receive updates as a community-run project! It’s completely free8,
and if you haven’t played it yet, congratulations: you’re about to have an amazing time. Pay attention to the tutorial, and be sure to use an interpreter that supports the
UNDO command (or else be sure to SAVE frequently!).
I remain interested in things that push the boundaries of what a “game” is or otherwise make the space “fun and weird”. If you’ve seen something I should see, let me know!
Footnotes
1 The blog post got deleted but the Wayback Machine has a copy.
2 Note you don’t get to see a video of me playing It is as if you were making
love; you’re welcome.
3 Strangely – although it’s hard to say that anything in this video is more-strange than
any other part – one of the “hard lads” friends’ then picks up his fag end and takes a drag
4 This, in case it wasn’t obvious to you already, is likely to be a big clue that the
authors’ claim that each chapter was “found” from somewhere different can be pretty-well dismissed.
5 I wanted it to draw parallels to The Langoliers, a Stephen King short story about a group of people who get trapped alone in “yesterday”.
6 Until they opt to “stay asleep forever”, ending the game.
8Counterfeit Monkey is free, but it was almost charityware: if it turns
out you love it as much as I did then you might follow my lead and make a donation to
Emily’s suggested charity the Endangered Language Fund. Just sayin’.
I made a massively multiplayer snake game that’s accessible over ssh. Play by running ssh snakes.run in your terminal…
I’d been speculating for the last month or so what Nolen Royalty had been working on recently that had required
such high-performance out of the SSH protocol, but now we know: it’s massively multiplayer snake.
My personal best length is in the region of 180, but I wouldn’t dare risking taking a shortcut when I’m at those lofty heights.
There’s a philosophical thing here that makes it feel different from probably any other Snake game you’ve ever played: it’s a thin client. All of the program
runs on the server.
Even slither.io is a split-client. The server is responsible for game state, but rendering the graphics based upon that state runs in JavaScript code in the browser. Not so
with snakes.run. The entire output is delivered as terminal rendering instructions.
It’s a reminder of how computing used to be. Dumb terminals sharing a mainframe that would do all of the processing, with only basic I/O being delegated to the terminals,
was the dominant way to use computers in the 1960s through 1970s, until the growth of microcomputer technologies made it cost-efficient to make “thick” clients: powerful computers that
would sit right on your desk.
It took decades until long-distance networks came to the scale and performance that we see today: fast enough that worldwide thin-client architectures are once again
possible. Nowadays, the closest thing most people use to a thin client… is their Web browser, passing messages back and forth. If you’re playing a real-time multiplayer game, though,
you expect the processing to be shared between your computer (for low latency graphical output) and the server (for state management and prevention of cheating).
snakes.run tips your expectation on its head. And that’s pretty cool.
It’s the year 2101. Corporations have taken over the world. The only way to be free is to join a pirate crew and start plundering the galaxy. The only means of survival is to play
basketball.
Now it’s your turn to go out there and make a name for yourself. Create your crew and start wandering the galaxy in search of worthy basketball opponents.
The game is under heavy development and breaking changes are often introduced. If you can’t continue an old game because the save file is invalid, you probably need to start a new
one or open an issue to check if the save file can be migrated.
…
Just try it out!
Connect via SSH to try the game.
ssh rebels.frittura.org -p 3788
Save files are deleted after 2 days of inactivity.
…
I feel like I’m reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting‘s fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.
These kinds of projects feel more like connecting to a BBS. And that’s pretty retro (and cool!).
Anyway: Rebels in the Sky is a networked multiplayer terminal-based game about exploring the galaxy with a team of basketball-loving space pirates. I met the main
developer on a forum and they seem cool; I’m interested to see where this quirky little project ends up going!
I’ve had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I’ve since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but
never really used my account as a “creator”.
I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io’s
discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.
I might republish some other “things” I’ve made on itch.io too. It’s not like there haven’t been lots of them over the years!
This article is probably “safe for work” (depending on your workplace).
It makes reference to a popular pornographic website and the features of that website. It contains screenshots, but the porny bits are blurred. The links are all safe.
Verify your age
After Pornhub introduced age check to comply with the Online Safety Act1,
I figured that I’d make an account to see how arduous and privacy-destroying the process of verifying that I was old enough to see naked people2. I thought it would make an
amusing blog post.
I felt confident that my stupid name, if nothing else, would guarantee me a hard time with this kind of automated system.
Unfortunately3,
it turned out to be super-easy for me to pass the age verification.
I just hit “verify by email” with the third-party age verification tool they use, entered an email address that’s associated with a few online accounts (not even the one I gave
Pornhub!), and… everything just worked.
Sooo… this isn’t a blog post about how insurmountable age verification is. This is a blog post about something else I discovered as a result of doing this research:
Pornhub has “achievements”!
Achievement unlocked
I was slightly surprised to see how many “social networking”-like features Pornhub accounts have. You can upload a profile photo… you have a “wall” that you can post to, and you can
post to other people’s. Your profile (unless you tell it not to) shares which channels you’ve subscribed to, which videos you’ve favourited, and so on.
Who on Earth wants those features? I mean: really? 😅 I consider myself pretty sex-positive, but I’m not sure I’d want there to be a web page with my name, photo, and a
list of all my favourite dirty vids!4
Anyway… the other thing a Pornhub profile seems to provide is… achievements:
Hurrah, I guess? The Virgin was easy, at least (snerk), unlike most of the things on my Steam profile.
I’ve only got the one achievement right now, of course, and it’s the one that you get “for free”. So it didn’t feel like I’d earned it.
I suppose I was an actual virgin, once. And I had to prove that I’m a real human to get an account. So… maybe I earned it?
Your profile page encourages you to ‘earn and show off more achievements’. Because, yes, your ‘achievements’ are on your public profile too!
But just stop and think about what this means for a moment. At some point, in some conference room at Pornhub HQ, there was a meeting in which somebody said something like:
“You know what we need? Public profile pages for all Pornhub accounts. And they should show, like, ‘achievements’ like you get for videogames. Except the achievements are for
things like how much porn you’ve watched and how often. You can show it off to your friends!”
If it weren’t for the time-based achievements like ’10 year-old account’, I’ll bet there’d be people competing to speedrun Pornhub.
Complete list of Pornhub Achievements
I’ve reverse-engineered the complete6
collection of Pornhub Achievements for you. Y’know, in case you’re trying to finish your collection:
The Virgin
Congrats! You have accessed your account for the first time! Enjoy the ride on Many Faps Road.
The Freshman
You have accessed your account for the 10th time! I take it you’ve enjoyed the 9 last times?
The Sophomore
You have accessed your account for the 100th time! Maximus Fappitus, you’re a true Pornhub warrior!
The Junior
You have accessed your account for the 500th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
The Senior
You have accessed your account for the 1000th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
The Porn Buff
You’ve watched 10 videos – This is just the beginning, trust me.
The Two Thumbs
You’ve watched 500 videos – Lotion or no lotion, that is the question.
The Cinephile
You’ve watched 5,000 videos – Be careful, carpal tunnel is a thing.
The Connoisseur
You’ve watched 50,000 videos – you are a veritable porn expert now.
1 Year Old Account
Our very first anniversary, I wish us many more!
2 Year Old Account
Two years of pleasure!
3 Year Old Account
Three years… Ah! The memories!
4 Year Old Account
Most relationships don’t even last this long #funfact
5 Year Old Account
That’s half a decade of watching porn.. woah… that’s impressive.
6 Year Old Account
I guess we were a match made in heaven. Who would’ve known that 6 years later, you would still be fapping on me.
7 Year Old Account
No 7 year itch here! Thanks for 7 fappy years
8 Year Old Account
The Outlook is good: you’ve had 8 magical years on Pornhub!
9 Year Old Account
In 9 more years, your account will be old enough to view itself.
10 Year Old Account
You were really ahead of the wave – here’s to a decade on Pornhub!
I have no idea who this feature is “for”. I’d feel the same way if YouTube had achievements, too7, but the fact
that you can, and by default do, showcase your achievements on a porn site is what really blows my mind.
But maybe they ought to double-down and add more achievements. If they’re going to have them, they might as well make the most of them! How about achievements for watching
a particular video a certain number of times? Or for watching videos in each of many different hour segments of the day? Or for logging in to your account and out again
without consuming any pornography (hey, that’s one that I would have earned!)? If they’re going to have this bizarre feature, they might as well double-down on it!
I also have no idea who this blog post is “for”. If it turned out to be for you (maybe you wanted to know how to unlock all the achievements… or maybe you just
found this as amusing as I did), leave me a comment!
Footnotes
1 Don’t get me started with everything that’s wrong with the so-called Online Safety Act.
Just… don’t. The tl;dr would be that it’s about 60% good ideas, 20% good implementation.
2 Obviously if I were actually trying to use Pornhub I’d just use a VPN with an
endpoint outside of the UK. Y’know, like a sensible person.
3 I mean: it’s probably pretty fortunate that – based on my experience at least –
it seems to be easy for adults to verify that they’re adults in order to access services that are restricted to adults as a result of the OSA. But it’s unfortunate in that I’d hoped
to make a spicy blog post about all the hoops I had to jump through and ultimately it turned out that there was only one hoop and it was pretty easy.
4 Of course, the Indieweb fan within me also says that if I did want
such a page to exist, I’d want it to be on my own domain. Should there be an Indieweb post kind for “fap” for people who want
to publicly track their masturbatory activities as an exercise in the quantified self?
Or should there be a “sex” kind that works a bit like “invitation” in that you can optionally tag other people who were involved? Or is
sex a kind of “exercise”? Could it be considered “game play”? What about when it’s a “performance”? Of course, the irony is that anybody who puts a significant amount of effort into standardising the way that a person
might publicly catalogue their sex life… is probably rendering themselves less-likely to have one.
I think I got off-topic in this footnote.
5 To be fair, I’ve worked places where committee groupthink has made worse
decisions. Want a topical example? My former employer The Bodleian Libraries decided to call a podcast series “BodCast” without first
performing a search… which would have revealed that Playboy were already using that name for a series of titillating vlogs. Curiously, it was Playboy who caved and renamed their
service first. Presumably the strippers didn’t want to be associated with librarians?
6 It’s possible there are achievements I’ve missed – their spriteset file looks like it
contains others! – that are only available to content creators on the platform. But if that’s the case, it further reinforces that these achievements are for the purpose of
consumers who want to show off how many videos they’ve watched, or whatever! Weird, right?
7 “Congratulations: you watched your 500th YouTube ‘short’ – look how much of your life
you’ve wasted!”
This is a blog post about things that make me nostalgic for other things that, objectively, aren’t very similar…
When I hear Dawnbreaker, I feel like I’m nine years old…
…and I’ve been allowed to play OutRun on the arcade cabinet at West View
Leisure Centre. My swimming lesson has finished, and normally I should go directly home.
On those rare occasions I could get away1
with a quick pause in the lobby for a game, I’d gravitate towards the Wonderboy machine. But there was something about the tactile
controls of OutRun‘s steering wheel and pedals that gave it a physicality that the “joystick and two buttons” systems couldn’t replicate.
The other thing about OutRun was that it always felt… fast. Like, eye-wateringly fast. This was part of what gave it such appeal2.
OutRun‘s main theme, Magical Sound Shower, doesn’t actually sound much like Dawnbreaker. But
both tracks somehow feel like… “driving music”?
But somehow when I’m driving or cycling and it this song comes on, I’m instantly transported back to those occasionally-permitted childhood games of OutRun4.
When I start a new Ruby project, I feel like I’m eleven years old…
It’s not quite a HELLO WORLD, but it’s pretty-similar.
At first I assumed that the tedious bits and the administrative overhead (linking, compiling, syntactical surprises, arcane naming conventions…) was just what “real”, “grown-up”
programming was supposed to feel like. But Ruby helped remind me that programming can be fun for its own sake. Not just because of the problems you’re solving or the product
you’re creating, but just for the love of programming.
The experience of starting a new Ruby project feels just like booting up my Amstrad CPC and being able to joyfully write code that will just work.
I still learn new programming languages because, well, I love doing so. But I’m yet to find one that makes me want
to write poetry in it in the way that Ruby does.
When I hear In Yer Face, I feel like I’m thirteen years old…
…and I’m painting Advanced HeroQuest miniatures6 in the attic at my dad’s house.
I’ve cobbled together a stereo system of my very own, mostly from other people’s castoffs, and set it up in “The Den”, our recently-converted attic7,
and my friends and I would make and trade mixtapes with one another. One tape began with 808 State’s In Yer Face8,
and it was often the tape that I would put on when I’d sit down to paint.
Advanced HeroQuest came with some fabulously ornate secondary components, like the doors that were hinged so their their open/closed state could be toggled, and I spent
way too long painting almost the entirety of my base set.
In a world before CD audio took off, “shuffle” wasn’t a thing, and we’d often listen to all of the tracks on a medium in sequence9.
That was doubly true for tapes, where rewinding and fast-forwarding took time and seeking for a particular track was challenging compared to e.g. vinyl. Any given song would loop around
a lot if I couldn’t be bothered to change tapes, instead just flipping again and again10.
But somehow it’s whenever I hear In Yer Face11
that I’m transported right back to that time, in a reverie so corporeal that I can almost smell the paint thinner.
When I see a personal Web page, I (still) feel like I’m fifteen years old…
…and the Web is on the cusp of becoming the hot “killer application” for the Internet. I’ve been lucky enough to be “online” for a few years by now12,
and basic ISP-provided hosting would very soon be competing with cheap, free, and ad-supported services like Geocities to be “the
place” to keep your homepage.
Nowadays, even with a hugely-expanded toolbox, virtually every corporate homepage fundamentally looks the same:
Logo in the top left
Search and login in the top right, if applicable
A cookie/privacy notice covering everything until you work out the right incantation to make it go away without surrendering your firstborn child
A “hero banner“
Some “below the fold” content that most people skip over
A fat footer with several columns of links, to ensure that all the keywords are there so that people never have to see this page and the search engine will drop
them off at relevant child page and not one of their competitors
Finally, a line of icons representing various centralised social networks: at least one is out-of-date, either because (a) it’s been renamed, (b) it’s changed its
branding, or (c) nobody with any moral fortitude uses that network any more14
But before the corporate Web became the default, personal home pages brought a level of personality that for a while I worried was forever dead.
2 Have you played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds? The first time I played it I was overwhelmed by the speed and colours of the
game: it’s such a high-octane visual feast. Well that’s what OutRun felt like to those of us who, in the 1980s, were used to much-simpler and slower arcade games.
3 Also, how cool is it that Metrik has a blog, in this day and age? Max props.
4 Did you hear, by the way, that there’s talk of a movie adaptation of OutRun, which could turn out to be the worst
videogame-to-movie concept that I’ll ever definitely-watch.
5 In very-approximate order: C, Assembly, Pascal, HTML, Perl, Visual Basic (does that even
count as a “grown-up” language?), Java, Delphi, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, ASP (classic, pre-.NET), CSS, Lisp, C#, Ruby, Python (though I didn’t get on with it so well), Go, Elixir… plus
many others I’m sure!
6 Or possibly they were Warhammer Quest miniatures by this point; probably this memory spans one, and also the other, blended together.
7 Eventually my dad and I gave up on using the partially-boarded loft to intermittently
build a model railway layout, mostly using second-hand/trade-in parts from “Trains & Transport”, which was exactly the nerdy kind of model shop you’re imagining right now: underlit
and occupied by a parade of shuffling neckbeards, between whom young-me would squeeze to see if the mix-and-match bin had any good condition HO-gauge flexitrack. We converted the
attic and it became “The Den”, a secondary space principally for my use. This was, in the most part, a concession for my vacating of a large bedroom and instead switching to the
smallest-imaginable bedroom in the house (barely big enough to hold a single bed!), which in turn enabled my baby sister to have a bedroom of her own.
8 My copy of In Yer Face was possibly recorded from the radio by my friend ScGary, who always had a tape deck set up with his finger primed close to the record key when the singles chart came on.
9 I soon learned to recognise “my” copy of tracks by their particular cut-in and -out
points, static and noise – some of which, amazingly, survived into the MP3 era – and of course the tracks that came before or after them, and
there are still pieces of music where, when I hear them, I “expect” them to be followed by something that they used to some mixtape I listened to a lot 30+ years
ago!
10 How amazing a user interface affordance was it that playing one side of an audio
cassette was mechanically-equivalent to (slowly) rewinding the other side? Contrast other tape formats, like VHS, which were one-sided and so while rewinding there was
literally nothing else your player could be doing. A “full” audio cassette was a marvellous thing, and I especially loved the serendipity where a recognisable “gap” on one
side of the tape might approximately line-up with one on the other side, meaning that you could, say, flip the tape after the opening intro to one song and know that you’d be
pretty-much at the start of a different one, on the other side. Does any other medium have anything quite analogous to that?
11 Which is pretty rare, unless I choose to put it on… although I did overhear it
“organically” last summer: it was coming out of a Bluetooth speaker in a narrowboat moored in the Oxford Canal near Cropredy, where I was using the towpath to return from a long walk to nearby Northamptonshire where I’d been searching for a geocache. This was a particularly surprising
place to overhear such a song, given that many of the boats moored here probably belonged to attendees of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, at which – being a folk music festival – one
might not expect to see significant overlap of musical taste with “Madchester”-era acid house music!
12 My first online experiences were on BBS systems, of which my very first was on a
mid-80s PC1512 using a 2800-baud acoustic coupler! I got onto the Internet at a point in the early 90s at which the Web
existed… but hadn’t yet demonstrated that it would eventually come to usurp the services that existed before it: so I got to use Usenet, Gopher, Telnet and IRC before I saw
my first Web browser (it was Cello, but I switched to Netscape Navigator soon after it was released).
13 On the rare occasion I close my browser, these days, it re-opens with whatever
hundred or so tabs I was last using right back where I left them. Gosh, I’m a slob for tabs.
14 Or, if it’s a Twitter icon: all three of these.
15 Of course, they’re harder to find. SEO-manipulating behemoths dominate the search
results while social networks push their “apps” and walled gardens to try to keep us off the bigger, wider Web… and the more you cut both our of your online life, the calmer and
happier you’ll be.
I’ve been enjoying playing Chain Words, from eclectech, intermittently, since it came out in November (when I complained
that the word ‘TOSSPOT’ was rejected; I don’t know if this obvious omission has yet been corrected). If you’ve not given it a go yet, and you like a word game that’s “a bit
different”, you should try it!
As part of my efforts to reclaim the living room from the children, I’m building a new gaming PC for the playroom. She’s called Bee, and – thanks to the absolute insanity that is
The Tower 300 case from Thermaltake – she’s one of the most bonkers PC cases I’ve ever worked in.
Over the Christmas break I dug out my old HTC Vive VR gear, which I got way back in the Spring of 2016. Graphics card technology having come a long
way1,
it was now relatively simple to set up a fully-working “holodeck” in our living room with only a slight risk to the baubles on the Christmas tree.
For our younger child, this was his first experience of “roomscale VR”, which I maintain is the most magical thing about this specific kind of augmented
reality. Six degrees of freedom for your head and each of your hands provides the critical level of immersion, for me.
And you know what: this ten-year-old hardware of mine still holds up and is still awesome!2
The kids and I have spent a few days dipping in and out of classics like theBlu, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Raw Data,
and (in my case3)
Half-Life: Alyx.
It doesn’t feel too heavy, but this first edition Vive sure is a big beast, isn’t it?
I’m moderately excited by the upcoming Steam Frame with its skinny headset, balanced weight, high-bandwidth
wireless connectivity, foveated streaming, and built-in PC for basic gaming… but what’s with those controllers? Using AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable one feels like a
step backwards, and the lack of a thumb “trackpad” seems a little limiting too. I’ll be waiting to see the reviews, thanks.
When I looked back at my blog to double-check that my Vive really is a decade old, I was reminded that I got it in the same month at Three
Rings‘ 2016 hackathon, then called “DevCamp”, near Tintern4.
This amused me, because I’m returning to Tintern this year, too, although on family holiday rather than Three Rings business. Maybe I’ll visit on a third occasion in
another decade’s time, following another round of VR gaming?
Footnotes
1 The then-high-end graphics card I used to use to drive this rig got replaced
many years ago… and then that replacement card in turn got replaced recently, at which point it became a hand-me-down for our media centre PC in the living room.
2 I’ve had the Vive hooked-up in the office since our house move in 2020, but there’s rarely been space for roomscale play there: just an occasional bit of Elite: Dangerous at my desk…
which is still a good application of VR, but not remotely the same thing as being able to stand up and move around!
3 I figure Alyx be a little scary/intense for the kids, but I could be
wrong. I think the biggest demonstration of how immersive the game can be in VR is the moment when you see how somebody can watch it played on the big screen and be fine but as soon
as they’re in the headset and a combine zombie has you pinned-down in a railway carriage and it’s suddenly way too much!
4 Where, while doing a little geocaching, I messed-up a bonus cache’s coordinate
calculation, realised my mistake, brute-forced the possible answers, narrowed it down to two… and then picked the wrong one and fell off a cliff.
I’ve found myself, unusually, with enough free time for videogaming this Christmas period. As a result I’ve played – and loved enough to play to completion – not one
but two games that I’d like to recommend to you!
Egg
Egg, released last month by Terry Cavanagh, is a frustrating but satisfying 3D puzzle platformer playable for free on the Web or downloadable for a variety of platforms.
If Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy was a story about eggs instead of a man whose legs are stuck in a cauldron…
then it’d still be much harder than Egg, which almost never made me want to throw my computer out of the window.
It’s not quite a “rage game”, because it’s got copious checkpoints, but it will cause at least a little frustration as you perform challenging timed jumps to deliver each
of your six eggs to suitable nests hidden throughout the map. But I enjoyed it: it was never too hard, and it always felt like my hard work was paid-off in satisfying
ways.
I probably spent a little over an hour lost in its retro aesthetic, and was delighted to do so: maybe you should give it a go too.
Dispatch
You probably don’t need me to introduce you to Dispatch, from AdHoc Studio, because the Internet
has gone wild over it and rightly. Available for PlayStation and Steam, it’s a narrative-driven multi-pathed game that straddles both storytelling and strategic resource management
mechanics.
And it does the best job I’ve seen at making it feel like your choices matter since Pentiment. Perhaps
longer.
For the bits in-between the strategy layer, the quicktime events, and the dialogue choices, the game seamlessly slips into pre-rendered video that provides a best-in-class
“interactive movie” experience.
The story is well-written and wonderfully voice-acted: I’d have absolutely been happy to watch this “superhero workplace comedy” as a TV show! But the way it has you second-guessing
your choices and your priorities every step of the way significantly adds to the experience.
The basic gameplay is intuitive, lightweight fun, with a couple of surprises along the way… but it’s the story that’ll keep you hooked to the end of the eighth episode. There’s a good
chance this one’s going to win a ton of awards.
It only took about 8-10 hours of my time, spread over two or three sessions, but it’s very “episodic” so if – like me – you need to be able to dip in and out of games (when life gets in
the way) it’s still a great choice. And there’s some replay-value too: I’m definitely going to run through it a second time.
So if you’ve got at-least-as-much space for videogaming in your life as I do (which isn’t a high bar), those are my two “hot picks” for the season.
Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called “Half Life 2”. Are you sitting comfortably? Then
I shall begin.
…
What is meant to happen is a guard (spoiler alert – it’s actually Barney in disguise) bangs on a door, the door opens, he says “get in”, and then the game waits for you to enter
the room before the script proceeds.
But in this case the door sort of rattled, but didn’t open, and then locked shut again. So you can’t get in the room, and the gate closed behind you, so you can’t go do anything
else. The guard waits forever, pointing at the locked door, and you’re stuck.
…
If you watch the video, when the door unlocks and then opens, there’s a second guard standing inside the room to the left of the opening door. That guard is actually standing very
slightly too close – the very corner of his bounding box intersects the door’s path as it opens. So what’s happening is the door starts to open, slightly nudges into the guard’s
toe, bounces back, closes, and then automatically locks. And because there’s no script to deal with this and re-open the door, you’re stuck.
…
So this kicked off an even longer bug-hunt. The answer was (as with so many of my stories) good old floating point. Half Life 2 was originally shipped in 2004, and although the SSE
instruction set existed, it wasn’t yet ubiquitous, so most of HL2 was compiled to use the older 8087 or x87 maths instruction set. That has a wacky grab-bag of precisions – some
things are 32-bit, some are 64-bit, some are 80-bit, and exactly which precision you get in which bits of code is somewhat arcane.
…
Amazing thread from Tom Forsyth, reflecting on his time working at Valve. The tl;dr is that after their compiler was upgraded (to support the SSE instruction sets that had now become
common in processors), subsequent builds of Half-Life 2 became unwinnable. The reason was knock-on effects from a series of precision roundings, which meant that a Combine
security guard’s toe was in a slightly wrong place and the physics engine would bounce a door off him.
A proper 500-mile-email grade story, in terms of unusual bugs.
This weekend, I received my copy of DOCTYPE, and man: it feels like a step back to yesteryear to type in a computer program from a
magazine: I can’t have done that in at least thirty years.
So yeah, DOCTYPE is a dead-tree (only) medium magazine containing the source code to 10 Web pages which, when typed-in to your computer, each provide you with some kind of fun and
interactive plaything. Each of the programs is contributed by a different author, including several I follow and one or two whom I’m corresponded with at some point or another, and each
brings their own personality and imagination to their contribution.
I opted to start with Stuart Langridge‘s The Nine Pyramids, a puzzle game about trying to connect all nodes in a 3×3 grid in a
continuous line bridging adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) nodes without visiting the same node twice nor moving in the same direction twice in a row (that last provision is described
as “not visiting three in a straight line”, but I think my interpretation would have resulted in simpler code: I might demonstrate this, down the line!).
The puzzle actually made me stop to think about it for a bit, which was unexpected and pleasing!
Per tradition with this kind of programming, I made a couple of typos, the worst of which was missing an entire parameter in a CSS conic-gradient() which resulted in the
majority of the user interface being invisible: whoops! I found myself reminded of typing-in the code for Werewolves and
Wanderer from The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, whose data section – the part most-liable to be affected by a typographic bug without introducing a syntax error – had
a helpful “checksum” to identify if a problem had occurred, and wishing that such a thing had been possible here!
But thankfully a tiny bit of poking in my browser’s inspector revealed the troublesome CSS and I was able to complete the code, and then the puzzle.
I’ve really been enjoying DOCTYPE, and you can still buy a copy if you’d like one of your own. It manages to simultaneously feel both fresh and nostalgic,
and that’s really cool.
I’d love to write a longer review to praise the art style and the concept, but there’s not much to say. Just… go and give it a shot; it’ll improve your day, I’m sure.
Anyway: Acai turns out to be not only a kickass Clone Hero player, but he’s also a fun and charismatic commentator to take along for the ride.
Incidentally, it was fun to see that the same level of attention to detail has been paid to the on-screen lyrics for Clone Hero as were to the subtitles on the video version of the album. For example, they’ll sometimes imply that the next line is what
you’re expecting it to be, based on a familiarity with the song, only to bait-and-switch it out for the actual lyrics at the last second. Genius.
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