My past self, receiving a copy of Transport Tycoon for his 14th birthday, would have his mind blown if he could see the kind of insanely-complex super-stations that are
possible in (the open-source successor to) the game 30 years on.
Of course, this kind of thing – multiple simultaneously shared in-and-out routes on a bidirectional station – wasn’t (sensibly) possible before the introduction of path-based signalling in OpenTTD 0.7.0. And modern path-based signals in the game are even smarter.
But still, 14-year-old me had a dream. And nowadays that dream is real.
My life affords me less time for videogames than it used to, and so my tastes have changed accordingly:
I appreciate games that I can drop at a moment’s notice and pick up again some other time, without losing lots of progress1.
And if the game can remind me what it was I was trying to achieve when I come back… perhaps weeks or months later… that’s a bonus!
I’ve a reduced tolerance for dynamically-generated content (oh, you want me to fetch you another five nirnroot do you? – hard pass2):
if I might only get to throw 20 hours total at a game, I’d much prefer to spend that time exploring content deliberately and thoughtfully authored by a human.
And, y’know, it has to be fun. I rarely buy games on impulse anymore, and usually wait weeks or months after release dates even for titles I’ve been anticipating, to see
what the reviewers make of it.
That said, I’ve played three excellent videogames this year that I’d like to recommend to you (no spoilers):
Horizon: Forbidden West
I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. Even if this review persuades you that you should play its sequel, Forbidden
West, you really oughta play Zero Dawn first3.
There’s a direct continuation of plot going on there that you’ll appreciate better that way. Also: Zero Dawn stands alone as a great game in its own right.
Horizon gives a lot to love, from a rich world and story, immersive environments, near-seamless loading, excellent voice acting, and a rewarding difficulty curve. But perhaps
all are second-place to what a kickass character the protagonist is.
The Horizon series tells the story of Aloy from her childhood onwards, growing up an outcast in a tribal society on a future Earth inhabited by robotic reimaginings of
creatures familiar to us today (albeit some of them extinct). Once relatively docile, a mysterious event known as the derangement, shortly before Aloy’s birth, made these
machines aggressive and dangerous, leading to a hostile world in which Aloy seeks to prove herself a worthy hunter to the tribe that cast her out.
All of which leads to a series of adventures that gradually explain the nature of the world and how it became that way, and provide a path by which Aloy can perhaps provide a brighter
future for humankind. It’s well-written and clever and you’ll fight and die over and over as you learn your way around the countless permutations of weapons, tools, traps, and
strategies that you’ll employ. But it’s the kind of learning curve that’s more rewarding than frustrating, and there are so many paths to victory that when I watch Ruth play she uses tactics that I’d never even conceived of.
Horizon: Forbidden West is like Zero Dawn but… more. More quests, more exploration, more machines, more characters, and more of the same story, answering questions
you might have found yourself thinking during the prequel. But it’s not just more-of-the-same.
Forbidden West is in some ways more-of-the-same, but it outgrows the mould of its predecessor, too. Faced with bigger challenges than she can take on by herself, Aloy comes to
assemble a team of trusted party members, and when you’re not out fighting giant robots or spelunking underwater caves or exploring the ruins of ancient San Francisco you’re working
alongside them, and that’s one of the places the game really shines. Your associates chatter to each other, grow and change, and each brings something special to the story that invites
you to care for each of them as individuals.
The musical score – cinematic in its scope – has been revamped too, and shows off its ability to adapt dynamically to different situations. Face off against one of the terrifying new
aquatic enemies and you’ll be treated to a nautical theme, for example. And the formulaic quests of the predecessor (get to the place, climb the thing…), which were already
fine, are riddled with new quirks and complexities to keep you thinking.
And finally: I love the game’s commitment to demonstrating the diversity of humanity: both speaking and background characters express a rarely-seen mixture of races, genders, and
sexualities, and the story sensitively and compassionately touches on issues of disability, neurodiversity, and transgender identity. It’s more presence than
representation (“Hey look, it’s Sappho and her friend!”), but it’s still much better than I’m used to seeing in major video game releases.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
If ever I need to explain to an American colleague why that one time they visited London does not give them an understanding of what life is like in the North of England… this is the
videogame I’ll point them at.
Among the many language options available for the game are “English”, as you’d probably expect, and “Dialect”, which imposes a South Yorkshire accent to everything, as illustrated
here by the main menu.
A short, somewhat minigame-driven, absurd to the point of Monty Python-ism, wildly British comedy game, Thank Goodness You’re
Here! is a gem. It’s not challenging by any stretch of the imagination, but that only serves to turn focus even more on the weird and wonderful game world of Barnsworth (itself
clearly inspired by real-world Barnsley).
Playing a salesman sent to the town to meet the lord mayor, the player ends up stuck with nothing to do4,
and takes on a couple of dozen odd-jobs for the inhabitants of the town, meeting a mixed bag of stereotypes and tropes as they go along.
Ahm gowin t’shop to gi’ sumof Big Ron’s Big Pies! Y’wanout, buggerlugs? Players without a grounding in Yorkshire English, and especially non-Brits, might benefit from turning
the subtitles on.
Presented in a hand-drawn style that’s as distinctive and bizarre as it is an expression of the effort that must’ve gone into it, this game’s clearly a project of passion for
Yorkshire-based developers Coal Supper (yes, that’s really what they call themselves). I particularly enjoyed a recurring joke in which the
player is performing some chore (mowing grass for the park keeper, chopping spuds at the chippy) when the scene cuts to some typically-inanimate objects having a conversation (flowers,
potatoes) while the player’s actions bring them closer and closer in the background. But it’s hard to pick out a very favourite part from this wonderful, crazy, self-aware slice of
Northern life in game form.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Finally, I’ve got to sing the praises of Tactical Breach Wizards by Suspicious
Developments (who for some reason don’t bother to list it on their website; the closest thing to an official page for the project other than its Steam entry might be this launch announcement!)5, the
team behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature.
The game feels like a cross between XCOM/Xenonauts‘ turn-based tactical combat and Rainbow Six‘s special ops theme. Except instead of a squad of gun-toting
body-armoured military/police types, your squad is a team of wizards in a world in which magical combat specialists work alongside conventionally-equipped soldiers on missions where
their powers make all the difference.
Jen the Storm Witch primarily uses large static shocks to fling targets around: relatively harmless, unless she and her teammates have arranged for/tricked enemies to be standing next
to something they can be thrown into… or near a window they can be flung out of!
By itself, that could be enough: there’s certainly sufficient differences between all of the powers that the magic users exploit that you’ll find all kinds of ways to combine them. How
about having your teleport-capable medic blink themselves to a corner so your witch’s multi-step lightning bolt can use them as a channel to get around a corner and zap a target there?
Or what about using the time-manipulation powers of your Navy Seer (yes, really) to give your siege cleric enough actions that they can shield-push your opponent within range of the
turret you hacked? And so on.
But Tactical Breach Wizards, which stands somewhere between a tactical squad-based shooter and a deterministic positional puzzle game, goes beyond that by virtue of its
storytelling. Despite the limitations of the format, the game manages to pack in a lot of background and personality for every one of your team and even many of the NPCs too (Steve Clark, Traffic Warlock is a riot). Oh, and much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, to boot.
The dialogue between your teammates – most of it right as they’re about to breach a door – reads like lighthearted banter but exposes the underpinning backstory of the setting.
The writing’s great, to the extent that when I got to the epilogue – interactive segments during the credits where you can influence “what happens next” to each of the characters you’ve
come to know – I genuinely flip-flopped on a few of them to give some of them a greater opportunity to continue to feature in one another’s lives. Even though the game was clearly over.
It’s that compelling.
And puzzling out some of the tougher levels, especially if you’re going for the advanced (“Confidence”) challenges, too, is really fun. But with autosaves every turn, the opportunity to
skip and return to levels that are too challenging, and a within-turn “undo” feature that lets you explore different strategies before you commit to one, this is a great game for
someone who, like me, doesn’t have much time to dedicate to play.
So yeah: that’s what I’ve been up to in videogaming-time so far this year. Any suggestions for the autumn/winter?
Footnotes
1 If a game loads quickly that’s a bonus. I still play a little of my favourite variant of
the Sid Meier’s Civilization series – that is, Civilization V + Vox Populi (alongside a few quality-of-life mods) but I swear I’d play
more of it if it didn’t take so long to load. Even after hacking around it to dodge the launcher, logos, and introduction, my 8P+4E-core i7 processor takes ~80 seconds from clicking
to launch the game to having loaded my latest save, which if I’m only going to have time to play three turns is frustratingly long! Contrast Horizon: Forbidden West, which I
also mention in this post, a game 13 years younger and with much higher hardware requirements, which takes ~17 seconds to achieve the same. Possibly I’m overanalysing this…
2 This isn’t a criticism of the Elder Scrolls games specifically, but of the
relatively-lazy writing that goes into some videogames that feel like they’re using Perchance to come up with their quests, in order to stretch
the gameplay. I suppose a better example might have been the on-the-whole disappointment that was Starfield, but I figured an Elder Scrolls reference might be easier
to identify at-a-glance. Fetch-questing 100 tonnes of Beryllium just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
3 In fact, if you’re trying to consume the Horizon story as thoroughly as
possible and strictly in chronological order, you probably should read the graphic novel between one and the other, which covers some of the events that occur between the two.
4 Did you ever see the alternate ending to Far Cry 4, by the way? If you
did, you might appreciate that a similar trick can be used to shortcut Thank Goodness You’re Here! too…
5 They’re also missing a trick by using the domain they’ve registered,
wizards.cool, only to redirect to Steam.
Part of the joy of the collaborative Internet is that people can share their passion. Today’s example comes from this YouTuber who’s made an hour long video demonstrating and
ranking the 35 elevators in the first five games in the Myst series.
Starting with a discussion of what defines an elevator, the video goes on to show off some of the worst of the lifts in the series of games (mostly those that are uninspired,
pointless, or which have confusing interfaces) before moving on to the well-liked majority.
I only ever played the first two Myst games (and certainly haven’t played the first since, what, the mid-1990s?) and I don’t think I finished either. But that didn’t stop me
watching the entirety of this video and revelling in the sheer level of dedication and focus it’ll have taken on the part of the creator. When I made my
(mere 15-minute!) video describing my favourite video game Easter Egg I spent tens of hours over the prior weeks researching the quirk and its background, configuring a copy of the
(elderly) game so that it’d play and record in the way I wanted, and of course playing through the game far enough to be able to fully demonstrate the Easter Egg. Dustin’s
video, which doubtless involved replaying (possibly multiple times) five different games released over a 12-year window is mindblowing by comparison.
I don’t really care about the Myst series. I care even less about its elevators. But I really enjoyed this video, if only for its creator’s enthusiasm.
In the late ’70s, a shadowy group of British technologists concluded that nuclear war was inevitable and secretly started work on a cutting-edge system designed to help
rebuild society. And thanks to Matt Round-and-friends at vole.wtf (who I might have
mentioned before), the system they created – ARCC – can now be emulated in your browser.
I’ve been playing with it on-and-off all year, and I’ve (finally) managed to finish exploring pretty-much everything the platform currently has to offer, which makes it pretty damn good
value for money for the £6.52 I paid for my ticket (the price started at £2.56 and increases by 2p for every ticket sold). But you can get it cheaper than I did if you score 25+ on one
of the emulated games.
It gives me more pride than it ought to that I hold the high score for a mostly-unheard-of game for an almost-as-unheard-of computer system.
Most of what I just told you is true. Everything… except the premise. There never was a secretive cabal of engineers who made this whackballs computer system. What vole.wtf emulates is
an imaginary system, and playing with that system is like stepping into a bizarre alternate timeline or a weird world. Over several separate days of visits you’ll explore more
and more of a beautifully-realised fiction that draws from retrocomputing, Cold War fearmongering, early multi-user networks with dumb terminal interfaces, and aesthetics that straddle
the tripoint between VHS, Teletext, and BBS systems. Oh yeah, and it’s also a lot like being in a cult.
Needless to say, therefore, it presses all the right buttons for me.
If you make it onto ARCC – or are already there! – drop me a message. My handle is DAN50.
If you enjoy any of those things, maybe you’d like this too. I can’t begin to explain the amount of work that’s gone into it. If you’re looking for anything more-specific in a
recommendation, suffice to say: this is a piece of art worth seeing.
If you lack the imagination to understand how a game like this could have dozens of possible endings, you desperately need to play it. My favourite path so far through the game was to
add a teabag, then hot water, then remove the teabag, then add some milk, then add a second teabag, then drink it.
Genuinely can’t stop laughing at this masterpiece.
My favourite video game Easter egg is found in Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds1.
Released early in 1993 after missing a target of Christmas 19922,
it undersold despite being almost universally well-received by reviewers3.
I don’t know how print magazine video game reviews read today, but back in the early 90s they seemed to be frivolous and flippant approximately 100% of the time.
Developed by Looking Glass Technologies, it used an enhanced version of the engine they’d used for the game’s prequel a year earlier4.
The engine is particularly cool for it’s time; it’s sometimes compared to Wolfenstein5, but
that’s not entirely fair… on Wolfenstein! The original version of Underworld‘s 3D engine predated Wolfenstein… and yet supported several features that
Wolfenstein lacked, like the ability for the player to look up and down and jump over chasms, for example.
Move around and you’ll see the 3D walls shift to your new perspective, but you’ll always see the same side of the 2D objects on the floor. Turn as you might, you’ll never see the back
of that skull!
The team’s expertise and code would eventually be used to produce System Shock in 1994. The team’s producer, Warren Spector,
would eventually draw from his experience of the Ultima Underworld games when he went on to make Thief: The Dark Project and Deus Ex.
But the technology of Ultima Underworld II and its prequel aren’t as interesting as its approach to storytelling and gameplay. They’re:
Underworld II encourages lateral thinking and provides multiple solutions to many challenges, perhaps best-described by this section in the Designers’ Notes page at the back
of the manual.
What’s being described there is what we’d now call emergent gameplay, and while it wasn’t completely new in 19937 it was still uncommon enough to be
noteworthy.
The Easter Egg
The Ultima series are riddled with Easter eggs, but my favourite is one that I feel is well-hidden, beautiful… and heavily laden
with both fan service and foreshadowing!
The third of the interdimensional planes the Avatar visits in the game contains a city frozen solid by the Guardian’s magic.
To find the Easter egg, you must first travel to Anodunos. This city was once the capital of a tropical city-state which had become allied to the Guardian, the the principal antagonist
of Ultima VII through IX.
After the city’s major, Beatrice, attempted to put an end to the red titan’s growing demands, the Guardian cursed the city fountain to radiate out a magical cold that eventually froze
the entire settlement under a cave of ice.
Mayor Beatrice lives on here, as a ghost. While she’s a great source of information about the ice caverns as a whole and has information highly useful to the primary quest, that’s not
the thing we’re interested in right now.
On the Eastern bank of the city’s river we find the remnants of the workshop of the magician Alorik, and in it – if we look in the right place8
– a secret door. We can’t open it though: unusually for a secret door in this game, it’s locked.
In the original, unpatched release of the game, you couldn’t even cast the “open” spell on it to unlock it: the only way through was to use a powerful late-game spell like “portal” to
teleport to the other side.
I didn’t even find this chamber on my first playthrough of the game. It was only on my second, while using the Map Area spell to help me to draw accurate maps of the entire game world,
that I found the room… and even then I spent some time hunting for a switch on the “outside” before eventually giving up and teleporting into the secret room.
Once you’re on the other side, there’s a switch. I guess it’s a Alorik’s panic room?
There’s valuable treasure here including a sceptre of mana restoration, a “grav” runestone (probably still easier to get than the one at the Scintillus Academy), but what’s most
interesting is the crystal ball, which the player can look into to see a vision of another place and, in the case of this orb, another time.
The first time you look into it, you’re told:
You see yourself striving against the forces of Mondain and Minax in the lands of ancient Sosaria.9
Mondain and Minax are the antagonists in Ultima I and Ultima II. We’re seeing the earliest parts of the player character’s adventures.
It’s long been argued that the “Stranger” – the protagonist of Ultima I through Ultima III – is a different person to the Avatar of Ultima IV but I feel
like this vision is canonical proof that they’re supposed to be interpreted as being the same person…
If we look into the crystal ball a second time:
You see yourself climbing to the peak of Olympus Mons on the planet Mars.
This is a reference to the plot of Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams… which is a… weird choice of game to reference.
In my mind, a more logical leap forward in time might have been to jump to Ultima IV10, in which the protagonist
first becomes the Avatar of the Eight Virtues and the Hero of Britannia. Martian Dreams is… a sequel to a spinoff of Ultima VI. So why pick that?
Little-known and oft-forgotten, Martian Dreams is apparently nonetheless a source of pride for the real Spector.
Martian Dreams starts with a friend of the Avatar’s from Earth facilitating the Avatar and their companions to set out on an adventure to the planet Mars. That friend is called
Dr. Spector, obviously named for Warren Spector, who helped develop Ultima VI and, of
course, this game. This usual choice of vision of the past is a cryptic nod to the producer of Underworld II.
Let’s look again:
You see yourself in the Deep Forest, speaking with the peace-loving simian race of Emps.
This one’s a reference to Ultima VII, the game whose story immediately precedes this one. The Deep Forest seems an strange part of the adventure to choose, though. The Avatar
goes to the Deep Forest where, via some emps and then a wisp are eventually lead to the Time Lord11.
The Time Lord provides a whole heap of exposition and clues that the Avatar needs to eventually close the Black Gate and win the game.
Tardis noises intensify.
Do these references serve to hint that this crystal ball, too, is a source of exposition and guidance? Let’s see what it says next.
You see yourself peering into a crystal ball.
I remember the moment I first saw this happen in the game: serious chills! You’ve just found a long-lost, centuries-buried secret chamber, in which there’s a crystal ball. You peer into
it and observe a series of moments from throughout your life. You continue to watch, and eventually you see yourself, staring into the crystal ball: you’re seeing the present. So what’s
next?
Alorik’s crystal ball from Ultima Underworld II and the mural of G’mork from The NeverEnding Story totally have the same energy.
If you look again, you’re asking to see… the unwritten future:
You see yourself winding a great war horn in the throne room of Castle British.
To save Britannia in Ultima Underworld II, the Avatar needs to exploit symmetries implicit in The Guardian’s spellcasting to travel to eight different parallel worlds, find a
place from which His power stems, dispel it, encase themselves in a shell of basilisk oil-infused magic mud, immerse themselves in lava to bake it on, find a magic sigil, consume a
djinn… it’s a whole thing. But ultimately it all leads to a climactic end scene in which the Avatar raises a horn retrieved from the Tomb of Praecor Loth and blows it to shatter a dome
of blackrock.
If you happen to find this clue on your first playthrough, it’s helpful exposition.
But that’s the end of this game, right? How can we possibly peer into the orb again?
You see yourself sailing through majestic pillars cropping up out of the sea, on a voyage of discovery.
What’s being described there is the opening scene from the next game in the series, the as-yet-unreleased Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle!
Serpent Isle begins with the Avatar and their companions sailing out to some special pillars in pursuit of a bad guy.
This vision is a teaser of what’s to come. That’s just… magical, for both the character and the player.
The character uses fortune-telling magic to see their future, but the player is also seeing their future: if they’re playing Ultima Underworld II at or close to its
release date, or they’re playing through the games in chronological order, they’re in a literal sense being shown what comes next in their life. That’s really cool.12
Let’s look again:
You see the obscure form of an old and dear friend, as he sacrifices his life for the good of all.
Some time after the party arrives on Serpent Isle, the Avatar’s companions are possessed by the Banes of Chaos and go on a murderous rampage. Later, there’s a ritual that will save the
world, but at the cost of the death of one of the heroes. The Avatar is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, but in the end Sir Dupre takes his place, unwilling to live within
himself after seeing the carnage he has wrought.
The death of Sir Dupre, who first appeared way back in Ultima II, is somewhat undercut by his resurrection in Ultima IX. But perhaps you’ll let me pretend for a
paragraph longer that Ultima IX doesn’t exist, okay?
At the end of Serpent Isle, the Avatar is plucked out of space and time and deposited into Pagan, The Guardian’s home base. The plot of Ultima VIII and Ultima
IX revolve around the Avatar working to return to a radically-changed Britannia, attempting to fight The Guardian and bring to an end the Age of Armageddon, and ultimately
merging and become one with Him before vanishing completely from the world.
I don’t disagree with how Ultima IX got to where it was going, but I don’t like the route it took to get there. Or the hilariously-terrible bugs.
Which is why it’s perhaps quite fitting that if the Avatar in Underworld II looks into the orb one final time, they’re told…
You see nothing.
That’s it. That’s the end.
The end of the vision, certainly, but also: a vision of the end.
Depending on how you count the Ultima games13, this is the 13th of 17 in the series. We’re approaching the
final chapter, and this Easter egg foreshadows that finale.
I feel hugely privileged that I got to experience it “organically”, by accident, as its authors presumably intended, back in 1993. But it also makes me happy to be able to share the
story of it with you14.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might enjoy watching the vlog version of this post, through which my enthusiasm for the topic might be more-palpable.
Footnotes
1 I’ve doubtless mentioned Ultima Underworld II before: for example both it and
Ultima VII, as well as NetHack (mentioned elsewhere in this post) made it into my 2007 list of top 10 computer games that stole my life.
3 It suffered perhaps for the time of year it was released, but perhaps also for the fact
that 1993 was a big year for video games and it was competing with The 7th Guest, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Return to Zork , Myst, Disney’s
Aladdin and, of course – later in the year – Doom.
4 Director/designer Paul Neurath apparently sang the praises of his team for improving
texture mapping and viewport size constraints, and he’s right: they’re a huge improvement on Underworld I‘s. Neurath would later go on create the crowdfunded “spiritual
successor” Underworld Ascendant, which was critically panned, which just goes to show that sometimes it’s better to get a tight
team together and make it “until it’s done” than to put your half-baked idea on Kickstarter and hope you can work it out what you’re making before the money runs out.
5 Like Wolfenstein, the engine uses a mixture of software-rendered 3D (for walls
and furniture) overlaid with traditionally-produced sprites (for characters and items).
6 All executed over a year before the release of the very first Elder Scrolls
game. Just sayin’.
7 That king of emergent gameplay NetHack was showcasing emergent gameplay in
a fantasy roleplaying game way back in the 1980s!
8 An interesting quirk of the game was that if you turned the graphics settings down to
their lowest, secret doors would become just as visible as regular doors. If you’re sure there is one but you can’t quite find it, tweaking your graphics settings is much easier than
casting a spell!
9 Do you like the “in the style of Underworld II” scrolls I’ve used in this post?
I’ve made available the source code you need
if you want to use them yourself.
10Ultima IV is my personal favourite Ultima game, but I see the
argument of people who claim that Ultima VII is the best of the series.
11 The Time Lord turns up throughout the game series. Way back in Ultima III,
he appears in the Dungeon of Time where he provides a clue essential to defeating Exodus, and he appears or is referenced in most games from Ultima VII onwards. He doesn’t
seem to appear in Ultima IV through Ultima VI, except… in Ultima IX, which wouldn’t be released until six years after Underworld II, it’s revealed
that the Time Lord is the true identity of the seer Hawkwind… who provided the same kind of exposition and guidance in Ultima IV!
12 How did the Underworld II team know with such certainty what was being
planned for Serpent Isle? At some point in 1992 project director Jeff George left Origin Studios and was replaced by lead designer Bill Armintrout, and the role of producer was assigned to… Warren Spector again! For some time, Spector was involved with both
projects, providing an easy conduit for inter-team leaks.
13 How you count Ultima games and what specifically should be counted is a
source of controversy in fan circles.
14 I’m sure many people reading this will have heard me talk about this particular
Easter egg in-person before, over the last couple of decades. Some of you might even have heard me threaten to write a blog post about it, someday. Well: now I have. Tada! It only
took me thirty years after experiencing it to write about it here, which is still faster than some things I’ve blogged about!
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
How do I play? Let me count the ways!
RPGs
I’m involved in no fewer than three different RPG campaigns (DMing the one for
The Levellers) right now, plus periodic one-shots. I love a good roleplaying game, especially one that puts character-building and storytelling
above rules-lawyering and munchkinery, specifically because that kind of collaborative, imaginative experience feels more like the kind of thing we call “play” when
done it’s done by children!
Family D&D and Abnib D&D might have a distinctly different tone, but they’re still both playtime activities.
Videogames
I don’t feel like I get remotely as much videogaming time as I used to, and in theory I’ve become more-selective about exactly what I spend my time on1.
Similarly, I don’t feel like I get as much time to grind through my oversized board games collection as I used to2,
but that’s improving as the kids get older and can be roped-into a wider diversity of games3.
Our youngest wakes early on weekend mornings and asks to kick off his day with board games. Our eldest, pictured, has grown to the point where she’s working her way through all of the
animal-themed games at our local board games cafe.
Escape Rooms
I love a good escape room, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough for (more of) them too so I’ve an excuse to do more of them. When we’re not playing conventional escape rooms,
Ruth and I can sometimes be found playing board game-style boxed “kit” ones (which have very variable quality, in my experience) and we’ve
recently tried a little Escape Academy.
Ruth and I make a great duo when we remember to communicate early-and-often and to tag-team puzzles by swapping what we’re focussing on when we get stuck.
They’re not the only satnav-based activities I do at least partially “for fun” though! I contribute to OpenStreetMap, often through the
“gamified” experience of the StreetComplete app, and I’m very slowly creeping up the leader board at OpenBenches. Are these “play”? Sure, maybe.
And all of the above is merely the structured kinds of play I engage in. Playing “let’s pretend”-style games with the kids (even when they make it really, really
weird) adds a whole extra aspect. Also there’s the increasingly-rare murder mystery parties we sometimes hold: does that count as roleplaying, or some other kind of play?
A chef, a priest, and a librarian walk into a party… stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Suffice to say, there’s plenty of play in my life, it’s quite varied and diverse, and there is, if anything, not enough of it!
Footnotes
1 I say that, and yet somehow Steam tells me that one of my most-played games this year
was Starfield, which was… meh? Apparently compelling enough
that I’ve “ascended” twice, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered.
2 Someday my group and I will finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 so we can get
started on Season 0 which has sat
unplayed on my shelves since I got it… oooh… two or three years ago‽
3 This Christmas, I got each of them their first “legacy” game: Zombie Kids for the younger one, My City for the elder. They both seem pretty good.
4Geocaching is where you use military satellite networks to find lost tupperware. Geohashing uses the same technology but what you find is a whole
lot of nothing. I don’t think I can explain why I find the latter more-compelling.
There are video games that I’ve spent
many years playing (sometimes on-and-off) before finally beating them for the first time. I spent three years playing Dune II before I finally beat it as every house. It took twice that to reach the end of Ultima Underworld II. But
today, I can add a new contender1 to that list.
Today, over thirty-five years after I first played it, I finally completed Wonder Boy.
My first experience of the game, in the 1980s, was on a coin-op machine where I’d discovered I could get away with trading the 20p piece I’d been given by my parents to use as a deposit
on a locker that week for two games on the machine. I wasn’t very good at it, but something about the cutesy graphics and catchy chip-tune music grabbed my attention and it became my
favourite arcade game.
Of all the video games about skateboarding cavemen I’ve ever played, it’s my favourite.
I played it once or twice more when I found it in arcades, as an older child. I played various console ports of it and found them disappointing. I tried it a couple of times in MAME. But I didn’t really put any effort into it until a hotel we stayed at during a family holiday to Paris in October had a bank of free-to-play arcade machines
rigged with Pandora’s Box clones so they could be used to play a few thousand different arcade classics. Including Wonder Boy.
Our eldest was particularly taken with Wonder Boy, and by the time we set off for home at the end of our holiday she’d gotten further than I ever had at it (all
without spending a single tenpence).
Off the back of all the fun the kids had, it’s perhaps no surprise that I arranged for a similar machine to be delivered to us as a gift “to the family”2
this Christmas.
If you look carefully, you can work out which present it it, despite the wrapping.
And so my interest in the game was awakened and I threw easily a hundred pounds worth of free-play games of Wonder Boy3 over the last few days. Until…
…today, I finally defeated the seventh ogre4,
saved the kingdom, etc. It was a hell of a battle. I can’t count how many times I pressed the “insert coin” button on that final section, how many little axes I’d throw into the beast’s
head while dodging his fireballs, etc.
So yeah, that’s done, now. I guess I can get back to finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the 2017 remake of a 1989 game I
adored!5
It’s aged amazingly well!
Footnotes
1 This may be the final record for time spent playing a video game before beating it,
unless someday I ever achieve a (non-cheating) NetHack ascension.
2 The kids have had plenty of enjoyment out of it so far, but their time on the machine is
somewhat eclipsed by Owen playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Streets of Rage on it and, of course, by my rediscovered obsession with Wonder Boy.
3 The arcade cabinet still hasn’t quite paid for itself in tenpences-saved,
despite my grinding of Wonder Boy. Yet.
4 I took to calling the end-of-world bosses “ogres” when my friends and I swapped tips for
the game back in the late 80s, and I refuse to learn any different name for them.6, saved Tina7Apparently the love interest has a name. Who knew?
5 I completed the original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap on a Sega Master
System borrowed from my friend Daniel back in around 1990, so it’s not a contender for the list either.
Woodward Draw by Daniel Linssen is the kind of game that my inner
Scrabble player both loves and hates. I’ve been playing on and off for the last three days to complete it, and it’s been great. While not perfectly polished1 and with a few rough
edges2, it’s still a great example of
what one developer can do with a little time.
It deserves a hat tip of respect, but I hope you’ll give it more than that by going and playing it (it’s free, and you can play online or download a copy3). I should probably check
out their other games!
Footnotes
1 At one point the background colour, in order to match a picture word, changed to almost
the same colour as the text of the three words to find!
2 The tutorial-like beginning is a bit confusing until you realise that you have to play
the turn you’re told to, to begin with, for example.
This post is also available as an article. So if you'd
rather read a conventional blog post of this content, you can!
This video accompanies a blog post of the same title. The content is mostly the same; the blog post contains a few extra elements (especially in
the footnotes!). Enjoy whichever one you choose.
Of all of the videogames I’ve ever played, perhaps the one that’s had the biggest impact on my life1
was: Werewolves and (the) Wanderer.2
This simple text-based adventure was originally written by Tim Hartnell for use in his 1983 book Creating Adventure
Games on your Computer. At the time, it was common for computing books and magazines to come with printed copies of program source code which you’d need to re-type on your own
computer, printing being significantly many orders of magnitude cheaper than computer media.3
Werewolves and Wanderer was adapted for the Amstrad CPC4 by Martin Fairbanks and published in The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus (1985),
which is where I first discovered it.
When I first came across the source code to Werewolves, I’d already begun my journey into computer programming. This started alongside my mother and later – when her
quantity of free time was not able to keep up with my level of enthusiasm – by myself.
I’d been working my way through the operating manual for our microcomputer, trying to understand it all.5
The ring-bound 445-page A4 doorstep of a book quickly became adorned with my pencilled-in notes, the way a microcomputer manual ought to
be. It’s strange to recall that there was a time that beginner programmers still needed to be reminded to press [ENTER] at the end of each line.
And even though I’d typed-in dozens of programs before, both larger and smaller, it was Werewolves that finally helped so many key concepts “click” for me.
In particular, I found myself comparing Werewolves to my first attempt at a text-based adventure. Using what little I’d grokked of programming so far, I’d put together
a series of passages (blocks of PRINT statements6)
with choices (INPUT statements) that sent the player elsewhere in the story (using, of course, the long-considered-harmfulGOTO statement), Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style.
Werewolves was… better.
By the time I was the model of a teenage hacker, I’d been writing software for years. Most of it terrible.
Werewolves and Wanderer was my first lesson in how to structure a program.
Let’s take a look at a couple of segments of code that help illustrate what I mean (here’s the full code, if you’re interested):
10REM WEREWOLVES AND WANDERER
20GOSUB2600:REM INTIALISE30GOSUB16040IF RO<>11THEN30
50 PEN 1:SOUND 5,100:PRINT:PRINT"YOU'VE DONE IT!!!":GOSUB3520:SOUND 5,80:PRINT"THAT WAS THE EXIT FROM THE CASTLE!":SOUND 5,20060GOSUB352070PRINT:PRINT"YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED, ";N$;"!":SOUND 5,10080PRINT:PRINT"YOU MANAGED TO GET OUT OF THE CASTLE"90GOSUB3520100PRINT:PRINT"WELL DONE!"110GOSUB3520:SOUND 5,80120PRINT:PRINT"YOUR SCORE IS";
130PRINT3*TALLY+5*STRENGTH+2*WEALTH+FOOD+30*MK:FOR J=1TO10:SOUND 5,RND*100+10:NEXT J
140PRINT:PRINT:PRINT:END...2600REM INTIALISE2610 MODE 1:BORDER 1:INK 0,1:INK 1,24:INK 2,26:INK 3,18:PAPER 0:PEN 22620 RANDOMIZE TIME
2630 WEALTH=75:FOOD=02640 STRENGTH=1002650 TALLY=02660 MK=0:REM NO. OF MONSTERS KILLED...3510REM DELAY LOOP3520FOR T=1TO900:NEXT T
3530RETURN
Locomotive BASIC had mandatory line numbering. The spacing and gaps (...) have been added for readability/your convenience.
What’s interesting about the code above? Well…
The code for “what to do when you win the game” is very near the top. “Winning” is the default state. The rest of the adventure exists to obstruct that. In a
language with enforced line numbering and no screen editor7,
it makes sense to put fixed-length code at the top… saving space for the adventure to grow below.
Two subroutines are called (the GOSUB statements):
The first sets up the game state: initialising the screen (2610), the RNG (2620), and player
characteristics (2630 – 2660). This also makes it easy to call it again (e.g. if the player is given the option to “start over”). This subroutine
goes on to set up the adventure map (more on that later).
The second starts on line 160: this is the “main game” logic. After it runs, each time, line 40 checks IF RO<>11 THEN 30. This tests
whether the player’s location (RO) is room 11: if so, they’ve exited the castle and won the adventure. Otherwise, flow returns to line 30 and the “main
game” subroutine happens again. This broken-out loop improving the readability and maintainability of the code.8
A common subroutine is the “delay loop” (line 3520). It just counts to 900! On a known (slow) processor of fixed speed, this is a simpler way to put a delay in than
relying on a real-time clock.
The game setup gets more interesting still when it comes to setting up the adventure map. Here’s how it looks:
Again, I’ve tweaked this code to improve readability, including adding indention on the loops, “modern-style”, and spacing to make the DATA statements form a “table”.
What’s this code doing?
Line 2690 defines an array (DIM) with two dimensions9
(19 by 7). This will store room data, an approach that allows code to be shared between all rooms: much cleaner than my first attempt at an adventure with each room
having its own INPUT handler.
The two-level loop on lines 2700 through 2730 populates the room data from the DATA blocks. Nowadays you’d probably put that data in a
separate file (probably JSON!). Each “row” represents a room, 1 to 19. Each “column” represents the room you end up
at if you travel in a given direction: North, South, East, West, Up, or Down. The seventh column – always zero – represents whether a monster (negative number) or treasure
(positive number) is found in that room. This column perhaps needn’t have been included: I imagine it’s a holdover from some previous version in which the locations of some or all of
the treasures or monsters were hard-coded.
The loop beginning on line 2850 selects seven rooms and adds a random amount of treasure to each. The loop beginning on line 2920 places each of six
monsters (numbered -1 through -6) in randomly-selected rooms. In both cases, the start and finish rooms, and any room with a treasure or monster, is
ineligible. When my 8-year-old self finally deciphered what was going on I was awestruck at this simple approach to making the game dynamic.
Rooms 4 and 16 always receive treasure (lines 2970 – 2980), replacing any treasure or monster already there: the Private Meeting Room (always
worth a diversion!) and the Treasury, respectively.
Curiously, room 9 (the lift) defines three exits, even though it’s impossible to take an action in this location: the player teleports to room 10 on arrival! Again, I assume this is
vestigal code from an earlier implementation.
The “checksum” that’s tested on line 2740 is cute, and a younger me appreciated deciphering it. I’m not convinced it’s necessary (it sums all of the values in
the DATA statements and expects 355 to limit tampering) though, or even useful: it certainly makes it harder to modify the rooms, which may undermine
the code’s value as a teaching aid!
By the time I was 10, I knew this map so well that I could draw it perfectly from memory. I almost managed the same today, aged 42. That memory’s buried deep!
Something you might notice is missing is the room descriptions. Arrays in this language are strictly typed: this array can only contain integers and not strings. But there are
other reasons: line length limitations would have required trimming some of the longer descriptions. Also, many rooms have dynamic content, usually based on random numbers, which would
be challenging to implement in this way.
As a child, I did once try to refactor the code so that an eighth column of data specified the line number to which control should pass to display the room description. That’s
a bit of a no-no from a “mixing data and logic” perspective, but a cool example of metaprogramming before I even knew it! This didn’t work, though: it turns out you can’t pass a
variable to a Locomotive BASIC GOTO or GOSUB. Boo!10
In hindsight, I could have tested the functionality before I refactored with a very simple program, but I was only around 10 or 11 and still had lots to learn!
Werewolves and Wanderer has many faults11.
But I’m clearly not the only developer whose early skills were honed and improved by this game, or who hold a special place in their heart for it. Just while writing this post, I
discovered:
Many, many people commenting on the above or elsewhere about how instrumental the game was in their programming journey, too.
A decade or so later, I’d be taking my first steps as a professional software engineer. A couple more decades later, I’m still doing it.
And perhaps that adventure -the one that’s occupied my entire adult life – was facilitated by this text-based one from the 1980s.
Footnotes
1 The game that had the biggest impact on my life, it might surprise you to hear, is
not among the “top ten videogames that stole
my life” that I wrote about almost exactly 16 years ago nor the follow-up list I published in its incomplete form three years later. Turns out that time and
impact are not interchangable. Who knew?
2 The game is variously known as Werewolves and Wanderer, Werewolves and
Wanderers, or Werewolves and the
Wanderer. Or, on any system I’ve been on, WERE.BAS, WEREWOLF.BAS, or WEREWOLV.BAS, thanks to the CPC’s eight-point-three filename limit.
3 Additionally, it was thought that having to undertake the (painstakingly tiresome)
process of manually re-entering the source code for a program might help teach you a little about the code and how it worked, although this depended very much on how readable the code
and its comments were. Tragically, the more comprehensible some code is, the more long-winded the re-entry process.
5 One of my favourite features of home microcomputers was that seconds after you turned them on, you could start programming. Your prompt
was an interface to a programming language. That magic had begun to fade by the time DOS came to dominate
(sure, you can program using batch files, but they’re neither as elegant nor sophisticated as any BASIC dialect) and was completely lost by the era of booting
directly into graphical operating systems. One of my favourite features about the Web is that it gives you some of that magic back again: thanks to the debugger in a modern browser,
you can “tinker” with other people’s code once more, right from the same tool you load up every time. (Unfortunately, mobile devices – which have fast become the dominant way for
people to use the Internet – have reversed this trend again. Try to View Source on your mobile – if you don’t already know how, it’s not an easy job!)
6 In particular, one frustration I remember from my first text-based adventure was that
I’d been unable to work around Locomotive BASIC’s lack of string escape sequences – not that I yet knew what such a thing would be called – in order to put quote marks inside a quoted
string!
7 “Screen editors” is what we initially called what you’d nowadays call a “text editor”:
an application that lets you see a page of text at the same time, move your cursor about the place, and insert text wherever you feel like. It may also provide features like
copy/paste and optional overtyping. Screen editors require more resources (and aren’t suitable for use on a teleprinter) compared to line editors, which preceeded them. Line editors only let you view and edit a single line at a time, which is how most of my first 6
years of programming was done.
8 In a modern programming language, you might use while true or similar for a
main game loop, but this requires pushing the “outside” position to the stack… and early BASIC dialects often had strict (and small, by modern standards) limits on stack height that
would have made this a risk compared to simply calling a subroutine from one line and then jumping back to that line on the next.
9 A neat feature of Locomotive BASIC over many contemporary and older BASIC dialects was
its support for multidimensional arrays. A common feature in modern programming languages, this language feature used to be pretty rare, and programmers had to do bits of division and
modulus arithmetic to work around the limitation… which, I can promise you, becomes painful the first time you have to deal with an array of three or more dimensions!
10 In reality, this was rather unnecessary, because the ON x GOSUB command
can – and does, in this program – accept multiple jump points and selects the one
referenced by the variable x.
11 Aside from those mentioned already, other clear faults include: impenetrable
controls unless you’ve been given instuctions (although that was the way at the time); the shopkeeper will penalise you for trying to spend money you don’t have, except on food,
presumably as a result of programmer laziness; you can lose your flaming torch, but you can’t buy spares in advance (you can pay for more, and you lose the money, but you don’t get a
spare); some of the line spacing is sometimes a little wonky; combat’s a bit of a drag; lack of feedback to acknowledge the command you enterted and that it was successful; WHAT’S
WITH ALL THE CAPITALS; some rooms don’t adequately describe their exits; the map is a bit linear; etc.
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![Scan of a ring-bound page from a technical manual. The page describes the use of the "INPUT" command, saying "This command is used to let the computer know that it is expecting something to be typed in, for example, the answer to a question". The page goes on to provide a code example of a program which requests the user's age and then says "you look younger than [age] years old.", substituting in their age. The page then explains how it was the use of a variable that allowed this transaction to occur.](/_q23u/2023/07/cpc664-manual-input-command.png)
