I have memories, clouded by sorrow

I put this on Facebook; for those of you who don't have me on there, here it is again for your pleasure.

"Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen videogames you've played that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes."

If I was being more rigorous about this list rather than just picking the first memorable 15, Id probably have listed Deus Ex, Oblivion, Microprose Grand Prix, Elite, Frontier, Laser Squad, Bloodwych, Trackmania, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, New Star Soccer 3, Passage, The Price of Magik, Soul Blade... but instead, here are the 15, with some historical notes as I prefer that to just a list.

1. Green Beret. This was the first computer game I ever played, I think. It was on an arcade machine at Oakdene Forest Park in Dorset. I didn't particularly know much about green berets or guns or bazookas but this rather typical side-scroller was great fun to this neophyte.

2. Scramble. I played this on the Vectrex machines at the youth club when I was about 7 or 8. (That's not 'youth'!) It had 2 colours - off and on! - but the gameplay was addictive, and you always felt good when you reached a section you previously hadn't got to.

3. Ultima VII. Probably the best RPG of all time, and both its storyline and its vast explorable world probably will never be topped. This kept me occupied for months during my college days, when access to the family PC was limited, but once playing I'd be occupied well into the night.

4. Thief: The Dark Project. This game grabs me both on a visceral level and on an intellectual level. There's something about hiding and sneaking that makes it easier to identify with than the far-fetched power fantasies of most games. Add a dark storyline and a reluctant anti-hero and you have a perfect mix.

5. Championship Manager 2. Myself and my friend Andrew Grist used to lose many evenings to this addictive game back in the mid 90s. Even if you strip away the footballing aspect it's still a suspenseful game of strategy and resource management that keeps you going back for one more match.

6. Sensible Soccer. Another one best enjoyed with a friend: I used to take my joystick round to Tom's on the weekends and play 2-player 'Sensi' on his Amiga. Completely the opposite of Championship Manager in that this is all speed and action and very little thought, but always fun.

7. The Bard's Tale. This game shaped me as a person more than most things in my life. Playing it expanded my interest in roleplaying and swords and sorcery in general, and mapping out the dungeons of Skara Brae on graph paper showed me that you could explore a virtual world that existed inside the computer.

8. Kung Fu Master. Another arcade game played while on holiday as a child, and it sticks with me for that reason. Also, my first experience of the long gone mechanic of 'joystick waggling', the technique that launched a thousand Daley Thompson games.

9. Doom 2. Our PC at the time wasn't up to playing Doom but when we finally got a 486 (SX, 33MHz. 4MB Ram I think?) Peter Denby happily supplied me with this sequel to the seminal first person shooter. It was as if the sort of game we used to dream would be made was finally possible - a world in 3D that you could move through in real time, and plenty of demon-based action to boot. I'd never seen anything like it before and I'm not sure I'll ever have such a horizon-expanding moment at a computer ever again.

10. Realms of the Haunting. Like Doom, RotH is a 90s game utilising a first person viewpoint, 2.5D graphics, and has demons in. But there the similarities end. RotH is 1/3rd interactive film, 1/3rd graphical adventure, and 1/3rd first person shooter, and for this reason it never had mass appeal, but the spooky storyline combined with the intimidating presentation made my Resident Evil playing housemates concede that this was by far the scarier game.

11. Lords of Chaos. I got this as the free gift when I subscribed to Amstrad Action magazine, and was hooked instantly. It's a turn-based strategy game, ultimately owing some of its mechanics to Games Workshop board game rules, and the character customisation and multiplayer mode made it very replayable. Some of my co-workers worked on one of its sequels, strangely enough.

12. Abattoir MUD. If the Bard's Tale showed me that you could have virtual worlds in a computer, playing MUDs in the early 90s showed me the next step: worlds that kept going when you logged off. The game was text-based but that didn't matter any more than it matters that this website is text-based: you read the words and your mind fills in the blanks. You entered the game and talk to and adventure with people from all over the world, truly something new in the 90s. Modern MMOs are derived directly from the MUD experience but they have lost a lot along the way, not all of which can easily be explained to today's players, which is a shame.

13. Civilization. Possibly the best strategy game of all time. This was another one I enjoyed in the 90s where I'd start playing late on an evening and then realise it was getting light outside. Sinking battleships with Greek phalanxes is the sort of fun you can't easily get these days.

14. Baldur's Gate. This was basically the rebirth of party-based RPGs on the PC, picking up where Ultima VII had left off almost a decade earlier, and basically taking much of the latter, giving it a Diablo style point-and-click interface, and setting it in TSR's classic Forgotten Realms world. I played through this game with my American friend Jen (who I'd met on Abattoir MUD), which was both a very enjoyable and incredibly annoying experience as the quality of the game, enhanced by the cameraderie of playing with a friend, was often marred by the awful networking code that tended to hamper our cross-Atlantic gaming sessions.

15. Football Superstars. Half arcade soccer game, half roleplaying game - this didn't exactly turn out as I would have hoped, but I worked on it, and thousands of people enjoy playing it today, which is encouraging to think about.

Come on then, some of you use it... what's the point of it? Don't take this personally but it just seems to be 90% of the LiveJournal functionality repackaged in a pretty Web 2.0 style and popularised by celebrities and journalists using it.

(Oh, and I hate hearing people talking about 'tweeting'. I shall quote someone and say 'I simply refuse to call the individual messages "tweets." That term lives in the uncanny valley between asinine and humiliating.')

Ah, old computer games are so much better than new ones! Thanks to Jonas, our token Swede at work, I managed to get hold of Diablo. I've been after this for some time, mainly because I wanted to hear the haunting acoustic guitar lines, but also because it's good, simple fun. But one look at the packaging takes me right back.

"Compete over the Internet", replete with capital 'I'!
"Spine-chilling SVGA graphics"!! Not CGA! SVGA!
"Real-time lighting effects"!!! What more need be said?

And it requires a Pentium 60 with at least 16 whole megabytes of RAM. I could probably run 50 instances of the game simultaneously on this PC. How times change.

In other retro gaming news, I'm playing through Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (ie. the one in the series before Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, so I'm working backwards. This is also why I've just rescued someone I remember killing earlier. You could avoid so many mistakes if you lived life in reverse. But I digress...), and also have a Fallout 1 save-game on the go, although that has aged poorly in some ways. I think I'm spoiled by the Baldur's Gate style interface, no matter how infuriating that was to play in multiplayer.

My TrackMania world ranking has dropped to about 98,000.
And I've not touched Thief 3 for about a year. Weird.
Must get back to Bards Tale 2 soon, as well.

I bought a 1 terabyte external hard drive today, and started backing up my music and documents onto it today. (What do people use for backups, incidentally? Anything?) A terabyte is a lot of storage. I remember when my mum bought her first hard drive for the PC she had in the early 90s, when running Windows from 5 floppy disks was quite a common thing to do. The hard disk she got was a then-large 40 megabytes. I proceeded to fill this up with classic games like Elite, Doom 2, Sensible World of Soccer, and Ultima VII.

Before all that, I still have memories of games for the Amstrad CPC 464, loading from cassette into a subset of the roughly 43 kilobytes of memory available once you subtracted the area reserved for the screen and firmware. I also encountered some people with machines with even less capacity: one person with a Dragon 32, and someone else with an even more anaemic ZX81. The games of today might be far more immersive and visceral, but the actual gameplay is rarely any different from before in pure ludological terms, and the variety has really dropped off as costs have risen, which is possibly the saddest thing. You don't see many, if any, commercial games along the lines of Lords of Midnight, Feud, Ranarama, The Bard's Tale, Ikari Warriors, Rampage, Tau Ceti, etc. Time to dig out my old games and read more Retro Magazine, I think.

---

On a completely different and more serious note... big demonstration rallies for things other countries are doing irritate me somewhat. In this case a bunch of people, annoyed with the Israeli assault on Gaza, march on the Israeli embassy in London. So the rest of London is inconvenienced by a few tens of thousands of people marching through the streets because of something largely out of our hands, which is the first thing that I think is a bit selfish. The UK is already attempting to back UN action to end the fighting, which is about as much as it can be reasonably expected to do under international law.

Then they have the fact that this march goes to the actual embassy, which just seems like intimidation to me. How else to interpret thousands of people chanting outside your residence? What actual good is it going to achieve - is the person in there going to call Israel and demand they change their policies so that he can get some peace? Diplomats can send news and opinion back to their country, but thousands of foreigners chanting and making a disturbance is not going to carry any more weight than thousands of letters being sent. And finally, these things always provide a handy smokescreen for militant trouble-causers, who start criminal damage, so then the police get involved, and then the other demonstrators get caught up in it, etc. It's just a rather foolish waste of resources all round, which I get the feeling is more about relieving people's personal guilt and feelings of obligation than about actually helping.

What should people do instead? Maybe donate to relevant charities. Write to MPs requesting that more pressure is applied through diplomatic channels. Take a course in conflict resolution and publish a plan for peace. Volunteer for the Red Cross and fly out there. I don't know, but do something constructive which might actually move things forward, not just march around in a mob attempting to intimidate people while inconveniencing locals and depleting our already stretched police force.

Today I decided to upgrade Kubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10, and wondered what problem I'd hit this time. Answer: it runs into this lovely bug, where the installer crashes, apparently due to version mismatches between the C runtime libraries and the Perl language. The fact that these are 2 of the most commonly used and tested parts of the operating system has not stopped this problem from arising, nor has it meant anybody has been able to fix it in the year it's been known about. *sigh*

Now I have to try and work out how to get around it. A fun way to spend a day off.

EDIT: I managed to grab all the packages at the command line and install them as intended. Then I rebooted, and it now hangs at 'running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local). If I switch to another terminal, and try to run 'startx', it fails with the 'no screens' error that means it's trashed your drivers and/or settings. Disappointing but not at all surprising.

What have I been up to...

Last Wednesday I met up with Chris in the SpeakEasy after work and chatted about band stuff, and the fickleness of women. I also taunted him with my parcel, which was the new Daylight Dies album and t-shirt. (Although I have to confess not being 100% convinced by the album to be honest.)

Thursday saw the unfortunate postponement of Damage Inc, so a reasonably large bunch of us ended up at the Salutation swapping stories of drunkenness and toilet humour. Good times.

Friday morning, I was ill, and injured myself. We shall speak no further of this.

On Friday evening, Allan and myself went over to the wilds of Sneinton to play "Rock Band" (I won't link to the actual site as it doesn't work at all on Firefox 3 and is pretty damn antisocial to IE too) with Matt, Russ, and Gareth. That went on for hours and eventually ended up with Matt on drums, Allan on guitar, and myself on vocals. I must admit that my Shirley Manson voice is not too good, my version of 'Detroit Rock City' by Kiss was worse, and my Die Toten Hosen rendition sounded like one of the Nuremberg rallies. However, I did score 100% on Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid', which is about 30% better than Ozzy Osbourne would manage.

Saturday saw me taking a late lunch with der_katzchen and getting stared at by women. Strange. I have little recollection of what I did in the evening but I'm pretty sure it involved wasting time sat at my computer looking at websites. As usual.

Yesterday I spent much of the day editing an article on programming; joy. I also found myself playing Football Manager 2005, ostensibly to research gameplay for the web-based game I've been working on for the last 6 months (at the rate of about 2 hrs per week... *sigh*). I do tend to get addicted to management and strategy games though, so I was up until almost 3am, with work in the morning. Gah.

Today is the aforementioned work, followed by a walk home in an inevitable rain shower, and then 3 hours of band practice.

So, I was stood in a queue in Boots this morning, and thinking about how using one queue for multiple checkouts guarantees fairness. If the checkouts are guaranteed to be able to deal with any customer eventually, and they always take their next customer from the front of the queue, you can guarantee in turn that every customer will get handled eventually, and that they will be handled in the order they arrived. The system exhibits safety properties, since only one person can leave the queue to go to any one checkout at once, and it exhibits liveness properties, in that the queue is guaranteed to empty eventually, and it exhibits fairness properties, in the ordering of people in the queue. It also shows some signs of being efficient, in that there's no time wasted in negotiating who goes next (as you'd see without a queue), nor do the checkout operators have to waste time finding people (as might occur with table service).

But alas! There is an inefficiency. The head of the queue is located several steps away from even the nearest of the checkouts. This means that after the checkout operator calls the next person over, that operator is sat idle for 2 or 3 seconds until the next person arrives. If each transaction takes a minute, then this latency between the queue and the checkout imposes a massive 3 to 5 percent penalty over optimal checkout operation. To fix this, the head of the queue needs to move closer to the point at where the work is done. In practical terms you can usually make this easier by dividing the queue up into several queues, but then you lose your fairness properties, and some safety properties (since a problem at one till stalls the whole thing). Dilemma.

I guess this means I spend too long thinking about computing problems.

Not much to report at the moment, but report I shall.

Work this week's been ok. A lot of the project is a lot worse than it ever needed to be, and it was even compared negatively to a previous project that got canned, which isn't good. And some of the guys seem to have discovered a competitor that seems to do most of what our game does and a whole lot more besides. So things are going to be interesting as we approach the end of the project, probably along the lines of "we need to add about 10 new features". It could have easily been foreseen, but the people who should have done the foreseeing are sadly not experienced enough to have done so. Still, my side of things is going ok.

At home I've done very little but play Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It's an interesting game, with some frustratingly hard bits. No match for Thief in the stealth stakes however. When not computer gaming I've been reading a short book on Logic, which is slow going at times. I disagree with some of the stuff the author says, but I suppose that's to be expected when I approach it from a mathematical point of view and the subject is equally applicable to philosophy.

I've said it before, but this weather is just like summer: temperatures mild, rain 20 hours a day. It's a bit tedious really. Still, I prefer that to snow. It seems like when I was little, we had snow every year, and it sometimes lasted a few days. Now, it seems rare for it to settle on the ground at all, never mind remain overnight. Still, I suppose I am 0.7° of latitude further south than I was back then.

I got tickets for Primordial in London yesterday morning, so I'm looking forward to that in a few weeks' time. Anybody else going? (erishkigal?) I'm still half-contemplating seeing them again at Ragnarök Festival V in Germany, but I doubt that will happen.

Last night, I went to the pub to meet up with various student types before relocating to Rock City. Rock City was dead until about midnight; 12:00 is the new 10:30, apparently. The music in the mainstream room was surprisingly good compared to usual - as Allan said, "where's the emo?" Downstairs was a bit of a mess as they had the classic rock room mixed in with the metal and hardcore, so nobody really knew what was going on. And there's always at least one moron dressed in a basketball top and long shorts (sic) who needs to pace menacingly back and forth across the dancefloor. How on earth is that dancing? Did he see it on a video somewhere?

Anyway, I think I might have also got zapped by some sort of spooky EMP last night, as my phone lost half of its settings, and my key fob to the security gate stopped working. The second problem involved me having to kick it open, as I was too drunk lacking in agility to get over the wall. I may have to resolve this problem quite shortly.

Oh, and I still don't have any extra shelving. I think I need to get some better cd storage and throw some other stuff away first, instead. I found out that the tip over in Lenton takes electrical goods for recycling/proper disposal, so at some point I need to send my TV and 15" CRT monitor over there (unless someone wants the latter, which I doubt). Maybe I'll throw in a couple of spare PC motherboards while I'm at it.

Government apologises for getting immigration figures wrong by almost 30% - ah, how can you expect people to formulate good policies for a country when they don't even know what the current situation is? That's 1 in 200 of the population they completely overlooked, or 1 in every 100 workers. Useless.

Someone staged a fake Federal Emergency Management Agency news conference concerning the Southern California wildfires. Not just a random impostor, but actually one of FEMA, who thought it would be fine to have other FEMA workers pose as journalists to ask convenient questions. As one person said, this is the sort of thing that corrupt officials do in third-world countries all the time. Amazing.

'Virtual worlds "threaten values"' - probably true, but why call the speaker, Lord Puttnam, an 'industry veteran'? He has worked in film. Neither games or virtual worlds are films, nor are they the same industry, unless you're talking about some sort of fluffily-defined 'entertainment industry' which probably includes strippers and amusement arcade attendants. Hell, why not get Belle de Jour in as the next speaker then. Ahem. At least BBC News didn't continue their frankly foolish trend of touting Second Life as the be-all and end-all of virtual worlds. SL apparently has as 'many' as 45,000 concurrent users these days, which is less than 6% as many as World of Warcraft has in China alone.

'The fighting fund set up to help find Madeleine McCann was used by her parents to make two mortgage payments, their spokesman has said.' Of course they fucking did, you morons! If you're contributing to a fund to help 2 people scour the world for their daughter, then do you expect them to be magically fitting this around their full-time jobs? This is not news, get rid of it. What next? "OMG MONEY DONATED TO ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE BLIND ACTUALLY WENT TO SOMEONE PARTIALLY-SIGHTED!!!11one"

*deep breath* Ok, I think I'm done, for now.

And lo, I've managed to stop being miserable long enough to ask a question, albeit one that will only concern those of you who play computer games of some sort. The rest of you, keep on scrolling...

I'm designing a simple game, which will probably be web-based, and focus around strategy. It'll be in the vein of Civilization, Transport Tycoon, Championship Manager, Theme Park, Sim City, that sort of thing*. I'm still in the brainstorming phase of noting down a thousand potential features before sifting through to find out which ones are good, but I think I have to make one particular choice before continuing too far.

And that choice is... do I make the game fixed length like the first two examples above, where there is a fixed ending point no matter how well you do? There will be a sense of urgency, even if it's long-term, as you're always battling against the clock, or perhaps against an opponent that increases in power until it defeats you. But eventually the game ends and you lose everything you built up, which is not a fun prospect for those who like indefinite play.

Or do I make it ongoing so that you can keep improving, like the latter three examples, even though this may take away any sort of ultimate goal? This lets people stay with their characters that they grow fond of, but gradually increases the difference between the older and the newer players, perhaps discouraging the new ones when they see that they may never catch up with the top players. It also means there will surely come a point where a player has seen everything and leaves through boredom rather than through winning, and maybe that is not good.

I can also envisage some sort of middle ground, sort of inspired by Championship Manager or any other sports game, where a given campaign may come to an end and various scores and resources are reset to zero, but other ones persist to the next campaign, at least in part. Theme Park also had this on a less chronologically fixed basis, where you could sell off your old park and buy a new one which posed a different challenge. But this sort of model is probably harder to balance than either of the two purer alternatives above, as I'd have to decide what can be carried forward and what cannot, risking alienating fans of both styles of gameplay if the choices are poor.

What do you prefer, and why? Opinions please!


(* Actually it'll be more along the lines of Majesty, Carnage Blender, and Quest PBM, but most if not all of you won't have any idea what they're like...)