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.

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.

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.

Ok, that's possibly the worst first mission I've ever encountered in 23 years of playing computer games. Rather than actually giving me something to play, it seemed to want me to click futilely while the developers played out their delusions of having created 'Saving Private Ryan' on the computer.

http://norefuge.net/vgng/vgng.html

Click it: have fun.

Some of the best so far:

Sensual Sailor Strike Force
National Lampoon's Business of the Third Reich
Infinite Sumo Showdown
Stealth Florist Fun
Chinese Spork Wasteland
Preschool STD Trader
Kinky Dungeon in My Pocket
Jackie Chan's Hippo Oppression
Maximum Hamster Apocalypse
Tiger Woods' Puppy Massacre
Armored Beautician College

And undoubtedly the best...

Undead Hobo - The Dark Project

:/

Last Thursday was the Dark Tranquillity gig at Rock City. I'd certainly looked forward to it, but two factors made me approach it with less enthusiasm than I might have previously. The first was that it would be the third time I'd see them in barely half a year - quite a far cry from the days when I wondered if they'd ever play in this country, never mind in my local club. The second was that, knowing what Dark Tranquillity are like live, they wouldn't impress me as much as Primordial did the week before. It was pretty much as I expected - a great and crowd-pleasing performance, but not one that seized my attention at that time. It's interesting to see just how many people at that gig heard about the band through me, too. Obviously many would have got into the band through other means by now, but it's still interesting. I also ran into another guy in a Primordial t-shirt, who was at the gig the previous Saturday, and he said he had photos and a review up on Some Website. I tried to remember the address of this Some Website but have now forgotten. Oh well.

After the gig most of us moved into the adjacent room for Damage Inc. The venue had just been refurbished, where refurbished appeared to me to mean 'painted red, and with the toilet doors no longer closing'. There were a couple of good songs played, balanced out by a few morons wandering in from the student night next door and getting in the way for a 'laugh'. I really wasn't in the mood for being out and 'clubbing' though - am I ever? - and after 20 minutes of standing around feeling a bit irritated I stomped off home early.

On Friday night I had no idea who was going out, but I did get told of who wasn't going out, so I stayed in and played Splinter Cell again.

On Saturday I did some pointless shopping during the day, dropped by the White Hart briefly with Hannah in the evening, and ended up being about the only person I know who didn't go to Rock City that night.

Sunday was mainly lazing around and cleaning.

Monday was mostly just work, and hearing how we're going to overcome otherwise fatal flaws in the game's design. The evening saw me writing tablature for my amazingly-named piece 'Track 9' for guitar/bass/drums, then more Splinter Cell, infiltrating a North Korean military base now after finishing a Japanese mission the other day.

More work today. WHAT A THRILLING LIFE. This week will see me finishing off the Track 9 tab, working out what formulae I need to use for the web game I've been neglecting since late last year, going out for a Not-Valentine's drink with Jen, and... no, that's all.

Last Friday I went out to Damage Inc. Yet again I didn't really enjoy it, though that's nothing to do with the night itself, which is fine, but that I think I'm not really the type of person to appreciate "nights out". I think I talked briefly to a maximum of 4 or 5 people, and left early to go and play Splinter Cell at home instead.

On Saturday afternoon I agonised over whether to go and buy myself a graphics tablet, given that I work on artistic things about once every three years. After having decided to do so, I got to PC World to find out that they'd sold out of the ones I wanted, so I came home empty-handed as I do almost any time I attempt to purchase goods. I did however manage to buy a couple of cds from Selectadisc. Surprisingly they managed to give me the correct cds. Unsurprisingly, one of the digipaks is damaged. But I suppose I should have noticed that myself.

Saturday evening saw a visit to jen_whitewave's underground base flat where munchies were consumed, amid episodes of Eerie Indiana and the first Highlander film.

On Sunday I had a long overdue lunch with _arnamentia_ at the Trip, where I had 'Hunter's Chicken', which is essentially chicken, bacon, and bbq sauce. I like the idea of a human hunter, the most cunning and advanced predator ever known, going into the forest to hunt its prey, and only managing to catch a chicken and a pig.

Today I'm back at work, getting electric shocks off my recharging phone. Ace. We have a new guy starting today, who's yet another male-programmer-with-long-hair. This one's from Sweden though, for bonus points.

This week I have virtually nothing planned. So, more Splinter Cell and Oblivion, I expect.

Ok, so... on Friday I went out, drank cider, listened to loud music, and ended up standing on a dodgy street corner with Chris until 4am. At least we didn't get anybody asking us where to buy crack this time.

On Saturday I realised that I really had drunk far too much and was barely able to leave bed until Mr Ibuprofen gave me a helping hand, at about 2pm. I went to town and spent money on things I don't need, like a new pillow and 2Gb of memory for my phone.

Yesterday I went for what I thought was a quiet pub lunch with a friend or two, and ended up playing Apathy Frisbee with 15 students. What is Apathy Frisbee, I (telepathically) hear you say? The rules are somewhat like this:

1) People sit - not stand, too much effort - in a circle roughly 10m in diameter. They should be placed at irregular points around the circumference, leaving maximum gaps for optimal effect. If someone has Megadeth audible on headphones that dangle loosely around their neck, that adds to the atmosphere, but is considered optional.
2) The person with the frisbee tosses it nonchalantly across the circle with little regard for distance or accuracy.
3a) Typically, the frisbee drops limply to the grass nearer the centre of the circle than to anybody sat around the edge. After 2 seconds of staring at it in silence, someone will sigh loudly and nominate someone else to reluctantly get up and fetch it.
3b) Occasionally, the frisbee will overshoot, passing over the head of the nearest person, who will have made a heroic attempt to catch, usually involving leaning over until they flop lifelessly to the grass with one arm outstretched in the vague direction of the frisbee. Eventually they crawl over to retrieve the offending item.
3c) Very rarely, someone with suspiciously powerful wrist action will propel the frisbee over the fence, nearly hitting a passing police car. By holding the event in a city allegedly plagued by gun crime, one can avoid having the police complain about random frisbeeing incidents.
4) Repeat from step 1, until visibility is too poor to avoid potential injury inflicted by incoming frisbee.
5) Go to pub.

When not out and about, I've been doing a bit more exploration on Oblivion. I'm quite bored of the game now, since the balance is screwed up by me levelling too far, and being stuck on several tedious quests, and tired of all the Oblivion gates and dungeons looking identical. It's also annoying that it takes about 50 arrows to kill anything. Oh well.

When I got home today, someone had washed my windows. It's like living in a new house. I can see next door and everything.

Tonight I have to choose between finishing some more of those quests on Oblivion, or designing the SQL database for this game idea I had recently. Both are slightly more laborious than they should be, so the decision isn't so easy.

This week, there's 'hard rockers' 1349 playing on Wednesday, Full Metal Racket at the Angel on Friday, and The Prophecy playing on Saturday. Ace. Anybody going to those?

FMR was ok last night. I think last September's one had about 100 people there, whereas this one probably had about 20. Funny how these things work out. I hear other specialist nights might have similarly low attendance at the moment too. I wonder if and how it's possible to make these events more viable? Perhaps there needs to be more small venues with several rooms, so you can save money on overheads by combining events.

Today I've mostly just played guitar, or read the latest Bernard Cornwell book. I also went to town and bought stuff. 2 books, Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction and How Long Is A Piece Of String. 4 cds, Tiamat - Wildhoney, The Meads of Asphodel - The Excommunication of Christ, Octavia Sperati - Grace Submerged, and Anathema - Judgement, the latter one I've had on mp3 virtually since mp3s existed. I also picked up new strings for my electroacoustic guitar, which has been played roughly 4 times since I bought it last Christmas, but has corroded strings nonetheless. Terry Brooks was doing a book signing in town and I was tempted to go along to that too, but in the end I couldn't be bothered.

Me and the new phone are getting along ok, although it only takes one wrong keypress to silently change an SMS into an MMS, meaning it won't get through to certain people's phones. Grr.

Later, as I am being boring and staying in on a Saturday night, I may go and play Thief: Deadly Shadows, where I am on the 'Shalebridge Cradle' level, supposedly such a work of art that it merited an entire article about it. So far I'm preferring the 'Trail Of Blood' and the 'Return To The Cathedral' levels from previous games though.

EDIT: Actually, that level just scared the absolute hell out of me. Ahhh. I revise my opinion. Not sure I actually want to load the game up again now though...


PS. If you haven't done it yet, do my survey. It only takes 5 minutes of your time and a bit of honesty. And I'm gonna run Mann-Whitney tests on the results and everything. Far more useful than one of those crap MySpace surveys that ask what food you had today and what colour your underwear is.

Wow, two days of sun in a row - this must be summer, right? Looks like it might stay clear until Friday, which will be good. I always planned to make the most of this summer, after having failed to do so for the last few years, but obviously Mother Nature has seemed keen on giving us extended Autumn and Spring but barely any Summer or Winter these last 12 months. I can't say I support this.

Who's going to Bloodstock? I need to start making decisions about how to travel there and whether to camp or not.

We had a woman in to interview for a position at work today; probably the first female to have been interviewed there in the year or so it's been open. I say probably, because there was a transsexual once and whether he/she was pre-op or post-op, who can say?

I started playing Civ 4 last night, and that was a lot of fun. I forgot how engrossing the Civ games are, even compared to my other favourites. I was a bit disappointed that there weren't more esoteric civilisations to play though; I ended up as the Romans since I didn't fancy being Queen Elizabeth or Victoria.