J - A - M

Loss

2005-03-18T03:57:00.000Z

Given my recent lack of activity in the IF world (coupled with a lack of activity in other spheres due to much less interesting things getting in the way) I've decided I need to finish and release my new game. An actual deadline might help. So:

Loss v1.0 will be released on Sunday evening.

If I could write Kallisti in a week, I can sure as hell finish my mini-game thing in a couple of days. Game might be too strong a word, but hey.

Incidentally, loss may well turn out to be the smallest TADS 2 game ever.

One of these days I should put up a website with my IF stuff on. Of course, I should also find somewhere to put the website if I ever get round to making it.

Also, some random thoughts:

2005-02-05T01:51:00.000Z

Trying to read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid while tired is deeply frustrating. Unfortunately, the only time I seem to get to read these days is either on the bus to work in the morning or when I really should be sleeping.

People who call customer services and expect customer capitulation are dumb ("why yes, we'll give you your money back for your stupid mistake"), but not so dumb as people who call customer services after they've been told the same thing more than twice and expect a different answer.

Working in customer services leads to deep cynicism about a) customers, b) the company you represent and c) your co-workers.

Almost anything is better than sending out form letters to the relatives of recently deceased customers of a major banking organisation. Especially when you can easily imagine these letters causing a poor elderly widow to burst into tears.

Choosing a degree and university based on criteria of obscurity and easiness to get into may have been a mistake.

Invoking dualism to explain consciousness is a little like invoking something other than physics to explain matter.

It's time to stop reading an author when by releasing a new book they make you annoyed that you no longer own a complete collection of their published works.

Typical...

2005-02-05T01:38:00.000Z

Well, I'm back.

This is what happened. I went off to London for a couple of weeks then came home with a few days to spare to finish off my ifcomp entry. I turned my computer on and then about half an hour later it died a terrible and slightly confusing death. The hard drive was unaffected fortunately, so I didn't lose any data. I did, however, need a new computer. I ordered one. In between placing this order and the thing arriving, I moved. The place I moved to had no spare phone line or, in fact, any way for me to connect to the internet. The ifcomp deadline went by, followed by a few months.

Now I've moved again to a place where I currently have dial-up over a wireless network and will have broadband access within a week. Sweet. I am swamped with work. Not so sweet. But when I have time spare, I'll finish and release what would have been my ifcomp entry. This may also be terrible and slightly confusing. But that's what I do best.

The larger-scale project is still on the distant horizon.

Reading Murakami

2004-08-30T02:13:00.000+01:00

I first learnt of the existence of Haruki Murakami in 2001. I was nearly at the end of my first year as a student and I was feeling a little down. Some people eat chocolate, some hit punch bags for hours, some go out drinking - I buy books. Luckily my local book shop was about ten minutes away and joy-of-joys it had a three-for-two offer on selected books. Determined to expand my tastes and discover some new authors, I bought White Noise by Don Dellilo (nowhere near as good as Underground, but much better than the truly awful Cosmopolis), Revolution Road by someone I have forgotten (It didn't make much of an impression) and Norwegian wood by Haruki Murakami.

Norwegian Wood (the title refers to a Beatles song of the same name) amazes me. Although it was the book that transformed Murakami from a famous Japanese author into an international literary superstar I had never heard of it. Murakami's books sold well before Norwegian Wood with sales figures in the hundreds of thousands. Afterwards, they were in the millions. The resulting furor caused Murakami to flee his native land only returning after the quake in Kobe. I didn't know this at the time. Norwegian Wood looked interesting, so I picked it up. This turned out to be a good decision.

As I tend to do with books that I love, I read it through in one sitting. The longest book I ever did this with would be American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which I also read that year. That took me sixteen hours. Norwegian Wood didn't take me quite so long. Reading in this way is like submerging yourself. It's deeply immersive. You put yourself aside, only breaking to deal with thirst, hunger and other necessities. Even sleep doesn't usually count. So, for six or seven hours I read and listened to Murakami's voice.

The protagonist of Norwegian Wood is a student attending a university in Tokyo in the 1960s. Campus riots happen around him, but he doesn't get involved. When he was seventeen, his best friend killed himself. Then, one day, he runs into his best friend's bereaved girl-friend, Naoko. It is a story about love and loss and growing up. It is sad but hopeful. Somehow Murakami manages to evoke all the heart-wrenching emotions of first love and first loss without ever straying into melodrama.

Being a student myself and identifying with the protagonist may have had something to do with my love of the novel, but the real reason is the writing. This is a little surprising, since it is a translation (someday I will learn to read Japanese so that I can read Murakami in the original). I'm not qualified to say how good the translation is, but as it is approved by Murakami, who has himself translated English works into Japanese, it seems reasonable to say that it is high quality. The writing is poetic without being poetry. The dialogue feels real. The last line of the novel hangs in the air after you finish reading, resonating and shimmering. It stuck in my mind then and it will stay there forever.

There are lines like that throughout Murakami's work. Here's one of my favorites from Norwegian Wood: "If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark."

So, I finished the book, then I read it again and the name Murakami stuck in my mind so that next time I went to the bookstore I was on the lookout for more of his work. It didn't have the largest fiction section and as it was close to both the university campus and the city's train station its stock tended towards the popular and the academic. As Murakami wasn't on any of the reading lists they didn't have a wide selection. Aside from Norwegian Wood, they stocked only Underground, his non-fiction work on the Tokyo subway gas attack by a religious cult, and a thick volume called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I had more interest in his fiction, so I bought that.

If I was expecting more of the same, I was mistaken. While The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has more similarity to Norwegian Wood than (for example) A Wild Sheep Chase, it doesn't share much. The protagonist is not a student, but a thirty-something unemployed house-husband. It isn't about falling in love. And it is far, far more experimental. It deals with one of Murakami's main preoccupations - how do we know what we know and what others know, how can we be sure that this reality is the reality of others? Like Norwegian Wood, the pacing is slow and the language beautiful. The point at which the plot really begins, when the protagonist's wife leaves him, takes place a good way in. This is not a flaw. We get to know the hero, to like and understand him. Without the grounding in reality of this first section the shifts in reality of the rest of the book would not have the power or effect that they do.

The plot takes place around the efforts of the protagonist to get his wife, Kumiko, back - or at least to understand the reasons - after she leaves him. This is, of course, only the most visible layer of the many meanings that his quest has. On another level it is about the conflict between the protagonist, an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, and his wife's brother, Noboru Wataya, a politician and celebrity. And beneath all this it is about the battle between two ways of perceiving the world, not quite 'good' and 'evil' (Murakami is never so obvious as that), but something similar.

The 'Wind-Up Bird' of the title has several incarnations within the novel. There is a bird that the hero sometimes hears whose call reminds him of someone tightening the world's springs. There is a statue of a bird taking flight in the garden of an abandoned house at the end of the alleyway behind his house. Then the protagonist takes the nickname of Mr. Wind-Up Bird when talking to a sixteen year-old girl called May Kasahara. There is even a work called 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle', portions of which are contained within the novel and the Wind-Up Bird features in this. This folding and layering of meanings and resonances occurs with every theme and with deft execution. The book is long, but it feels bigger than it is. I understand that the original Japanese version is longer still, but the English-language publishers decided to shorten their version against the wishes of the translator.

The perfect phrasing of Norwegian Wood is also in evidence here. One particular paragraph made me start a file on my computer to record quotations I particularly liked in things I had read:

"Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability."

For me, at least, Murakami manages to express things that I feel but could not put into words (and I pride myself on my ability to articulate difficult things). For this alone, he is valuable reading. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle joined Norwegian Wood on my list of favorite novels. I could not say which I liked more. They are very different books and seem to complement each other instead of competing. For a while I didn't explore Murakami's work any further. I was reading books from my local library to satisfy my literary appetites. Among some decidedly mediocre fiction, I discovered authors like Jonathan Caroll; enjoyed Don Dellilo's masterpiece, Underworld; and turned towards non-fiction. The library didn't have any Murakami. I re-read Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a couple of times each, finding them even more enjoyable second and third times through.

2004 turned out to be my year of Murakami. Two events contributed to this. Firstly, I was browsing in a book shop with a friend when he pointed out that this author I had been harping on about was on a three for two offer. Having nearly finished university I was short of cash, but I decided I couldn't pass the opportunity up. After some consideration I bought A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and South of the Border, West of the Sun. I read them back-to-back, which may have been something of a Murakami overdose if I hadn't have interspersed this with work on my dissertation ("Ideological Warfare: The War on Drugs and the War on Terror as a War for Reality").

I began with Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I would call this Murakami's strangest novel. It has an interleaved structure with the Hard Boiled Wonderland sections alternating with the End of the World. Working out the relationship between these two stories is one of the principle delights of the novel and I don't intend to spoil that here. The theme of reality is dealt with in a much more heavy-handed fashion than in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Although it's still a good read it doesn't seem to aspire to the heights of that other work. I don't want to sound as if I'm criticizing it because if it wasn't Murakami writing it, I'd be deeply impressed, but it's probably my least favorite of his novels. I don't remember the plot as well as the other novels, but this could be because of the complexity of it rather than any dislike I harbor about it. While the Hard-Boiled Wonderland sections are entertaining, I found myself becoming bored with The End of the World and had to force myself through them to get back to the story that was interesting me. The resolution is, however, brilliant.

So, after I finished Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World I was wondering if the first two of his novels I had chanced upon were the best. I was feeling a little disappointed. I needn't have worried, however, as A Wild Sheep Chase reclaimed my confidence in Murakami from the start. It is a seemingly simple story that, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has much more complexity than would first appear. The protagonist is drawn into searching for a particular sheep and goes looking for it with his girlfriend whose ears have a supernatural beauty and powers. As with so much of Murakami's work, it is the journey that's important rather than the eventual aim.

My last selection was South of the Border, West of the Sun, which has many similarities to Norwegian Wood. It too is simply told and filled with almost heart-breaking emotion. While Norwegian Wood dealt with young love, South of the Border, West of the Sun deals with the consequences. A single paragraph in this slim volume puts it much better than I ever could: "But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair." The skill and restraint of the writing is breath-taking.

After I'd finished, I put the books to one side (all my Murakami books stacked neatly in prominent view; I was quite proud of my growing collection and they looked nice together) and concentrated on finishing my dissertation. As it happened, it was my dissertation that allowed me to expand my Murakmi collection further.

I hadn't put enough work into my degree to earn myself a first, but with minimum effort, I received a 2:1. Much of the degree course was far too boring to bother reading much on and I preferred to spend my time with good fiction than boring and misguided course texts. My dissertation was different. I cared about it in a way that I couldn't apply to any other work. I had originally wanted to explore the idea of 'property' within international relations, but after discussions with my advisor (and reading some interesting work on anarchy), I had decided to go with a different idea looking at US foreign policy with reference to the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, which I saw as two sides of the same coin. I put vast amounts of effort into reading around the topic, researching primary source materials and constructing an argument that seemed genuinely new, interesting and impassioned to me. Someone evidently agreed because my dissertation won the prize for best extended essay in the politics department. I was pleased, though the politics department at my university was quite small. I was even more pleased when I received two £25 in book tokens to spend however I wanted.

The first token I spent buying Maul by Tricia Sullivan (an excellent SF novel) along with a collection of Ernest Hemingway short stories and Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, which is also a collection of short stories. While I would generally say that Murakami works better as a novelist then a short story writer, there are some incredibly good stories in this collection. Some are forgettable, but the majority are excellently done, including the title story. Covering wide ground it is an excellent demonstration of Murakami's versatility, from realism all the way to bizarre fantasy. It left me in the mood for more Murakami, so when I spent my next token, I got both Dance Dance Dance and Sputnik Sweetheart (along with another Japanese novel, the very different Battle Royale).

These two books seem to complete the cycle I began back in 2001 with my first two Murakami novels. They each are, in their own way, a combination of the things I loved about Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle with realism and fantastic elements working together to produce two works that are stunning in both conception and execution. Sputnik Sweetheart is a love story, or possibly two love stories. The hero of the novel is a young teacher who is in love with a young writer who falls in love with a businesswoman who she ends up working for. They go on holiday together to a Greek island where she disappears. The businesswoman calls the young teacher and he flies to Greece to find his friend. One of my favorite pieces in the novel is when the protagonist claims the story isn't about himself. It is an utterly beautiful piece of misdirection.

Dance, Dance, Dance turned out to be a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, although this is hardly clear from the blurb on the back of my copy. I'm glad that I read these two in the right order. Although Dance, Dance, Dance could certainly be enjoyed without having read the former, it does add another dimension to it. Dance, Dance, Dance surpasses Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for me. It may well be the best novel that I have ever read (possibly sharing that distinction with Vladimir Nabokov's Ada: A Family Chronicle). Describing the novel in a sentence: Called back to the location of A Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist struggles to regain his life. There is no way that I can convey how absolutely wonderful I found this novel. I would not be exaggerating to say that I found every page was a joy to read or that I could not put it down. Opening the book at random I find phrases that I loved, ideas that I treasure:

Page 55: "Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porches and Tokyo land values. Worshiping everything their shiny Porches symbolize. It's the only stuff of myth left in the world."

Page 152: "The other woman wore glasses and a soft-colored dress. She wasn't beautiful like her companion. She was more what you'd call appealing and fresh. With long legs and slender arms and tan as if she'd spent the last week on the beach in Guam. Her hair was short and neatly pinned up. She wore silver bangles that played on her wrists with her brisk movements, her flesh trim and taut like a sleek carnivore"

Page 280: "By then it was already getting late in the day, so I hopped in the Subaru and drove to Aoyama to do some shopping before the stores closed. More pedigreed vegetables, the latest shipment fresh from Kinokuniya's own pedigreed vegetable farms. Somewhere in the remote mountains of Negano, pristine acres surrounded by barbed wire. Watchtowers, guards with machine guns. A prison camp like in The Great Escape. Rows of lettuce and celery whipped into shape through unimaginably grueling supravegetable training. What a way to get your fiber."

One thing in particular made me link Murakami and Nabokov. One of the characters in Dance, Dance, Dance has a name that is an anagram of Murakami. He turns up in relation to a 13 year old girl that the protagonist befriends. Nabokov was fond of using a character called Vivian Darkbloom, which is an anagram of his own name and his most famous work is Lolita, which famously concerns the rather more sinister relationship between an older man and a young girl. I have no way of knowing if Murakami intended this as a reference, but it occurred to me and it doesn't seem unreasonable.

There remain two in-print Murakami books that I have yet to read (I understand that some of his early work is quite difficult to get hold of today) - after the quake and his non-fiction work, Underground. I'm sure I'll eventually get around to these, but I'm in no rush. After reading five of his novels and a collection of short stories this year I need some time to fully digest everything and several are crying out to be read again.

If you haven't read anything by Murakami - and why the hell not? - I'd suggest The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as a starting point. Norwegian Wood is excellent but isn't as representative of the majority of his work. A Wild Sheep Chase followed by Dance, Dance, Dance is also an option. Like all great fiction, Murakami doesn't just entertain, he provokes a response from the reader to the questions his books ask. He stays with you and there are times when his beautifully crafted words come to mind as the answer.

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Thoughts on Shade, delays, coding when deprived of sleep and - aw heck, just call it a general update

2004-08-23T09:25:00.000+01:00

I see it's been over three weeks since I posted anything here (which probably isn't that bad because I'm assuming nobody - or very few people - actually read this thing). I've not been idle, though. When I get around to writing them up, I'll have some more 100 word reviews to post (I like the 100 word format - I find it forces me to choose my words carefully because they're limited).

I'm trying to read Hemingway short stories at the moment. Trying and failing. It's not that they're dull, it's just that I find Hemingway's prose insanely difficult to concentrate on. (Mind you, there's a thought - IF in the style of Hemingway).

Anyway, the only IF I've played recently was Shade by Andrew Plotkin (as this isn't a full review you can find your own links). Although, in actual fact, I was replaying it. It remains my favourite short work of IF ever. It's very good at slowly drawing the player into a world of deep meaning. There's been so much written about this game that I don't really have anything to add.

Speaking of reviews, I saw a nice review for one for my own effort of the 2002 IFComp, The Granite Book. The one thing that lots of reviews have picked up on is the lack of resolution at the end. There's a good reason for this - originally the game was going to continue from there into other elementally based locales. I ran out of time and energy and slapped on the conclusion. I did actually begin coding the second location, but it didn't work very well and I gave up. I'm still very happy with how the game worked out though and some day I'll get round to releasing an updated version.

(If any of this is coming across as incoherent, it's probably because I've had six hours sleep in the last forty-seven hours.)

...which brings me to my next point (or "blathering ramble" as I like to call it). Recently, while frequenting (more "occasionalling", really) the IF newsgroups, I've sometimes mentioned my latest project. Well, if I can't make spurious vaporware announcements in my own blog, where can I? So here one is:

Cages: My Day at the Zoo

The new medium-length IF from James Mitchelhill

Arriving late 2004/early 2005!

Cages will feature many things my previous games haven't - actual geography, NPCs who are complex in a way that doesn't lead to terrible frustration, writing that doesn't make you cringe, a human protagonist, all sorts of things.

It's taking a long time to write, but I'm getting there slowly.

This hasn't been helped by my side project (spurious vaporware anouncement #2), which is the reason for my sleep-deprived state. No details yet. I'm thinking of entering it in the comp. Possibly pseudonymously.

Life's getting busy again though (possibly I'll be relocating to London soon) so further updates may well be patchy.

Another Five 100 Word Reviews

2004-08-01T03:35:00.000+01:00

I reread American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. I first read it when I was seventeen or so and I think I understood it much better this time around. What with the semi-controversial movie, the story is familiar enough not to describe here. It's not nihilistic: Patrick Bateman is desperately trying to affect his world. He fails. In general, I cannot stand Ellis's prose (Couldn't get into Less Than Zero and hated The Informers). Where those failed for me, American Psycho worked, possibly because despite everything, Bateman is a very sympathetic character. I found it funnier this time, too.

Just finished reading At The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft in The Annotated Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi. Also included are three shorter stories. Joshi provides nice and informative annotations and interesting introduction/appendices. I feel vaguely and uncomfortably spooked. It's impossible not to come into contact with the 'Lovecraftian' in various homages and parodies, but those always seem strangely warm and friendly. Lovecraft is not warm and friendly. He's scary like the game Silent Hill is scary. He He takes patience and a willingness not to laugh at adjectives like 'eldritch', but it is definitely worth the effort.

Tongue First by Emily Jenkins is subtitled Adventures in Physical Culture, which translates to an examination (with practical examples) of the relationship between body and mind. The quote on the front suggests this is some sort of feminist thing, but that does the author a disservice. She's doing something much more interesting. This is a deep exploration of the interrelation of body and mind, how the things we do to and with our bodies are also the things we do to and with our minds. But with a sense of fun and exploration. Always grounded in experience and always interesting.

I only read half of American Splendour, a collection of Harvey Pekar's comic books. These are stories of a moderately unpleasant man who seems to think himself profound, but is completely mistaken. I know, I know, critical acclaim, etc. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered trying to like this. I loathe the drama of the everyday. It bores me silly and I never find it dramatic. I mean, I know what it's like to be human. I am one. I've known a few. I don't see the point. If this is a literary comic book, maybe we're better off with superheroes.

Having cut my conspiracy teeth long ago reading Illuminatus!, I was interested to read something a little more scholarly on the subject. David V. Barrett's Secret Societies, which explores clandestine societies from the beginnings. It presses a lot of my interest buttons (Aleister Crowley, the Cathar Heresy, the Inquisition) and a few subjects I consider quite boring, e.g. Freemasonry. Even the boring bits are interesting as they are tied into the general thrust of the book. More modern stuff would have been good, but you can't have everything. Never sensationalist, this is a successful take on a difficult subject.

Random Review - Fallacy of Dawn (by Robb Sherwin)

2004-08-01T03:07:00.000+01:00

(There are spoilers here, but anything objectionable should be way down at the bottom of this review so the wary can avert their eyes.)

So, I decided it was time to catch up on all this crazy stuff I've been missing during my IF-less wilderness years (2001ish-2004). Hence, I downloaded a copy of Robb Sherwin's Fallacy of Dawn, the latest Hugo 'terp and, with a plentiful supply of caffeine (although on reflection this should probably have been Jack Daniels) and a healthy appreciation of archaic videogames, began to play.

The key word here is infuriating. I know people have criticised Robb for the level of bugginess in his games (I know this has improved since 2001, when Fallacy of Dawn was released, which is a good thing, oh yeah), but I didn't expect it to hurt this bad. Strangely, Robb's earlier game Chicks Dig Jerks seemed far less buggier to me, but this is probably just coincidence. Speaking of which, I'm probably the only player to hit a show-stopping bug real early on (I haven't seen anyone else complain about this). It's a spoiler, so I'll discuss it in detail below so that you can all share in my frustration without the uninitiated sullying their eyes with the hideous plot/solution revelations. I resorted to a walkthrough (though only for that puzzle) and restarted, somehow missing the bug this time.

The game is buggy. This is true. But it's just interesting enough to make the various annoying things and implementation hoops worth jumping through. Having to type "enter door" is annoying. Having to read inane error messages in response to reasonable commands gradually builds to intensely irksome. The utter lack of implementation of most scenery objects rises to a crescendo of rage. But it's worth it. Just. (The final scene nearly tipped me over the edge, but I'll accept it. See spoilers for gory details.) I'm just venting here. After all, I'm led to understand that Sherwin has learnt from this.

So, the plot. Its beginning reminded me of William Gibson's Neuromancer, but with crazy eighties references, then segued off to generic cyberpunk. I like cyberpunk, so this may not be a bad thing. One of the characters, the assassin guy reminded me heavily of the character Raven in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The fact that it's set in the future and yet makes continual reference to our recent past bugged me like crazy to begin with, but it gets easier to deal with when you pretend it makes sense. There is a Big Twist, but unfortunately the Big Twist is much less interesting than the untwisted story, which I was happy with until this revelation. Also, the structure is flawed (in the midgame you wander around, do something, wander around, find something else to do... which didn't feel very engaging - also, the puzzles seemed easy, even for someone of my limited abilities.)

But damn it, it's funny. I didn't care about the characters, but I liked the jokes. I get the feeling that I'd prefer to see Sherwin on stage in some smoke-filled comedy club than play this, but as, so far as I know, Robb Sherwin is not developing an international stand-up career, playing Fallacy of Dawn is the next best thing. The bits with real feeling involved didn't work for me, but hey, you can't have everything. In the context of IF, the writing is good and where it's not good it's just filler between jokes.

So, if you like Robb's sense of humour and twisted sense of cool and get more than 50% of the references, then you'll enjoy Fallacy of Dawn (just remember the Valium for when the horribleness of the coding and implementation get to you too much). Enter Robb's imagination for a while; you wouldn't want to live there or anything, but it's an interesting, if disturbing place to visit.

(spoilers are next...)

SPOILERS-A-GO-GO!

So, the show-stopping bug I encountered was the second major puzzle, in the video rental store. What's supposed to happen is this: You give the clerk a bad video-game and he laughs. Then you give him some more and he laughs harder and harder until he laughs himself unconscious. In my game: "The clerk chuckles to himself at that selection, but not with enough mirth or momentum to injure himself or anything..." was repeated forever. Or until I ran out of games. So I ended up spending at least an hour wandering round the small bit of the map available at this point trying to find some item that would help me (something that would make the bad games funnier perhaps?). I looked at a walkthrough the next day, found it was a bug and started again... and everything worked perfectly.

The final scene in the parking garage made me want to kill things. And not in a good way. Other cars aside from the one the author wants you to drive are implemented. You can unlock their doors. You can walk into them. But you can't drive them. Nope. No good reason for this is given. The final, climactic scene of a game should not derail a player who just wants to see the ending.

Random Review - Beyond the Tesseract (by David Lo, ported to Inform by Andrew Plotkin)

2004-07-19T04:20:00.000+01:00

I'm not a fan of old games and, unless I'm in the right mood I tend to dislike puzzles. I especially dislike puzzles that get in the way of the story. When I'm trying to advance the plot of a game, the last thing I want to do is spend an hour beating my head against the keyboard in between bouts of staring at the screen wondering what the author wants me to do. Under the right circumstances, however, I quite enjoy puzzles and I'm willing to spend time working them out. Beyond the Tesseract is a puzzle game, with an interesting setting and the kind of ultra-light plot that merely frames the puzzles it presents.

BtT is, as its title suggests, a game about mathematics. A tesseract is, in the same way that a cube is a three-dimensional square, a four dimensional cube. If you like this sort of thing, then I imagine you'll be charmed by Beyond the Tesseract. If this kind of mathematics makes your brain squeak, then probably you won't. The game itself does not hold up to the standards of modern IF, but if you play it with this in mind and as the series of puzzles it's intended as, then this is not a problem.

There are some very nice moments in it. The scene that comes to mind is a dream sequence in which you use abstract concepts like a hypothesis and a supposition. Although there is a slight guess-the-verb problem, once I realised the verb it seemed obvious. Unfortunately, there was one puzzle that proved a major problem for me. In the game's ABOUT section, Andrew Plotkin notes that in fixing a few deisgn flaws he has made certain the game can no longer be made unwinnable. While this is true in a technical sense, from the perspective of the player it is not. I won't go into specifics on this. Generally then, at one point the player gets some information. The player may not know what relevance it has. If the player then performs a certain action, it is impossible to regain the information. With that information gone, there is no real way of completing an essential puzzle.

I resorted to a walkthrough at this point.

Charm, however, makes up for a lot. Beyond the Tesseract is (as Plotkin notes) short and whimsical. This sense of whimsy really does carry the game. Rather than the head-beating, screen-staring rages that most puzzle games induce in me, up until the above-mentioned incident BtT succeeded in luring me into a sense of how nifty its subject matter way.

One word conclusion: Cool.

Prettier

2004-07-16T12:30:00.000+01:00

I vaguely customised the site template. See the pretty colours. See the pretty colours look pretty. Look pretty, pretty colours, look pretty. Hopefully this should not offend the eye.

Today's Heretical Thought

2004-07-15T15:40:00.000+01:00

The writer whose style HP Lovecraft most reminds me of is Vladimir Nabokov.

Lunchtime

2004-07-13T15:50:00.000+01:00

As I was sat outside at lunch today, reading American Psycho, a woman handed me a flyer for a local church. I'd just reached a particularly distrurbing murder sequence, which was amusing.

The headings on the first page of the flyer run as follows:

God Loves You!
You Have Sinned!
Neglect and Perish!

Casting my eyes down the page, under the delightfully titled 'Neglect and Perish!' I saw: "For to be carnally minded is death." (Romans 8:6 apparently).

Such synchronicity.

Five 100 Word Reviews

2004-07-12T04:13:00.000+01:00

Chocky by John Wyndham is an SF book from the late sixties involving an intensely normal nuclear family - mum, dad and two children - that recieves an univited addition in the form of a voice in the eleven year old son's head. Naturally, this causes concern. Of far more interest than the by-now well worn SF tropes (the same themes have been explored in Star Trek, which always signals the death of a once original SF idea) are the amusing characterisations of the family, which are very much of the era. Quick and enjoyable, but it has not aged well.

I got Paul Broks' Into the Silent Land because the library had no Oliver Sacks. Nor did the library at university. A review in the blurb says: 'Paul Broks is set to be the new Oliver Sacks.' This is nonsense. ITSL is not a book of coherent case studies. Rather, it is, as the subtitle suggests, a series of meandering 'travels in neuropsychology'. Indeed, these journeys often stray into the realm of philosophy. I agreed with most of Broks' thoughts, but like him, I am a fan of Daniel Dennett. In my final analysis, ITSL is interesting if somewhat frustrating.

Viddy this well little brother. Yes, this is a review of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. That's the book not the film (which I saw first - I only got around to reading the book recently). Now I know why it's called A Clockwork Orange. The film is relatively complete, the major omission being the final scene. Both are, of course, master works. Against expectations, I found the book easy to read. Being the classic that it is, there doesn't seem much to what has already been written on it except to recommend it, without reservation, as utterly essential reading.

My comics consumption recently has edged towards the serious and literary with Maus: A Survivors Tale by Art Spiegelman. A piece of holocaust historigraphy mixed with everyday father-son drama, Maus is serious, though not without humour. I'm sure this will make me sound as barbaric as poetry after Auschwitz, but it bored me. Inevitably, no matter that the participants are dressed up as animals, this is well trodden ground (though not in comic form). I already know the history and, for me at least, the story is not compelling enough to make me care very much about the characters.

The library had the new Terry Pratchett novel, Monstrous Regiment. Mini-mini review: Pratchett fans will love it, Pratchett critics probably won't. I'm in the former category. Some notes: The story deals with an almost entirely new set of characters and the way the story is handled seems a departure. It remains just as funny, but unlike most other Discworld novels, there is really only one story thread and we remain in close proximity to the central characters. It almost feels claustrophobic. This is quality writing - having to deal with these new characters seems to push Pratchett to his best.

Real life intrudes

2004-07-11T16:02:00.000+01:00

Real life has very much intruded on my IF playing and online activities in the last couple of weeks. Normal service will no doubt be resumed shortly. Meanwhile, it was pointed out to me that many IF people seem to use the same template for their blogs. This is obviously unacceptable to me, so I changed the template.

Z-Machine Abuses Round Up: Part One

2004-06-28T02:49:00.000+01:00

The development of the modern interactive fiction scene owes its direction to a number of historical accidents. One of these accidents is the z-machine, the 'virtual machine' that all z-code games run upon. The z-machine, probably Infocom's most important legacy, is quite limited in scope and (as a consequence of its limitations) has been implemeted on a huge variety of platforms. Interactive fiction authors (as has been pointed out) are quite... odd... individuals. Interactive fiction itself thrives on limitation and many of the conventions that exist within IF games are due to the limitations of the form. Many of the most successful pieces of IF break these conventions, expose these limitations and sometimes surpass them. There is an urge on the part of authors to see what can be done and to push the boundaries.

This, I think, is why people write 'abuses' for the z-machine: To break down the limitations and to see just how far it can be pushed. (It's worth noting, I feel, that the vast majority of 'abuses' are aimed at the most limited IF interpreter - the z-machine. So far as I know, I'm the only person's who's written a TADS abuse (I'm Gonna Take You To The Video Bar!).

Here, then, is a round-up of various zAbuses. Also, my high scores. I used WinFrotz for everything, it being the only interpreter I had to hand.

The Mad Bomber (by NJB) is simple, yet effective. A plane flies over a city of towers, getting lower and lower each time it passes. Crash into a tower and it's game over. Your only chance is to bomb the city flat to the ground. (Yes. There are certain similarities to certain events that are quite famous. I could write for a while about this, but I think this would be silly). The controls are as simple as controls can be (press space to drop a bomb... that's it) and success is only a matter of timing. It doesn't really have longevity, but as a coffee-break game is surprising amounts of fun. [High score is 522 by James]

Robotfindskitten (ported to Inform by David Griffith) is not so much a game as 'a zen simulation'. Not having played any of the other versions, I can't comment on how well the translation to the z-machine works, although holding down a direction key seems to make the screen go a little flickery. I find this sort of silliness (for silliness it is) quite interesting. Not enough zen, though. [Mu!]

Ever seen Tron? Remember that scene with the motorbikes that make walls on a grid? Paint and Corners (by L. Ross Raszewski) is pretty much that scene in ascii form. You paint a line of blue. Your opponents paint lines in other colours. Hit a line (any line) and you lose a life. Force all your opponents to do so and you win. It's quite complicated play for a simple game, requiring reflexes and strategy. It's quite entertaining stuff. I did, however, find quite a serious bug. Once you get past a certain level, your opponents stop moving - they head for the nearest wall and immediately crash. [Played to destruction]

SameGame (by Kevin Bracey) is solidly programmed, but isn't really the sort of game I enjoy: Far too much forward thinking for not enough reward. (which is, come to think of it, one of my major complaints about a lot of puzzle-based IF). It's one of those classic puzzle games, so it's worth having if you like that sort of thing: It's difficult to fault a 7kb implemetation. Graphic mode 3 works best on WinFrotz. [1 JAM 4815]

Wurm (by C.V.F. Knight) is an excellent implementation of Snake. I think one of the things about these simple arcade games is that additional complexity tends to distract rather than enhance. It's certainly possible to imagine a 35 version of Snake with all kinds of power-ups, but the question is whether it would be any more fun than this simple text version. I think not. (Diving into nostalgia mode for a moment - one of my favourite games of all time is a very simple game for the ZX Spectrum called JetPak. I must have spent more time playing JetPak as a child than I have on any computer game since.) If I had one complaint (and I always have complaints, you should know this by now) it would be that I'd like the walls and boulders to be represented by a different letter than the snake so I could tell which blocks were the snake and which will never move. Incidentally (and unexpectedly) Wurm demonstrates the graphical equivalent to a certain IF debate that's been going on for years. It supplies both fixed and relative directions (equivalent to north/east/south/west and left/right). I find it much easier to play with the fixed directions. It takes my brain longer to work out what exactly left/right mean. I suspect this partially maps over to uh... maps in IF. [champ 435]

zRogue (by Gevan Dutton) scares me. It's an implementation (as the name suggests) of Rogue. There's two things. Why would anyone want to implement this and why would anyone want to play it? (After all, Angband is available for many platforms...).

More to come in part two...

Random Review - The Act of Misdirection (by Callico Harrison)

2004-06-26T02:34:00.000+01:00

Note to authors: It is a BAD BAD BAD (did I mention BAD?) idea to have the very last bit of text of the game proper whirl its way off screen simply because the player has not noticed the "Press any key..." prompt and is typing the next command he wanted to try, thus forcing said player to play through the entire game again so that he can assure himself he didn't miss some huge revelation in the ending which would change everything and make his review of the game seem dumb, stupid and irrelevant. I'll say no more about this.

So, one thing I am developing a deep loathing for is being forced to work out the right commands to get the main character in story-based IF games to do something that they should already know how to do. The Act of Misdirection opens with the protagonist, the great Meldellevo on-stage as he begins his magic act. Obviously, Meldellevo knows exactly what his act consists of. As the game itself claims, Meldellevo has been doing the same act for years. If I am in the role of the great Meldellevo then, I should not have to spend time working out what I'm supposed to do next. When the next action is intuitive enough, it can work. These moments are good ("pick a card, any card"), but there aren't enough of them.

This first section though, in spite of this annoyance, is done well and, for me at least, is the most interesting section of the game. There is a nice interplay between what the reaction of the audience in the game and the audience of the game (who is also the player). I also liked the writing in this first section much better than in the rest of the game. It was very 19th century stage magician:

The ladies shriek and the men sit forward with eyes like darts. "And so the wrath of God turneth all weapons on their owners!" you intone apocryphal, to wonderous effect. The crowd is rapt: they have lost the quality of the reality outside your theatre's door. Here, now, is a land where a sword may become live at a wild-man's touch. The Great Meldellevo has them, in the palm of his hand and the pit of his eyeball.

Eyes like darts? The pit of his eyeball? Yikes. I quite like "intone apocryphal" though. It's delightfully over the top. The other scenes, while more restrained in their tone, seem slightly overwritten:

A splash of red paint on a portico marks the start of the slouching hat-maker's shop. Its door hangs like a snoozing drunkard's jaw and for inebriated eyes the place has small square windows where another shop would have displays, awning, décor and allure. It is reminscent of the Bastille's gaol-walls; but whether to keep people out or something in is unclear.

"...or something in". Menacing. I'm complaining too much, though. This is far better than many pieces of IF. I'd definitely prefer something to have a style that I dislike rather than no style at all. Besides, I didn't actively dislike the style, it just got on my nerves after a while. Occasionally anachronisms have made it through: "In the throng of people, any might be Italian, Hungarian, Indian or Martian."

So far as implementation is concerned, I did discover one show-stopping bug on my second play-through (you remember, when I missed the ending first time round... I was going to say no more about it...), but it would only happen if the player has prior knowledge and tries to do things too quickly (Which probably only happens if the player is rushing through to see the ending they missed; I'll shut up now,) so it's not a major problem. There were places where I'd have liked a slightly deeper implementation:

>x oriental man
He has more of the East than l'est about him. The dagger he twirls on the table is stubby like he is and moves to inscribe pentagrams onto the table.

>x dagger
You can't see any such thing.

These are minor quibbles, however. My medium-sized quibble is with the plot, which takes a decided turn toward the supernatural. I'm not a huge fan of the supernatural (except when including elements of it in my own games, of course). I suppose that someone who was might enjoy this sort of thing far more than I did. I lost any sympathy I had for the characters after every attempt I made to get out of an obviously dangerous situation was diallowed. Admittedly, the situation is part of a flashback, so a certain amount of linearity is to be expected. This device seems more suited to static fiction, though. Which leads me to my major complaint. I don't see how interactivity adds to the mostly linear story that The Act of Misdirection tells. Apparently there is an alternative ending, but I couldn't find it.

I don't want this review to be so negative. The Act of Misdirection is, in many ways, a great first game. It is certainly worth playing. Especially if you're not as deeply bitter a person as this reviewer.

Random Review - Solitary: A Single Room Reminiscence (by Kahlan)

2004-06-25T05:26:00.000+01:00

How depressing. Not that depressing is always a bad thing (I've read great books that have depressed the hell out of me. I'd give examples, but I think my memory has blanked them out). What's depressing is that Solitary is the first IF game I've played in a year or two and it's not very good. Also, it's about as angstful as you can get without special implants. You play Amy, "an eighteen year old college freshman" Amy has problems. Amy gets very melodramatic about her problems.

I didn't find any bugs. I note that I was playing the second release, so presumably the bugs have mostly been fixed by now (Beta test. Always beta test. No matter how small something is, it will always have some terrible wrongness on initial release.) So, Solitary seems pretty well coded for the most part. Unfortunately, the game relies on players taking certain actions that seem entirely unmotivated without serious hintage. It's a little like playing guess the verb without knowing what the verb should be. On the first occasion this worked in the game's favour: I typed in 'cry' just to see if it was implemented and was pleasantly surprised. However, I finished the game with only five points out of ten and had to resort to help to find the remaining actions.

The way the game handles exposition is quite strange, too. Playing Solitary, there's a clear sense of distance between the game character and the player. Amy knows all about her problems, but the player is forced to make her do various things just to learn about them. "Events from last week have been especially bad", the game says. For the most part playing the game involves finding out what these things are.

The writing is decent, but it grates in places. "It's a Thursday, and you had night classes, so almost no one is around. Up a few flights of stairs, you slip the key into the lock, turn, and walk inside." Now, I'm not one to pontificate about writing style (after all, my own games are not known for their beautifully turned out prose), but these two sentences, which are in the very first paragraph, just don't seem right (Trouble with commas and something I can't remember the word for: What is turning, Amy or the key?)

I preferred the losing ending in which the player sends Amy crashing to her death through the window. Somehow it seemed more in keeping with the game's tone than the happy and hopeful ending. Solitary seems to operate in a world of emotional polarities. This isn't really to my taste. Despite its angstyness, Solitary is a solid, small (15 minutes or so to play through) game. The coding and writing abilities demonstrated here could be built upon and I'd like to see a larger game from the same author (although possibly a happier, or at least more interestingly depressing one).

Damn it.

2004-06-25T03:16:00.000+01:00

So, Blogger is owned by google? Who woulda thunk it? Reminds me of Yahoo buying geocities. I used to like google, but now they seem to be just another big scary company. Especially after the gmail publicity stunt. Oh well.

Anyway, I never wanted a blog, but I'm come to accept that it's probably the best way to communicate these days (and isn't communication what we're all about in so many fundamental ways?). However, I will promise right now that there will be no dumb personal shit in this diary. I find other people's lives terribly boring. Hell, I find my life quite boring (there's bits that aren't, but I'm not going to go into those because, as I said, there will be no dumb personal shit in this diary). I don't want any strangers who'd be interested in my life to be reading about my life.

So, what will be here? You (you? my pretend audience? just who do I think I'm talking to here?) will find posts on a variety of the things that interest me. 100 word reviews of things I've read. Possibly some lengthier reviews of interactive fiction. Other stuff that seems relevant (relevant to what? by its nature an unfocused blog is open ended...).

Jesus I hate this medium, but for now it's better than the alternatives.