Sometimes you just have to look at what you’re doing and say “Fuck it, this is going to be great, and there’s no sense in sugarcoating anything about it.”  Go for broke and let the people that matter understand what it is, and love it, and to hell with everyone else.  The thing that could have gone most wrong with this game would have been to give it a nice, soulless, commercial name, like “3D Ultra Minigolf” or “Marble Blast Ultra” (”Ultra” is the go-to Redeemer Of Crummy Names Word these days. Let’s hope no one notices.)

Happily, War Twat makes no pretension toward mass appeal, and is better for it (although there is a kid-friendly version called “War Bus”, but that is not the game I’m reviewing and detracts from my point, so I will maintain the Internet standard of ignoring contradictory evidence, and press on.)

I am a huge fan of “psychedelic overload” games, from Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe all the way back to Eugene Jarvis’ example of how to continue to enjoy the single life even if you’ve broken your right hand, the great and wonderful Robotron.  Pretty much any game in this genre owes Robotron, though at the time it’s doubtful anyone knew they were birthing a sub-genre of what many people would one day call art.  In the early days of Xbox Live Arcade, Robotron was ported over to the new system.  Hey, the controllers already had two sticks on them, and there wasn’t much to play on the system anyway, since the vast majority of launch titles were forgettable sports and racing games.  So… Hexic, anyone?  Didn’t think so.

After about 3.4 seconds of the Robotron port, everyone realized that they were playing a 26 year old game and all the visuals and sounds were exactly as they were 26 years ago.  The two ironies being that (1) usually the game mechanics tend to repeat year after year while the audiovisual assets ratchet endlessly and (2) if you’re of the opinion that 6-pass specular mapping has little impact on your ability to blast robots, Robotron’s presentation holds up really well to this day.  But these were lost ironies, like Indiana Jones might raid, and so everyone decided they were going to do a Robotron clone and turn on all the special effects the 360 could give them.  Which was a lot, as Minter himself discovered.  Never before has so much bloom been used by so many for so little reason.

All that said, here’s the thing: War Twat out-skronks pretty much any of those other games.  By about a zillion times.  And it does it without bloom.  I think.  Because I haven’t made it more than a minute in without dying.  Yet.  Years of conditioning on internet forums have me knee-jerking that, even at a cost of zero dollars, a game less than ten hours long can never hope to be more than “okay,” and even then grudgingly so.  And years of conditioning by actually playing games has taught me that developers always save their coolest tricks for hours 12-16 of the narrative–when you’re actually buff enough to do some real damage, but without (yet) having to (quickload) every (minute) or so because (the) difficulty level hockey-sticks (in) (preparation) for the (utterly unfair) end-boss fight.  [By the way, developers, that very un-fun boss fight is the last thing your most loyal customers will remember about your game... because everyone else already ragequit hours ago.  Possibly weeks ago, if you're a JRPG developer.  My point being: let's do our best to make it less bad, hm?]

So yeah, I dunno if the author coded in the bloom starting at Wave 73, just to keep things interesting as your feet go numb and the trickle of blood starts to run from your nose.  I just know I want to play wave 73, because those damned re-re-re-recycled Street Fighter II sprites were still fun no matter how blocky they got relative to their peers, and War Twat takes this one step further by having crazily pixelated sprites that grow to 50 times their size, and that is so cool looking, and all the crazy colors and sounds look like the acid trips I never took because I didn’t hang out with the drug kids in school, because I had my Commodore 64 and Archon, and how can drugs compare to that?

In closing: This game is a haad-caw-matha-facka that immolates your soul because you secretly kind of liked Peggle (and don’t think we don’t know, boyo.) This game is the glue-sniffing-induced head-on collision between Venetian Snares and Melt-Banana, which will wreck you, and you will be glad it did.

Oh dear, this doesn’t bode well. First run after install on my work machine, and I see the sad tab. And it won’t go away no matter how often I restart. Aiiiiieee.

Update: Apparently this issue has to do with Symantec Endpoint Protection. Adding “––no sandbox” to the shortcut makes it work, albeit at the expense of one of Chrome’s neatest features.

>look
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
After=
a long and horrible trip to be described in a subsequent blog post, you ha=
ve arrived in the city of Halifax.
You are in your hotel room. It is ge=
tting dark, and you are almost hungry enough to eat a grue.

>outHistoric Properties
The city maintains its colonial look as it keeps =
the lucrative tourist business going. The few buildings left standing after=
the great Explosion a hundred years ago are now rented as studios for thos=
e attending the nearby art college.
You hear music to the East.

&=
gt;go east
Waterfront
Making your way towards the piers, you come upo=
n a group of Canadians and tourists watching a band. The band is playing &q=
uot;Sweet Home Alabama". In Canada. They finish up, to rousing applaus=
e, and then launch into the theme song from "The Jeffersons". Eve=
ryone is caucasian. None of them know why the caged bird sings. The incongr=
uity of situation (not to mention the queer South/Black segue) is too much =
for you.
You have died. Your score is 2 out of a possible 639. Do you wa=
nt to try again?

>quit=

The vast difference in appraised and asking price (and failure to sell even at 6% of the appraisal) tells me that the basis of my rant is well-founded, or at least, not entirely wrong. He owns millions of vinyl platters, relatively few of which are available on CD. This is much less a tragedy when one asks, “was there merit to their re-release?” Plenty of awful music came out back then, same as today — we’ve just had longer to forget it. People are constantly dismissing the whole of the new as inferior to the whole of the old, conveniently forgetting things like child labor, crucifixion, and The Doors.

Beyond all that, though, is the whole notion of hanging on to old formats and the “thingness” of things. To sidetrack for a moment: A few of my friends belong to an artist’s collective that specializes in fancy books and unusual/antiquated printing and binding methods. Hanging around in their studios, whippersnappers can learn why we refer to the upper- and lower-case, for example. One day, I was chatting with their president, Mark, and mentioned that I had read Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot 1000 in 1997.  And I liked it!  I thought it was a really good book, despite its complete lack of paper. This blew Mark’s mind, and some time later, he gave a talk at a fundraiser explaining specifically that they were making books “not for people like” me. Which was fine, because people like me bought electronic organizers and spent weeks seeking out add-on programs (written and distributed by programmers who were bored on weekends), and then took free ebooks and downloaded them to memory cards. Not to save money, but for convenience. Convenience in a perverse, head-scratching, weeks-taking way.

Big corporations (Amazon, Apple) looked at this, wised up, and put together systems (Kindle, iTunes) that took you straight to the good stuff without the slog. So now, the problem is that there are millions of people that see little worth in hanging on to old formats when the new ones are so much more convenient. The iPod’s original slogan should have been “1,000 songs in your pocket at no extra weight.” That was why I went through all that work to get Moby Dick converted; because then I could also carry The Hacker Crackdown and 1984, and still have room left over for Pocket Chess and HMaki, without looking like Giant Backpack Dork.

Getting back to the record collection: the discussion that doesn’t seem to be happening is that the old formats fundamentally limit our freedoms. Artificial limitations are a hallmark of DRM, which we all hate, but even LPs do this — geographically. [It might be more accurately referred to as a natural limitation, and then we get to throw the size and weight of this pile of PVC and cardboard into the complaint. And I'll point out that digital files can't grow mold nearly as well as record sleeves.]

With open digital formats, we can place-shift and format-shift to whatever degree we wish.  If I’ve had the foresight to put my digital jukebox online (whether in the cloud or on a NAS), I can be walking around in Guam and stream Boogie Woogie #5 directly to my phone if the mood strikes me.  If I am suddenly stricken with idiocy and buy a music player which requires some esoteric format, I can likely re-encode and re-tag my entire collection in a simple batch operation. There isn’t even a need for me to be in the same room as the hard drives in order to do this. It seems to me that given modern society’s disposition toward convenience, the good people fighting Big Media might push this point a little more.

Given all this, appealing to the collection’s size strikes me as akin to those signs you’ll see when driving across the middle of the United States: “Largest Ball of Twine in the US”; then, 300 miles later: “Largest Ball of Twine in the US Wound by One Man”. Yeah, impressive, but who cares?

So it’s a shame that he is unable to unload his life’s work for profit. Or is it? Isn’t that what we used to call a legacy? Where is the pity in his leaving this trove to society, free of charge, if it is a truly wonderful and precious thing? Why does it always have to be about the money? I get a really bad taste in my mouth over the thrust of this video, which seems to focus on the fact that this man has built something over the span of his life that he can’t sell at the end. I’m sure he isn’t the first.

After a long, frustrating week at work, nothing says “Friday evening” like booting up your 360!

Thanks, Microsoft!  I sure hope the 2 cents you saved by this design helped you absorb the billion dollars in warranty repairs. Oh well, at least you dinged me twice this week for some pretty cool games, and are already spending my money on “compelling next-generation experiences” that FUCKING BREAK 20% OF THE TIME.

The new Treo looks sweet!  What a relief.  While they were rarely on the bleeding edge of technology, Palm has been the only handheld maker I’m aware of that consistently delivered a great experience.  This was the case until Apple got into the game, although Apple itself has had a bunch of stink centered on its recent release.

Luckily for the rest of us, Apple has raised the game to the point where the old guard finally have to bring a real game to the game.  We’re finally getting past the point where you have to choose between 3G or WiFi or touchscreen or GPS or looking like an industrial air conditioner. Sure, these were not trivial technical problems to solve (that’s a whole bunch of radios in a tight little space), but hardly insurmountable to a determined group of engineers.  It’s shameful that Apple was able to take so much market share so quickly from the hegemony of Nokia, Motorola, Sony, RIM, and yeah, Palm, but it’s not without precedent that they enter and dominate a market years late. The fat cats at the top get lazy, dole out token upgrades every once in a while, knuckle under to the carriers… and maybe people start to suspect that their hardware can actually do more. So one day, someone shows the unwashed masses that yeah, they’re right. (And some of us ask how T-Mobile dares use “Get More” as a slogan, considering how often carriers nerf promising handsets.)

People one day (next week-ish) will point to the iPhone as the inflection point where the general populace realized that it could do so much more with its phone than just call people. People still think of a car in the same way they did 100 years ago; their cellphones, not so much. Now you can map, surf the web, read books, watch full-length movies, play quality games, etc., etc., etc..  But people still, by and large, seem to think this is the purview of the iPhone, even though my HTC TyTN II–a year ago–could do everything the iPhone 3G can today. And a Treo 5 years ago could, too, just a little slower.

So thanks, old guard, for holding us back all this time. You have no one to blame but yourselves for the pickle you find yourselves in, and maybe some of you will be wiser on the next round.

It felt a lot like riding the 7.

Some days, it feels so good to be a web geek. Earlier this week, I [two years late] discovered jQuery, a JavaScript library. It takes most of the pain out of making your fancified whiz-bang Web 2.0 pages go, go, go. Even better than that, their logo is based on the DEVO energy dome (their former tagline being “new wave JavaScript”.) I get the feeling they won’t end up getting sued over it, unlike some megacorporations.

Today, I find this:

Ajaxorized has released a GPL licensed image manipulation script called Phototype. Phototype is a client/server-side library, based on prototype, which provides image manipulation functionality. On the server, it uses the PHP/GD framework to render the image. While the client is an interface that makes these features easily accessible in JavaScript, including the ability to chain effects.

Phototype supports: image rotatation, resizing, flipping, drop shadows, effects, grey scale, captions, as well as an addChuckNorris() method [for all you Walker, Texas Ranger fans]