I'm putting this blog on hold until I can think of a reason to justify its return (like a sudden surge in general internet popularity, one can dream!)
That's not to say I'm not still busy doing things - on the contrary, I've just launched the biggest load of content I've ever posted online across a whole range of different platforms... As a quick run-down:
Sofa Space - my book - is now done and available to purchase on Amazon. Let's Get Itchy- is a new Let's Play series where I try out random games on Itch.io My Itch Page- Speaking of Itch, this is where my newest games are hosted. Stupid Mario Bros Revisited- I've done a 10 year retrospective on my crude but popular animated series. Supermarket RPG - is Sean Rugg's big upcoming game project I'm helping out on.
So, while I'll no longer bother updating this blog for the time being, I'm definitely keeping busy. I'll also be contributing to the Supermarket RPG blog as development heats up.
See you on the other side!
I released my game OOORBS a year ago today. Now it's time for some stats that nobody asked for! In the last year:
Across all players, almost 750,000 orbs have been individually collected. The first two weeks of tracking were accidentally wiped so I'm going to pretend that's actually 1 million.
The main mode has been played 7831 times - nearly 90 hours in total. That's not tracking the majority of people who gave up during the tutorial. Hmm...
My personal high score of 1497 has been thrashed 58 times. I guess making the actual game gave me no advantage whatsoever.
Oddest / most worrying player names include 'toast', 'kanye west', 'Killer Man', 'Mr. President', 'Asian Sticker', 'fick ye all hahd', 'freakyfrank45', 'FatWhale****' and 'Guess who?'
OOORBS was played over 1000 times on Christmas Day 2016 for some reason.
Thanks to the .swf format's lack of copy protection, OOORBS has been unofficially reposted on countless Flash sites without my permission. It's annoying, yes, but something I'll be more careful of on future projects - especially now that I've moved away from Flash entirely. Someone even posted it on a Chinese game website complete with elaborate Chinese instructions...
So much for my 'you don't need instructions' mandate...
So, what now? Am I done with OOORBS entirely or am I planning on using it as the stepping stone towards something better? Come back in 2018 and I might have an answer to that question. See ya! You can play OOORBS here or check out even more stats if you really want to.
Brace yourselves, I’m going to talk about video game speedrunning. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Now, the concept of ‘speedrunning,’ that is, the practice of attempting to beat a game in the fastest possible time, has been around for decades. Think back to the early id Software shooters and the quaint old days of ‘rocket jumping.’ In recent times, it has grown into a much broader phenomenon, from the charitable cesspool of awkwardness that is AGDQ to an almost endless of surplus of Twitch streamers, let’s players, ridiculously complex TAS explanations and countless bizarre communities. And yeah, it can get pretty ugly.
It’s fair to say in many cases, speedrunners will obsess over a game to the point where it has become a detriment to their health and social lives. One has to wonder, why bother? What exactly is the point? What is the compulsion to play games beyond the way they were intended - taking a perfectionist attitude to uncovering shortcuts, frame-perfect maneuvers and programming quirks? There’s an element of competition, sure, but there has to be more to it than that. Is it just challenge for the sake of challenge?
Well, plenty of speedrunners no doubt have made up their own minds on the matter and I doubt I’m really qualified to answer that question. I don’t speedrun games, nor do I want to, but the other day I did try something along these lines: The Majora’s Mask 3-day challenge.
Let’s back up a bit. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: the best game in the series, obviously. (If you disagree then you are wrong and I hate you, though it remains to be seen if the soon-to-be-released Breath of the Wild has a shot.) It’s one of my favourite games, and I could easily fill a whole blog talking about why - hell, one day I probably will, but for now I just want to focus on its potential for impromptu challenge. As you may know, the entire game is built on a timer system. After three in-game days, you are forced to reset the clock, the idea being to plan ahead which tasks to accomplish and gradually make progress through repeated three day loops. As a kid, I always used to speculate on whether it was possible to complete the game in a single loop - that is, after the first reset, when Link is restored to human form - is it possible to clear all four dungeons for the first time and beat the game without having to reset once?
I never attempted this on the N64, but with the added convenience of the portable 3DS version, I thought it could be fun to try. One catch - the total gameplay time (after slowing the clock) of the 3-day loop on 3DS is 1 hour and 48 minutes, substantially less than the original version. That’s less than 2 hours to beat something that, according to howlongtobeat.com, takes most players 24 hours. So I planned ahead; rather than following any one established guide on how to accomplish this, I used my own knowledge of the game’s systems, what items I’d need and what to skip. I still needed to do some research when I realised there would be impossible barriers to overcome. Case in point: Reaching two of the game’s areas requires Epona, your horse, which must be recovered on day one before sundown. To achieve this is… borderline impossible. The workaround I found is sort of amazing - a 3DS-only trick revolving around the sheer luck of additional geometry and a conveniently placed save point, almost as if the designers put it there on purpose:
People dedicate their free time to figuring out tricks like these...
So, I gave it a shot, rehearsing each segment that I’d need to do and then attempting it with as few mistakes as possible. This was about 2 years ago - I failed spectacularly by running out of time in the final dungeon, but having gotten so close I knew it was still possible. So, just the other day I attempted the whole thing again. I ironed out a few specific instances where I could have saved more time and went for it, this time successfully. What made it especially satisfying is just how close-cut my second run actually was. I beat the game’s last dungeon and made it to the ending with literally about 1 minute to spare. The act of clearing Stone Tower Temple and fighting Twinmold on such a stringent limit was especially nerve wracking (Link’s low health and underpowered items from skipping so much doesn't exactly help, neither does the fact that the remade Twinmold fight is incredibly long.) Still, I made it, and the end result was undoubtedly satisfying.
But to come back to that first question: Why bother? Why did I feel the need to achieve this? You could make the case that my self-imposed challenge was even more pointless than those of the folk who spend all day streaming speedruns online. At least those people are competing with each other for world records, or entertaining audiences of basement-dwellers. Was this not all a waste of time? Well, let me backpedal to the thoughts that were going through my head when I was planning my route through the game. When I think about it now, it’s all about the appeal of discovery, of utilising your understanding of a game’s subsystems and mastering something. When you’ve sunk enough hours into a hobby you enjoy, you can’t help but imprint your own self-imposed challenge onto it. Where it goes too far, I believe, is when it completely sabotages any previous enjoyment you got from the activity. And from what I’ve seen of the speedrunning community, a healthy balance of this is not something that is always in abundance.
Anyway, those are my ramblings for now. I’m thinking about making a disillusioned speedrunner the protagonist for a future book one day. I find the psychology behind them interesting even as I cringe at their methods. Living a life consumed by the inanity of self-perpetuating video game challenge.
In the end of the day, video games are supposed to be fun, right?
It’s been a while, erstwhile fans of my blog (yes, all 2 of you) so you might be wondering what games and films I’m planning to review next. Actually, I did promise someone to add some variety on here by not restricting myself to only doing half-arsed reviews every now and then… So I’m back with something unapologetically self-obsessed that maybe taps into the reason I’m doing this silly little thing in the first place.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to create. It’s always been a driving force in my life, and I’ve also never been particularly restricted to one form or another. Well, okay, there are restrictions, in the sense that there are certain things that I’m so appallingly bad at that it makes no sense to even contemplate trying them. And that’s ok. Arts and crafts, anything relying on manual dexterity; certain primary school projects featuring pottery or stitching or woodwork come to mind as disastrously applied examples of botched art; it is quite apparent that these are not areas that I should be looking to fulfill my creative itches.
So, at a young age, faced with an overwhelming lack of ability in sports but above average literary skills, it makes perfect sense that I would want to write. All kids doodle, and doodle I did, but I also wrote, and wrote a lot. The really early ‘stories’ I wrote are surreal to the point of actually not making any sense at all, and not just because of the terrible handwriting. Looking back through all these archives (I’ve got really good at hoarding everything through the years, both on computer and on paper), it’s quite amusing to see how many stories and things I abandoned soon after beginning, after the first chapter, first page, or in some cases, after just the contents page (for a while as a kid, I had this hilarious quirk of wanting to do the contents page first,and guess the page numbers for each chapter, before even writing a single sentence.)
Video games had a massive impact on me. We got the Nintendo 64 in 1997, and my five-year old brain just exploded. I’d never seen anything like it; bearing in mind until then I’d only ever seen games on the blurry monochrome screen of the original Game Boy. So, of course, soon everything I was writing was video game themed; I’d be making up badly-worded game walkthroughs for games that didn’t exist and writing lists of game menus - even more pointless than fake contents pages. It didn’t matter though, it was all just adding fuel to the childish fantasies in my head, no different to kids playing make-believe and running around pretending there are exploding spaceships everywhere.
The first ‘book’ of any notable length that I finished was based on N64 classic Banjo-Kazooie in 1998. It was about 50 pages long in the end (albeit with massive handwriting and huge pictures) but it was complete, and I was so proud of it I spun out two sequels over the next few years, and then tape-recorded myself reading it out loud like an audio-book, high-pitched voice and all. I would have been maybe 8 years old. I have no shame. (I also used to record myself playing around with a Casio keyboard - badly, I never learned to play piano - and singing along... THAT, my friends, is embarrassing.)
Of course, this was around the time I ended up starting to make things on computers. There was a great old art program called Kid Pix that I was obsessed with, not just because it was a child doodler’s paradise, but because it let you stitch together slideshows and essentially make your own little movies. Here's one of them:
"I think it's about time we fought Earth" - Great motivation there from the Martian leader
That was mind-blowing, because now I could tell stories through moving pictures as well as words. Over time, my dad’s graphic design credentials led me to gradually become exposed to what is now Adobe Flash, and it’s what I’ve used as an animating tool now for almost 15 years. The beauty of Flash is that it also houses its own programming language and combined with the visual interface it’s quite easy to make certain basic types of games. Yeah, games. I’d already been tinkering with level editors at this point, but there’s just something different about being able to make something entirely on your own. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, back in the early 2000s, but I figured out how to do point and click styled things and had an absolute blast doing so. Most of the time I’d knock out a title screen and get no further, but it didn’t matter that I was never going to finish most things, it was just fun to try.
Everything changed when we finally got broadband in the mid-2000s and I realised I could share my stuff with the outside world. Before then, I’d done the odd crude animation or two to share with people at school, but as I started developing my skills, I realised I really could do something more ambitious. My first real internet project in 2006, Stupid Mario Bros, was a crude sprite-animation video that I chose to do, pretty much, because similar things were already widespread and attracted a lot of views. Funnily enough, this video has had by far the biggest viewership of anything I’ve ever made, even though it’s unoriginal and was animated it in a single day.
10,000 views… 100,000 views… This was exciting! For a while I became captivated with the idea of simply having an audience, so I guess I became a bit of a sell-out. I jumped aboard the ‘YouTube Poop’ train, basically a fad of doing quick and silly remixes of memes, particularly the Cd-i videos, and these made up the majority of my YouTube channel for a good few years. I brought in a whole load of views this way, but it didn’t feel earned. It was fun for a while, but it was too cheap and lacking in spirit. I took up a number of ambitious projects to try and dispel this bad taste, and most fell through, though there were exceptions - this Star Wars game I did stands out as being a massive 6-month long project I can actually say I finished, back in 2008. During this period I had a website too, tank2tank.co.uk. It’s long-gone now, was never particularly successful, but it was a massive learning experience. In a way, I think it proved to me that internet views are pretty meaningless. You can attract a following from any kind of rubbish, but is that really what you want to do? You have to be a) absurdly lucky and b) obsessively committed to make a living off it anyway, so surely it’s better to just do what you feel like doing?
The flip-side of the coin is the feeling of having made a difference on a more personal, interconnected level. There’s the rare occasion where you get a comment along the lines of ‘this video cheered me up after a hard day’ or perhaps most unbelievably ’I watched this video with my parents and we quote it every day,’ and you can’t help but feel proud of what you’ve done. It’s still true, then, that people’s reactions to what I’ve made are something I actively seek out, whether it be between my friends or amongst strangers online. Of course, that can mean sifting through criticism or incessant trolling if you’ve ever navigated the labyrinths of YouTube comments before. It’s never been a problem for me, though. Sometimes I question whether I’m just selfishly looking for something to prove, to witness that spontaneous reaction of people being impressed, amused, or even in awe of seeing something they wouldn’t know how to make themselves. I don’t know whether that’s really what it’s all about. There is something special about being able to provoke a reaction in something you’ve made, but there’s also something special about fulfilling your own desire to simply create, to seize ownership of your own imagination and turn it into something tangible.
In recent years perhaps my output has lessened. It’s a pretty natural effect of growing up, grinding through university, having to get a job and then having less time week on week to make things at the same rate as before. Also, it’s a side effect of wanting to make everything better, trying more and more ambitious ideas that just aren’t going to go anywhere without proper planning and time management. As recently as 2012 I was trying to focus on Shoe Sandwich, a collaborative channel with much higher quality output; for a while it looked like it would work - the Shoenice video below is the most sophisticated animation I’ve worked on - but like many things Shoe Sandwich soon fell apart due to a lack of time and overly elaborate ideas.
If I die tomorrow, at least I can die knowing that I once voiced a talking tampon.
But elaborate ideas can’t be ignored. My own YouTube account may have gone quiet and it may be harder for me to find the right time or place to work on something, but I can never give up on my desire to create. Why else do you think I started this blog? I have massive projects I still want to do someday, things I’ve never tried before, other things I’m already half-way there on. I’ve come full circle, in a way, back to my original desire to tell stories and design games, and I’m finding it exciting. It’s really, really exciting. What I’ve learned is that it really doesn’t matter what medium you choose. Writing books, poems, drawing comics, painting, making music, singing, dancing, acting, directing, programming… it doesn’t matter what it is you choose to do, or how you choose to do it, or how successful you are at it. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with your career, or get in the way of your degree. It can just be a hobby. I actually like the fact that it’s just a hobby for me. In a way, that makes it more special. Do it because it’s enjoyable. I know what I want to do.
Right, I think I feel like taking a break from talking about mooveez ’n vidya gamez for once. Good gravy! Did I just say what I thought I just said?
As a graduate who has now managed to transition into the perpetual reality that is the world of work, as someone who was used to taking five minute walks into lectures and had to adjust to a daily ninety minute commute into the capital, I thought I’d give a brief overview of some of the less-than-widely-documented things I’ve noticed over the last few months. 6 of the most unceremoniously trivial and generally obtuse points I can think of, which may or may not ring true for anybody else of a similar background. Are we sitting comfortably?
1- Commuting from outside London isn’t as common as I thought it would be
You can always tell when somebody asks ‘where do you live’ that they are expecting the name of a London borough somewhere within zones 1 to 6. Give a different answer and the typical response will generally be ‘which zone is that,’ to which you must calmly explain that there are in fact places beyond the city and it is actually possible to come from “the outside.” Once the shock dials down, the accuser will then proceed to either treat you as one of the wildlings from Game of Thrones or continually ask you bewildering questions about your commute as if it is the most exciting thing in the world. (Spoiler alert, it isn’t, although that hasn’t stopped me blabbing on about it.)
Of course, I shouldn’t complain at the end of the day, because there are still more than enough commuters like me around. Frankly, if there were any more of us, the whole national rail system would grind to a halt. In the grand scheme of things there isn’t much to complain about - the travel time is still significantly less than many people who live within the confines of ‘zone 1-6’ so is it really something to worry about? Cheaper house prices offset the higher travel costs, so in the end of the day, I suppose, the decision of where to live is a matter of personal convenience, and personally, it’s quite convenient being able to come in from such a distance that there’s just enough time to watch an episode of Game of Thrones on the train every day. That’s the second time I’ve mentioned Game of Thrones and I'm still on point number one. I think I might have a problem.
2 - Everyone walks around with smashed up phones
Now this is a weird one. I get the principal, really, you’re working in London, you’ve had a few pints and you’ve dropped your phone. The screen is all buggered… where’s the warranty? Your phone is on a contract, ooh but what’s this? Next year’s model is about to be released? Never mind - you can wait until then to get it fixed. But seriously? The amount of smashed up phones I see being used on a daily basis is quite bizarre to me. It’s at least one per day and often three or four, be it on the tube, out and about or in the office. I’m not talking minor scrapes or scratches either, I’m talking full-blown shattered glass.
Maybe it’s the fashion these days to be unable to see 95% of your screen thanks to cracks so deep they make the pixels around them bleed into one another. I can’t imagine it’s very good for productivity - try sending a legible text message when you can’t use certain letters ‘cos there’s a massive gaping hole in your screen. What exactly is going on here? Are people this prone to butterfingers with their mobiles when travelling out and about in the capital? I don’t remember ever noticing this trend anywhere else, maybe it’s just me? Maybe the sheer density in population is making it appear like this is more commonplace than it actually is. I guess the moral of this story is to take care of your phone, but if you smash yours up to the point that it’s almost unusable and want to feel less bad about it, I guess you should go to London.
3- There’s a knack for catching the right train at the right time
Alright, listen up whippersnappers. I’m going to break the commuters’ code and give y’all some actual advice right now. It’s hard to quantify this but there is a system, there is a way to make sure you always manage to get on a train that’s A) a fast train, B) always has a space to sit and C) doesn’t break down suddenly. The first point is obvious, you just have to know in advance which ones will have loads of extra stops and which ones won’t. If you want to do some more detective work, mix up your routine from time to time. Figure out which trains regularly have large pauses at signals at specific times (the ones with more stops won’t always be slower) and which ones tend to be the most crowded.
As for point B, you don’t have to get to the platform super early, although it can help. If you’re staring at the departure boards waiting for an incoming train’s platform number to be announced, you can usually rely on simple deduction to figure out which platform it’ll be, and if not, I’ve noticed that the average King’s Cross’er doesn’t have particularly good reaction time when the boards refresh, even when they’re fixated on them. It’s pretty satisfying (in a kind of devilish, OCD way) to be the first one in a massive crowd to have twigged which platform a train’s gonna arrive at - and once you’re ahead of the masses, remember you’ve got first dibs for seating. If you’re not going to be early, I find that the best place to get on a long train is about a third the way down the platform. People will generally get right on the front of the train if they’re completely rushed, but many will try to go all the way down the platform and fill up from the opposite end, so you often end up with this weird lull about a third down the platform shortly before the train departs. That’s my advice, anyway. What do I know? I’ve not been doing this for very long, so I’m probably not qualified to write a whole bloody essay on it.
Oh, as for point C? Yeah, ok, that was a lie. Good luck with that one...
4- Finding something productive to do on the journey isn’t hard, but plan ahead
More advice? What’s come over me?
I’ve already mentioned how much I enjoy watching stuff on the train. However… If you’re trying to watch something on your phone in the middle of Summer, it can be pretty damn impossible to hear any of the dialogue with the sound of the wind rushing past, even with maximum volume booming out of your headphones. Frankly, nobody wants to shut the windows on a hot day, probably not even you. So download some subtitle tracks beforehand. It’s not hard to get them synced up to whatever you’re watching - use an app like VLC if you’re doing this manually. The other point of course is to make sure you’ll be able to get to a good stopping point in time. If you’re gonna sit playing games or even do some actual work on the train then the same advice stands. You don’t want to be missing your destination ‘cos you just had to beat that damn level / fix that spreadsheet (delete as appropriate)
I’ll confess to occasionally watching things at 120% playback speed. A little mental, I know, but faster-than-normal dialogue becomes surprisingly unnoticeable with practice (as long as it’s not pitched up.) So if you need to make a 50 minute show into a 42 minute show to fit the travel times, give it a go, and let me know how much of a nutter I am.
If all else fails, just take a nap. It’ll be good for you. I like to do that in the mornings, since it helps soften the blow of getting up at stupid o’ clock. Again, don’t miss your stop. It can happen.
5- Don’t eat food on the tube
Just don’t do it. I don’t care how empty the carriage is, it’s just not on. I’m not sure where this rule originated from but I could hazard a guess that it’s because you pretty much can’t find anywhere less hygienic in the whole of London, and that’s saying something. Oh, but feel free to go nuts if you’re on a National Rail train. At rush hour it’s like everyone's just come from an all you can eat buffet.
That’s all I want to say about the underground. The less said about it, the better.
6- Beware the King’s Cross escalator hologram lady
Fans are weird. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to following a few escapades in ole London this weekend. Let’s start with one of the geekiest fandoms of them all: anime. Now here’s the disclaimer: I am not, and probably never will be, an anime fan. I’ve probably seen about 2 or 3 episodes of anime in my entire life, and that’s including the Pokémon animated series. I’ve come across a few films like the weird pre-Inception dream based film Paprika, and the big hits like Ghost in the Shell, Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro are certainly on my to-watch list. But again, I am not an anime fan. Why do I bring this up? Well, someone decided to drag me along to the London Anime & Gaming Con today. My verdict? Well, let’s just say, the people I came across weren’t doing much to deflect the awkward anime nerd stereotype.
That’s fine. I’ve got nothing against those types of people. If you want to dress up in a tightly fitting dress wielding a polystyrene sword (with far too much attention to detail) from your favourite piece of fantasy nonsense, I’m not going to stop you. I might feel slightly weirded out, but I don’t think that can be helped. There’s something faintly terrifying about a group of cosplayers completely into their characters, running around with no shame. It reminds me of the role playing society back at my university that would run around campus in full medieval costume and act out ridiculously complicated storylines oblivious to everyone else. Well, all the power to them, I say. Just accept that most people are going to be confused and probably a little bit intimidated.
Of course not all anime fans behave like this, because if they did, the textiles industry would probably collapse in on itself. Cosplay is there for those who want it, others can silently consume anime in their own privacy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t make you any less of a ‘fan’ just because you don’t want to join in with a certain vocal community - that's what separates ‘fan’ from ‘fandom.’ Cosplayers wouldn’t run around in ultra-stylised fantasy costumes if nobody else did; it’s the very reason they feel no embarrassment, and one reason why events like LAGC are worthwhile. For the right people…
Now on to a very specific type of fandom… The Room. One of the most universally loved bad movies has spawned a whole group of dedicated fans, myself included. In between all the screenings and spoon-throwing Tommy Wiseau’s happy accident has become a cult phenomenon that continually spreads through word of mouth and sheer audience fascination. Co-star Greg Sestero’s hilarious book The Disaster Artist and its just-announced movie adaptation from James Franco would not exist if it weren't for the fans. It’s the perfect example of how much can arise from such an obscure obsession.
Tommy and Greg continue to host regular screenings all around the world. Indeed, they were in London this weekend; while I didn’t go personally this time (it was my brother's turn), I did attend a screening with them back in 2012, and I can confirm that it was every bit as mental as you could expect. I may have a photo here somewhere…
But I’ll finish by getting back to the real sticking point here - fandoms aren’t for everyone. And I think we all have a right to dislike, hate, even laugh at them to a point. They are, by their very nature, completely divisive. Sitting on the train on the way back from London today I had to put up with a bunch of intoxicated football fans and their loud, derogatory banter. I have absolutely zero interest in any sports whatsoever, so fans acting obnoxiously only serve to wind me up, or make me break down into uncontrollable laughing when it gets as ridiculous as it did. I swear, if I have to hear the ‘tangy cheese’ song again…
Anyway, the point is, if you want to belong in a fan community, go for it. You’ll have a lot of fun, and you won’t feel embarrassed doing something mental if you’re hanging out with a whole bunch of other people doing something mental. But it’s also okay if you’d rather just hang back and read a book or something. I don’t know. Fans are weird.
My new year’s resolution was to make a blog. Apparently. I decided that a few moments ago. So that’s what this is. Hopefully. I’ll probably change my mind in a minute. Perhaps my real new year’s resolution was to come up with multiple new year’s resolutions throughout the year in some kind of bid to make me do lots of new things.
Anyway, for those of you who have ended up here by some freak browsing accident, I’ll just set the scene a little bit. I’m a maths graduate who happens to be writing a novel and… sorry, I’ll just give you a few seconds to wrap your head around that.
All done? Right, I’m starting this blog up because I figured it would be a good idea to have some kind of an outlet to post stuff on. You can expect a few reviews, general musings on topics I’m interested in, maybe a few snippets of stories and scripts I've worked on if I’m feeling adventurous.
I’ve been on YouTube for a long time, generally doing bits of animating, editing and video mashups which have always been fun to knock up, if not a bit mindless. This blog isn’t gonna be like that. Except for when it is. Anything could happen...
