erhebung

Birds and Balls

I’m sorting out the external drives, packing, and trying to pretend I’m not drunk (or hungover, or a mix of the two). In an attempt to focus on some­thing other than muzzi­ness, I’ve been playing Endless Migra­tion, a highly addictive web game in which you have to protect a flock of birds from a variety of airborne threats (storms, air­liners, Zep­pelins: that sort of thing). Good stuff. I also recom­mend the frus­trat­ingly playable Bas­ket­ball.

Not Always a Foreign Country

So, I’ve changed the blog a little, as I men­tioned earlier. And while I was importing the posts from the old blog to the new blog I noticed that it was possible to import posts from Live­journal accounts. Nat­ur­ally I pressed the big button and imported them, as I was curious, and now I have nearly 2000 extra posts here on erhebung. I thought it would let me import them as drafts, allowing me to tweak them or delete them before they went “live” here; but it didn’t, and now they’re all here. I’m going to delete them, gradu­ally, pulling out anything that seems interesting.

One things that seems inter­esting is this post from the 16th of February, 2009:

I’ve recently become semi-​addicted to a computer strategy\shoot-em-up game called ‘Hostile Waters’, and I must say, it’s great fun, if slightly long-​winded some­times (the missions seem to go on, and on, and on…

My cold feels slightly less bad, but I’m still sniffing and coughing a bit.

Irrit­at­ingly, I missed the first bit of West Wing on C4 tonight, after missing all of the first episode of season 3 last week… I couldn’t quite get into it, which is annoying, because I really love it at times…

Addic­tions to computer games, colds, and The West Wing. The past is not always a foreign country. Oddly enough, a day or two ago I found myself looking at the Wiki­pedia article for Hostile Waters after taking a wrong turn while searching for inform­a­tion about the film of the same name. And watching The West Wing again might not be such a bad idea.

Jumping Between Dimensions

Crush is that rare thing: a wholly original creation. It is a game for the PSP that has the player con­trolling a char­acter who has to move around a fairly small map, jumping up and down plat­forms, solving puzzles, col­lecting marbles (the reason for doing this, the story, is some­thing to do with insomnia; but I have to admit I haven’t been paying much atten­tion to the story, despite the amusing voices and occa­sional jokes). The twist to the gameplay, the thing that takes the game beyond plat­forms and puzzles and marbles, is that the game’s player-​controlled char­acter has the ability to change his envir­on­ment, at will, from one that is two-​dimensional to one that is three-​dimensional, and back again. In addition, while playing in the 3D envir­on­ment the point of view can be rotated, in 90° intervals, along the hori­zontal and vertical axes. At first it is a little dizzying, but thanks to a very good tutorial at the start, it quickly becomes very straight­for­ward, and immensely immersive.

Imagine a version of Super Mario Bros where you can switch from the infamous side-​on view to a top-​down, The Legend of Zelda–esque map, where you can move around within that map, do things, collect things, and where you can switch back to the side-​on view, as and when it suits you. And imagine, addi­tion­ally, being able to switch from the freedom of a 3D view (think Doom) to the restrict­ive­ness of a 2D view (Lemmings, say), the physics of the world adjusting as you change, objects and per­spect­ives com­pressing, certain things becoming possible in 2D that are impossible in 3D, and vice versa. And most cru­cially, imagine a game where some of the tasks that must be per­formed in one of the perspectives\environmental-visualisations, 2D or 3D, are con­ti­gent on some­thing first being done in the other. And it is not dif­fi­cult to see that when the player is allowed such control over the way the game world is viewed, over the fun­da­mental per­cep­tual archi­tec­ture of the gameplay envir­on­ment, there is prac­tic­ally unlim­ited poten­tial for chal­len­ging puzzle scen­arios. And I’m enjoying every minute of the chal­lenges Crush presents.

Going back to a game like Field Com­mander, a game where the con­trol­lable action is played out in one per­spective (top-​down), can feel frus­trat­ingly limiting. I used to love playing Dune II, another top-​down, turn-​based strategy game, but if I want to play Dune II, I’ll dig out an emulator and play it; it feels a little point­less to play a weak (if glitzy) clone of it on a platform that can clearly do so much more. So, Field Com­mander will soon be deleted (unless, of course, I can find a way to play online — going to head-​to-​head with someone real is always a dif­ferent exper­i­ence), but Crush will stay on the memory card for quite a while longer.

UFO

One of my all-​time favourite ways to waste time (I say “waste”, but see below) on a PC is X-​COM: UFO Defense, a turn-​based strategy game in which you act as the com­mander, or perhaps director, of a global agency whose job it is to prevent extra­ter­res­tials from suc­cess­fully invading Earth. The gameplay is varied: some of the action takes place on a global, stra­tegic level, where bases have to be built, squads equipped, and incoming UFOs inter­cepted; and some of it (most of it, during busy phases in the invasion) taking place on a more local, tactical level, where your squads need to be guided through close combat with the aliens, or your base itself defended from attack. Myself and a friend would play it together, con­fer­ring on the best way to manage the global situ­ation, or on the most effective weapon for dealing with a par­tic­u­larly tough alien in a tense combat situ­ation. Terror from the Deep, a sequel that took the action into the oceans, was equally immersive, if not more so, and also far tougher, as the invasion (or insur­gency, in the case of the second game) intens­i­fied. This is a screen­shot from the first game:

Lurking in the shadows in that image is a small and fast “little green man”-type alien (I’m sure we had dif­ferent names for them, then), and I remember they were easy to kill, but very fast (although perhaps they weren’t even fast). The name of the char­acter selected is one of the defaults given by the game, but all names were, I think, cus­tom­is­able, which led to further argu­ments (or maybe just debates) about how to christen newly recruited soldiers (Aliens, the James Cameron film, was a popular source as it con­tained many characters).

This screen­shot is from Terror from the Deep, the sequel:

Daft name aside, you can see from that image that the weapon design shifted in a pleas­ingly (for some) retro dir­ec­tion for the second game, and also that the colour scheme used more sea-​like yellows and greens and blues, some­thing which many hated, but I really dug (it makes me think now of Stingray, and probably did then, too). I found Terror from the Deep more immersive than its pre­de­cessor because it was more dif­fi­cult: I had to play it for longer if I wanted to win, and playing it for longer led to become more involved. But the first game is the classic, the one that blew everyone away.

Why am I writing about this now? A few nights ago I down­loaded an XP version of X-​COM: UFO Defense, and when I loaded it up I was suddenly sent back in time by the music accom­pa­nying the opening title sequence. I’m hoping to get a copy of Terror from the Deep, too, as I’m sure that too will bring back some memories of wasted (or well-​applied: there may yet be an invasion) youth.

Right now, though, I need to track down some episodes of UFO, the tele­vi­sion series starring Ed Bishop:

An episode or two of Captain Scarlet and the Mys­terons wouldn’t go amiss, either:

And maybe also the “Mytharc” episodes of The X-​Files:

You see, they’re all connected.