Ed Games

This has been out a week now, so apologies for the dated-ness.

But, datedness is sort of the theme of this post! Iron maiden's new album is out next month, and in advance of this their new single 'Speed of Light' was released to the internet just over seven days ago.

The song is pretty cool - something of a throwback to early Nineties Maiden with Bruce Dickinson's growly voice, and a more rocking feel than the progfests of recent albums. That said, it's an opening track, and the band tend to have form on this tactic - 'El Dorado' was the taster for Final Frontier, 'A Different World' was AMOLAD's opener, and it's arguable whether either was indicative of their parent albums.

But hey, I like it. It's got a lovely Ritchie Blackmore style riff to kick things off, some nice leads from all three guitarists, Bruce sounds great (pre-cancer diagnosis, it must be said), and there's more cowbell working hard here than Waikato Stadium in a home game.

To be honest, though, it's the video that's the drawcard. I love a good video, and with Maiden I think they're something of a rarity: the early days are very much live performance-based with movie cutaways; in the Nineties these turned into slicker products that somehow didn't really sell the band or Eddie very well - some of them just tried too hard. On the whole, however, it's when Eddie'in the visuals that the videos work best, and 'Speed of Light' is a great example, being almost all about the history of Eddie and Maiden's most memorable album covers, as experienced through the medium of... video games! I have fond memories of mashing rubber ZX Spectrum keys to the background sounds of Number of the Beast and Maiden's debut album (point of fact: both games and music were likely loaded on the same tape deck.) Iron Maiden are around the same age as your common or garden home entertainment system, so the synergy of the band's evolution alongside that of digital gaming works really well. Eddie is back in his rightful punkish fright wig original form, it's witty, deferential, self-referential (count those nods!*) and, I think, more than a little essential.

A brief pause to reflect that this is not the first time the worlds of Maiden and video games have crosed paths, as the mid-Nineties compilation/video game Ed Hunter attests. Reception in the gaming mags was not kind, apparently, and it goes to show that despite heavy metal making an excellent gaming soundtrack, getting the right mix is a delicate art. I think they've cracked it this time, though. Hell, I'd buy it :)

UPDATED: Thanks to Dave R's observations, it appears I got my wish! 

*Visual references I noted:

'Bust Never Sleeps

Hey, this post is synched with blog posts from Al, Jamas and Guanolad!

Thirty years on and a month or thereabouts from its New Zealand debut, here’s my Ghostbusters blog post.

I was a fan of Ghostbusters as soon as I’d heard of it, which if memory serves was during a hike on a school camp at the end of the third form year. My friend Andrew was recalling a clip that had played on a local after–school kids’ TV show, now easily identifiable as the hallway confrontation between Venkman and Slimer, but in Andrew’s re-telling, including the urgent walkie talkie relaying and eventual “he slimed me”, it sounded even more exciting.

And it was! I eventually saw it with other friends at the local picture theatre on a Friday night, sitting restlessly through a special short beforehand – which I think must have been a heavily-truncated Bowery Boys movie (Spook Busters comes to mind. It wasn’t great.) The rest cemented itself into my mind – already fed by a childhood of mythologies, ghost stories and space opera - phenomenally.

Anything with Bill Murray or Dan Ackroyd in it I’d watch; I got the soundtrack for Christmas from my sister and played and played and played it (my favourite post-production soundtrack goof in the movie – as the trio’s equipment is being removed from the college at the beginning, check out the headphone-wearing removal guy ‘rockin out’ to a slow Air Supply ballad) and I just basically loved the movie. I coveted, though never owned the roleplaying game (it got pretty good reviews as I recall) and envied my friends for their copies of the ZX Spectrum game (here's a walk-through!)

Ray was my favourite character (certainly he’s the most sympathetic, being cheated out of his family home for a decrepit fire station), although I was intrigued by Egon;  Venkman is a charming and charismatic creep, and Winston is a strange sort of audience-translator to introduce halfway through the story (he’d have been even more distracting if Eddie Murphy hadn’t passed on the role.) And I liked Janine more than Dana – and Louis Tully, seemingly formed in media is a brilliant character brought to life by Rick Moranis and Ivan Reitman.

Above all that it’s such a great and imaginative concept:  blue-collar pseudo-scientists and paranormal activity that springs from the very city they inhabit. I thought at fourteen that a double degree in Psychology and Parapsychology seemed a pretty valid field to go down – thankfully I never entertained the notion of actually pursuing it, but I also sketched out an idea of what my ghost hunting TV series would be like a year later – yes, influenced by Ghostbusters, but it was over time refined into something much more cynical and less funny. Speaking of which, it’s intriguing to note that there weren’t really any successful imitations (although I loved John Ratzenberger’s turn in the goofy House II), and I never saw Ghostbusters II in the theatre, that ship had clearly sailed for me as much as nearly everyone else by 1989.

But in the original there’s a lot to love, including a highly-quotable script and great teamwork by all onscreen. There’s a real invention to the effects – the earliest hand-painted Eighties lightning I think I’d seen; blue lightning was de rigeur by the end of the decade, but the Ghostbusters thanks to their proton packs had pink and orange energy beams, while Gozer was a radiant crystalline rose, Slimer was a lurid green, the library ghost was magenta – it’s a movie not afraid to play with the colour palette, probably for levity’s sake, but it really helps the movie find its own identity. The design is similarly unique – a firehouse HQ, the ’distinctive’ and utilitarian beige uniforms, the Ectomobile of course – there’s nothing really flashy or showy outside the backpacks and the ghost traps; even the containment grid is robust and practical, lending it more credulity. It has a great aesthetic and tone overall, effortlessly combining scares and laughs with virtually no mugging from any of its cast, and it made me want to visit New York. It also sparked my appreciation for Art Deco – an absolutely-fitting design choice for this movie being very New York, and being the design era of both the skyscraper and the archaeologist/antiquarian – heavy plot elements in this film. The success of all of the above means to me that Ghostbusters hasn’t really dated, even if it has become very very familiar.

And from here on? It’s been fun to reconnect with the movie, as I have through the Black Dog podcast, a recent SFX Special, and rewatching the film itself. The fan community still seems quite strong online: the original Ghostbusters RPG is now online. and reliably, Crooked Dice have produced a team of Paranormal Exterminators who would make great stand-ins for the crew, and currently there's also under construction a bea-u-tiful model of the Ghostbusters HQ

Will the love still be there once the feminised reboot has arrived? I think so – I hope so. The original’s place is secure already; last week I read a Spider-Man story to Jet Jr that featured Reed Richards trapping Spidey’s belligerent black symbiote costume in a special technical snare – rendered by the artist as a direct copy of the Ghostbusters’ spirit traps. I think we’ll be seeing the Ghostbusters around for some time yet.

"Vanity Waltz"...?

Five things I can remember about the ZX Spectrum game Planet of Death:

1 Adventure A: Planet of Death is a text-only adventure based around the scenario of the player character (YOU!) marooned on an unfamiliar world.

2 It came free with the machine we bought, and as this was a common practice at the time, I believe this adventure has a certain association with a generation of computer fans.

3 It has this awesome cover which I thought was one of the most awesome things ever and, I regret to add, has absolutely no bearing on the events of the game. A world of disappointment at owning a ZX Spectrum may well have begun with this stark, simple fact.

4 Artic Computing strikes me as a most unusual name for a business, and perhaps as far from the world of high adventure computer games as you could get. But their logo totally does what it says on the box - it's in the shape of an articulated lorry, wheels and all!

5 I never completed the game despite many tries, and found its infamous clue "VANITY WALTZ!" utterly impenetrable for a thirteen year old. The answer lay in a means to pass a force field separating you from your captured ship, the only thing that will take you off the titular benighted, but lamentably storm-lashed, skull-rocked world.

Roll20: The Beast of the Broch

Well, as promised, via the online usefulness of Roll20 last weekend I GMed a game of my own creation, an old school Basic D&D game called The Beast of the Broch, with three other guys and only an equator separating one of us from the others.

The result? An experience actually not too different from my past games - we over-ran on time (by about two hours!), there was a last-minute stand off/scramble to escape on the PCs' part (which ran smoother than in previous games due to this one being simpler and having some 'emergency exits' built in), and I want to do it again soon! Ultimately we used a minimum of Roll20's features - an online dice roller (though we turned off the graphic interface), a map builder with separate levels for players and the GM (fun to make, but I spent nearly a week creating these due to me being a little too particular), and the text-box chat function which, when Skype fell over on occasion, was a perfectly fine compromise.

So, all in all a fun game with some joking around, some 'character moments' or opportunities for genius/heroism/novel alignment play for the PCs (something I work at to foster in my games as it makes them more satisfying all round), and a bit of mystery. There' some discussion of the mechanics behind the game story after the jump below, but in short Roll2 provided most of the short cuts I needed (apart from the monster stats, roll tables and the like - a handy GM shield close by did the job though) and removed some of the messier game mechanics while still providing the visual clues and dramatic dice rolls. I'll stick with Roll20, I reckon, and see if I can't unlock some of its other features to ease play a little more.

Roll20: Just Like Starting Over

Last weekend I embarked on a test run of Roll20, a kickstarter project that developed into a free online RPG tool. It’s pretty cool, even in the limited capacity I used it; incorporating map creation, real-time chat and audio links, tokens and dice randomisers, plus the ability to pass messages on to players, ‘hand out’ notes and accessories for play, and take care of a lot of pretty routine but necessary stuff that you’d otherwise need space for in a usual game. Best of all, it woks without borders, so our test run was played on either side of the Equator, with player Paul sitting comfortably in his study in the UK on the morning of the very same day the other three of us were playing a relative eleven hours later. My teenage DM self would have had his mind blown by this.

 

Not that Roll20 is as sophisticated as World of Warcraft or any other multi-user online games; it’s not that kind of product. Instead it’s a tool with optional add-ons if you sign on for bigger deals. Did I mention it’s free otherwise? In the end we ditched the video link and used Skype to see if we could reduce the bandwidth cost (which this seemed to do), and to be honest, we didn’t lose much that way. Our game was a good old entry-level basic D&D scenario of my own devising The Beast of the Broch, with about six PCs and a couple of NPCs, setting the party on a short quest to a ruined broch to uncover the sinister presence lurking within its rounded walls. As it happened, and as it was a test play, the party barely got down the road, didn’t make it to the broch and only achieved one encounter before real-world events forced a sudden close of play. But weirdly, that’s how my first D&D experience was as well. It was 1984, I was in my third form year with a school mate (a boarder) on an overnight stay at our place, and together we with three other friends and my brother had a go at our first game TSR’s B5 adventure Horror on the Hill. Like the Broch gaming our party was a broad range of character types and alignments, and due to fumbling our way through the rules and regulations of play, we didn’t venture too far before Friday night curfew brought the crunch of parental car tyres on our gravel driveway and with it the end of the game. Our party, the Old Guard of Guido’s Fort, had collected some treasure and magic items, encountered some hobgoblins, wolves and ogres, and finally retreated after one of its main fighters (Argorn) fell prey to a giant centipede, becoming too sick to go any further. Twenty-nine years later it was an angry, invisible Redcap that threatened to decimate our party (that and our play making a little too much noise). If the party had actually made it to the broch they’d have certainly been slaughtered!

 

Still, as a playtest it was a success, and there’s room for streamlining yet. In fact, it seems the ideal tool to use for concluding the longest game I’ve ever run, Dwarven epic Bargigazl. With luck, this will happen very soon. In the mean-time, a return trip to the Broch awaits...

 

My Rainbow Connection

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a fact that quite frankly blows my mind just a little.

We had a Spectrum, my brother and I, after months of attending the local Computer Club and watching the slow transition of those in the group from the modest but limited ZX81 through to models that were a little more ambitious in memory and performance - including the Speccy. Money was saved, cases were argued (including the old chestnut that it would improve our education) and, eventually, as a family we made the trip down to Dunedin to pick up the new addition, all 16 kilobytes, peripherals, manuals and polystyrene packaging of it. It was a big moment in my adolescent life. I was thirteen and this looked for all the world like the future in our spare room. We loved our ZX Spectrum, lavishing it with hours of our developing lives and crafting it a fuzzy blue workstation of its very own, with holes for its coaxial cables and a shelf for its cassette player. Within a year or so we made a further plunge and with the help of a school friend, upgraded our little beauty to a more impressive 48k.

Let other blogs and sites tell of games and cheats and fledgling forays into BASIC and COBOL; my Spectrum experience was forged in site of these. I was no programmer, although my early attempts at computer graphics started with our home machine; nor was I a gamer, my lot in digital life seemingly ever to be terminated (with extreme prejudice) around the end of level three of every game I've ever played. My Spectrum experience was however an immersive one: lured by glossy ads and the promise that my comic heroes (Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, Dan Dare) would be realised in interactive, noisy 8 bit form. I became savvy to the Spectrum phenomena of marketing and fan culture - the slick advertising that promised so much (even if it delivered slightly less), the cheat-sheets and playground negotiations of these and bootleg game cassettes, the specialist magazines with their infinite lives pokes and codes. Every day trip to Dunedin had to involve two shop visits: to London Bookshops for White Dwarf magazine, and to David Reid Electronics, who'd sold us the computer and had many more cheap games and cassettes to copy others on to.


Somewhere amidst travelling with Bilbo Baggins, collecting Chuckie's Eggs and Jet-Setting with Willy I grew up. I learned the shrewdness of brand recognition (Melbourne House games were often literary based - The Hobbit, Sherlock Holmes, earnest but very well put together, Ultimate games - Sabre Wulf, Atic Atac, were punchy, dynamic, imaginative and innovative) and brand loyalty (I spit on you, Amstrad! et cetera). I learned my limitations as a programmer and gamer. But I communicated wit other kids about our shared interest in the computer, I made friends, and by god I actually got more out of it than I put into it. That's a rare thing in life right there. In time the world moved on: my friends upgraded to C64s or Amigas, and our school BBC Micros became robust, cuboid early Apple Macs. Ten years on from our ZX Spectrum I was eventually writing university essays on a word processor, then using email, Telnet, and eventually the World Wide Web. Technology, as George Lucas would modestly put it, had caught up with me. But my first love, for ever and always, will be a slim, black box with rubber keys and a non-threatening 80s-sharp rainbow flash on the corner.