The blog MusEditions wrote a fascinating little piece about music in computer games, and Cubert and TGTTPOACS are mentioned therein. I tend to agree with the author in that a game’s music is truly a huge factor that increases my immersion therein; perhaps a big reason I really got into LucasArts adventure games in my pre-teens was precisely because they put such emphasis on music to convey atmosphere. I suppose this is why I’m so flattered that someone has said the same about my own games. Although I know I’ll never have the talent and specialized training of Michael Land, Peter McConnell, or even Jared Emerson-Johnson, I do try and make the best effort possible to recreate the same atmospheric effects through music that influenced me in the classic Lucas games. I’m hoping to do this even better in Chivalry; though the music samples are a bit shorter in order to facilitate continuous looping effects (and to save me some time and space), I’ve been playing with a variety of different styles that I think fit well with the fantasy atmosphere. Time will tell if I actually succeed, I suppose.

On another note, I’ve recently been made feature editor at the somewhat dormant yet soon to be revived Adventure Developers. My my, the writing gigs just keep piling up, now don’t they?

As you can imagine from my last post, I’ve been keeping myself quite busy with my new Wii. It’s wonderful. I’ve fallen absolutely madly in love with it. I can’t possibly imagine playing games with a normal controller again.

I mean, really. The Wii has so much potential for adventure games, it’s amazing. What better way to create immersive interactive stories than to do so on a system that even my parents can pick up and play effortlessly? Gawrsh, I wish I were developing games for the Wii. Sadly, as a lowly student, I have to resort to making games for the PC instead. Woe is me.

Now for something completely different: a piece of music I just wrote. It’ll likely be featured in a future game or something.

Last month, I said I was going to make something and release it on November 23. And considering that today actually is November 23, allow me to finally unveil… Facetious Nonsense: An Adventure in Text!

That’s right, folks. Somewhere along the way, I decided to make a browser-based text adventure. I figured it would give me licence to explore a larger number of crazy situations and locations without having to go through all the trouble of creating art assets for them. Plus, if I were making a graphical adventure, I’d certainly want to make original music for it, but I can’t because I left my trusty MIDI keyboard in Vancouver.

Anyway, this little game of sorts is not really all that much of a game in that all you really do is explore - there really is no goal to speak of. It’s pretty Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-esque in nature, and very similar to a couple of well-loved gameish things I programmed on my TI-83 back in high school. Except somewhat more wordy and descriptive and perhaps even a little bit deep and meaningful, owing to the fact that I can fit more words into an HTML file than I can on a teeny little calculator screen. In any case, I hope you all enjoy it.

Oh, and I also turn twenty-one today, in the event that anyone actually cares.

Dear Myspace Users,

Having music automatically play when a person loads your website is so 1997. It is also extremely annoying. If I want to listen to music, I’ll fire up Winamp or something, okay?

Oh, and enough with the busy background images already. How am I supposed to read all your badly-formatted text if I can’t even see most of it?

Love,
The Management

This weekend, I downloaded and played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a classic edutainment game from my childhood. To this day, I still find it way more fun than 99.7% of all the newer edutainment games. I mean, who cares if it refers to Beijing as Peking and to the Soviet Union still existing? You’ll never find any other game where people can steal Hudson Bay and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Now, all I need to do is find episodes of the TV show and I’ll be completely satisfied.

In other news,[1] I met Michael Land at a party this weekend.

I’ve just noticed that I only posted in this blog three times in January, meaning that yes, I’ve been keeping myself busy.

I have realised that I hate adventure game walkthroughs with a passion. I get dependent on them WAY too easily. It doesn’t matter how easy or hard the game I’m playing is, as long as I know that a walkthrough exists, I’ll always peek at it at the first sign of impatience. It’s not good.

But wait, there's more! »

Today, I decided that I felt a little generous[1] and posted some music I just composed up on the Internet. To be precise, it’s the theme song for the seventeen-piece boy band that performs in the S.S. Asylum’s talent contest in TGTTPOACS. I rather like how it turned out. It makes me want to dance around and be cheerful.

On another note, I’m quite amused that this thread over at Adventure Gamers is still active. If you’re too lazy to look, it consists of a precocious fifteen-year-old boy arguing that all fan games[2] are of terrible quality and not worth playing, and of many adventure developers whining about how wrong he obviously is. At some point, even I got in on the debate, because it’s been ages since I’ve taken part in a good flame war. Ain’t that sad or what?

I must say, however, that Richard Longhurst and the Box that Ate Time really is pure genius.