Yesterday we downloaded the first chapter of The Tales of Monkey Island, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, and finished it this afternoon. It is excellent :D

I'd been looking forward to it, but been slightly apprehensive that it would be an inferior ripoff by some people who'd bought the rights to the original series and slapped them on their own unrelated games, or a graphics-fest at the expense of gameplay and fun, but those fears were completely dispelled. It's a delightful, extremely fun game in the spirit of the originals, with at least some of the voices from #3 and #4. The puzzles are intriguing and are pitched at a good level of challenge. The dialogue is excellent, with witty one-liners, cheesy puns, and occasional amusing innuendo ("Release my wife at once, LeChuck - she gets a bit tetchy if she's tied up for more than an hour"), which I hadn't noticed in the previous games, but maybe I was too young. There are the obligatory references to the previous games and to Indiana Jones. As well as the main three characters, the Voodoo Lady makes a reappearance, and there's a hint that Stan might be involved later, or it might just have been an in-joke. The relationship between the no-longer-newlywed Threepwoods is entertainingly depicted. Elaine treats Guybrush with a mixture of patient amusement and annoyance that reminds me of Susan from Coupling.

I give it 9.5 out of 10, and the missing 0.5 is all interface niggles. You have to click and drag to walk anywhere; and you can't combine inventory items by clicking on one with the other, but you have to drop each into a special area of your inventory and click a "combine" button. And it took us until nearly the end to find the button to skip unwanted dialogue (e.g. that you've seen before), that was always mapped to the dot key in LucasArts games (it's right-click now).

We've also bought the remastered Secret of Monkey Island - Special Edition. We haven't started playing it at all yet, but from the screenshots, it looks as though they've stayed very faithful to the original - the scenes look very familiar, drawn from the same camera angles, just with improved graphics and (presumably) voices. And it was only £6.99 - I thought it might be full game price. And it includes the original un-remastered version, and you can hot-swap back and forth between the two renderings at any point.

So we're going to play that next (well, Alex will play it, because he's never played it all the way through before, and I will sit and watch, squee with nostalgia, and offer cryptic hints if required).

Tags: games, monkey island, reviews
Current Location: Flotsam Island
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Monkey Island theme tune

I recently played an adventure game in which you play character A and have to lock character B in a room, and then in the next chapter you play character B and have to escape. It was a slightly unsettling shift in perspective: I'd been playing character A and identifying with her, and agreed with her that character B needed to be locked up because he was a danger to himself and others. I didn't want to help him escape.

alextfish plays a lot of Starcraft, and he says you get the same phenomenon in that, but even worse. At least the two characters above were ultimately on the same side, but in Starcraft you play the Terrans and build a base, and then you play the aliens and destroy the base you just built.



A good developer needs to be at least a reasonably good tester; and a good tester needs a certain quality which, in normal life, is usually bad. I might even call it malevolence, or at least scepticism. It goes beyond just the destructive desire to try to break things; you have to try to break things which other people have just created, which they've put time and effort into, which they might have invested a part of themselves in. You have to assume those creations are flawed, and make it your mission to expose the flaws.

I am not very good at writing robust code. The testers find even fairly obvious bugs in my software. And I think this is because, on some subconscious level, I'm being precious about the thing I've just built. I don't want to prod it until it falls apart; I don't want to look for the flaws in it.

To be a better developer I need to apply this perspective-shifting, side-switching trick to my work. I need to look for ways out of the room I just locked; I need to bomb the base I just built.

Tags: games, software, work

I ordered a computer game from Amazon Marketplace as a present for a friend.

The seller, games4u-uk-net, sent me a bootleg copy. The cover was printed in low quality, like from a home printer, and with no logos or branding, and there was a badly-spelled note on the back saying that the game was free software (it's not) and you're paying for the disc and the emulator.

I looked at their feedback page. They had mostly very good feedback, but the few negative ones were a bit suspicious-looking: they didn't sound like honest mistakes, like sending the wrong product. They were from people who'd ordered consoles described as new, and received them in unbranded plain white boxes. All the negative comments were followed up by indignant, not very polite, not very grammatical replies from the seller asking why the buyer had left negative feedback rather than contacting them.

So I decided to be nice and contact them, asked for a citation for the claim that the game was free software, because I hadn't been able to find one, and tried to explain the difference between free software and abandonware, and said if I had wanted abandonware I wouldn't have paid £10 on Amazon for a legitimate version of the game. I said they were misrepresenting what they were selling, and if they're going to sell discs and emulators they ought to make it very clear that's what they're selling.

They replied, reiterated the claim that the game was free software and that they were only charging for the disc and emulator, and claimed outright that the original producers of the game were an outfit called Classic Gaming Presents (who, as far as I can tell, are an abandonware download site: they have the moral high ground over games4u because they a) have a link inviting the real owners of the game to request they take it down, and b) don't misrepresent what they're offering). They also said they would refund me only if I didn't leave negative feedback.

I was particularly appalled by that last bit, and went into righteous-indignation mode, and reported them to Amazon and to the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and told them so[1], and told them I would certainly leave negative feedback now, and did so (including the bit where they tried to buy my silence).

Amazon replied to my complaint with long complicated instructions of what I should do to claim a refund. I didn't get around to doing anything for a couple of days, and then they sent my money back anyway, without me having done any of the stuff in the email, which surprised me.

Interestingly, games4u now seem to have dropped their price by £2, and have also added a comment to the product page, saying "This is NOT the Whit Label vresion. what we sell is the modified software which enables the game to be run on XP and/or VISTA, the game is distributed for free with the software." [sic]

I've written this for the benefit of two groups of people:
* Those who, like me a few weeks ago, naively think that Amazon Marketplace is something more official and vetted than it really is. Be warned. Treat it like you would eBay. Research the sellers.
* Those who cynically accept that receiving bootlegs is an inevitable part of buying stuff online, and who just shrug and play the CD/DVD/game anyway, or stick it in a drawer and forget about it. Stop it. You're enabling them. Complain, get your money back, get them to start being a bit more honest.

[1] The downside of this is They Know Where I Live. I should have used my work address for the original order.

Tags: bootleg, games

Yesterday we had a GamesAfternoon, focusing on playing people's home-made games. angoel was there, who created On the Underground, and he'd brought some more of his games. They were quite professional-looking for unpublished games, each in its own plastic box with colour DTPed boards and rules and box front. I got to play four of them: Top Banana, which was good, and Rally Car, Captains of Piraeus, and Colour Clash, which were excellent. (Colour Clash has changed its name, but I never fully caught the new name.)

( Reviews of the games )

I hope he gets them published. I want to buy copies.

We also played alextfish's game Castles in the Air, and between us we came up with a change which simplified the rules and turn structure while also making the game much more fun to play and giving players more choice, so that was excellent. Alex is now putting together new rules sheets incorporating the change.

Tags: alextfish, angoel, games, reviews