Mersey Remakes

I’ll admit, my head is an odd place to be of late. It’s one of those things, the brain lays dormant for a few months with other things to worry about, summer holidays certainly don’t help if you want to get any work done so best not to even try. Then Bzzzt. There goes the alarm. Things falling into place in a rather random way.

This year has been an odd one. It’s the year I became a little too fixated on the more casual end of the spectrum. The mechanics of putting together a truly great casual game. I blame Bejewelled Twist personally, evil thing it is. It’s clever and pretty easy to see how much thought has gone into the design.

It’s also a fruit machine, that impresses me.

Those who play far too much Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook (thankfully, I’m not one of them) will already be aware of how utterly random it is and oh, the arguments over Peggle and the madness of seeing things that likely aren’t there. Ok, ok, casual is wrong. My fascination has mainly been with Popcap whilst trying to ignore the ridiculous nature of the “scientific studies” they indulge in for marketing because, y’know, being someone who gives a shit about the difference between misinformation and information they kinda offend me a little bit.

It was also the year that I realised that in many ways, I was sorta heading in a tangential but similar direction. Here I am making hardcore-ish arena shooters that use many of the same principles. I knew I’d finally snapped in the last update to Squid Harder when I added a ranking system. Yup, totally gone now. There’s no going back.

So it kinda started with an idea I had a few months back. Make a kids game. After all, War Twat had graphics designed by my then 4 year old so why not go the whole hog and “do a Dizzy” and expand the SYNSO theme away from a direction I felt I’d little else left to explore with. I did some rough mock ups (as in “draft” not as in “arses”) and found myself pleasantly surprised at how nice they were. A bit too limiting though, y’know? It needed something else, a bit of madness to it and where my head was sort of bobbling around at the time meant it wasn’t really going to work out too well. Having learnt my lesson the hard way before now, I left it on the side for a while and went off to write a remake of Transversion instead. That’s done by the way. As I ported it over to GM8 a few weeks back you’ll have to wait for it to come out of beta to be released.

I kicked around another couple of ideas to myself. One of them I’d still love to do – get Harry S. Price to remix War Twat. In a moment of madness I was even tempted just to ask a couple of people to remix it to see what would come of it. Maybe when I’ve got all this crap out of my head I’ll come back to that one. Definitely needs Harry S. Price-ing. Contemplated going back to Peejay and revisiting Deus Ex Machina but oh, the graphics! The work! Not yet, dear Bob.

Nah, best to finish off the SYNSO trilogy first. From moments after completing the orginal version I figured it should be a trilogy – it’s only right. The rule I laid down for myself at the time was that if I were to write a new one it’s got to be a riff, not just a rehash or a sequel. Play about with the constraints and the ruleset a bit, mess its hair up, change its face. Do something but not the same thing. All times, stick to the golden rule. It’s a love letter to those who made me. The first is hugs and kisses to Eugene Jarvis, the second (you’d never guess this, right?) to Minter. The third? The third you probably don’t expect.

When I was but a lad, one of the first games I picked up was Football Manager for the Spectrum. If I still had my review of the remake to hand from a few RR competitions ago, I gushed at the time that despite having little to no interest in football itself, I loved Football Manager. It inspired me as much as any of my beloved shooters. A game made in BASIC and sold? Something anyone with a little rubber keyed Spectrum could do. Well, there’s part of my philosophy right there isn’t it, readers?

Here’s the thing though, there’s not much room in my head for a football themed SYNSO. It’d be a silly too far. There is, however, room for Kevin Toms (the author of Football Manager) to appear in SYNSO. In a moment of madness, I dropped Mr Toms a line, likely sounding like a complete crazy head to ask would he mind. He replied with a rough not at all and even offered to write in his own dialogue. Brilliant. Ok, we’re getting somewhere. This is going to a good place. Where next? Oh yeah, the kids game – lets take that and run with it a bit but stretch it out a bit. Let’s go a bit casual in the visuals department. I’ve done CRAZY IN YOUR FACE. I’ve done the arcade look thing. Alright, let’s not go totally casual though, it’s still going to need a shiny effects mode. It wouldn’t be SYNSO without a shiny effects mode.

Christ, I do like making work for myself don’t I?

Let’s top it all off and call it Vampyros Squidos. Sorted.

So, I fucked around for a couple of weeks trying out different looks, seeing what looked nice and what didn’t. Thanks to Ed Clewes for letting me use some artwork, I’ve got the look I like. It’s hyper-casual cute kiddy. It looks sweet. It’s not going to be the only look. Twice I’ve put off including two different looks in the game so finger out of backside and crack on there. Thing is, I can’t show you that bit in a screenshot as it’s still in my head so y’know, it cannot be seen. Thanks to some fine suggestions elsewhere I’ve got the direction of the game now and it’s coming along alright. It doesn’t do much right now, I’ve got the intro, the titles, the portal screen and all the graphics bar a few fripperies done and that’s been harder work than I anticipated. It’s trucking along though.

And yeah, the headline of this post is a bit misleading, sorry. I sorta liked it though. I’m not really subverting anything here, I’m just taking where I’ve been heading with the SYNSO series to its natural conclusion design-wise and having some fun letting the game evolve around the stupidity of my own brain and itself. For those familiar with SYNSO, you’ll be right at home with Vampyros Squidos but hopefully, it’ll be different enough to stand on its own two feet. Whether I succeed with this, I don’t know yet – it might yet turn out to be a massive folly created by an idiot – who knows? I’m enjoying myself with it right now.

Ok, a bit of background for those new to my little corner of the interwebs. Around 12 months ago with the advent of the new Microsoft Community Games service, I decided to set up a little web site to review the games as they land. It’s called xnPlay. Some of you may have heard of it, some of you may have not. I’m quite proud of some of the work we’ve done over the year and proud of how we’ve been able to get the word out along the way about some of the forthcoming gems to the system. I’m proud of some of the writing that sits over there and I’m proud of the small community of commentators and other reviewers that lurk around the place.

It’s a good place built on honesty, not infallible but with each and every reviewer and commentator being true to their opinions and reasonably open to discuss things without relying on shock news or sensationalism, I’ve been sad to have to leave it at the wayside for the time being. In some ways, I miss that smiley moment when you post up a preview and watch it spread around the net – not for the hits (given I’m the one who has to keep the server on the level, high traffic certainly doesn’t mean any fun for me) but for that warming knowledge that something you care about is something others can see the value in.

I’m not going to proclaim that xnPlay is somehow important but it’s built on love. A harsh love at times, yes, but love none the less. It’s certainly not done for money, that much I can tell you. If it were, I’d have quit long ago.

Here’s the thing though. If I can’t review the games, I can’t write for xnPlay. Right now, I can’t review the games.

Why? A long, slow, gradual death of the dashboard.

So, here’s the thing. In order to run and review for xnPlay I find myself having to download either the trial or full versions of quite a few games. For those who don’t really delve into the Indie Games service too often, this can be between one a day or three or four a day, sometimes more. This takes a bit of time. Downloading the games is the speediest part of this thanks to my rather reasonable connection. If we don’t have a code or .ccgame to rely on, then we’re looking at playing through as much of the 8 minute demo as we can. Repeatedly unless it’s really glaringly obvious that it’s a bit mup.

When I started xnPlay last year, this was a pretty speedy process. I belted through as many of the launch titles as I could in only a few days. As time has gone on, things have got increasingly more difficult as despite clearing out the rubbish that each one stores on my HDD on a regular basis and clearing the cache, the NXE has been descending into unusable over time. With each passing month it’s got less and less comfortable to use. It’s taking longer and longer to populate the games list making each and every test of a game into a game of luck. Will the dash populate after I’ve dropped out of the game? If so, how long will it take? Is it going to be 2 minutes, 4 minutes or longer?

After two months of NXE roulette, a fortnight ago, it’s all but dead. I get one shot at it when I first boot up if I’m lucky, if not, the games list hangs, locks up and I have to reboot the 360 in order to try again without the guarantee of success. If I manage to get it to run one game, it’ll hang on the next. I mentioned this last week in the comments section of xnPlay and dropped an idle tweet about it. It seems I’m not alone in suffering these symptoms. Those who’ve downloaded and played a lot of titles are finding their 360 or their gamertag becoming increasingly unusable.

The scale of the problem? I don’t know and truth be told, that’s not really my problem. I just want to be able to get back and play and review some games. That’s not going to happen for a while. I’ve been through the drill of support and been informed I have to return my 360 for repair outside of its warranty. That’s going to have to wait, given I’m pretty skint right now.

I’ve been lucky I guess, my 360 only bought the curse of the RROD the once but long enough ago to let it fall out of the warranty area.

Bugger me, I didn’t expect the NXE to all but kill itself in one crucial department simply for me reviewing games though. That’s the bit that sorta chafes y’know? It would seem I’ve killed off my 360 trying to help promote and review XBLIG games.

In the meantime, whilst I try and get this sorted, xnPlay is all but down to xAD holding the reigns. I apologise to all the devs and readers for us running on low power of recent times and I apologise for not bringing this up sooner. As soon as I can get back on the road, I will get back on the road and normal service will resume.