Design Design Design
I’ve mentioned an awful lot of times recently my love for the more simplistic vector approach to graphics, clean lines and high speed gaming is something I utterly adore. When I were a lad and the humble Speccy were in its prime (enough of that - Ed) there was a pair of companies that were responsible for me developing this love.
Whilst I’m sure a lot of people got hooked on the vector look courtesy of Battlezone or Star Wars, this wasn’t for me. For a start, there wasn’t really that much in the way of arcade action to be had in a crumbling industrial town with unemployment on the rise. There was only really the one leisure centre in the town anyway and that had Scramble. We did have an arcade, I might add, but it was more the kind of place parents warn you away from than encourage you to dive inside.
For me it was the games of Realtime Games and Design Design that got me hooked on vector graphics. Now, Realtime’s 3d Tank Duel I still claim is the most impressive home port of Battlezone that existed during the eighties but Design Design? I’ve just realised that I don’t think I’ve mentioned the beauty that is Simon Brattel’s Dark Star on this blog before which is quite forgetful and unforgivable of me. The sheer speed of the fucking thing at the time was (well, I guess still is) fucking amazing. No, don’t just listen to me here - have a go yourself. (I’d normally do a WoS link, but I can’t get the site to load right now so have something a bit more competitive).
One of the truly wonderful things about Dark Star (aside from just being plain phenomenal) was the amount of control over the game Simon Brattel built into it. As much as is possible is user configurable. You have 4 game variants, 6 difficulty levels ranging from easy to “pretty damn devastating”, you can configure the brutality and frequency of the enemy missiles all the way from none to (again) “pretty damn devastating”, varying levels of sound effects and even have different display modes. It also features a wonderful high score table and one of my favourite sets of instructions ever:
Fly around the universe. If it moves shoot it. If it doesn’t, shoot it anyway. If it’s square - fly through it.
Utterly fantastic. Even if the tunnels were cunts.
Anyway, the purpose of this post isn’t just to eulogise over how fantastic Dark Star, Design Design and the work of Simon Brattel is/was (although that is something more people should mention, honourable props to the Good Reverend Mr Campbell for his YS Top 100 write up many moons ago) but to also mention that Mr Brattel has now dug out a ruck of his old source code for the games and put them online. Which is awesome.
Also, have some related links:
Design Design Source Code
Crash Interview
Noddy’s Guide To Game Design
Riddle Me This
Why is it that whenever I stumble across a site on the old intertits proclaiming to either be intelligent, smart, for serious gamers or hardcore gamers or whatever pseudo-intellectual niche that someone feels has a gaping void where their opinion lies…
…why is it more often than not written by thick cunts?
Seriously, why is this? What possesses a bunch of sprout brained idiots constantly to band together and wave their alleged Level 9 Penis Of Intelligence around in folks faces when they quite clearly can’t even be trusted to tie their own fucking shoelaces, never mind be allowed near a keyboard?
At least once a month I stumble upon a new one, be it a blog, a site or a dark hovel of bleak intertwatdom and just once, just for once in this godforsaken life, I’d like to stumble onto a site that claims it’s intelligent, serious, profound or whatever and actually *is*.
Is this some sort of deep human instinct to better oneself by proclaiming the big brain as fact? Or is it, as I suspect, that you have to be a bit backward and not allowed to cross the road without supervision to attempt to place yourself in the position of intelligensia to the masses?
More to the point, why do they always write essays that would break Tolstoy’s word-count-o-meter? Is it, as I suspect, the belief that writing more truly means more substance or is it perhaps that they love the sound of their fingers bouncing merrily off the keys so much that they begin at 1am after mum has gone to bed and don’t stop until the crack of sunlight peers through their muggy spunk stained curtains, shivering orgasmically the entire time?
Even more to the point, is there any way we can make them stop?
Gametunnel Review Weirdness…
[update: the "offending" (Christ, I hate that phrase) text has been adjusted since this post. Carry on about your business, people.]
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