Month: October 2012

Ten Years

About a decade ago, back when I actually enjoyed my day job, I used to work as a contractor. I was good value for my employers, and I went out of my way to maintain a morally consistent stance when it came to the tools of the trade – the thing about contractors, I (and the tax office) argued, was that they provided their expertise and tools to their employers.

So I had all my own hardware, and bought all my own software. Anything that was required, I bought – that seemed completely logical to me. Someone wants money for something they made? Fair enough. Hell, I even bought WinZip once upon a time – and how many people can say that?

Anyway… at the time I programmed in Object Pascal, using a fantastic IDE called Delphi. The latest version, Delphi 7, had been released in August 2002, and I’d promptly upgraded through my usual software supplier, Microway. It was a great upgrade, and I fired it up every day in joyful anticipation of the development process.

But this post isn’t about programming, or my tools of choice… it’s about gaming.

And, at that stage of my life, gaming was a very sporadic pursuit – twice a year, a game would arrive with the purchase of a new piece of PC hardware (graphics card purchases presented me with Deus Ex and Soldier of Fortune, amongst others), and I was a big patron of the Quake series; whenever a new game was acquired, I would play it incessantly until completion (usually requiring a couple of non-working days)… but between those episodes, there was precious little gaming going on. And there was certainly no video game consoles in my house. Ever since I became a C64 owner at the age of thirteen, I was a PC snob: how could a console – a toy, emphasised by the departments in which they were found in stores – possibly compete on any term with a computer?

But then, on the 9th of October, 2002, I received a phone call that would change my attitude… and most likely changed my life.

“Pete… it’s Chris, from Microway,” was the response when I answered my mobile. Chris was my regular contact there.

“Chris! What’s up?”

“Good news! You remember that competition you entered a few months back?”

I did not. I had no idea what he was talking about, and relayed that to him.

“Oh,” he said, slightly taken aback, “…well, when you bought your copy of Delphi 7 you were entered into a sweepstake. And you won!”

“Great!” I said, still completely unaware of what he was talking about, but excited nonetheless. “So… what’d I win, then?”

“An Xbox console,” he replied.

Now, quite honestly, my heart sank a tiny little bit upon hearing that. My head had gone racing ahead with ideas like “ten year MSDN subscriptions!” and “a new monster PC workstation!”… so the reality felt a little less impressive. Still, the gears started grinding, and I figured I’d be able to sell the Xbox to one of those silly console “gamers” at work and pocket a couple of hundred bucks.

After a bit of stuffing around – Chris wanted me to clear the prize-winning with my manager, which wasn’t really a problem due to my self-employment – the Xbox was given an address, and dutifully shipped.

It came into my possession on Thursday, October 10, 2002. Ten years ago today.

I thought I’d give it a look, and unboxed it, hooking it up to my TV. The weight, the textures, the styling of the Xbox was fantastic – it felt significant, and the controller (an original Duke) felt like a weapon. The rumble of the Xbox boot sequence tantalised on a bass-rumbling level, too.

But… there was no game to play. I thought these things had always come with a pack-in game? So – off to the local video store, only to discover that they only stocked PS2 and N64(!) titles. Into the city I went, to the closest department store; their range was brash and colourful, and the names meant nothing to me. But then, at the bottom of one green-tinged case, I spied a logo: “Bungie,” it said.

Years earlier, I’d played a demo of Marathon on my Macintosh IIvx – I’d loved the tone and feel of it, but not enough to go out and buy it in the software-starved Mac market of the mid-nineties. But that flicker of recognition encouraged me to pick that game up, purchase it, and wander home, curious as to how one could possibly control an FPS with that massive controller.

By the end of that weekend, I was convinced: it was doable. In fact, it was more than doable… it was perfect.

I was not merely convinced… I was converted.

Jet Set Luxoruga Adventures

Well… it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Thankfully, sheer laziness has been only a secondary cause for my lack of blogging; the primary reason is that I’ve been to busy actually playing games. And procrastinating. But, spurred on by a (necessary) resurgence of my other blog, I’ve decided that the words need to flow on this one, too. Too much of a blockage can get uncomfortable, y’know?

When I last posted something on this blog, I was battling with Ikaruga – in attempting to get an A-Rank on the first (and, by far, the easiest) level, the best I could manage was a B++… 1.86 million points, and little idea of how I could realistically up my game to get that extra little points bump. After watching a pile of replay videos (a wonderful feature of the XBLA port), I realised that I was missing out on some serious use of the energy absorption / release mechanism: not only was the homing super-weapon useful for chain maintenance, but absorbing bullets actually scores points.

I switched from Easy mode to Normal mode, with the result that slain enemies dispatch little clusters of same-polarity bullets… and there was an immediate pay-off, with a score bump to 1.93 million. Another day of practice and I hit 2.03 million – and with that Achievement unlocked, my Gamerscore completion percentage hit 96%.

The following weekend I accompanied my nephew to AVCon where, as luck would have it, they had a Gamecube running Ikaruga in an unofficial high-score competition. Once I got (re-)used to the wonderful Gamecube controller, I figured I knew the level well enough to get into the 1.5 million range… but, after about half-an-hour of play, I managed to snag a score just over 2.1 million – better than my own local highscore, a fact that is likely to play on my mind in the future. When I left AVCon that day, I was still the highest score by about 1.8 million points(!).

Ikaruga [1] 2,182,540

After moving furniture around to accommodate the camera, I managed to rope my ex into helping me out with Kinect Adventures… she was incredibly sceptical of the Kinect initially, but we were soon leaping around, sweating up a storm, pushing through for the co-op Achievements. She gracefully retired, and I spent another couple of nights flailing around to get the requisite platinum ranks… and knocking Kinect Adventures off The List.

Quite unexpectedly, I found myself playing Luxor 2 again, pushing through the Normal difficulty level and into Advanced. Things seemed to be pretty easy going early on, but I hit a tough patch around Stage 9: some levels were taking up to two hours to tip-toe through. Perseverance paid off, though, and I breezed through the final handful of stages in one grumpy after-work evening; a weekend of more troubling levels in the tricky Challenge of Horus netted the final skill-related Achievement. A few hours of whoring, and Luxor 2 was also off The List.

With that large project off my plate, I started looking for another to tackle… and, with the imminent re-release of Jet Set Radio, I decided to tackle the three Dreamcast variants of the game that I had squirrelled away (two of them still shrink-wrapped!). After discovering the extent of the game’s unlockables – and its annoying peccadilloes – through a play through of the PAL version, I threw away my progress and started from scratch, stepping through all three versions of the game in parallel. The differences with the Japanese version were most noticeable, of course, but even the US and PAL versions had their (inexplicable) differences… but by the time I finished all three games, I was well practised in the game.

So when the 360 version was released on September 19, I leapt into it with gusto. I surprised myself by Jetting most of the levels on my first attempt – muscle memory really pays off, I think! TrueAchievements had me pegged as the sixth person to “complete” the game (though I seem to have dropped to eighth now), and I would’ve been much higher on that list… had I not taken a little trip to Melbourne to see Tetsuya Mizuguchi speak. Oh – and to meet him. He watched me play Child of Eden, don’t-you-know. But there’ll be a (longer, painfully detailed) post about that later ;)

Miz and Me

There’s other games that’ve been played – Child of Eden, Rez, Burnout Paradise, Mario Kart Wii – and most recently I’ve returned to Uncharted 2 (in an effort to wrap that up before year’s end, as resolved). I’m still champing at the bit for Dyad (which is caught up in Certification Hell), but there’s not really that much else that’s tickling my fancy at the moment. I’m just cleaning up older games at the moment – or, as I like to think of it, following through on prior commitments.

Oh – and the Wii U? I’ve only got one thing to say about that…