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Our Daily Beard – 17/02/13

Greetings fellows!

What’s going on today? Not a great deal!

I’ve been working lots of evenings, not seeing anyone and trying to remain focused on my projects. Part of that is using Twitter more- and I am slowly starting to love it.

A big reason for loving it is that I was followed, quite out of the blue, by a game maker and novelist called Andy Gavin (@asgavin).

Now, for me, this is Big Deal Central. Andy was a co-founder of Naughty Dog, who made one of my favourite games of all time. Crash Bandicoot? No, silly. RINGS OF POWER.

Not played it? Get a Mega Drive emulator pronto. We’re talking about a massive, maaaassiiiive RPG with a sprawling story over a huge world. Short version: Rod of Creation is like God’s remote control, it was split into several rings each denoting a trait or quality like Intuition, and scattered to the corners of the planet. Our plucky heroes find them, battle evil, chill out. Each character belongs to a school, like a magical/warrior class. So simple, but a massive world with its own factions, economy and terrain types expands from this. Ships, dragons, trading, tons and tons of dialogue, Easter eggs – the works.

It wasn’t perfect. The isometric view was jerky and the controls were awkward. It had game-ending bugs. The 16 bit faux-medieval music and sloshy colour palette combined to make everything slightly off-kilter and nauseating (actually that sounds worse than it is – I remember it quite fondly!).

Thing is, all these things made it all the more awesome, because this was the first time (for me) playing a console RPG which was big and detailed enough to have bugs and control issues and all the rest.

Anyway, the point is that I was a huge fan of this obscure game and being able to chinwag with one of its creators was like meeting a celebrity. So long story short – Me = chuffed.

Have a good Sunday everyone!

 

 

[sociable]

The Saga of Sweetangel – Part 5

Yeah, more Sweetangel!

Also do let’s watch Let’s Dance for Comic Relief folks 🙂

 

Longthorn cleared his throat politely,

“Good woman, have you seen a Karkar girl?”

He asked over the din of machines.

“I seen a good many” said Pearl,

“Dirtlings of every kind come around here,”

“Detectives, beggars, shaman and queens.”

 

“The girl is but small,” said Poulter,

“Twin of this urchin you see before you,”

“Who fears she was taken… by something.”

Mrs Pearl regarded Turtle,

“I’m sorry, but I recall no such girl,”

“No doubt Sweetangel took the lostling.”

 

Well Turtle’s eyes grew wide with fear,

“What do you know about dire Sweetangel?”

“The taken ones must end up somewhere.”

“They go the sea,” she replied,

“Where everything lost and unwanted goes,”

“Leave me in peace and search for Frog there.”

 

She instantly knew she’d slipped up,

And the detectives noticed her mistake:

“No name passed our lips,” accused Poulter.

She raised up a lode-lock pistol,

Hidden among the tools on her workbench,

As her façade began to falter.

 
[sociable]

Our Daily Beard – 15/02/13

Well, we woke up to startling news from Russia today.

Just as we’re due to have a near miss with asteroid 2012 DA14 (terrible name, I prefer to call it ‘Steve’), a meteor strikes in the Ural mountains! They are thought to be unrelated- but it does give one the willies.

Over 950 are said to be injured (it varies, that’s the BBC’s figure). The exact spread of these injuries is unclear, but apparently sonic booms from the meteor shattered glass windows in cities under its trajectory.

The footage is amazing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that gets seen on the TV in the background, at the start of a disaster/alien invasion movie, disregarded by the protagonists until it’s too late. I would have been terrified to see it, wondering if it were a missile shaped pressie from North Korea.

Adele tried to warn us!

So: here’s a poem inspired by the meteor.

 

Sorry Russia- please accept my apology!

I’m not too familiar with Earth’s geography.

I was on a bit of a mission, as it happens,

But I didn’t mean to hit the Ural mountains.

Sorry about that big sonic boom,

I was trying to tell him: here comes your doom!

You know who I mean, I bet you don’t like him either,

The talentless, all-American, floppy haired geezer.

A broadcast from your planet just reached my system,

I believe it was a movie called ‘Armageddon’.

I was outraged by this man Michael Bay,

And the anti-asteroid propaganda he chose to portray!

He paints us as villains, out only to destroy,

Not as peaceful wanderers, rolling stones of the void.

Well I came to smash his smug face into jam,

But I got mixed up and flew over Kazakhstan.

So sorry again about the mess and dismay,

Don’t suppose you could roll me to L.A.?

 

 
[sociable]