*bulldada = so bad, it’s actually good
A poorly thought through promotional item for Yet Another Zombie Game is given both barrels’ worth of sarcasm. Best comment so far:
There has to be a zombie movie out there where the walking dead go for the tits instead of the brains.
Possibly Japanese. And the zombies are all middle-aged business men.
International Gorillay is a Pakistani film from 1990. The film’s protagonists are three Pakistani brothers, the older one being a police officer and the…
I am trying hard to watch this, but this… is… bulldada.
Ages ago – well all right, a matter of months – I picked up a book from the library. It was about a zombie apocalypse, and it was magnificently bad. It was the sort of thing I coined the term Apocalypturd for.
Honestly! We’re besotted with apocalypsii. Zombies, alien invasion, robots rebelling, nuclear war, global warming, ebola and friends… the list goes on. I sometimes wonder about that.
But I digress. To the book.
It is published by a specialty publisher, P-something Press (Piffle, probably) which delights in inflicting a plague of its own – ends of the world. I don’t know how they stay sane. Perhaps they just look at the money, or they’re ‘goth’ or 'emo’, or both. But if they can afford the dead trees they’re evidently doing something right. After all, it seems at the moment, with history inexplicably veering away from the comforting business-as-usual future it was aiming at after giving up on the shiny silver future that was dead ahead in the 50s. And worse, we can’t figure out where the damn thing is headed, so it must be bad.
An apocalypse, I suppose, is when the actual march of history and our presumed march of history part ways. We’re not very quick on the uptake. Perhaps instead of a metaphor where we just ride the bus, history is the road and our fate is determined by who has the strongest grip on the wheel.
Hey everyone, if you haven’t heard yet, we’re promoting Aberford as a Concept on Steam Greenlight (it’s sort of a dress rehersal for an actual Greenlight Campaign). If you have a few minutes, would you do us a big favor and upvote us? Currently, we’re ranked #74 out of 4442, but I think we can crack the top 50 with your help.
Doing well in the concept helps us gauge how well we might do in a Greenlight Campaign, as well as helping us build a community on Steam.
Upvoted.
Normally I’m not a big fan of zombie games, but Aberford sounds a lot more fun. Especially since, instead of being set at the end of the zombie apocalypse, it’s set at the beginning. There’s still hope. And 50s style. And whacking zombies in the appurtenances with common household products.
I bitterly resent this book since it inexplicably vanished and I had to pay for its replacement – with another copy, unfortunately. I seem to have a knack for finding terrible literature in the library. Originally posted August 2007.
Information on Amazon.com for The Blue Star: Millennium by David Gau-Chan
One of the problems with New Age fiction is that it is, by nature, religious and instructional in flavour; and in inept hands can be not only tedious but overtly preachy. And David Gau-Chan, unfortunately, was definitely not ept when he wrote this.
The storyline concerns an extraterrestrial being, Zakeera, of the eponymous rank, who is sent to Earth in order to head off a coming eco-cataclysm. To do so, he takes over the recently deceased corpse of an American senator after more or less fighting his way past a posse of bad-vibes Reptilian spaceships to do so. However, things do not go well, and the entire story finally gives up and walks off with the tried and rusted (sic) plot device of it possibly being a dream.
The spirituality invested in the book is a mixture of New Age-esque talk about “light” and “vibrations”, the concept of extraterrestrials who are not only benevolent, but might have seeded us here in the first place (echoes of Von Daniken), and a large dollop of the Christian Rapture. The New Age also tends to combine sci-fi and magical tropes, so it should be no surprise that Zakeera not only zooms around in astral form, but also drives a spaceship and shoots lasers (yes, lasers) at sinister alien farces — excuse me, forces.
Since the novel is concerned with contemporary Earth, you would think that Gau-Chan would leave the history intact. Unfortunately, he doesn’t: every important name has been changed in such a way that you find yourself mentally stumbling at every reference. The worst offender is Pol Pot — renamed Hell Cat. My mind fell flat on its face every single time I ran across this reference. What the hell was Gau-Chan thinking? That he was going to be sued?
The Rapture inevitably comes when the dictator of Iraq lets off a nuclear bomb that ignites all the oilfields in the Middle East. As if this wasn’t improbable enough, the resultant energy release finally kicks off the long-awaited “polar shift”, in which the planet is supposed to just flip upside down in remarkably quick time. This is the cataclysmic cue for the saucers to Rapture up those who are open to being beamed aboard… oh look! Pre-Millennial Dispensationalism! Wow.
Oh, yeah. Those who make the cut get to meet the twelve apostles — no, sorry, I mean Planetary Teachers. One of them has holes in his wrists and feet. He gets special mention, which makes me wonder exactly which theological camp Gau-Chan sides with. Well, Mr Gau-Chan, is that a crucifix or a crystal in your hand… or are you just glad to see me?
And then time gets rewound and it’s like all a dream except that one guy makes a gesture that suggests… oh skip it. The End.
What annoys me about this book is that while it claims to address our existing ecological problems, it is inherently pessimistic in tone: us puny low-energy human beans can only save ourselves by getting the Big Space/Supernatural Parents’ attention so they can rescue and/or punish us. Whatever humans do, either it’s not enough, or it’s promptly undone by other humans, or both; so look to the skies for salvation.
If the book does convey a useful lesson, it’s that, despite any protestations to the contrary, and the sci-fi trappings, there really isn’t any difference between “Space Brothers” blather and conventional religious statement. Both preach a message of helplessness and need for divine intervention if you’re to be saved.
Would I recommend this book? Well, yes. It would make the perfect present for an enemy.
Sometimes you realise you’re taking the hard road for no reason.
The board game I’m working on takes place on a 13x13 grid, as mentioned, but it’s rotated at 45° to the board (root prim). My initial viewpoint was that there’d be a 0,0 in one corner and 12,12 in another, which with a simple calculation of offset = X+12Y would reference a list of 169 local coordinate pairs (stored as vectors) to be referred to. Which of course would be great fun to plot and laboriously enter into the script.
So earlier tonight I fired up the spreadsheet and started plugging in some values, and only then did I discover a constant that was hiding in plain sight.
I could have kicked myself.
This constant also acts as a Z-offset to rest the game pieces on top of the board. It spaces both the X and Y axes on the playfield. Moreover, I finally realised, the centre position in the board has local X and Y coordinates of 0,0.
If, instead of 0..12, I thought in terms of -6..6, all of a sudden all I’d need is a multiplier and some simple math. No huge list. Just… one… float.
I think I’ll go back inworld and try it out - a second board and one piece that marches through each cell. We’ll see what happens.
seriously have fun digging around in there, i hope you dont get lost.
( just in case this is posted before the game comes out, the game should release at 10am pst )
post your war stories here:
At about 7:30am my time this morning I finally had it unlocked. So far, I have seen some of the new items, encountered the large rooms, and some of the new enemies, and observed that its sound system doesn’t seem to play well with passing through a Numark Mixtrack Pro II, but that might just be something else.
Then it was 8am and I had to go to stinky ol’ work.
And the soundtrack is seriously boss.
Get it. Play it. Love it. Zelda/Robotron/Roguelike. Me like.
The Second Life board game has taken a slightly retrograde step - but one that to my delight, actually worked right out of the box.
Previously, when I started, I had the sensible idea of having each seat maintain itself, sending link messages to the main script (hiding in the board prim) whenever someone mounted or dismounted. Unfortunately I didn’t understand that whenever someone did so, a changed() event was sent to all the scripts in the object, which caused Interesting Things to happen. So for a while, wanting to get shot of Interesting Things happening, I was contented by having seating and perms control handled by the one main script and one incredibly hairy-looking chunk of code.
Yes, that hairy chunk worked, but I was moving to a state-based system
Today I looked at it again and it occurred to me that, instead of four bulky and unpleasantly similar conditionals, I could have the seats asking: “Hey? That change? Was that me?” and send link messages appropriately.
And my code worked! I think there’s a little adjustment I could make which would be even more elegant, but that can wait for now. After all, for my next trick, I must not only roll the dice, but make it do something very important and cool.
You’ll find out soon.
There’s a game idea I’ve had for about 20 years, and for some reason (*cough* Phaser HTML5 game engine *cough*) I’m revisiting it. The basic play design, even the playfield, has remained surprisingly consistent, although now the humour is even more puerile and the art style draws inspiration from Roger Ramjet. Especially for the cutscenes.
You’re a hideous freak, running through underground caverns, fleeing a giant worm, oh and there’s creatures trying to turn you into sushi if you don’t fall in the yellow goo of death. Welcome to Discount Mayonnaise.
So, how is this game like Tetris?
The storyline is more elaborate than that of, say, Wouter “Aardappel” van Oortmersson's Cube, thanks to that bloody giant worm, but you still are involved in killing stuff. It’s just that you can’t kill or slow down that sodding worm, so you have to survive to the end where a handy bunker awaits you, collect coins to afford better armor and weapons, and generally avoid falling into the yellow goo. Maybe it’s the eponymous condiment.
Visually the game has that cartoonish, crazed edge that makes me think of a cross between Edmund McMillen (Gish, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac) and Jhonen Vasquez (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Invader Zim). Admittedly the graphics are overwhelmingly brown and yellow, but that just makes the baddies and pickups stand out.
The music by Hopeku is suitably frantic, and while not as ‘metal’ as the graphics might suggest, manages to do two things: first, it keeps up the anxiety levels, and secondly, doesn’t get in the way. Either that or the developers didn’t crank the volume to maximum like almost all do.
Sound effects are effective and alternate between meaty (the roars and splats of dying monsters) and strangely appropriate (e.g. the two-tone lift bell when you reach the end.)
Controls are as simple as you can get: Arrows or WASD to move, space to shoot or open menus, escape to close said menus. However, you can only shoot left or right, you can’t shoot up or down. Which is annoying at times when there’s a posse of monsters waiting for you.
Powerups are jackets (which shield and heal), gloves (which allow you to use damage and special pickups), and shoes (which affect your speed and jumping ability). Depending on the path ahead you’ll probably need to trade off powers - especially on level 12, where you need a lot of speed as opposed to jumping, if it’s your first attempt.
The first downside - and there are two - is that the game lags noticeably when there’s a lot going on - not a good thing in an action time-attack title that is this Hard. And yes, that’s Capital-H-italic-and-bold Hard. You’ll be crying with frustration by level 9 and ragequitting by level 12.
The second is that this game doesn’t have an autofire facility - and in this game thought goes out the window and the space bar gets a hammering. Which hurts after a while.
Despite this, the game is like Tetris. There’s no plot, simple controls, and most importantly, you keep going back to try again, because it’s a matter of pride.
