Aside from work a lot of things happened during week 25. On Tuesday I started googling for underground live music in Beijing, and I read about Club 13, D-22 and a lot of other places. However, one thing in particular caught my eye: three German bands were playing at Yugong Yishan on that very Tuesday! Yugong Yishan is a reference to a Chinese proverb about a foolish man attempting – and succeeding – to remove a mountain. But that has very little to do with the actual club itself.

I got distinctive flashbacks to my high school years; the place was small and crowded, and the audio was decent but not brilliant. The bands were also decent and quite worth watching, even though I guess I won’t be telling my grandchildren about them in years to come. There were also lots of Germans present at the club. Apparently this was part of a Chinese-German cultural exchange thing.

I don’t recall the band names, but they were a pop band with a female singer, a pop-punk band with some young guys, and some celtic death metal to top it all off. Very interesting mix.

On Wednesday we decided to explore the Sanlitun bar area, starting with a visit to The Tree, a quite hidden and secretive little Belgian pub. They have an excellent athmosphere, cozy interior, good selection of beer and quite possibly one of the best stone-oven baked pizzas that I’ve ever tasted. And some quite expensive beer…

We moved on to the appropriately nicknamed Gauntlet – the tourist trap street of Sanlitun – where we got ripped off and ended up paying 80 RMB for a Heineken at one of the places. 80 RMB equals about 8 Euros. That’s one-a expensive-a beer-a! After that we learned to always look at the menu first. Another interesting thing that happened was that we got lured into a place that offered pole dancing. Unfortunately for us we forgot to check what gender…

Eventually a girl did go up on the stage as well, but by that time we were howling with laughter, thinking that we just had gotten screwed for the second time that night. Still, that pole dancing guy really was impressive!

A lot more restaurants and pubs followed that week, and we explored the Sanlitun area quite well. The 80’s night at Alfa is particularly worth mentioning! That place rocks. I also hadn’t had enough of live music so I watched a phenomenal reggae band at the MAO Live House, close to Houhai. Quite impressive – and well worth the 60 RMB entrance fee.

Afterwards I went on to Houhai, a bar district next to the lake from which it receives its name, and ended up chatting with a Danish troubadour.

“So, I guess you’re singing to earn a little extra at the side?”
“Oh.. Nah… I just get free booze.”

For some reason I decided to walk around the lake and ended up meeting a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) harassing a couple of guards.

I spent a couple of hours walking along with the banana, his wife and a friend of theirs, experiencing bad Vietnamese coffee and strange youths fishing for clams or something in the lake.

After a while I bade them a drunken farewell and made my way home.

The week ended with a trip to the Forbidden City. It’s a very impressive place…but somehow not as impressive as I expected. It’s a gigantic area covered with statues and elaborately painted houses; it’s strange to think that all of it belonged to the Emperor in days of yore, but it wasn’t varied enough to keep up my interest very long. Well worth a visit, but nothing compared to the Great Wall. I have high hopes that the Summer Palace will be more interesting, whenever I end up going there.

Some more shopping also ensued. 70 RMB for an 128 GB USB memory? Too good to be true?

Indeed, it was too good to be true. After filling it with 32 GB of data it crashed. I wonder what’s inside…

Hmm, looks like a USB controller chip of some sort. What does the flash chip say?

D’oh! The sneaky bastards! They removed all useful information from the flash chip!

Stay tuned for more Beijing stories in the following weeks.

Cynical Stuff has been perilously low on updates lately, and there have been good reasons: personal issues, social activities and a lot more to do at work. In fact, we’ve been quite busy preparing a partnership with a Chinese company – and I ended up getting to spend two months in Beijing this summer. This is the first post in which I tell of the adventures me and my two colleagues have in Beijing during June and July.

Upon landing in Beijing everyone gets their temperature taken even before getting off the plane. The fear of swine flu is rampant and no sick foreigners are wanted inside China. Unfortunately for me I traveled to China one day after I got back from a five-day hard rock festival, and I had a massive cold. I ended up examined by two doctors; they wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that I’ve been boozing and sleeping on the ground for five days, so of course I have a cold! But eventually I got to enter China if I promised to report to the nearest hospital as soon as I felt worse.

Yeah, I really planned on doing that.

The first night was spent at a vegetarian restaurant called Pure Lotus, owned by Buddhist monks. Very impressive presentation, but the food was nothing special. Still, that’s the first time I’ve seen something made out of mushrooms look like steak.

The following days were filled with bright sunshine, an unholy temperature, meetings and my first Peking duck. When Chinese people eat duck they don’t mess around – everything of the duck is eaten! Duck liver, duck feet, duck tongues…

I still feel ill when I think about it.

The hotel is located in the Central Business District of Beijing, in an area populated by foreigners and prosperous Chinese. The area is pretty enough, with a lovely view from my room at the ninth floor.

We did some brief sightseeing the first days, but a deep sense of desorientation is always present – Beijing is big with more inhabitants than the entire country of Sweden. Me and a colleague intended to go to the bar street in Sanlitun – but we somehow got completely lost and ended up walking around aimlessly for hours until we magically found ourselves back at the hotel again. We sure learned our lesson then: take a taxi when you want to go to a new place in Beijing!

On Saturday we were brought to the Great Wall by people from the company; a lovely experience that would have been infinitely more troublesome without their aid.

The Great Wall is impressive. There’s just no getting around it. Everything about it is impressive – the sheer size, the location, the surroundings, the history, the view, the crowds of hawkers trying to make you buy more-or-less useless trinkets. It’s also impressively hard work to climb the wall and its steep stairs. We were probably half dead after climbing to the top at the Mutianyu section.

But the view was worth it; excellent for posing and making an epic picture.

After all that hard work we still weren’t satisfied, so we visited Silk Market as well – a notorious tourist trap. You need clothes? Electronics? Trinkets? A locomotive? You can probably get everything there. We did some awful bargaining and stocked up on bare necessities like underwear and socks, leaving the major shopping for the following weeks. Then we decided to call it a week, and spent the rest of the time having relaxing stays at bars and restaurants.

A slow start on our Beijing trip, but stay tuned for exciting things – there’s a lot more to come!

Apparently, March 14 has been named the National Pi Day by the US congress. They think they’re being oh-so-clever with their choice of date. “(3/14, get it?)”

Phah, says I! If they wanted to go for nerdy humor they should have selected July 22 instead:

22/7 = 3.1428571428571428571428571428571

Pi = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795

Sure, it’s not perfect. But it’s damn close!

This year has been full of good games so far. Not only did I get caught playing Eternal Eden; on a whim I decided to try out Totem Tribe by Enkord as well. And boy do I regret that. Not because the game is bad, but because it’s too darn addictive!

After reading the description I didn’t have very high expectations on the game:

“High adventure, real time strategy and hidden object gameplay come together for the first time in Totem Tribe.”

Hidden object gameplay. Meh.

Still, eager to broaden my horizon, I decided to give the game a go – and I was pleasantly surprised. The game is divided into different islands on which you have to perform various tasks ranging from finding objects strewn all over the island, to building your village and defeating various kinds of enemies á la classical real-time strategy games. It’s easy to suspect that a casual real-time strategy game would fall into a single type of RTS. Tower defense style, or build-stuff-and-overwhelm-your-opponent style, for example. The beauty of Totem Tribe is that both these gameplay styles are included – and many more as well, as there’s great variety between the tasks given.

The RTS part is in general fairly simple but surprisingly fun despite that. There are lots of units, lots of different tasks, and lots of things to see and do. And most importantly – for a game I play as a diversion, for relaxation – it’s hard to lose. Not impossible, though. So don’t get too cocky, thinking that you’ll breeze through every single island of the game. Especially not the last stage of the game. Sweet mercy, the difficulty ramps up incredibly for that one!

In fact, that’s one of the game’s negative sides. I dislike backtracking or redoing things in casual games – I want to see steady progress. I really hated having to restart an island in Totem Tribe, the few times it happened. It’s hard to balance loss/gain/challenge/boredom but I have a suspicion that it could have been done a bit better.

Another annoying thing is the hidden object parts. Trust me, I was pleasantly surprised by those too, but I still found myself grinding my teeth now and then as I found myself missing an orange, or a single bleeding turtle shell that was nowhere to be found. I really really really hated the fact that I didn’t even have a hint button, or some way to purchase (maybe with some in-game currency) hints, or anything at all to guide me toward the missing items.

On a final note I have to mention that the game is gorgeous and sounds very nice indeed, and that I’m very pleased with my gaming experience – despite a few irritating moments.

Graphics

Good graphics, nice sprites. Really, there’s nothing that I feel that I have to complain about.

4/5

Sound

To be honest I can’t recall the music at the time of this writing…but I think that it serves as evidence that it is integrated properly and works quite well.

3/5

Gameplay

Build stuff! Explore! Battle! Find hidden things! There’s a lot to do here, and I like it.

4/5

Addictiveness

I was seriously debating with myself what grade this game should get. It’s very addictive, but also annoying at times. Either way, the game is highly recommended.

4/5

Technical notes

The only annoyance was the usual problem with dual displays and fullscreen mode. Running the game in fullscreen messes up the display on the other screen. One of these days I’m going to have to look into the reason for that – many games I try display the same behaviour.

Wildhollow, the quirky indie adventure game featuring weird humor and bizarre animals to take care of, is slowly starting to come together at long last. The minigames are still not up to par but at least the game is now possible to complete. I still have a few side quests to wrap up, but the main storyline is written and playtested. Up to, and including, the endgame that twists and turns a little but in the end settles into a nice and cozy happy ending.

Here are some tiny screenshots from the late stages of the game. If you’re really sensitive toward spoilers you might want to avert your eyes now. Nothing critical is revealed – I’m just offering a friendly warning in case you really want everything to be a surprise.

Yeah, let’s get it oooon!

I think I smell some fightin’ comin’ up!

Breaking the fourth wall? Guilty as charged!

I went for a very basic credits screen. I think it works, though.

Now, as soon as the minigames are functioning properly and the animal tending sub-game is in order I think the game is just about ready for release. I still wonder how it will be received, and if it will be appropriate for portals. Time will tell I guess.

Stay tuned for more information!

In my brief career as a hobbyist independent game developer/producer I’ve encountered one area that I like particularly. It’s not the tired old seeing-the-whole-thing-come-to-life cliché, or even the watching-the-royalties-come-in part; no, instead I’ve come to realize that the best part of developing a game is writing the dialogue. Writing humorous dialogue in particular.

I’ve come to realize that my English is fairly decent for a non-native speaker and that I write dialogue in a fluid and relaxed style, filling my characters’ sentences with wit and occasional panache. Oh, and I’m modest too! But all is not well in the land of writing… Even if I disregard the fact that my storylines are haphazardly and organically evolved rather than thought through and planned (I need to work on that), there’s another problem that’s slowly starting to become more and more opaque:

My sense of humor isn’t good enough.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m not on some self-doubting angst trip here. I know full well that I have my brilliant moments and that I produce good stuff. But lately I’ve started to analyze the jokes in sitcoms and I see no reason whatsoever that independent games shouldn’t have the same intelligent jokes that sitcoms have.

“Did I hear you right,” a few of you exclaim. “Did you just say that sitcoms have intelligent jokes? Dude, it’s just a bunch of TV shows! Mass-produced garbage!”

I disagree! I’ve plowed through a number of complete series, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the brilliant jokes I’ve seen. Malcolm in the Middle, Seinfeld, 30 Rock, Scrubs, The Office, Two and a Half Men, Frasier – there are heaps of excellent comedy series one really ought to analyze if one wants to become a better humor writer for games. Before you question my sanity and/or taste in humor, and claim that shows like Family Guy or Saturday Night Live should also be part of the list of series to analyze, I have to mention that there are a few reasons I chose the series I chose as examples.

• First of all, the shows I mentioned have a great sense of continuity. There are references to earlier episodes, and the shows rely on a strong cast of well-known characters to bring forth the humor. In fact, a lot of the humor stems from knowledge of the characters. This is all very suitable for a game.

• Secondly, the shows mentioned have a great sense of inner logic. They may be surreal at times, but they follow more-or-less believable plots and act consistently and rationally within the internal boundries. One might argue that, for example, Family Guy also acts rationally within its defined set of rules: it has a rule that states that it will include random absurdities. But that’s more of a meta-rule in my view – it basically states that “the rule of the show is that it must break the rules” and I prefer to not judge that as rational reasoning and internal consistency. Even if it technically is.

• Thirdly, the series all rely on well-known settings. The hospital in Scrubs, Charlie’s place in Two and a Half Men and so on. I find this very suitable for humor in independent games where budget constraints makes it impossible to constantly include new locations.

• Finally, the jokes are often very verbal in the shows mentioned. Verbal humor relies more on good writing than on an actor’s individual quirks and delivery. This is a pretty weak point since most sitcoms do rely on individual actors, but I find that a lot of the humor is in the dialogue itself despite this. One just have to disregard the gags that aren’t applicable.

However, one thing that’s common not only for the shows that I mentioned, but for almost all good ones is that they aren’t written by a single person. The reason I feel that my writing is particularly inadequate in comparison probably stems from the fact that I’m a single person trying to come up with stuff – I lack the synergy of having a bunch of other people to bandy ideas with. If I want my games to be better I just might have to look for someone to co-write dialogue and storylines with.

Who knows, maybe I’ll find someone in time for Spandex Force 2.

The new year is upon us, and despite the fact that it’s been a pretty awful year so far there have been a few good points too. A few glimpses of light to brighten this dark and dreary January. One of those lights is an excellent CRPG by Blossomsoft, called Eternal Eden. “What’s a CRPG,” I hear you wonder. It’s short for Console Role-Playing Game, and essentially means “kinda like the good ol’ RPG games you played on 16-bit systems like the SNES.” You can also call this JRPG if you wish. I don’t care.

In this game you assume the role of young Noah, an inhabitant in the eternal land of Eden. Together with your friend Downey and other assorted heroic types you roam the obligatory two dimensions (there’s always a light world and a dark world isn’t there?) and try to set things straight after someone messed things up by eating the forbidden fruits whom the enigmatic Father explicitly told everyone to leave well alone. The game is obviously quite inspired by Christian mythology and the Bible, and as an atheist fascinated with these things, that is exactly what drew me to the game in the first place.

Unfortunately Eternal Eden doesn’t follow up on the promise of religious interpretation very well; I was let down a bit by the common, secular storyline that emerged from this extremely promising beginning. Maybe I’m simply missing some of the more religious points, but it feels that Blossomsoft missed out on an opportunity to create something deeper and more thought-provoking. Still, what the game delivers is a well-designed and interesting RPG experience that lasted some 15-16 hours. Much of it was filled with battles and the usual leveling up, but there was surprisingly little forced level grinding – not a single time did I have to backtrack and fight stuff in order to become stronger.

One of the reason for this is that there are no random battles. Hallelujah! Praise the lawd and all that jazz. All the enemies are clearly visible and avoidable if one chooses. Much appreciated move. What this means is that the game is more streamlined, more simple in a way since the designer placed enough enemies so that you’ll always be prepared for what comes next as long as you fight your alloted fights. But it also means that you always see how many fights you have ahead of you – at least in the current area. This may not seem like a big deal but to me it felt like an enormous relief to be able to plan how many of the sodding sasquatches I had to slay before I got to where I wanted.

There are other neat things about the game. The graphics are good (although fairly simple compared to games like FF IV, FF V, FF VI, etc), the sound is good (but nothing special), and there are a few interesting minigames like bounty hunting and turtle hunting. Yes, turtle hunting. You go around an island looking for turtles. It sounds insane, but it really is fun! I never found all those stealth turtles though…

The most important thing about the game is that it has that elusive addictive quality, though. The areas never become too big or long-winded, and there is always more to see just around the corner. The scope of the game is much smaller than FF IV or FF V or FF VI (yes yes, I use them as examples again), but I most definitely think that that’s one of its major strengths as well. Because of its limited length this is a game I wanted to buy and finish, unlike most RPGs I’ve played lately. The relative shortness of the game might even be why it felt so addictive – it wasn’t stuffed with too much filler content. Kudos to you for that, Blossomsoft.

Graphics

Good graphics and special FX. Even though the resolution is higher than that of SNES RPGs, the latter win in comparison by virtue of better animation, design and variation.

3/5

Sound

Decent music, although a bit synthetic. The sound effects were okay. In the end I chose to not have the audio on throughout the whole game.

2/5

Gameplay

If you like the standard JRPG/CRPG deal you’ll definitely like this.

4/5

Addictiveness

Could it be? Could this be the first game I review to get a full score in addictiveness? Indeed it is! I couldn’t put the game down. I rarely buy games, but this was well worth the dough.

5/5

Technical notes

Eternal Eden was made with Game Maker or RPG Maker or some other kind of engine like that, but it’s not very noticeable – it performed well and felt like a solid game. One annoyance is that I’d like a larger window, more resolution choices or a scalable window – I want to play windowed, but the default resolution is just too small on my laptop! Also, when I alt-tab the game is paused (good!) but that music just keeps on playing (bad!)

My Tribe by Grubby Games is an island simulator in which a tribe of people are stranded on an island and have to learn how to survive. This includes gathering food, building shelter, chopping down trees and harvesting rocks (um…) among other things. I’ve debated with myself whether or not to call it a blatant clone of Virtual Villagers, but there really is no getting around it – My Tribe is a blatant clone. But it’s also a very good game.

The graphics are adorable. The intro was very cute and I like the look in general – a slightly more painted look than the standard CG colored or pixel art look often present in casual games. The animation also receives some bonus points as it’s fluid and pleasant, and the game screen is full of life. Butterflies and stuff fluttering around everywhere. Very nice. At times it’s hard to differentiate between objects one can interact with and a colorful bird that’s just decoration, but that’s a small price to pay for a lively background. The audio is also quite pleasant, and I was impressed by the speech in the tutorials. Nice touch.

The gameplay quite simply is fun. There’s a lot to do, a lot to explore, and you always have the urge to solve the next mystery or see what the next technology level will bring. While My Tribe is a ripoff of Virtual Villagers, it does bring some new things such as random islands instead of just a static one. Also, the island is a bit bigger and more dynamic – chopping down trees cause them to disappear and you have the option to plant new ones as well. In general there are more ways to affect the environment than in Virtual Villagers.

After a while I started feeling that the island was limited, though. I think that there needs to be more stuff to do – a bigger set of things to interact with. I may not be the ideal person for these kinds of simulators but I feel that there ought to be more to do all the time. Sure, I need to let my little islanders work in order to improve their skills, but I’d like to have minigames to play at the same time. Something to occupy my restless mind with. The game is still fun, but I can’t concentrate on it since there’s often nothing to do. Which brings me to another aspect of the game…

The game is progressing even when it’s not running, so while you’re away your islanders are still chopping up wood and fishing and researching. This is a neat idea, but also a very frustrating one: you need to remember to play now and then in order to not wipe out your entire tribe. I left the game a couple of days and feared that white skeletons would greet me upon my return, but I was pleasantly surprised. They had managed to take care of themselves and had given me an excrement-load of science points to boot! Great! I assumed that the game wasn’t all that keen on that death thing, so I got cocky and left the game a couple of more days.

Disaster! Tombstones littered the island. My once proud tribe was reduced to its bare minimum. I did find two survivors though: Jeremy and Hannah were starving but mysteriously still alive. Also, a young girl was alive as well. I wonder if this is a contingency plan by the developers? “That lame dude left all his islanders to die! Well, we’d better make sure that he has enough to breed more people at least.” If so, it’s a brilliant idea. However, it doesn’t work in practice.

This is where the game enters a downward spiral. With so few people left it’s no fun to play the game, which means that you won’t be arsed to start up the game very often. Which of course means that the tribe won’t expand very quickly – or at all. In the end I had a tribe consisting of 54 year old Xavier, an aged woman and a young girl. It’s impossible to breed more people once they are too old, so these few are the remnants of a once proud budding civilization now destined for extinction.

By the way, when you click on an islander you can see his or her thoughts. I kept seeing “Xavier is very happy to live on the island” and “Xavier thinks this island has no equal.” No shit. Here’s a guy who’s lived a nice and cozy life alone with two women on a deserted island. You old goat, you.

Finally I have to mention that despite the game’s flaws it’s strangely addictive. My current tribe is doomed but I have the urge to start a new one – see if I can get things right this time. The game is still a bit limited, but fun nonetheless.

Graphics

Quite nice! Good animations and lovely painted look in the intro.

4/5

Sound

Nice music, and good sound effects. Extra credit for the voice acting even though the girl sounds smug. You biatch! Don’t smirk at me while you tell me how to play!

3/5

Gameplay

My Tribes is fun, there’s no getting around that. A bit lacking in variety and things to do on the island.

3/5

Addictiveness

I want to make my tribe great! I want to solve the mysteries! I want to explore lots of islands! I guess that means that the game is pretty addictive?

4/5

Technical notes

The game started up in fullscreen and did awful things to my two-screen setup. Everything was restored fine when I put it in windowed mode, though, so no harm done aside from messing up my desktop brightness. I like the loading screen – “sailing to your island” and a boat moving to the right to indicate the progress instead of a simple loading bar.

Edit: As was mentioned by Olivia in the comments below, the game can be set in slow mode if one intends to leave it for a while. The problem for me is that I never know in advance if I’ll be gone for a few days – I play games when I feel like it and have the time to spare, so it’s not always easy to predict these things.

I went through my X: drive today in search of old screenshots of Might and Magic games (don’t ask), and I found these hilarious newspaper clippings. Thoughtful as I am I thought I’d share them with you:

Ironically, if line six is to be disregarded then the instructions for how to read the notice should be disregarded too. I smell a paradox.

Sooty is a legend. He’s become part of my standard repertoire of drunken anecdotes. “He slept for two days” is just the icing on the cake. But no matter how funny Sooty is, I found something even better:

Sweet mother of the f-word, I can’t stop laughing at that. It has to be a fake…but if it isn’t, it’s the best captioned picture ever.

It’s December 20 and this could be the least Christmassy Christmas ever. No Christmas songs playing, no snow, no candy or xmas foods, no Christmas beer at home, no presents planned (except for one) – this place isn’t exactly bursting with holiday cheer. So, what better way to make things brighter than to create a little Christmas card from KarjaSoft to you all.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year well in advance! Just in case I forget to mention it later.

Now I’d better get back to my cactus tea and a that stupid movie I was watching.