Integers, Nostalgia & Gitaroo

Quite possibly the oddest blog entry name I've ever extrapolated from the murky depths of my brain.

So, anyway, part one. Integers. Yesterday I participated in NT in a friendly "make a game within a set hour" competition. Amazingly, he actually bloody finished. His game was a jet pod-esque game by the name of Poorple (a portmanteau of his opinion of the game and the colour of the majority of objects in it). Mine was a game originally to be called 1234. I decided against that, it was boring. So I made it rhyme: "1234 LMV in Ecuador!". It's a kinda outright lie, I lost it in some empty village, but eeh. Anyway, I liked the concept of the game but wanted to make it just a little bit bigger. So I made it longer, added a tutorial/title and a finish, and a speedrun mode. Accompanying this, I renamed it to 1n23g4r - 1234 embedded near-legibly into the word "INTEGER". You pronounce the game name "Integer", not "Onentwothreegfourr", by the way. You can play it on YoYo Games or on Game Jolt.

Part two - nostalgia. This is a short bit. I just find it odd how certain songs trigger an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia, even if they're not really tied to an event. Tracks that do this to me include Kasabian - LSF, Deepest Blue - Give It Away, Jamelia - Thank You (you heard), Dodgy - Good Enough, and the song that triggered it today, one of my all time favourites - Portishead - Sour Times. If Dr Horrible's freeze ray was a real object, then he must've shot me in the back as I listened to it. Odd.

Part three - Gitaroo. About a week ago I got hold of a copy of Gitaroo Man on PS2. I have spend six goddamn years trying to get hold of a copy of this game, and it finally happened. As a direct result, I did the impossible. I broke my sleeping pattern even more. I was up until one in the afternoon playing the bloody game. (Subsequently I was down until seven in the evening eating pillow as my poor, decrepit body desperately tried to refuel my energy.) Now I'm stuck on it. God, Japanese studios really don't hold back on the difficulty of their games. Katamari Forever before it was one massive difficult pain in the arse.

NALGames.com V4 is finished. Sean Buller finished it off and fixed a few of the bugs, and I've filled in everything I could find. Unfortunately I've lost all trace of the two fonts I made, but they weren't very good so I guess it was just my computer doing me a favour. If you've any bug reports or want to see an editable up that isn't yet, comment with it. I'll forward bug reports to Sean, and I'll be 99% okay with adding pretty much any editable you want to the site.

Also in website-related news, me and Sean are creating a website for the somehow-unpublished Rebecca Smith. Her site's been a Synthasite jobbie for a while, and we decided that we'd make her a lovely big custom one to her design. I've also bought a .com domain for it and customised her a Blogspot skin based quite heavily on my own. She's highly appreciative of the work we've done so far which is a great motivation in making it. If you want to see her work, check out her current site at http://rebeccaclaresmith.com/ or her journal at http://rebeccaclaresmith.blogspot.com/ .

One more subject to converse about is how Clank needs to go and die. If you're a Twitter follower of mine you may know what that means. Basically, having played all the main Ratchet & Clank games and been in deep love with the series, A Crack In Time is like an OmniWrench to the gut. The platformingy-Ratchety sections were trimmed down in this one. The rest of the game is occupied by space sections (better than previous spaceship levels but there's too much of it), and Clank levels. Oh god, Clank Levels. I've always hated him. His tininess makes levels slow enough as it is, but the fact that all of his levels have the same tedious puzzles, boring location, and mind-blowing repetition just made me go "Oh f***, not again" every time I was thrown into the little isn't-funny-any-more piece of metal's shoes.

But yeah, that's all. I shall be entering the Game Jolt Jam tomorrow/in two days (depending on how you look at it), so while it's going on you should be able to find up-to-date information through:

Livestream (NALGames)

Twitter (NALGames)
Game Jolt's chatroom (NAL)

Skype (NAL-Games)

And that is all. G'bye folks!

~Andrew