The Clan of the Cave Bague

For anyone in our street who may have been awakened at 5:30 am by the sound of sleigh bells…… it wasn’t Santa, it was me and I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, it was freezing cold Worked a treat though – within fifteen minutes, half the bedroom lights in the street were on and Matthew’s flagging belief in Santa Claus has been bolstered for another year.

This year was undoubtedly the best Christmas ever – loads of lego and bionicles and dollies and stuff. Debbie likes the flower arranging kit & manual I bought her. She has yet to comment on the “teach yourself juggling” kit, though As for me – well, Metroid Prime 2 == Metroid Prime + better environments + better enemies + better puzzles + better interface == ACE BEST (in deKay USENET speak).

Tristan managed to clock up an hour or so on Paper Mario 2, but the poor lamb seems to have caught the RTS bug – he’s spent most of the holidays so far playing Age of Mythology on the iMac. It’s the start of the slippery slope – before long, he’ll be looking at my Civ 3 box in an interested manner Not a bad thing, I don’t think.

Merry Christmas one and all

Well well, it’s all going swimmingly. i think I’ve finally got my head around how the rooms as stored in the original version. I’ve been poring over Chris Wild’s disassembly of the Spectrum source, but it’s obviously intended for hyper-intelligent genii, rather than thick individuals like me Hopefully, I’ll get the map structures in place and ported out to an easier-to-code format over the next few days.

Well, folks, I have precisely 35 minutes of work left then I’m on holiday until the 5th of January. I’m off on a works outing to paint ceramics (!) this afternoon, then offski. Really looking forward to this holiday. The kids are all bouncy about it as well.

Harmony is off on a nursery outing today to see a puppet show.. She’s been yapping about it all weekend (in between bouts of bossing the boys about).

I’ve just come across the source code for Linux Lizards on an old ftp site For those not in the know (i.e. everyone), Lizards was the first game I ever wrote. The timestamp on the source code says November 10th 1995 – 11 days before my first child was born. The game was charming in an incredibly bad way and could very well be used as an example of how not to write games. It was written to run under SVGAlib on the Linux console and therefore had to be run as root, via sudo or by making the exe setuid root. Trouble is, it had an utterley stupid (on my part) exploit at the end – a system call to “clear” with no path, basically allowing anyone who could create a file named clear in the current dir to spawn a root shell. Oh dear. I’m older and wiser now

I’m going to port it to run under allegro cos I really REALLY want to see it again! It has knitted monsters!

The Onion | World’s Scientists Admit They Just Don’t Like Mice

Nearly there – this is the best bit of Christmastime is the anticipation of two weeks when not only am I off work but the clients are off as well This is the first time in twelve years that I won’t be on call during the Christmas period and I’m really looking forward to it.

I discovered the other evening that the best way to play Metroid Prime is on a seven foot wide display, produced by a data projector It’s scary.

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells Jingle all the fucking way. Oh what bastard fun it is to have PIPED FUCKING CHRISTMAS MUSIC PLAYING EVERY BLOODY PLACE YOU BASTARDING GO.

It’s christmas time. According to Woolworth’s shelf-stockers, it’s been christmas time since fucking SEPTEMBER. It was christmas before it was bloody halloween this year.

“But it’s nice,” someone might whine. “But it’s the season of giving.”

It’s the season of fucking GREED, you apologist fuck, I would undoubtedly answer. It’s the season of charging around Tescos stuffing your trolly with all the food in the fucking world just in case there’s a bastarding FAMINE, despite the fact that the larger shops close for TWO DAYS and the corner shops……. don’t bloody well close at all. JUST FUCKING STOP IT!

People are being driven to this crazed panic-buying like the pathetic lemmings they are by a media which constantly screams CONSUME at them. Why do you NEED to buy a month’s worth of shopping on the 23rd of December? Why do you NEED to have four palettes of Tennent’s fucking Lager (undrinkable yak-piss that it is) sticking out the top of your trolley? The answer? You bloody well don’t. There are places in the world where people live on the equivalent of a single christmas shopping trolley for the whole fucking YEAR if they’re lucky.

And what’s all this bollocks about Christmas cards? “Here’s a piece of paper to say that despite the fact that I haven’t spoken to you since the last christmas card, you’re still my bestest friend.” It’s only a matter of bloody time before Hallmark start printing boxing day cards, 17th of January cards and day-with-a-fucking-y-in-the-name cards.

Get this – a shop near my house sells a box of 100 cards for 69p. That’s less than a penny per card. It costs thirty times as much to post the fucker! If you really must send them, why not take the opportunity to actually visit one of these so called friends and drop the bloody thing off yourself. That way you might be able to avoid being a complete hypocritical loser.

On that note, it’s only fair to point out that anyone trying to hand deliver a card to me will be immediately stabbed in the bastard.

….but there are other remakes on the horizon as well – Wizards Lair, to name but one. I’m currently, amongst other things, working on getting the map up and running in DD.

My Nintendo DS arrived from Canada yesterday. It’s lovely Super Mario 64DS is essentially a reworking of Mario64 on the N64, with extra playable characters, a pile of minigames – single and wireless multiplayer, and some extra tricks up its sleeve. The map display on the bottom screen (also used for analogue touch control) works really well. The main thing that struck me about the console is the extremely rich and vivid stereo sound it puts out – particularly as it’s a handheld unit.

All I need now is for nintendo to do the same for Ocarina of Time and my life will be complete.

So, dual screens – one of which is touch sensitive, surprising stereo sound, wireless connectivity, and it’s not region locked, so importing one from the US now won’t stop you playing European games (when it launches next year). All in all, a fab little console.