2456: Miku in the Clouds

I’ve been playing some of Hatsune Miku Project Diva X recently. I opted for the Vita version because I enjoyed the previous installments in this series the most in handheld form, and when I tried the PS4 demo version, the timing calibration was so far off that it was borderline impossible to play.

So far I’ve been enjoying it a great deal. It’s an interesting new structure compared to previous installments in the series in that it… well, has a structure. Previous games in the Project Diva series were all business, presenting you with a list of songs and a selection of difficulty levels to try them on, gradually unlocking new songs as you completed previous ones but never really having a sense of overall “coherence” — they were pure arcade rhythm action experiences, in other words.

Project Diva X, meanwhile, takes a much more formal structure from the outset, in effect acting as an interactive tutorial to concepts important to the game as a whole and locking off things that the player isn’t “ready” for yet. Series veterans may find this a bit frustrating — though the Free Play option unlocks quite early — but newcomers to the series in particular will doubtless find it a lot more accessible, plus there’s a rather charming story to tie it all together, giving the whole experience a significant injection of personality between the songs. (During the songs, one can never say that Project Diva lacked personality; in between them, however, was another matter.)

The basic structure for Project Diva X’s early game sees you (as “you”) collaborating with Miku in an attempt to restore power to the various “clouds” and consequently enable Miku and her friends to remember how to perform. It’s lightweight fluff, of course, but it does a good job of tying things together, and also has the added benefit of grouping songs into categories according to their overall character.

New to Project Diva X is a gear system, where you can equip Miku or one of the other Vocaloids in various costumes and accessories, with a suitably coordinated outfit gracing you with an “aura bonus” and consequent increase to the “voltage” (score) you generate during a song. New gear is unlocked in several ways: accessories can be gained after a song if you filled the voltage bar at least once, while “modules” (full-on costumes) are acquired by successfully completing the “Chance Time” section of a song — this is accompanied by a satisfying magical girl-style transformation sequence.

This gear system is, I imagine, what will give Project Diva X a lot of its longevity along with the addictive high-score chasing of previous installments. There’s something very satisfying about unlocking new items and producing new ensembles for Miku and the gang, and there’s an element of loot-whoring gameplay about the whole thing thanks to varying degrees of rarity on the items.

On top of all this, there’s a relationship-building metagame with Miku and the other Vocaloids where you can provide them with gifts and build up your affinity with each of them. This is a bit pared back from previous Project Diva games, in which you effectively hung out with the characters in their rooms and triggered various events according to what you put where, but there are still numerous special events to discover by providing the right gifts to the right Vocaloids.

Overall, I’ve been enjoying Project Diva X a lot. It remains to be seen if it has the same “legs” as its enormously addictive predecessors — whether it has a decent “endgame”, in other words — but so far it’s been a blast, and I can confidently recommend it to any fans of rhythm action games.

2455: Not-So-Super Max

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I finally got around to finishing the last episode of Life is Strange yesterday. My final feelings about the whole thing were… overall positive, but a little mixed in a number of areas. Personally speaking, I didn’t feel it was the utter masterpiece most critics made it out to be; in fact, there were a number of aspects in the final episode that I found fundamentally unsatisfying and downright awkward. More on those in a moment; let’s talk more generally.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Continue reading “2455: Not-So-Super Max” →

2454: Spooks and Spectres

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I finally got around to starting the Blackwell miniseries of adventure games this evening. These are some games that I’ve had in my GOG.com library for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to playing before.

So far as I’m concerned, the Blackwell games have a good pedigree, as they come from Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, who produced the subject of the very first Squadron of Shame SquadCast, The Shivah. While The Shivah was a little lacking in production values (as, too, is Blackwell — at least, its first episode is, anyway; I can’t yet speak for the subsequent ones) it told an interesting story and was a good adventure game to boot.

The Blackwell series centres around protagonist Rosangela Blackwell, last of her family line. Both her aunt and her grandmother succumbed to a mysterious mental illness, and Rosa discovers that she may be at risk too. What the psychiatrists didn’t know, however, is that the Blackwell family has a legacy: a ghost named Joey, who has been stuck in between this life and the next for the last forty years, and who has found himself “attached” to each generation of Blackwell women to fulfil some sort of greater purpose. Rosa is the latest to discover the existence of Joey, and is determined to get to the bottom of who he is and why he has been haunting her family.

The Blackwell Legacy, the first installment in the series, is largely concerned with establishing the characters and the setting. Joey isn’t present until a good halfway through the storyline; prior to that, we simply see life through Rosa’s eyes as she learns what little there is to know of her family’s mysterious apparent mental illness. Once Joey shows up, however, the story becomes much more supernatural in nature: he and Rosa team up to help restless spirits move on to the next world.

The Blackwell Legacy opens with Rosa investigating the suicide of an NYU student. It gradually comes to light that she and two of her friends had been meddling in the occult — did these people not pay any attention to horror movies? — and consequently, two out of the group of three had ended up dead. The girl Rosa was originally sent to investigate passed on with no regrets, it seems, but one of her friends finds herself stuck between realities, unable to accept that she is dead, while the third attempted suicide and failed, ending up in the same psychiatric hospital where Rosa’s aunt spent her twilight years.

The story strikes a good balance between “real world” investigation and the supernatural; in order to help the restless spirit move on, Rosa has to research the people involved and what they were up to. The game features a cool “clues” system where Rosa makes notes of important people, places and things in her notebook, and these can then all be brought up as topics of conversation when questioning witnesses. There’s also an Ace Attorney Investigations-style system whereby Rosa can “connect” pairs of these clues to produce a third clue based on her conclusion, and indeed most of the puzzles in the game revolve around doing this, then asking someone about it.

The Blackwell Legacy was a short but enjoyable adventure that I enjoyed a lot — it certainly made me curious to see where the story goes in its subsequent installments. Its low-res pixel art with jerky scrolling brings to mind the old LucasArts games, it had some good, atmospheric music throughout and the voice acting was decent — albeit done with poor equipment and software, a criticism which could also be levelled at The Shivah. Joey is particularly prone to shouting into the mic and performing with particularly plosive plosives, for example, while other voiceovers have a great deal of background noise, presumably as a result of boosting quieter voices up in volume a bit too much.

The game was also a bit prone to crashing to desktop — I’m not sure what it is about adventure games that make them some of the most crashy games on the planet, but I swear, of all the games that have crashed on my PC in the last few years, most of them have been adventure games — but fortunately there’s an autosave system that prevents losing too much progress.

Overall, I enjoyed The Blackwell Legacy a lot and I’m looking forward to playing its sequels. If you’re a fan of classic late ’90s-era point-and-clickers, you could do far worse than check it out.

2453: A Meeting of Generations

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After a bit of fiddling around and faffing (and eventually giving up on the OSX side of things) I managed to get a 35-year old Atari 800XL talking to a modern-day Windows computer. Not only talking, but even reading and writing files back and forth.

The secret to this black magic is twofold. Firstly, you need a bit of kit called an SIO2PC module, which converts the signal from the Atari computer’s SIO hardware — used for communicating with peripherals such as disk drives and cassette decks — into something which can be interpreted by modern systems, since SIO was a proprietary format and cable type. The SIO2PC module I had was serial-based, so I then had to run it into a modern computer using an RS232 to USB converter cable, since many computers these days don’t come with serial COM ports as standard. The cable effectively sets up a “virtual” COM port via USB, tricking the serial device into thinking it’s plugged into an actual serial port on the PC.

Once you’ve got that bit sorted, you need some software. There are three pieces of software I’ve experimented with today. Firstly, SIO2OSX just didn’t work at all. I don’t know if I didn’t set it up correctly or if the Mac simply didn’t have the appropriate drivers to set up the virtual serial port — though said virtual port certainly appeared for selection — but eventually I gave up and switched to my laptop PC, which has been gathering dust for a little while now.

Second up was Atari Peripheral Emulator, or APE for short. This Windows-based tool emulates a stack of Atari disk drives, printers and modems, allowing you to mount disk images and (theoretically, anyway) boot from them. I had trouble getting this part of the program to function correctly, but what did work was a separate application distributed as part of the APE package called ProSystem. This is a much simpler tool that allows you to either “rip” Atari disks to .ATR disk image files, or take an .ATR disk image and write it to a physical 5.25″ disk to use in the Atari disk drive. While APE failed to do what it was supposed to, ProSystem had no problems whatsoever, reading from and writing to my ageing Atari 1050 disk drive with no problems whatsoever.

The final tool I tried was AspeQt, which is still in active development. AspeQt is pretty much an open-source tool that does most of the things APE does — APE is shareware — but I found it to work much more reliably than APE for simply mounting disk images and using the PC as a “virtual disk drive” for the Atari. AspeQt also has an excellent feature that I was specifically looking for: the ability to extract individual files from .ATR disk images and save them as standalone files on the PC filesystem. It even automatically converts from ATASCII — Atari’s proprietary take on the now-standard ASCII character set — to standard ASCII, meaning that files such as AtariWriter documents can be easily transferred to PC for dumping into other applications with all the requisite line breaks and suchlike intact rather than being replaced with special characters.

My current Atari setup, then, is a bit of a kludgey mess, using ProSystem to rip and write complete disk images and AspeQt to mount and use individual files on a disk or image — ideally APE would act as an integrated solution for all of this — but it works, by God. And, boy, was it exciting to hear the 1050 snark into life when I clicked a button on my Windows PC. Just to prove it really worked, I downloaded a disk image for the AtariAge forums’ current High Score Club games and wrote it to a blank disk. A few minutes later, I had a bootable floppy disk that you’d never know I’d downloaded from the Internet running on original Atari hardware. Black magic, I tell ye.

Getting all this working opens up all manner of exciting possibilities, and I’m sure I’ll be exploring them more in the coming weeks.

2452: Dark Cloud, Revisited

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I first played Level-5’s Dark Cloud midway through the PlayStation 2’s lifecycle. I recall enjoying it enough to finish it, but finding it lacking in a few areas compared to some other role-playing games that were around at the time. Most of the criticisms I had of Dark Cloud were addressed by its sequel (known as Dark Chronicle here in Europe for some reason) but, regardless, I still have fond memories of the original.

Looking for something to fill the gap between now and Final Fantasy XV at the end of next month, I remembered that I’d bought several PS4 revamps of Level-5 games when they were part of a sale ages ago, but never booted them up. (Specifically, I got Dark Cloud, Dark Chronicle and Rogue Galaxy, the latter of which I’ve never played at all.) Since I played the demo of Dragon Quest Builders earlier in the week and heard it compared favourably to Dark Cloud and its sequel, I decided to fire up Dark Cloud and take another look, a good (probably) ten years or more after I played the original.

Interestingly, having played it for a couple of hours this evening, I’m finding myself liking it a lot more than when I played it the first time around. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of my tastes changing (which, although I know they have a bit, haven’t drifted that far away from what I enjoyed 10+ years ago) or if Dark Cloud has just aged very gracefully, but either way, I like it a lot.

For those who weren’t around for Dark Cloud first time around for one reason or another, here’s the gist. You play a teenage boy who looks a bit like a non-elfin Link in a poncho, who is a silent protagonist for the course of the adventure. In the opening moments of the game, your village is destroyed by a Dark Genie which, moments before, we saw had been unleashed on the world by an obviously evil gentleman in an M.Bison uniform and sporting a spectacular moustache. Somehow, you manage to survive through a windmill falling on top of you as you rescue your childhood friend and obvious love interest Paige from certain death.

Awakening to find your village nothing more than a bare patch of land, you start hearing voices. Specifically, the Fairy King decides you are his chosen one, and blesses you with the magical gem Atlamillia, which apparently will enable you to rebuild the world. Conveniently, the Fairy King explains, he managed to seal away all the people and buildings of the world in magical spheres called Atla to prevent them from certain annihilation at the hands of the Dark Genie, but unfortunately this wasn’t enough to stop them from being scattered all over the place, with most of them rather inconveniently rolling in to local dungeons.

What then unfolds is a rather unusual adventure that alternates between action-RPG dungeon crawling in randomly generated maps, and a top-down building arrangement game called the Georama. The latter is sometimes described as a “sim”, but it’s not anything like as deep as something like ActRaiser or Dragon Quest Builders — all you have to do is find the component parts of each building, plop them down on the map, talk to the residents to figure out the right part of the map to put their building in (and which direction to face, in some cases) and then your job is done. In other words, there’s no actual “management” required beyond making sure everything is in the right place, making it more of a puzzle than a simulation.

The Georama does give the dungeon crawling a unique twist, however — as well as finding treasures that your own character can use, you’re also finding people and places, and in turn these can unlock new facilities for you to make use of when you return to the surface. Once you rebuild the Odd Gaffer’s Buggy, for example, he’ll start selling you items. Rebuild Paige’s house and her father will teach you to fish. Even seemingly incidental houses will reward you with special events and items when you complete and place them correctly.

The Georama gameplay gives Dark Cloud an interesting sense of personality. Because you’re quite literally rebuilding these people’s lives from nothing, you get to know them quite well; far from being the random, anonymous NPCs you get wandering around towns in more conventional role-playing games, Dark Cloud’s characters all have names and personalities. Some of them get along with one another; some of them don’t (in which case you’ll need to make sure their houses are far apart!).

Meanwhile, the dungeon crawling, although action-based, has plenty of aspects to get your teeth into. Your main concern, at least early in the game, is the game of “press your luck” you play with your supplies, because not only do you have to make sure your HP don’t run out, you also have to keep yourself watered and ensure that your weapon doesn’t break. This latter aspect is of particularly key importance, because weapons can be customised and level up through use, meaning if you break one it can potentially be absolutely heartbreaking.

The weapon growth and customisation system takes the place of a traditional experience and levels system. Instead, each weapon has its own level, with most capping at 5. Once they’ve capped, however, you can turn them into a gem that can be attached to another weapon in order to transfer some of the capped weapon’s statistics and attributes. When the new weapon is upgraded, it absorbs the gem and becomes far more powerful than it would have been through just upgrading alone. Ultimately it becomes possible to construct some formidable weapons, making it all the more important that you don’t inadvertently snap the blade on a passing rock monster.

Dark Cloud is charming and enjoyable, and there are still relatively few games quite like it; even Dragon Quest Builders itself is a distinct experience, focusing more on the town-building and crafting side of things than dungeon crawling. I think I made a good choice in revisiting it, and I’m looking forward to playing some more soon.

2451: GTA Online: Simultaneously Amazing and Shit

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There are few things in this world that are simultaneously quite as amazing and quite as shit as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto Online.

Every few months, I boot it up to see what’s been added, and there’s always been some pretty significant new content bolted on for free since I last tried. I get excited to try it, maybe even actually get to try it… and then before long I remember why I’m not playing Grand Theft Auto Online all day every day.

The most recent additions to the game — or new to me, anyway — are the Stunt races and the Motorcycle Clubs. The former provides a series of TrackMania-esque building blocks for track designers to construct physically improbable/impossible tracks using the game world as a backdrop, while the latter offers a new means of progression for small groups of up to eight players.

I haven’t yet raised enough money to purchase a hideout for a Motorcycle Club yet, which is why I was doing the Stunt Races — conveniently, there’s a trigger point for one right outside my in-game apartment. And I’ve been having an absolute blast participating in these races, which make the best of Grand Theft Auto’s exaggerated vehicle physics with lots of jumps, switchbacks, corkscrews and all manner of other funtimes — plus, of course, the inevitable playing dirty that tends to come with the territory.

This was all absolutely great until the “host” of the session either went away from their keyboard or crashed, leaving their game logged in but not responding. Not only did this mean that we had to wait a long time between every event because the host wasn’t there to manually press the “start event” button, but it also meant that at the end of one session in particular, everyone was left stuck as the results screen with no means of leaving the event or quitting back to the free-roaming mode short of completely quitting the game altogether then logging back in again. And with Grand Theft Auto V’s astronomical initial load time, this is not a particularly appealing prospect.

I’ve run into this problem before, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been fixed. Actually, no I’m not, because Grand Theft Auto Online is still missing a variety of features that a lot of other online games have had for a very long time.

Chief among the missing features is a “party” system whereby you and other players can form a group that sticks together, regardless of whether you’re doing events or free-roam stuff. The game does keep people from the same event together if they vote to continue on to a new map, but if anyone chooses to exit to free-roam mode, they’re immediately separated from all of the people they were just playing with.

Couple this with the fact that setting up a “friends only” game is a faff and a half, involving booting up Grand Theft Auto V’s single-player game, then entering Grand Theft Auto Online from there — there’s no means of starting a “friends only” session once you’re already in Grand Theft Auto Online — and you have an online experience that is a real mess, particularly if you want to play with friends. And for those who think what I just described isn’t a particular faff, you obviously haven’t endured GTAV’s load times.

It’s kind of baffling how these features simply haven’t been added to the game since it was launched, because I can’t be the only one keenly feeling their absence. And it’s frustrating, because the activities on offer in Grand Theft Auto Online are many, varied and a whole lot of fun. It’s just such a monumental pain to get it working properly that I often give up out of sheer exasperation rather than wanting to stick with it.

GTA Online should be an absolute masterpiece. And it has the potential to be just that. But short of a fundamental revamp of how the whole online functionality works, it’s doomed to remain an admirably fun and varied, yet ultimately frustrating and irritating experience that, for my money at least, often ends up feeling like more trouble than it’s worth.

2450: Original Hardware

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Emulators are great and all, but there’s something indescribably wonderful about playing old games — or using old applications — on their original hardware.

I hooked up my Atari 800XL to an old-fashioned CRT TV/monitor today, attached the 1050 disk drive and booted up a few old favourites from my childhood. And it’s been marvellous.

One thing that’s struck me with the retro scene of today is that you often hear the same game names coming up time after time, and they’re more often than not console titles. For my money, while the consoles of the ’80s were technologically superior — most notably with regard to scrolling and sprite work, which were done in hardware as opposed to the home computers, which required extensive poking around in RAM to accomplish the same goal — the games were far, far more creative.

I guess this is kind of a reflection of the situation we have today, where all the blockbusters come out on consoles, but the truly creative, weird indie games tend to hit PC first and perhaps consoles a bit later if we’re lucky and/or the developers feel like jumping through Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo’s respective hoops to publish their titles. The only difference is that home computers of today are regarded as the pinnacle of gaming technology, while the consoles represent the “affordable” option.

One thing I find especially interesting about the Atari 8-Bit scene in particular — and I’m sure it’s the same for the Spectrum and Commodore 64; I just don’t know those systems nearly as well — is that some of the most creative, interesting games were put out for free(ish) as type-in listings for magazines. All Atari systems could run the programming language Atari BASIC: early models had it on a ROM cartridge, while later models had it built in so that you’d just turn the machine on and it was ready to obey your every command.

The fact that absolutely everyone had access to this easy to learn (albeit not very efficient or speedy) programming language meant that magazines were able to publish complete programs sent in by readers or composed by staff members. Type the program listings into your computer using BASIC, save them to disk or cassette and voila: a free game or application for you!

Because these games weren’t beholden to the fickle whims of publishers — not that even commercial games were particularly restricted in this regard at the time — the authors were free to be as batshit crazy as they wanted with them. And oh, they were: some of the greatest games on the Atari are some of the most abstract, in which the answer to the question “why does that happen?” is simply “because it’s more fun and interesting that way”.

Take a game called Duck Dash, published by renowned Database publication Atari User in July of 1987. This is a game in which you play a farmer (inexplicably represented by a green diamond) as he runs around his farmyard trying to gather up his ducks in preparation for Hurricane Harriet. A simple enough concept, you might think. But there are two farmer-eating spiders wandering around the farmyard. And the ground is so muddy that you dig out bottomless pits behind you with every step you take, meaning you can’t retrace your steps.

Or how about Doctor Boris, from the same publication a few months later? So confident was Atari User in the quality of this game — written entirely in BASIC — that they declared it “Game of the Year” on their front cover, promising “the ultimate challenge”. In Doctor Boris you play the eponymous doctor, a recent graduate from medical school who has come to his new hospital in the North of England only to find that it’s still a building site, so it’s up to the good doctor to finish the building work himself. Also there are unexploded bombs scattered around the area. And your supervisor has skin so bad it is fatal to the touch. And there are radioactive skulls buried everywhere.

Ridiculous and insane-sounding, right? Obviously. But the thing is, these games play really well. They’re simple, they have clear goals, they’re well designed and their rules are self-explanatory. Above all, they’ve been designed with fun and challenge in mind, not realism, and for this reason they’ve aged better than a lot of other games I could mention, even with their primitive graphics and sound, not to mention their slow initialisation routines thanks to them being written in BASIC.

We have games that are this silly these days, of course, but when it happens today it always feels very much like they’re being designed as wacky YouTube-bait — that they’re trying a bit too hard to be funny. Neither Duck Dash nor Doctor Boris are trying to be funny or ridiculous; their premises and setup are pretty much irrelevant once you start playing, and the focus is entirely on providing a satisfying, enjoyable and challenging experience for the player. To put it another way, they “play it straight” rather than the whole thing being infused with the feeling that the game is going “HEY! HEY! LOOK AT ME! I’M HILARIOUS!” that you get with modern “creative” titles like, say, Shower With Your Dad Simulator and suchlike.

Anyway. So far it’s been an absolute pleasure to boot up these games — many of which are often neglected and forgotten by the broader retro scene thanks to them not being commercial releases — and I anticipate there are plenty more treasures hiding in the disk boxes full of not-at-all-pirated-games-honest that I happen to have standing by. You can probably count on hearing about a few more in the near future!

2449: Planning Ahead

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With it being October now, I find myself pondering whether to do some creative writing this coming November as I have done for the last few years. And I think I’m going to, only this time try something a bit different.

I’ve been meaning to check out the well-known interactive fiction creation software Twine for quite some time now, and this November feels like an ideal opportunity to do so. I’ve been having a little fiddle with it this evening in an attempt to get to grips with the basics, and I think I now know enough to be able to put together a convincing interactive story over the course of a month.

For the unfamiliar, Twine is an open-source piece of software that allows you to create primarily text-based games with hyperlinks as a means of interaction. In simple terms, it allows you to create Choose Your Own Adventure-style experiences, though with a bit of scripting knowledge and/or making use of the macros available in the various story templates, you can create somewhat more complex affairs with conditional branches, variables and all manner of other goodies.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the software for me is the fact that it’s entirely text-based and consequently carries no need for you to be good at graphics or sound design — and no risk of people accusing you of being “lazy” for relying on predefined assets. Everything in a Twine game is a collaboration between the author’s skill at writing and the player’s own imagination. (It is possible to add graphics, sound and music to Twine games for those who see fit, but doing so feels a bit like you’re missing the point somewhat.)

Another really nice aspect of Twine is the fact that it depicts your story as a flowchart, automatically creating new branches according to the choices you offer throughout. This makes it very easy to visualise the overall flow of your story and branch it off into different routes if desired; likewise, it allows you to bring divergent paths back together pretty easily.

I need to have a think about what sort of story I want to write and how it might be interactive — the latter being a consideration that you don’t have to think about when writing linear traditional fiction! Still, I’ve read plenty of visual novels for “inspiration” over the years, so hopefully it won’t be too difficult to come up with something; going by my previous experiences, however, the true challenge will be keeping the scale of the project in check so I don’t get too overambitious and start attempting to produce something that will never be finished in a month of development!

I’ll continue experimenting in Twine in the run up to November so hopefully by the time November rolls around I’ll be proficient enough in the software to produce something convincing. And then, of course, the final product will be playable by you, dear reader, should you so desire.

2448: Taskmaster

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Freeview TV channel Dave is best known for being the home of endless repeats of BBC shows such as Top Gear, QI and Mock The Week, but in the last few years it’s been putting out some pretty solid original programming, too. Aside from the excellent Go 8-Bit, which I’ve talked about previously, there’s been an unscripted chat show fronted by Alan Davies, which made for surprisingly compelling viewing thanks to the candid conversations that unfolded; there’s currently a new series of Red Dwarf running which doesn’t appear to suck; and there’s a show I only discovered a few days ago called Taskmaster. It’s the latter I’d like to talk about today.

Taskmaster, one of several programmes on Dave that began as an Edinburgh Fringe production, is an unusual show in that it’s set up a bit like a panel show, only it’s the same “guests” each time over the course of a whole series, while the show is presented by Greg Davies playing an exaggerated version of himself, accompanied by the show’s creator Alex Horne playing a meek, sycophantic version of himself, a good foil to Davies’ mock arrogance. In the first series, which I’m currently watching, the lineup of guests includes Frank Skinner, Romesh Ranganathan, Tim Key, Roisin Conaty and Josh Widdicombe, who all happen to be some of my very favourite current comedians as well as regulars on the panel show circuit.

As the name suggests, Taskmaster revolves around tasks — specifically, Davies setting his guests a series of ridiculous challenges and then acting as omnipotent judge and jury over the results. The tasks are many and varied, including identifying the contents of a pie “without breaching the pie”, emptying an entire bath of water without pulling out the plug, producing a video that when played backwards appears to depict something incredible, and high-fiving a 55 year old member of the public as quickly as possible before the other contestants.

There’s a clear element of things being staged a bit — Key is usually set up to “cheat” in the challenges in one way or another, for example, while Ranganathan’s shtick is to get absolutely furious at him for breaking the rules — but this doesn’t hurt the show at all. Because the five guests represent such a broad spectrum of attitudes and approaches to comedy ranging from Skinner’s middle-aged calmness to Conaty’s energetic ditziness, the challenges can all unfold in a variety of ways. During a task in which the cast were challenged to eat as much watermelon as they could in a short amount of time, for example, Widdicombe thought things through before entering the room (and thus starting the clock) by finding a knife and spoon, then proceeding to very politely slice the melon then eat it a mouthful at a time, while Ranganathan simply picked up the melon and hurled it at the floor, shattering it into countless pieces which he then had to pick up from the floor and eat.

The challenges are frequently physical and slapstick, but never quite cross the line into “gross-out” territory; the closest it came to genuine unpleasantness was following Ranganathan’s melon-eating episode, where he ended up coughing a fair amount of it back up afterwards, but this wasn’t dwelled upon. Instead, the atmosphere is very much one of a group of friends setting silly tasks for one another, knowing full well that one of them is going to cheat, one of them isn’t going to be very good at it, one of them is a bit old for this shit and so on.

It’s been a real pleasant surprise to discover Taskmaster, and if you’re looking for something entertaining to watch I can highly recommend it, particularly if you’re a fan of Davies in full-on “Mr Gilbert” mode. You can watch it online here, though those outside the UK may need to dick around with VPNs and whatnot to convince the site that you’re a proud Brit.

2447: Left Behind

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I think one of the biggest sources of my anxiety these days is the growing feeling that I’m being “left behind” by the rest of the world thanks to the fact that everything changes so damn quickly these days… and moreover, if you don’t keep up with it, you may well end up having difficulties.

As I type this, I’m occasionally stealing glances over to my dining room table, upon which sits an Atari 800XL and a CRT TV-monitor for which I’m currently awaiting a cable to allow the two to talk to one another. I’m excited to get the 800XL up and running not just because “woo, wow, retro”, but because it formed such an integral part of my early life that it feels like a small piece of “stablity” in the turbulent waters of the modern age; a rock I can cling on to in order to avoid getting swept away.

This might sound like an odd thing to say with regard to a 30+ year old computer that I’m not entirely sure still works (I’m pretty sure it does), but since tracking it down I’ve become quite interested — excited, even — in the idea of using it for various purposes other than just games. Specifically, I’m perhaps most excited to use it as a “distraction-free” means of word processing; once I get it up and running, I fully intend to fire up the old copy of AtariWriter and actually do some ol’ fashioned plain text composition. (My one nod to it actually being 2016 is the addition of an “SIO2PC” cable, which will allow me to transfer files from the Atari to a PC or Mac for safekeeping rather than relying on 30+ year old floppy disks.)

This probably sounds like a lot of effort to go to, but I’m excited because it allows me to focus on one thing rather than constantly being bombarded by the distractions that life in 2016 — and computing in 2016 — offers. Multitasking is all very well and good, but when you’re trying to get anything done and Google Chrome is right there willing you to go and, I don’t know, hunt for rare Pepes or something, it’s sometimes hard to resist. Boot up a word processor that you have to load from disk and can’t do anything else while it’s running, on the other hand, and you have a situation much more conducive to Getting Shit Done, because once you’ve spent a couple of minutes listening to the soothing (and occasionally terrifying) sound of that disk drive snarking and zurbiting its way to your chosen program, it feels like something of a waste to then just shut it all down without actually doing anything.

I’ve drifted off on a tangent a bit, but my point is fairly simple: I long for the simplicity and the single-mindedness of days gone by, and am feeling increasingly stressed out and anxious by the constant demands for attention we get from all angles these days in 2016. I’ve attempted to minimise my exposure to these distractions as much as possible — primarily through minimising my contact with social media, which is probably the biggest distraction of all for most people these days — but with each passing day, I feel more and more inclined to just want to shut myself in a dark room and have a bit of peace and quiet to myself.