Torley Lives

This crowdsourcing thing’s really working out, ma! Imagine if frat boys were god. I mean, c’mon…

SOURCE: go to Spore’s Channel, then sort User Uploads by “Most Viewed”. Or go here and here for the videos in question. And here for moar hilarity. News can’t help but break and make!

It’s only a matter of time before fanart/slashfic comes pouring in.

What’s your theory, evolutionary defense mechanism? A means to attract mates? Or the roots of language?

Now let’s see some creative equivalents for the ladies! IT BEGINS.

I'm always eager to pay respects to the pioneers and originators of a great thing. In virtual worlds, Habitat was here over 20 years ago. Some things have changed a lot — we have rich 3D environments and versatile content creation tools which were a pipe dream back then. And some things are still the same —  as you'll see in this promo video posted by Randy Farmer (one of Habitat's founding fathers), there's a ongoing emphasis to stress that behind every avatar is a real person.

Watch for the the teleport booths and the avatar customization process, which is essentially Re-Animator-like decapitation (and not too dissimilar from how we can remove attachments in SL). And do observe what parallels connect the Second Life of now to the Habitat of then:

Wasn't that refreshing? I liked the old-timey intro and visual similarities to Maniac Mansion (also by Lucasfilm), but deplore the lack of guys playing girls.

Srsly, I also find it intriguing that Habitat's classified in Wikipedia as an "online role-playing game", used interchangeably with "virtual world". This was during a time before "MMORPG" ever became commonplace, and before businesses really considered using such a cyberspace for their ventures. Ah, the 80s. *puts on mirrorshades*

I'm not really a folk who has a lot of regrets, but I certainly have a lot of things I didn't do in my youth that I wanted to. The other day, I was recalling Ebenezer's, a comic book store I frequented as a kid. It had a lot of then-new, now-very-old classic computer games in boxes (like the King's Quest series, gosh bless Roberta & Ken Williams) and also had a lot of gaming mags in plastic wrap. There was a very nice shopkeep named Darcy who let my brother and I rent NES carts for a Loonie (that's a Canadian dollar) a night. This was an era of technological discovery for me, and while that hasn't changed, there were a lot of pieces of interactive entertainment that passed me by. At the time, I was on an Amiga 500 and transitioning into a Macintosh Quadra 660AV (yeah, the one with the AT&T DSP and… OMG voice recognition), which is the time when I discovered Cyan's Myst. And what a glory-filled experience that was. I purchased The Best HyperCard Stack Of All Time™ from Future Shop with scholarship winnings acquired via piano competitions.

"I'll do my best impersonation of a new games journalist as I accompany you in this most humble boat!"

Further along the way, I heard about Cosmic Osmo and The Manhole, two more of Cyan's offerings. I read about the latter's color Masterpiece Edition while perusing the magazines in high school (placing this story around 1995); this was even more of a time of wonder when I loaded up on issues of CD-ROM Today which was Phenomenal (yes, with a "capital P"!) for the quality & quantity of goodies they packed onto the bundled CD. But before I diverge from my mainline of thought too much, I never got to play The Manhole in its coloriffic entirety — until yesterday.

Sometimes, but all-too-rarely, I have quiet moments where I sit in my chair, clasp my hands, and think about what I missed out on. Getting thoughts together, I wiki'ed this article and went, "Holy moly, it's on GameTap?"

GameTap, y'see, was a service I had tried a year previously, when it wasn't all that compelling but had a slick interface (the zip-zap sounds that play when you scroll through titles is amazingly fun). Reading the subscription prices (and this in no way constitutes an endorsement), I read that the first month was US$0.99 (99 cents!), so I signed up and headed on in.

And not just for The Manhole — many other "long-lost friends" returned to greet me as I scrolled past the selections. Overjoyed, I love how despite the fact this is a commercial service, it also functions as a museum of gaming history. I don't consider myself a hardcore gamer, but I do have a lot of faves I'll talk endlessly about, Deus Ex being one of them — and yes, it and its sequel, Invisible War, are on the menu. Apparently, even if you don't signup for their paid plan, they have an ad-supported free service of sorts which currently offers 70 games. A lot of these titles are big, established names too, not dinky ripoffs or lame-O "1,000 in 1" garbage.

But back to The Manhole: I ran into some errors trying to download and then play it (it spit out a "mount failed" message), but I persisted. And then, after all these years, The Manhole launched in its glorious, dithered self! Sadly, it also force-resized the resolution of my 1600×1200 monitor to 640×480, which looked brutally large-pixel, but after I made some adjustments, I began to play. Seeing as this came after Myst, I noted that some of the music selections wandering hallways and caverns and whatnot sounded awfully Myst-y, and smiled. Kind of like a goofier, children-oriented parallel twin of that seminal classic.

Alas, my long-winded adventures were not to be, because: (1) I couldn't spot a save button and (2) kept crashing on my route to bigger and better things. I don't know what buggered up the system's arse, but perhaps my computer being "too new" to run this classic had to do with it. Yes, I sighed heavily, but then continued to look at other games (like Altered Beast which encouraged me to "rise from my grave" and the new Sam & Max adventures… gotta love that hyperkinetic rabbity-thing!) and dip into them.

I had a lot of memories come back to me, forming new ones in the process. What I especially appreciate about GameTap is — despite the periodic errors and besides the really-well-done presentation in both the in-app interface and the website (they didn't just license the games for their collection and dump 'em on a meaningless platter) — that access to classic and not-yet-classic gaming is so easy. Installation for each title almost lives up to a "click 'n' play" ideal; the original manuals are scanned for many games, including the ones that have copy protection and ask you to type X word on Y page; and altho I wish some Windows titles likely to crash ran under emulation like the DOS ones instead of as-is (like The Manhole), it's overall a very cheerful package.

I don't know if GameTap can keep things going at this price — some, like Greg Costikyan, are skeptical of how sustainable the model is — and I certainly don't want to make any game developers sad BECAUSE I LIKE PLAYING GAMES, but for what it's worth today… I'm really enjoying GameTap and hope to delve into it further if/when I get spare time to reminisce about the days when my hair transitioned from rice bowl to wavy swirls.

Until next time, here's s'more piccies from my Manhole-ian adventures. And you there, by all means, share your retro-tech memories in these comments! I may reminisce with you, particularly if the Commodore 64 turning 25 (GameTap, incidentally, has a special feature on this) holds a lot of meaning to you.

This is surely one of the most beautiful pieces of black & white art I've ever seen, digital or not. It comes from the classic Mac title, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel.

There's less info about it about the Net than I'd like to see, visually speaking, but this picture alone should tell you how whimsical it is. I'm playing an emulated version right now after many years of separation, and the sound design sounds amazingly rich. Some of you might know a later series of works which Robyn & Rand Miller would go on to create — called Myst.

As a kid, I used to make Hypercard stacks; one of them was titled Galaxy II. No, there never was a Galaxy I, but in Mr. Simard's 6th-grade class, I said, "Damn the UI!" and went out to create a world of my own. Sadly, it's long-lost now and I have no original floppy diskettes I can revive, but part of the inspiration was reading about Cosmic Osmo — that's right, I didn't even play it, or even see a picture… a blurb in Macworld magazine got my attention.

Nowadays, I like laying awake for a few minutes before sleeping and thinking of fantastic worlds harnessed by the imagination, and a fraction of their splendor brought into communal existence that can be enjoyed by other people.

I think that, at least in part, is what draws me to Second Life, and its rich tapestry of ever-evolving dreams, awakening.