dfan says

I can’t believe I forgot this one.

One of the levels (5, I think?) was largely populated by ghouls, with standard flesh-eating names like Eyesnack and Kneenibble. Naturally you could talk to them instead of just fighting them. Jon Maiara (the same guy responsible for the Pac-Man homage) was writing the conversations for them, and included all sorts of things like the opportunity for you to make fun of Eyesnack’s name, to which he would respond by making fun of your name in return. You see the edge case, of course, right?

That’s right, part of our precious 640K was devoted to checking for whether the player’s name is also Eyesnack, in which case, in response to your mockery, the ghoul proclaims indignantly, “But your name same as mine!”

Maybe that will make you feel better about Judy falling into the lava.

While I’m reminiscing about the old days…

As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991-1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own people” largely meant MIT friends of the core programming team (me, Doug Church, and Jon Maiara) who we roped into helping out.

Our lead tester was Tim Stellmach (now at Vicarious Visions), a math major. You could tell he was a math major because his bug reports would start with “Consider a door.”

Our producer from Origin was Warren Spector, already a pretty important guy in the industry but someone who has since received yet more accolades for working on, well, Ultima Underworld, not to mention other games such as System Shock (with us), Deus Ex, and Epic Mickey. He is a super down-to-earth guy and we wasted no time in making fun of him, which he took with impressive grace. I guess it was a tradition at Origin to insert characters based on Warren into their games, so we figured we had to as well. Luckily we already had a “spectre” type of monster so it took no work to name one of them Warren. We made sure that Warren was in town the day that Tim was reading through the daily bug report list and said “Bug: There is no reference in the game to Warren Spector”, to which the rest of us immediately piped up, “Fixed!” without further explanation, much to Warren’s chagrin.

We were working with a lot of pretty raw graphics technology, as you can imagine, and it created some unintended graphical results fairly often. The upside was that whenever we ran into some heinous graphics bug that resulted in crazy psychedelic effects, once we figured out what was causing it, after fixing it we kept the code that would make it happen and enabled it when you ate too many mushrooms.

Speaking of graphics… well, probably most of you are far too young to remember the Apple ][, but it had a seriously weird graphics mode, which had not only a crazy palette (black, white, green, blue, orange, and purple) but also placed additional restrictions on how you could use the colors near each other (see here if you really need to know the gory details). Paul Neurath, our CEO, never tired of telling stories of what a pain it was to work with that system when he had written his earlier game Space Rogue. So naturally we added code that would specifically look for a certain file we had planted on Paul’s computer, and if it found it, would switch to a green-blue-orange-purple palette for one frame every half hour or so. Unfortunately I honestly can’t remember whether Paul ever actually noticed it.

One part of one of the levels, designed by Jon, was a Pac-Man homage. You had to run around a maze, which I believe faithfully duplicated the first level of Pac-Man picking up “ore” while avoiding ghosts. How Origin let this through I’ll never know, but they did have one complaint: Jon had named the ore “unobtanium” (yes, the same joke that Avatar used 20 years later), and they insisted that that name was too silly. So we changed it to “zanium” in protest… and apparently they were perfectly fine with that.

The worst bug that made it into the shipping game was probably mine. One of the quests involved talking to a woman named Judy, who could be found hanging out next to a river of lava. It turned out that, given our emergent-gameplay physics-driven simulation philosophy, we never actually prohibited characters from walking into the lava (although of course their AI tried to avoid it). So it was possible (although thankfully rare) for Judy to wander into the lava and die, making your game unwinnable. If you have been enraged at me for the last 20 years, I apologize.

But the best bug report I remember came from Origin. We rendered the world in true 3D but most of the objects (monsters, objects you could pick up) were 2D sprites. There were a few actual 3D polygonal objects, though, such as boulders. When we added the 3D object capability, we needed something to test it out, and we hadn’t created any ourselves yet, so we used a red sports car from some friends who were developing a game with the Car & Driver license, which we plopped down in the middle of a cavern. Sure enough, you could walk all around it and it looked just like a red sports car.

Then the bug report came in, of course. “On the fifth level, at this particular location, there is a red sports car sitting on the floor.” OK, I guess we could have expected that. What we did not expect was the next sentence: “I should be able to enter it and drive around.”

I feel like too many of my book posts lately have been of the form “Eh, didn’t really float my boat.” Well, in this case my watercraft was 100% buoyant. The Shadow of the Wind not only should have been my thing, it actually was my thing.

I guess it was a big hit in Spain, where it was originally published, and I can see why. It’s full of books and (metaphorical) ghosts and romance and melodrama in a way that is slightly over-the-top but always enjoyable. It’s set in post-WWII Barcelona, and I really enjoyed the evocation of the time and place. It has a fairly standard metaplot of Young Man Digs Into The Mysteries Of The Past While Getting Dragged Into A Modern-Day Plot And Also Falling In Love With Someone Who May Or May Not Be Good For Him, but it implements it superbly. The characters are kind of two-dimensional (which is to say, they don’t really have three dimensions, but at least they don’t have only one), but who cares. I found myself tearing through it, both wanting to know What Happens Next And What Is The Real Identity Of That Mysterious Guy but also wanting to see how the personal relationships played out. I would call it a guilty pleasure but it was too well written for that.

Zafón has written a few other novels, and I have a feeling I’ll be reading one of them during my next summer vacation.

Six months ago I made some general comments about the musical vocabulary of Tim Smith (of Cardiacs). Here are some notes on “Odd Even”, a song that illustrates a lot of his standard tricks. The song is on YouTube here and my transcription is here (PDF file).

The form could not be simpler: three repetitions of verse (a 7-bar phrase repeated twice) and chorus (8 or 12 bars; in the second and third choruses the last 4 bars are repeated). The third verse is instrumental.

The introduction (which foreshadows the end of the verse phrase) is a straight-out “Smith cadence” (♭­III—v—I in the key of E), which already renders it unclear whether we’re in the key of G major (starting on the tonic and repeatedly raising the tension) or E major (starting on the flat mediant and repeatedly resolving the tension). This ambiguity will persist throughout the song.

The start of the verse seems to resolve the question by claiming that we’re in G major, and could not refer more explicitly to the Lydian mode, with a C♯ over the G chord. Already this is a hint that we might be moving back to the sharp side soon. There’s an interesting clash between that C♯ of the melody and the C♮ of the C chord that arrives on the second bar. The harmony then moves through A and E back to G, apparently establishing that E is subordinate to G—but then immediately repeats the introductory Smith cadence twice, reestablishing the ambiguity.

The phrase rhythm of the first verse phrase is also quite interesting. From the melody alone it looks like a pretty straightforward [4+4]+4 beats, but the harmonic rhythm, as well as the way that the instruments enter during its first statement, implies 6+6.

The chorus starts by moving fairly strongly to the flat side of G, going all the way to E♭­ before slowly relaxing back to G, and right through G all the way to Bm and E again. The feeling of resolution provided by G is lessened this time by it happening for only two beats on the second half of a bar, rather than lasting a whole measure as it did before. The melody here is really nice; a drone-like D is continually returned to on the bottom (it’s a common tone of all the scales passed through, including the E Mixolydian implied by the final destination of E) while the upper implied voice of the line descends from B♭­to A to G, then returns up to B♮ and G♯ to both chromatically fill that third and also strongly establish the “surprising” E (not so surprising in reality since the G—Bm—E sequence has been repeating the whole song).

The chorus ends by following yet another path from G to E, this time by repeating the triple plagal cadence G—D—A—E and sitting on the final E for an additional bar. That relaxation of the harmonic tension certainly makes it seem like E was the final destination after all—but when the next verse starts up again, back in G, it feels like a return to the tonic rather than a jump away from it.

The instrumental verse suddenly triples the melodic speed, and it’s interesting to see such a relatively hyper solo in the middle of what is otherwise a fairly sedate song. I wouldn’t have thought of it when I first heard the song, but after listening to a lot of jazz in the last month, the solo has sort of a bebop feel to it, at least when you look at it on the page and imagine it being played by a saxophone rather than by a keyboard.

It looks complicated but it is largely doing the same things found elsewhere in this song or Smith’s work in general—emphasis on that Lydian C♯, liberal use of whole-tone scales, and near the end a gleeful insistence on B♭­, a note dissonant against both G major and E major.

The song ends with a final chorus, repeating that G—D—A—E progression four times in a long exhalation and landing with relative finality on E. So maybe it was in E major all along? But I think the fight between the two potential tonics the whole time was a charade; the whole point is that both G and E are equally important, and to proclaim one of them superior to the other is to force one point of view on a song that is all about presenting two.

The second volume of the ten-book epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which was begun with Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates is regarded by many fans (though not me) as the best of the bunch. It’s true for sure that you can see Erikson hit his stride here in a way that is new.

For one thing, the plot feels a lot better controlled. There are still a half-dozen independent threads going on, and in fact they don’t even all end up tying together in the way that they did in the first book, but perhaps it is that independence that lets Erikson take each one to a conclusion instead of trying to combine them all in the last chapter. This book also contains the famous Chain of Dogs sequence, which is pretty wrenching and gives the whole book an emotional weight that was less present before.

Once again, all the stuff going on can seem pretty random, most memorably when a ship of manages to go through a series of weird dimensions in quick succession, each crazier than the last. It is easy to regard this as Erikson just randomly chucking in every weird idea he can think of, but as I mentioned before, if something is introduced out of nowhere that seems to bear no relation to the plot, it is likely to be a call-forward to something in a future book. This can be a little frustrating but it certainly does contribute to the epic feel.

I would say that at this point the dimensions of the larger plot start to become clear, but that’s a lie—the most important plot thread in many ways doesn’t even really get hinted at until book 3. But you do start to get a sense of the scope of the thing. That scope will widen even more in the next book…